Planet Fedora

June 23, 2008

Projeto Fedora Brasil

O Projeto Fedora Brasil anuncia que o BrOffice.org finalmente entrou para o repositório oficial do Projeto Fedora. A versão 3.0 dos pacotes da suíte de escritório já encontram-se disponíveis no Rawhide (árvore de desenvolvimento) do Fedora 10, que está programado para ser lançado no final de outubro deste ano.

Esta é mais uma grande vitória da comunidade Fedora brasileira. Parabéns a todos!

June 23, 2008 05:02 PM

Dave Jones

sometimes the obvious ideas are the hardest to find.

Something that's great about conferences, is that they often cause discussion which leads to thinking out loud, and suddenly, an idea comes up that seems to obvious it smacks of "why hasn't anyone done this yet?".

During my talk at fudcon (yes, I said I wasn't going to do one, but it ended up being just a Q&A instead of a 'state of the union' kind of talk), there was quite a bit of talk about the forthcoming kernel modesetting feature, and how awesome it's going to be to be able to capture oopses when we've locked up in X. This led to "I don't know how many times I've seen a kernel panic scroll off the top of the screen, and I didn't have a serial console hooked up".

I boot all my boxes with appropriate grub lines to make it spew out the serial port, but I don't have enough serial cables to keep every box permanently rigged up to a console (I know there are multiplexer type things, I don't have, nor want one of those either). A lot of the time, the box I run minicom on isn't necessarily powered up either. So a lot of the time, that serial output goes nowhere.

After we panic, we just sit there in a for (;;); loop forever.

The 'duhhh' moment that came up on the weekend was..

Why not make that infinite loop do something like:
for (;;) { wait for a minute send the dmesg ring buffer out again

As well as this giving you some time to find/hook up a serial cable/start minicom, it would also have the advantage that it would print out the whole dmesg buffer, which may contain additional useful clues as well as the oops.

June 23, 2008 03:21 PM

Greg DeKoenigsberg

Fedora gots mad skeelz, yo

One of the next big projects for Fedora, in my opinion, is skills management.

The following is a repost of a long-ish email I sent to fedora-ambassadors-list earlier today. Apologies if it makes you go blind.

===

POINT #1: ALL THE ENTHUSIASM IN THE WORLD FAILS IF IT CAN NOT BE HARNESSED.

This was the first thing I really, really learned in my tenure as Red Hat Community Guy. Pretty much everything I've done since has been to harness energy by providing focus.

===

POINT #2: WE STILL DO NOT HAVE A COMPREHENSIVE SET OF FEDORA WORK ITEMS SUITABLE FOR NEWBIES -- BUT WE WILL FIX THAT.

This is an absolutely key problem to solve. The following scenario is one that we must avoid at all costs:

Newbie: I just found out that I can help this cool project called Fedora! I'm going to go to the Fedora site to learn more!

(An hour of searching an inherently confusing wiki follows.)

Newbie: This is really hard. I think I'll go play Freeciv instead!

Note: MORE WIKI PAGES DO NOT SOLVE THIS PROBLEM. We've tried. There are abandoned "suggest your projects here" pages all over the Fedora wiki. We need a strong mechanism for collecting project information, and making it easy for potential contributors to find *exactly* those projects that suit them.

Fortunately, I think that we are now tackling this challenge from a couple of different directions:

a. Seneca College. Chris Tyler of Seneca College, who is copied on this email, is giving us a very tangible reason to solve this problem. Chris will be teaching about open source participation to his students in the upcoming year, and one of the first things that Chris needs from the Fedora community is precisely this kind of list of work items. Which means that Chris will be relentless in helping us figure this problem out. :) If you want to learn more about the Seneca project, please email him to learn more.

b. Task Management Tools. Luke Macken, who is also copied on this email, is working on an interface for Fedora community members to contribute their ideas to the project. The best ideas can be voted up. It's a good start.

