On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 12:34 AM, Samartha Vashishtha wrote: > > Dear Jigish, > > Congratulations on your splendid win at FOSS India Awards! We are glad > that your contribution to the Indian Open Source landscape has earned the > accolades it deserves. Keep up the good work! Thank you very much for your kind words :). Please find below the response to your questionnaire. > > Questionnaire for the project > > Please answer in brief. At the same time, please try to include all relevant > information > Please describe your project (in brief). Please include the purpose of the > project, intended audience, proprietary software competitors and open source > counterparts (if any). KIWI-LTSP(http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/KIWI-LTSP) is LTSP5 implementation on openSUSE using KIWI imaging technology. LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project http://ltsp.org) aims to provide thin-client support to Linux servers. LTSP is a flexible, cost effective solution that is empowering schools, businesses, and organizations all over the world to easily install and deploy desktop workstations. KIWI (http://kiwi.berlios.de/) provides a complete operating system image solution for Linux supported hardware platforms as well as for virtualisation systems like Xen Qemu or VMware. KIWI features distribution independent design, support for virtual systems, network deployed images, live CDs, diskfull clients and now with kiwi-ltsp diskless clients too. The project is aimed to provide education institutes and enterprises who cannot afford the great cost on hardware procurement and software licenses. This project aims to provide means to use old hardwares as diskless thinclients and the server technology that is very easy to set up, even for non-technical users. We aim to provide a easy to set up thinclient server technology that makes it possible to set up a lab with as many clients as required in less than an hour. Imagine setting up a lab with 50 computers with all the softwares installed, currently to set such infrastructure up would take days to get everything right. License and the hardware cost would be immense. The inherent instability and insecure, virus prone nature of the proprietary operating systems available today makes it a challenging task to run such infrastructure. KIWI-LTSP addresses the need for secure IT environment that is easy to set up and manage (due to clients being diskless among other things). > How do you feel, now that your project has won a FOSS India award? I feel greatly honored by this gesture. > What is your message to community members on participating in such awards > and events? We aspire to be IT superpower, please join any project that you enjoy working on, there are no work pressures, deadlines, just work for the joy of doing something you like. You will come across great developers of our time and the community who really value your contribution, no matter how small you think it is. You can start by installing any free OS in one partition and dual boot if you must use other OSs. > How did the project begin, and who started it? What was the core > inspiration? Project begin last year, having worked on LTSP's early avatar (varsion 4.x) previously project team members were always convinced about the need of such technology in developing country like ours. The development work on the LTSP project had stagnated since last few years, only recently other projects like Fedora and openSUSE showed some interest in it. There is no proper integration or easy to deploy mechanism for LTSP5, this was something that we thought we could do, James Tramblay, founder of openSUSE Education project kept nudging everyone about doing something about LTSP5, thus the project started was started by Jigish Gohil. Little after the project began Magnus Boman joined the project as the co-developer, making the core development team of two. > What are the key highlights/features of your project? The most innovative aspect of the project is the use of best of the two distinct technologies: KIWI - Imaging technology and LTSP - Linux Terminal Server Project. The best feature is the ease of deployment, even a person with no prior knowledge of Linux server administration, for example a school teacher, can hopefully now deploy such complex technology as LTSP with just "one-click", a couple of changes in configuration that can be done via GUI or directly in text file and a single command to build and set up all services. > Please tell us something about the project team—their backgrounds, > occupations, areas of interest and so on. Jigish Gohil is the Director of CyberOrg Info, a leading Linux training and solutions provider based in Vadodara, Gujarat. He is an active contributor to openSUSE and Compiz projects. He keeps an occasionally updated blog at http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~cyberorg/ with posts about all the projects he is involved in. When not hacking on open source software or conducting workshops on OSS technologies, he enjoys music, movies, reading, languages, traveling, photography, (all equally). Magnus Boman is an active contributor and recognized member of the openSUSE Project. He's been an IT Professional since 1995 and been using Linux since 2003. He currently works as a premium service engineer at Novell in Australia/Sydney. If Magnus is not glued in front of the monitor, he likes to go camping and fishing. Marcus Schaefer the lead KIWI developer and Oliver Grawert, Vagrant C, Warren, S Balnaves, Jim and all the LTSP developers, and our testers are other great assets to our project. > What is the future roadmap that you have in mind for the project? Probably at the time this goes in print, we would have first alpha of KIWI-LTSP for openSUSE 11.0 out. There is a long list of shrinking task list here: http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/KIWI-LTSP-Tasks We are planning to do our production ready release along with openSUSE 11.0 which is scheduled for release on June 19. > Are you looking for help/contribution from others in the Indian OSS > community? If yes, what sort of help? Of course very much :). If you are a developer who can help with testing, optimizing, fixing bugs or take on any tasks listed in our task page, we would love to hear from you. Hey who knows we might even spilt prize money of next award we win with you ;) > Are you working on any other Open Source projects? Please enumerate. Jigish is working on Compiz and Compiz Fusion projects, he is the maintainer of Compiz Fusion packages for openSUSE and maintains i18n of Compiz Fusion. He is also a co-administrator of VGLUG (Vibrant GNU/Linux User Group). Magnus hacks on GNOME project doing cool profiling and optimizing work of various GNOME applications. > What is your strategy for FOSS India Awards 2009, where existing projects > will only be permitted to participate if there have been major improvements > or changes, else only new projects will be allowed to register? -- There is nothing more we want than letting other new projects win next year.