Plasma/Plasma Netbook Reference Platform

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Revision as of 21:33, 12 March 2010 by Binarylooks (talk | contribs)

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.


Weekly rebuild Images are made available at the following address: 

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 ?)


To extract the image to a stick, follow these simple instructions.

Short version:

  • Download and extract somewhere in your home folder
  • (sudo) dd if=image.raw of=/dev/DeviceCode (Needs at least a 2 Gb usb stick)


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 the KDE filemanager (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/).
  • Plug in a USB stick with a minimal size of 2 GB (WARNING: All contents of this disk will be deleted by completing 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 your 3-letter device code and the .raw image name with whatever downloaded).
  • 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
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