These kinds of tools may also be able to correlate a newbie's skills with the skills required for various projects. One can imagine the following flow:

* The proposal UI. Alex has a great idea -- "an interface to track cell phone numbers for all Fedora volunteers" -- and he goes to the "Fedora Proposals" UI. He enters an abstract of the project. He clicks the "Turbogears" box and the "Python" box under the "skills needed" part of the UI.

* The voting UI. Every member can go to the list of proposals and vote them up or down, Digg-style. Bill sees on Fedora Planet that a new idea has been proposed for "tracking cell phone numbers". He likes the idea a lot -- not just because it's a good idea, but also because Alex took the time to explain it well. So he clicks on the link and votes the idea up. Note: this implies that the bad proposals, like "I think Fedora should move to apt" with a description that reads "cuz it's awesum", will languish at the bottom of the list.

* The project-finder UI. Clarice signs up with Fedora as a contributor. As part of the join form, she is asked for her skill set, and she checks "Python" and "Turbogears". Upon completion, she immediately sees a UI that says "hey, the following projects need exactly your expertise!" And at the top of the list is the "cell phone numbers" project, with contact information of potential mentors who can help her get started.

This is not a complicated vision. It is a highly achievable vision. Luke Macken is already working on pieces of it, and if you have any web programming skills, you could probably help him on it, right now.

===

POINT #3: ONCE WE HAVE STRONG TASK MANAGEMENT TOOLS, WE CAN FUNNEL ALL KINDS OF NEW ENERGY INTO OUR PROCESS.

Once the infrastructure of participation exists, the critical job changes, from *enabling* participation to *driving* participation.

First, you SIMPLIFY. It should be *dead simple* for *any* newbie -- college student, college professor, bored professional, retiree -- to find useful work to do that helps his fellow man.

Then, you AMPLIFY. When you trust your ability to manage community work, you shout from the rooftops, "HEY, WE NEED YOUR HELP!" If the projects that you drive people to are interesting, useful, and achievable, you will find that people will crawl out of the bushes to work on them. If college professors want to build their own curriculum around such a program, so much the better.

===

So. That's my take. Sorry for the long email. If you agree with this vision, please get in touch with Luke Macken to help make this vision into a reality. He's already got a great headstart. :)

June 23, 2008 03:18 PM

Tim Niemueller

Naos arrived! (1 comment)

Finally our four Naos arrived! Yeah! If it wasn't for Alex they would still be anywhere. He had to fight hard to get the financial stuff in place. Thanks for this!

We are currently charging and waiting to wake 'em for the first time to see them in action. Now going to get the tool chain running on Fedora, yay! The Naos themselves run a Linux derivate -- nice. Unfortunately the access to hardware isn't that open. Let's see how it works out. I'm now going to port our software framework to the Nao -- to be released to the public at some point in time this year!

Oh, the sign reads "Nicht streicheln, nicht füttern", which means "Don't pet, don't feed!" :-)

Stay tuned for more exciting news! You might want to have a look at the Fedora Robotics SIG page to see what's currently going on in Fedora regarding robotics. Maybe you even want to join!?

Don't pet! Don't feed!

June 23, 2008 02:33 PM

Nicu Buculei

Romnian Fedora team at Cluj - an illustrated history

As announced, a group of Romanian Fedora contributors went Saturday at an event organized in Cluj-Napoca by Grupul pentru Software Liber. Now it is the time for a [heavy] illustrated report of the event (even more photos [*] can be found in our photo gallery):

So, we leaved Bucharest Friday, with the night train:
[fedora]

Where for now "we" is as this: me, Nicu, (if you read this, you should have a pointer about who I am), Adrian and Andrei are Fedora Ambassadors and the other Andrei is a junior member of the team (and being underage, we had to take care of him, Adrian received something like 20 minutes of instructions on the phone from his mother).
[fedora]

We were awaited early in the morning at the train station by Jani and Adi (both are Ubuntu contributors), and having a lot of time until the event's start, they took us for a walk in the city:
[fedora]

