Plasma Netbook Reference

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.