Yesterday I seeked advice to the IRC #suse channel but I was dismayed to be dismissed and categorized as an annoying newbie. However today I put Jeff "fataerrors" to work on the machine and well, he happens to be a Suse guru. Today at my LUG we had our monthly KDE workshop at Alexis "darktears" place. Jeff wanted to participate but has no laptop so I suggested he works on the Classmate PC. He did wonder and installed KDE-Edu 3.5.1! Thanks a lot Jeff!
And the result:
I found out that KHangMan is too big for the Classmate display so its starting size should be reduced. Same with KLettres, the rest of Edu apps seem all OK. I'll commit the fixes and I'll hope there will be a 3.5.8, if not maybe the choosen distribution will package them from svn. It's only a matter of cummunicating with distribution packagers and I'd like to thank Intel for sending a machine so I can test our software on it and fixe any problem.
I'll further test KDE-Edu programs for KDE 3.5.1 then I'll try to upgrade to KDE 4 if I can manage it.
Alexis made me recompile Alsa so I got my laptop sound working again, not with headphones but at least I have sound. Thanks for a friendly and productive day. I was glad to be away from the 5 kids + 1 friend that populate the house these days (so much cooking!) so thanks to my husband for this free time!
8 comments:
Hi, I work for International Syst, a Brazilian company that created Metasys Linux installed in ClassmatePC. The version you used seems to be one of our alpha versions based on Suse 10.1. I am working on the next version that is based on Suse 10.2. I had to remove yast2's software part (and others) because the system could become unsuable if it was used. For instance, the kernel used has some patches applied, if yast2 upgraded the kernel the system would not boot anymore.
ClassmatePC 1.0's display is 800x480 pixels with the option to use 800x600 in "compressed mode", which is the default mode. 800x480 is an unusual resolution, other programs also has problems with it. Intel's engineers are working to improve the compressed mode to use 1024x768 resolution.
If you have any other doubts fell free to ask me.
Hi Annma,
saw you on #suse yesterday coincidentally and wondered that I hadn't seen you there before, but I was too busy trying to get 10.3 to recognise Till's SATA controller to say hi! I'm sorry you had a bad experience. Anyway, #opensuse-kde is where the cool kids hang out.
http://software.opensuse.org/search is a good way to find packages for the distro from the build service. You won't find KDE 4 packages though, as the version of DBUS on 10.1 is too old for QtDBus.
Reading lamarque's comment, for packages like the kernel that should not be upgraded, you can set them to Locked in YaST2 so they cannot be upgraded. The better solution than dumping the software management part would be for whoever patched the kernel to set appropriate Requires: fields in its specfile so it can't be upgraded using 'newer' upgrades. You can get help with this at #opensuse-buildservice on Freenode or opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org. It would be great to see your packages in the build service!
At Lamarque: thanks for the explanations! Indeed I can understand why upgrading is not a good idea.
I'd like to try KDE4 on it but I am not sure how I'll do it.
Maybe I could try the new version based on 10.2 when it is available if this is possible.
At Bille: noted for the correct channel! I'll come there for more precisions when I need them :)
The kernel is not the only problem when upgrading the system. rpm is not installed to save disk space. Intel wanted to limit system usage to 600 MB out of the 1 GB ClassmatePC's internal flash memory. That is too tight if you consider that OpenOffice, Firefox, Krita (and koffice libs) are also installed. If rpm is installed the 600 MB limit is crossed.
Upgrading is one of the goals for the next version (1.5). I am going to try jffs2 instead of the squashfs + unionfs (1.5alpha uses aufs), although I think the 600 MB limit will not be achieved. jffs2 let's the system reuse flash space, something that is not possible with squashfs, well I heard it is possible, but even if it is possible it will be less flexible.
I do not know how OpenSuse deals with KDE 3.x and 4.x in the same system. Probably is a matter of copying /opt/kde4 directory to ClassmatePC. The problem is that doing that can make the internal flash run out of space. I want to add KDE 4.0 but that will have to wait until ClassmatePC 2.0, there are already a lot of changes between 1.0 and 1.5 including modifications to KDE programs, Xorg's display driver, NetworkManager, KNetworkManager and one particular problem that I am have with the 2.6.21 kernel: the system clock drifts too fast in some situations, that does not happen with the 2.6.17.13 kernel used in the 1.0 version. If you know something that can help me about this last problem let me know :-)
Intel have asked me to publish a page about ClassmatePC (how to install other distributions, some info on the hardware details, suspend to ram, etc), I have not had time to do that yet, last week was really crazy here. Next week I will try to add at least a simple to page to our web site (http://www.metasys.com.br) to at least to give some info on the development progress.
@lamarque: No RPM? Interesting, are you creating the image on a desktop machine using RPM then copying the whole thing across onto the Classmate?
You might be interested in the KIWI image creator tool then:
http://en.opensuse.org/KIWI
openSUSE puts KDE 4 under /usr (LSB compliant) so there is no conflict between 3 and 4).
Classmate and Suse ? I thought it was Mandriva, based on this page : http://www.classmatepc.com/classmatepc-system-software.html
@Bille: yes, that is what I am doing. I will take a look at kiwi. I have the building system automated already, there is one squashfs image for each supported language (English, Brazilian Portuguese in 1.0, +Spanish in 1.5). French, and some other other languages are planned. Splitting localized files into separated images is something that still requires human intervention sometimes, do you know if kiwi supports something like that?
@Yoho: We (International Syst) are not from Suse/Novell, we are a Brazilian company that uses OpenSuse as base for our products (Metasys is a line of products, which includes Metasys ClassmatePC). We are in negotiation with Novell to have development support from them (not for ClassmatePC, for our other products), but we do not respond for Suse, OpenSuse nor Novell. If you look at the page you mentioned there is Metasys along side Mandriva. We have been working on ClassmatePC since middle of last year, we just do not have that much attention from the media :-)
Hi, I went to Metasys website and english version is not working while my portuguese read is not good. I was trying to find a download link for Metasys Linux products can you help me send the link?
I'm interesed in Educ applications as MSTech Bluelab and EduSyst Class Control.
http://www.classmatepc.com/classmatepc
-system-software.html
Is EduSyst Class Control opensource? If you can tell me more I'll apreciate. Thank you. Christian
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