After that, we went to Jani's house, meet Alex) (he came from Timisoara), who work on Fedora but also on Firefox and OpenOffice.org, took the materials and headed to the event's place:
[fedora]

Namely, to the Babes - Bolyai University, which is a beautiful place (from every point of view):
[fedora]

There we prepared the room and waited for the audience to come:
[fedora]

I started the presentation with a talk about the Fedora community, but instead of half an hour, as planned, I got carried away by the speech, talked for a full hour and messed-up the entire schedule (bad idea guys to move my speech at the beginning):
[fedora]

Then Alex talked about Narro, his wonderful web-based translation tool, and about using it to translate OpenOffice.org and Fedora
[fedora]

Then Adrian gave a general presentation of the new features in Fedora 9, but he had to rush the presentation, because of me, who talked to much in my previous segment:
[fedora]

But probably my greatest victim was Andrei, who intended to talk a bit about Java in Fedora (sharing the same presentation with Adrian), but effectively had to resume it to a couple of phrases (bad, Nicu, bad!). But he helped us a lot and took a large number of photos (not yet online)
[fedora]

Then Alex took the stage again and talked about Firefox 3, release, features and translation
[fedora]

And during all those speeches, aour junior apprentice was helpful and good at cheering
[fedora]

After the presentation, we got to a Firefox 3 release party: friendly people, beer and interesting personal talks.
[fedora]

After the party, all of us Fedora guys (all five, including Alex), took another walk in the city (mainly at the Botanical Garden)
[fedora]

But we have not limited to admire some beautiful places, the city has plenty of other beautiful things to see:
[fedora]

And that was almost all, we returned with another night train.

In the end, many thanks to Adi and Jani, you were fabulous hosts!
[fedora]

Note: I made even more photos, but in the gallery are available only photos somewhat related to FOSS, photos with other subjects (like beautiful girls from Cluj streets) may be found on my other sites.

June 23, 2008 02:27 PM

Rex Dieter

Rex's FUDCon redux

Kudos to those coming to my aid wrt my own accommodations, including Mike McGrath and J5. Mike shared his excellent wit as well as sysadmin-fu (iscsi+raid!, csi) and fedora infrastructure goodies (asterisk). J5 and I had a nice chat at FUDpub about the state of gnome and kde, and taking advantage of future opportunities for collaboration... via shared technology and potential future joint (guadec, akademy, whatever) sites.

One of my favorite aspects about FUDCon is getting valuable facetime with folks I hadn't met before. Highlights include meeting Smooge, unselfishly sharing a wealth of fantastic stories and hammering on epel-related business; Andrew Overholt, busy working some java-fu magic to get Alfresco into fedora; and Clint Savage, utilizing his own brand of media-fu magic by experimenting with streaming audio and video of FUDcon talks.

I also helped lead a couple of barcamp sessions, "How to be a package maintainer" and "the care and feeding of SIGs", and was very happy with the results of both. The former, went through http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Join describing each step and answering questions along the way. If all goes well, we'll have at least 4-5 new maintainers, including some guy named Max.

The care and feeding of SIGs brushed on many of the same topics that I wish to also bring to akademy 2008. I've got a bit more work to get that where I want it to be, but it was a good start on brainstorming and feedback.

Unfortunately, didn't have much chance to evangelize kde as I would have liked, but that's ok. As a positive aside, through heroic measures by other KDE SIG'ers, we saw kde 4.1 beta 2 (4.0.83) land in rawhide. Rock on.

June 23, 2008 02:08 PM

Bastien Nocera

More than a game: GUADEC FreeFA tourney!

The FreeFA tournament will take place again this year, on Tuesday 8th July. We still have room for a couple of people. Seems like keeping it low-key wasn't enough to get it under-subscribed.

Diego will soon be taking care of setting up the teams. There might be some room left for a couple of people to join, in case we get late cancellations, so please add your name and contacts to the wiki page if you're interested.

