Several times a year SUSE has the concept of a hackweek, where employees get to work on whatever they thing will benefit openSUSE. I Don’t work at SUSE but I still like to use the idea of the week to deviate from my standard openSUSE packaging and spend time looking at something a little different. This week I decided to look at doing a openSUSE Enlightenment Live CD using SUSE Studio, something thats been requested several times and that I thought would be fun to try and I have wanted to do it for a while.

Enlightenment Live CD + Terminology running within browIser test functionality

Enlightenment Live CD + Terminology running within browser test functionality

This image is just a starting point, it is using openSUSE 13.2 efl 1.11.5 and enlightenment 19.2 as that is what shipped with the last openSUSE release. It works but has some issues, i’d appreciate help finding any other issues so that I can fix them up in future releases. A list of the Issues i’ve noticed so far is below.

  • There are several pages in the first run wizard that are irrelevant.
  • Enlightenment doesn’t seem to load a icon theme so one must be selected manually
  • No Network Manager Status
  • Bootsplash doesn’t show correctly

I would also like to get more efl apps building and running as a part of it and the next openSUSE release along with having a working nm-applet and variety.

I also decided to include some of my favorite open source applications like krita and digikam as well as libre office which bumped up the size a bit If there is significant demand I will look at doing a cut back image thats a smaller size I think I could get something that might just fit on a 2GB USB Stick. I tested on 3 machines, using a 16GB USB3 flash drive, all seemed to work fine other then some missing wireless drivers, I think i’ll set up a stick up with persistent storage and the packman repo at some point to help with that. Performance was pretty reasonable, on my desktop which has USB3 ports the live image boots significantly quicker then the install I have on a  Hard Drive.

The process was pretty easy I really only spent a couple of evenings on it, as such I will call it a success and will look to having a polished Live Image available for the next openSUSE Release and into the future when there is a significant time gap between openSUSE and enlightenment releases I may do some live images with the latest enlightenment release on top of the last openSUSE release.

For the most part after playing around a bit I found the following helpful guide and basically followed it but replacing xfce with enlightenment.

You can find the SUSE Studio Image Here where you can try out the image in your browser, modify the image or download it. The direct download link for the tar can be found here it is approximately 1GB. Instructions for writing the image to disk can be found here I used dd, however for persistent storage I think the instructions are slightly wrong and you don’t need to create a second partition after, I did that and it didn’t work.

Username: enlightenment
Password: enlightenment
Root Password: enlightenment