Plasma/Plasma Netbook Reference Platform

What It Is

The Plasma Netbook Reference Platform is a full system image that makes it easy to test and improve the Netbook workspace shell. It can be downloaded and installed on a USB memory stick for easy testing on netbooks an devices with other form factors.

Our Goals

Our goals are:

to provide an easy, reliable way to test Plasma Netbook
to provide system integrators a reference to evaluate Plasma Netbook with as well as to compare their own Plasma Netbook offerings with
to support the growing Plasma Netbook user base in being able to easily get involved with testing, improving and demonstrating interesting, useful and fun modifications both to the upstream Plasma project as well as to other Plasma Netbook users.

We strive to accomplish all of these things in an open manner that embodies the precepts of the Code of Conduct.

How To Get It

Note: The following procedure creates an actual persistent filesystem on a USB stick. This is not comparable to a live CD system where everything resides in memory. The speed you experience will be comparable to what you are used on your system. All changes will be saved on the stick and will still be there on your next reboot.

The, weekly updated image is available at this address in a compress format:

https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=KDE:Netbook

(is this address correct? Does everybody need an account to download the image? what is with http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Netbook/images ?)

Short version:

Download and extract
(sudo) dd if=image.raw of=/dev/DeviceCode

Long vresion:

Download the file with the raw.bz2 extension. It should have a size of around 500 Mb (i.e. Plasma-Netbook-Reference.i686-0.1.0-Build16.1.raw.bz2)
Extract the compressed file using your preferred method. For example by right-clicking on the file in dolphin and selecting: "Extract Archive Here". Depending on your hardware this should only take a couple of seconds. The resulting folder has a size of about 1.7 Gb and contains the actual raw disk image with a .raw extension.
The following step has to be performed on a terminal window (You can easily get a terminal by hitting <Alt+F2> in a default plasma desktop or netbook installation, then type "konsole" and hit <Enter>).
Change into the same directory that contains the extracted .raw image (i.e. cd /home/user/Desktop/Plasma-Netbook-Reference.i686-0.1.0-Build16.1.raw/)
Put in a USB stick with a minimal size of 2 GB (WARNING: All contents of this disk will be deleted by following the following steps). There is no need to manually mount the disk.
Type "dmesg" in the terminal and note the 3 letters between the brackets in the last lines (i.e. [sdb]. This is the actual code of the device that you just plugged in.
While still being in the directory where the raw image was extracted type the following command: "dd if=Plasma-Netbook-Reference.i686-0.1.0-Build16.1.raw of=/dev/sdb". Hit <Enter> (Replace "sdb" with whatever was your 3-letter device code and the .raw image name with whatever you have).
If you are on a K/X/Ubuntu system, precede this line with "sudo" and enter your user password. On other systems make sure you have root privileges
The dd command takes about 10-15 minutes to finish!
Your plasma-netbook stick is ready to be used. Just plug it in a computer and reboot.

How To Get Involved

irc: #plasma-netbook on irc.freenode.net
mailing list: plasma-devel at kde.org
how to join the build service project
how to fork it and do your own customizations
gitorious project for config?
sharing your modifications
testing and bug reporting?

Known Issues and Current Efforts

The fullscreen dialog from the opendesktop.org plasmoid needs to be removed
First launch issue with the activities bar: it is so wide that the part of the panel with the window title/close plasmoid is off the right edge of the screen (Marco)
Updated network manager plasmoid package (Will)
WiFi not working out of the box