June 23, 2008 02:06 PM

Fedora Mexico

K3RNEL P@N1C 01: Obsesiones

Desde antes del lanzamiento de K3RNEL tenía una duda sobre el formato del comic a seguir, si uno con historia y ‘aventura’ y demás, o una historieta cómica como hay muchas en Internet. A fin de cuentas decidí tener ambas. Cada semana, habrá una tira de K3RNEL, pero cada 4-6 semanas, habrá una “interrupción”, con un K3RNEL P@N1C.

Si les agrada el formato, pues lo verán cada mes o mes y medio. Si no les agrada? Pues solo tendrán que soportarlo 1 vez cada mes o mes y medio. Que quede claro que no soy el único que se dedica a comics graciosos sobre Fedora, Nicu Buculei tiene su propio Webcomic, e inclusive habló sobre nosotros la semana pasada.

Before launching ‘K3RNEL‘, I had to decide the story of the comic, and between my choices, I needed to know if I wanted to make a ‘funny’ comic, or an action/adventure based one. I chose both. Every week, there’ll be a new K3RNEL comic, however every now and then (4-6 weeks), there’ll be a ‘K3RNEL P@N1C’. You can consider it filler (It isn’t.. entirely).

If you like this section (K3RNEL P@N1C), sorry, my limited creativeness only allows me to make one of these every now and then. If you hated it? Lucky you, you’ll only see it once a month, maybe even less often. Either way, I’m not the only one in town with a Fedora webcomic, Nicu Buculei has his own, which is dedicated to ‘funnies. He even mentioned us last week.

Click en la imagen para agrandar / Click image to enlarge

Finally, I’ve received about a dozen emails and comments asking me to translate these comics in english, which is funny, since they’ve always been in english.

This blog is intended for Latin-American people, there aren’t many Fedora, or even Linux pages in spanish, so I decided to invest my time in the language. The comics have always been in English. Perhaps the format isn’t clear, maybe I should make a new website dedicated to it, or a new category. While I haven’t decided on the path I’ll take, rest assured I’m thinking about it and I’ll solve the issue sooner rather than later. In the meantime, the comics are in English already, so enjoy!

Libera tus Bytes!
-Nushio

June 23, 2008 02:00 PM

Rex Dieter

United joy

I've held a long grudge against United, but I won't go into that here and now. What I *will* go into is my renewed frustration based on the fact that my flight home, in the air and half-way there, turned around and went back to Chicago. W-T-F. OK, I'm sure that the minor mechanical malfunction they encountered was probably a very good reason for doing so, but it frustrates me to no end that now I (and J5) woke up this morning ~4AM for nothing! My well-laid plans to get home early were foiled.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, United. Happy, Happy, joy, joy. I love you too.

June 23, 2008 01:56 PM

Nicu Buculei

We are going to Cluj

We are going to Cluj-Napoca this Saturday! Grupul pentru software liber (the Group for Free Software) organized an event, held at the Babes - Bolyai University and we, the Romanian Fedora team are going to talk (in front of what I expect to be an Ubuntu predominant audience, so keep your fingers crossed for us to return alive).
[fedora at cluj]

a poster for the event,
greatly influenced by Mo's work

What we will to there? the plan is like this: Adrian to talk about Fedora 9 with Andrei adding a few words about Java, Alexandru will talk about localization with Narro (introducing OpenOffice.org) and Firefox, me to talk about the Fedora community (as viewed thru the eyes of an Art Team contributor) and the other Andrei to cheerlead.

homemade promo stuff for the event

As you can see from the photo above, I have a new toy, but more about that later, probably next week, for now is enough to say it stole a lot of my time, so I barely prepared a a set of slides for my presentation (according to the schedule, I have about 20 minutes for it anyway).

But back to the topic, after the event we will go ~~to drink~~ at the Firefox Release Party, so it must de fun!

