Just ahead of next week's launch of openSUSE 11.2, the open source community has posted three variations on a really green theme and invited openSUSE users and FOSS community members to choose the one they like best.

The choices are:

This week, I've been going over some options students have for setting up a computer with educational software and applications. Monday, I gave readers an overview of Edubuntu, an education edition of the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu. Today, let's take a look at openSUSE Education, a community-driven project backed by Novell.

The openSUSE Education Project is an effort to support schools using Linux and to provide an openSUSE-based Live DVD that can be used to set up a quick educational environment without installing any software. The KIWI-LTSP server supports up to five users from the Live DVD. The Live DVD is also installable, so classrooms that are switching to Linux on a full-time basis can use the "Life" (Linux for Education) DVD to do a permanent install.

OpenSUSE Community Manager Joe Brockmeier has a very interesting post up about trademarks, in which he argues that they are vitally important to protecting branding related to open source projects. His post is a reaction to this one from Linux book author Keir Thomas, author of Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference, which we covered here. Thomas recounts getting comments from Canonical about how his use of Ubuntu trademarks may have included taking too many liberties. Thomas finds rules like Canonical's, surrounding trademarks, to be too restrictive. I see good points made on both side of this argument, and it's an important one.