I haven’t yet blogged about Tokamak 4 yet.
Well, it’s only 2.5 weeks after the event. I can finally tell you about one of the projects I worked on 
Aaron already blogged about the general idea and goes into more technical detail in a second post.
The Plasma team would like to have a reference demo that can easily be updated and show off the new hot that Plasma Netbook is.
Since we were hosted by our friends from openSUSE, we thought about making use of their great tools. So I sat down in order to build a USB-Stick image (we also plan on having a CD ISO later on) using openSUSE buildservice.
I had the joy of poking Adrian and Will whenever I had a question, so getting started was quite easy. With their help I overcame an old (irrational?) fear of RPMs and created a package to contain config files that let you log in to the Netbook shell rather than the normal Plasma Desktop on first start.
The USB stick raw image can be found here, but I rather recommend to start with a bit of Documentation on Techbase
Now we’re all excited to get feedback on the Plasma Netbook Reference!
Please keep in mind that this is the very first iteration of this project. Now is the time for early testing feedback and to get involved. How about joining our super-secret IRC channel on freenode (#plasma-netbook, but don’t tell anyone)?
We plan regular updates for this project (using the factory repository we can update the KDE components to very recent versions) and will use this to get feedback on design decisions (Marco, “Mr. Netbook-Plasma” himself will thank you for your considerate feedback). Now is a great time to get involved with this exciting project. There are lots of low hanging fruits to be picked 
For example carefully examining the list of packages that we put on the image, optimizing the default configuration and many other things. No coding skills are required.
One question: on which OBS repository is this image based off? Factory?
Are you sure this is not Kubuntu Netbook 10.04? I have been playing with it for the last 3 alphas of Kubuntu 10.04
Hey Frederik, awesome work. A few questions:
Would it be difficult to make it a Live USB to show KDE-Edu programs?
Do you have a netbook yourself or could we get one from somewhere that we could use at the Edu sprint to check how the programs look like and what need to be improved (large dialogs, shortcuts, …)
Suse has an Edu based CD, can someone from Suse Education come to the meeting for at least one day?
I’ve played with the netbook interface, and I find it not intuitive at all–but rather confusing.
Maybe I’m missing some big picture here, but I see three areas, and they’re relations/purposes are not clear.
1) the taskbar, but it has two items “Search and launch” and “page one”. What’s a page? Are these running applications? A different paradigm?
2) the icons grouped above the search box
3) the icons grouped below the search box
What’s the difference?
I’ve used computers since 1982 with many different UIs (classic Mac OS, Atari GEM)–I am a developer, and was struck by confusion when first playing with this. That makes me think that an ordinary user may fair worse.
I haven’t played with an actual netbook yet. Is this exactly like what they are shipping?
Check out the comments here for some good design ideas:
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3856526/The-Great-Open-Source-Netbook-Interface-Race.htm
Hey Frederic, glad that everything worked out even after the meeting
Btw, this is the public download URL. It redirects you to some mirror hosting it and no log in is needed. http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Netbook/images/.
Btw, Coolo thought about to take this as base for the next openSUSE Netbook installation theme. So users will get offered it by default when YaST is booting from DVD…
@Luca, it is using openSUSE 11.2 as base + the 4.5 alpha packages from KDE4:UNSTABLE project. You can see that in the .kiwi file in the link Frederic posted.
Annma: now we have the ‘upstreamified’ netbook image, and build/update instructions addressed to KDE developers (as opposed to for seasoned distro guys) it would be really easy to create a specialised Edu image too. Ping me on IRC if you want help getting bootstrapped.
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