June 23, 2008 01:45 PM

Matt Lee

Bill Gates and the importance of source code

An interesting article on Bill Gates and the importance of source code -- in it, it refer to Bill Gates statement in a recent BBC interview that he and Paul Allen were stuck with the first computer they had access to, until they found the source code in a bin.

In a bin.

30 years later, Bill Gates and Microsoft continue to trash the freedoms of computer users, with Steve Ballmer describing the same goals and community ideals that allowed Gates to learn as a cancer, with Gates himself saying "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

30 years from now, will Microsoft continue to act with hostility toward the very goals that gave Gates and Allen their big break? Will the next generation of Microsoft be able to finally drop the arrogance of Gates and embrace the free software community as something other than a threat? Remember -- companies like Sun have shown hostility towards free software in the past, only to turn around and release something as significant as Java under the GPL -- not just any free software license, but the same license that Gates disagrees with.

June 23, 2008 01:19 PM

Pierre-Yves Chibon

A Hello through the World !

Un Hello autour du monde

Hello world around the world !

English version (Français dessous)

I had an idea (ok we were two, the idea comes from my office mate and I)... I know this is crazy, we should not do that...

But since we did, let me try to explain it to you.

We are now using web services for our work, these are biomoby web services (written in Java for those that I do). With this services you can have a work-flow approach of different services, with it you can link different web services, let them do their job and get the output.

Our idea, (prepare yourself) would be to use such services to build the biggest HELLO WORLD never made (it could be registered as a Guinness book record maybe ?).

What is needed:

A bunch of people with few time in front of them all around the world.
Very few knowledge on how to write web services (you can chose the language of your choice- perl, java...)
A bit more knowledge on how to deploy the service

The idea is to create all around the world, web services that receive a string as input, add a letter (pick your choice) and return the new string as output.

With this we could create a Hello world, around the world !

Ok it is now time for me to sleep a bit more (too much thought) :-p but think about it could be fun to do, isn't it ?

French version

J'ai eu une idée (j'en partage l'origine avec mon voisin de bureau, on est deux sur ce coup là ), je sais on devrai pas... promis c'est la dernière avant la prochaine

Mais bon comme je l'ai eu cette idée laissez moi vous la présenter.

Pour notre travail on utilise en ce moment des services web biomoby, écris en java pour ce qui nous concerne. L'avantage de ces services c'est la possibilité de les utiliser les uns après les autres constituant ainsi ce qu'on appel un "workflow". Les différents services s'appelent alors les uns après les autres.

Notre idée est donc de créer le plus grand Hello world du monde ! (un autre record ?)

Ce dont nous aurions besoin:

Quelques personnes motivés tout autour du globe
Très peu de connaissance en programmation serai requis
Quelques connaissances pour le déploiement du service sera par contre nécessaire

L'idée est donc de créer tout autour du monde une serie de services qui récupère une chaine en entrée, y ajoute une lettre (parmis celle de "Hello world") et retourne cette chaine en sortie.

Ainsi on pourrait faire le plus grand "Hello world" du monde

Bon aller il est tant d'aller dormir je crois que j'en ai besoin (trop de réflexions...), mais bon pensez-y ça peut être marrant à faire

June 23, 2008 12:42 PM

Yaakov M. Nemoy

Making Communication Easier

One hot topic that was discussed alot were a few of the communications issues the French team is having. I have a nice long laundry list of some things they would like to see changed or that can be done better.

The number one complaint was a lack of history on the Fedora Planet blog. Reading through English posts can be time consuming, so it's quite common for people here to push that off to a once a week event. Since most articles disappear after two to three days, most articles are missed. I cannot stress enough that I heard this complaint *alot*.

On a more positive note, several people told me how happy they were to hear about gregdek's translation bot and would love to see this put into production use. Let's hope it doesn't turn into a bikeshed issue on how to integrate it with our regular channels.

