Results Education Meeting 2008-08-12

Hi Community!

Here's the summary of the IRC Meeting from Tuesday. The full transcript 
can be found here:
http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Meetings/Education_Meeting_2008-08-12/transcript

1) Old action items

No news from Andreas, James, Jens-Daniel and Jordi. (not present at this 
time)

News from cyberorg:
a) The LTSP Team has released the first "working" easy-ltsp packages for 
openSUSE and Fedora (see http://www.luckylemon.de/?p=32) . 

b) LTSP5 now comes with real local application support, so schools that 
require resource heavy apps can now off load them to the client.

c) LTSP wiki pages are completely revamped - have a look at 
http://en.opensuse.org/LTSP !

d) Now also USB images and a Live-CDs are available, so Clients without 
PXE-Networkcards are able to boot LTSP!

News from anubisg1:
a) Mr. Carugo from "DIDASCA Youniversity" 
(http://www.didascauniversity.it/) is giving us the chance to use an 
openSUSE dedicated server to use the "Didasca Webinar" for our 
meetings. Should be tested and documented during the next days.

b) Packages: a lot of packages for 11.0 are fixed now. So we are nearly 
ready for the next release Left to fix: gnome-chemicals-utils would be 
downgraded in the next days, netbeans has some wrong path entries for 
Ruby binaries and the update to Koha 3.0 needs some additional work.

c) The official online repository has some dependencies issues, which 
can be fixed by copying some additional packages from the openSUSE-FTP 
repository - so users just starting with the openSUSE- and the 
Education-DVD get no missing dependencies.

News from Lars:
a) Gambas packaging is done and already announced (and used) in the 
german user forums.

b) Additional information about "how to create the Edu add on" is 
available in the openSUSE wiki 
(http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Development) and the used scripts are 
available for everyone in the SVN.

News from The_Code:
a) Will be participating in the openSUSE Hackweek 
(http://news.opensuse.org/2008/08/07/announcing-hack-week-iii/) in 
Nuernberg.

b) Jan is interested to work on the planned YaST2-Education module - 
mail to jdsn about the current status is out.



2) Status of the wiki pages 

a) No doubts against the "Education Packaging Policy" 
(http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Development#Education_Packaging_Policy) - 
so this policy is now implemented. The main target of this policy is to 
get as close as possible to the current openSUSE packages. So all 
Education packages are "ready for integration" if the decision about a 
big "contrib" community repository is done.

b) The Development page contains a simple changelog script, which is 
also available in the tools directory in SVN (called "vc" there). Just 
edit the "email" variable, and next time you only have to call "vc 
*.spec" in your package directory to get a valid changelog entry.

c) The template for application descriptions is updated with the 
new "age categories". People writing new application descriptions 
should use this template for educational applications: 
http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Wiki#Template_for_Application_descriptions
SLEducator will  overhaul the wiki pages in the next weeks.

d) looks like the Software template has some problems with lists in 
special cases (see http://en.opensuse.org/Avogadro , "developers" for 
example). Needs to be investigated.



3) Status of the next Edu-DVD 

a) FYI: http://www.opensuse-education.org/download/test/11.0/  contains 
the "behind the released" repository - which might be inconsistent but 
the next official repository. 

b) anubisg1 will do the dependency testing which should just cover the 
openSUSE-DVD + openSUSE-Education-Repo cases (only thing allowed is the 
Update-Repository as additional repository). So teachers who like to 
install the Education Add-on in their schools without internet access 
can install all packages.

c) The test repo shows a problem in the current sync scripts: moodle is 
avaible in 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 - looks like the version compare is 
sometimes buggy. Needs to be fixed in the next version.

d) anubisg1 has updated the Roadmap:
http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Development/Edu-CD/Roadmap
which needs the following two new entries:

        Aug 17: Beta2 Release for 11.0
        Sep 07: RC1 for 11.0

Deadline for packages: 2 days bevore the release - so it's always Friday


4) Q&A Section

a) anubisg1  announced the CIA-56 bot in the #opensuse-edu channel on 
freenode, which report subversion checkins.

b) anubisg1 also announced ldd2rpm - available in the SVN - which allows 
packagers to find fast BuildRequires of binaries and libs.

c) We should clean up the wishlist 
(http://en.opensuse.org/Wishlist_Education) more regularly. Last 
cleanup was done by anubisg1 in the last days. The wishlist should be 
added as general topic to the meeting agenda.

d) AlbertoP informs us, that openfoam (a very advanced simulation code 
for fluid dynamics ) is a nice application for education - but 
currently the developers are moving to ubuntu and in general are not at 
all open in their development. He think it's worth to wait and see what 
they do before investing time on packaging their apps for openSUSE 
Education.

After nearly 2 hours, we decided to end the official meeting - unless 
the discussion goes on the whole day... ;-)

With kind regards,
Lars