The rest of the issues centered around making Fedora Planet more accessible. There was one proposal to make it a requirement to provide at least a one sentence summary in English with each blog post. Another proposal was to provide automatic 'translate this post' links for every single post. Optimally, this could be available in the RSS feed too. (One person mentioned that he doesn't see the translate links in Paul Frield's posts.)

One final proposal was to turn it into something approximating a full web application, where the user could access the stream through any number of filters. Some of these filters could be 'french blog posts only', or 'all posts, but through a translator', and a few others. I suppose this would take more work to implement, though.

June 23, 2008 11:48 AM

Bryan Che

Red Hat Enterprise MRG Presentations From the 2008 Red Hat Summit

I've posted online the presentations that we just did at the 2008 Red Hat Summit about Red Hat Enterprise MRG. You can download them at:

Realtime Linux: Who, What, When, Where and Why by Clark Williams
Red Hat Enterprise MRG Overview by Carl Trieloff
Dynamic Grid Computing With Red Hat Enterprise MRG & Amazon EC2 and accompanying demo video by Bryan Che

June 23, 2008 11:21 AM

Aurélien Bompard

Can we domesticate germs ?

In this incredible talk at TED, Paul Ewald tells us how we can control the evolution of viruses and pathogens, just by understanding how they can be transmitted.

A very interesting, fresh view on immunology and prevention VS cure. If you know the rules (of evolution), you can best play the game (of life).

Voir en ligne : Can we domesticate germs ? (Paul Ewald on TED)

June 23, 2008 11:12 AM

Debarshi Ray

A ballpoint pen

"... How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?" -- Robert Mugabe

June 23, 2008 10:27 AM

Pierre-Yves Chibon

Fedora FR ce qui a été fais

Fedora FR, un point de vue extérieur

Fedora FR a new point of view

French version (English below)

Ce week end nous avons reçut Yaakov Nemoy lors de notre Install Party à Paris.

Nous avons aussi pu aussi discuter de Fedora-FR, ce qui nous faisons, comment et dans quel but.

Il nous livre ici ces retours, c'est en anglais mais google translate peut aider

Merci Yaakov d'avoir fais ce déplacement et de nous livrer tes impressions à bientôt à Paris ou ailleurs

Merci aussi pour tous les cadeaux que tu nous as fais

English version

This week end for the Install fest in Paris we welcome Yaakov Nemoy.

It has been the occasion for him to meet Fedora FR, to see what we are doing and how.

He gives us back his impression about Fedora FR.

Thanks Yaakov to have made this trip and thanks to give us back what you think of the work we have done.

Hope to see you again in a Fedora Fest in Paris or somewhere else...

Thanks also for all the gifts you gave us

June 23, 2008 09:56 AM

Yaakov M. Nemoy

Some of the things the Fedora FR team has done

Over the weekend, I spoke to alot of people in the Fedora FR team about some of the things they've done. So far I've had only an small inkling of the amount of work they've put into promoting Fedora. I think that it's time that the rest of the world knows what they've been up to.

The Fedora-FR group and non profit organisation is concerned with promoting Fedora within the Francophone community. This includes not only France but southern Belgium, some border towns in Germany, northern Africa, half of Switzerland, and any other community that speaks primarily French. As I've written before, the Fedora FR team is on the unique challenge of providing Fedora as a good resource to a population that does not speak English well.

In a nutshell, they've reproduced most of the information infrastructure available to the mainstream Fedora but in French. They have their own:

The Organisation is made up of:

19 Ambassadors
A whopping 14,600 people signed up to the forum
80 documentation writers
22 contributors to the French blog.

They've put together in the past:

Powered by Fedora stickers
Fedora pins - I have a few, the quality is excellent
A French Live CD spin
An Online Fedora Schwag store - Including the unofficial Fedora thong.
A PDF Manual for Fedora available for offline reading
Articles in local magazines

They've arranged and ran many events for the French Community including at least 3 install fests for every Fedora release. Overall, they are sincerely one of our best and top performing marketing and Ambassador teams in the Fedora world.

This presents a few issues in regards to Fedora as a whole. Firstly, there is a strong overlap between the efforts of Fedora FR and Fedora EMEA. They are both looking to provide an outlet for alot of Fedora resources, including funding of events and running online stores. Even so, the focus of Fedora EMEA is far more corporate than Fedora FR. Most of the members of Fedora EMEA either use Fedora professionally at work, or work for Red Hat. In contrast, Fedora FR is made up mostly of community members who use Fedora for fun. The bar for membership is alot lower in Fedora FR, and they actively encourage people who participate at events to sign up for membership. One thing that we certainly can work on though is better communication and collaboration between Fedora FR and Fedora EMEA.

My weekend in Paris has been quite enjoyable so far. I can certainly say, without a doubt, that everyone in the French speaking Fedora community is quite hospitable, and more than happy to welcome visitors. If you can speak French, I really highly recommend visiting this community. It is definitely a very valuable experience. I would like to thank the entire community for hosting me this past weekend.

June 23, 2008 09:36 AM

Luis Villa

san francisco, etc.

I have to say it is pretty easy to fall in love with this place, especially on days like yesterday when it is clear and not too hot but not too cold- spent most of the day in a park relaxing at the birthday party of a friend of a friend.

dolores park

dolores park by Beth Rankin. License:

There were people in the park collecting petition signatures for (1) prostitution legalization and (2) naming the sewage treatment plant after George Bush. (Big Sort indeed.)

I am still having problems getting used to the transportation thing- I’m just not used to getting in a car to go places when I’m in a city. When I’m home in Miami, or in North Carolina, cars come naturally- but somehow it seems different and wrong here. And that is even before you have to deal with parking. I think an old beater for train<->office commute + zipcar for in the city might be the best compromise, not sure.

Work itself remains equal parts interesting and educational; difficult to say more about it than that at the moment- still too much to take in and make sense of, especially in a public forum like this one. Suffice to say that I really like the people at the firm, and much of the work is interesting and stimulating. Both of these things would have surprised me two years ago. :)

Oh, and singing ‘Creep‘ in Rock Band is quite a bit of fun, it turns out. No real danger of me buying an xbox, but if you need a singer for your next Rock Band party, I’m available…

June 23, 2008 06:30 AM

Izhar Firdaus

OSCC Mirror

So, at last the Open Source Competency Center, Cyberjaya _finally_ have mirrors running. Theres Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, ArchLinux mirrored. For the Fedora Mirror (only F9), here are the baseurls:


Everything : http://mirror.oscc.org.my/fedora/releases/9/Everything/$basearch
Updates    : http://mirror.oscc.org.my/fedora/updates/9/$basearch/

However, sadly, its only a 8Mbps mirror - rather surprising for a government-supported organization. I've asked whether they want to be in mirrors.fedoraproject.org automated by-nearest-country mirrorlist reply so that the mirror can get a one nice DDoS, not sure whether they'll take that idea or not.

Update: Haris said, he want to proceed. I hope it goes well. Yet, I don't want MirrorManager to reply list with only that OSCC mirror. Coz with 8Mbps, I doubt it can really handle it >.< . Hopefully, that once they get themselves in mirrors.fedoraproject.org , that can be a big enough traction to push their higher ups for bigger bandwidth. I hate to admit this: only 8Mbps from a country like Malaysia, is quite embarrassing.

June 23, 2008 05:20 AM

Michael Stahnke

Spacewalk over the weekend

Well, a couple things to report about for spacewalk. First off, Nigel Jones and I put in a bug for spacewalk to get it into Fedora. It can be found 452450. I also started a page tracking progress of the packages. on the hosted wiki. . Looks like Nigel started a few packages, so hopefully this week we can finish with the perl packages and move on to the next set....java. I'll need a lot of help here, so if you know anything about Java, speak up.

Also, thanks to help from Justin, I think I have a patch ready for spacewalk that allows a user to list system notes via XML-RPC. In his words "It's stupid easy." In my mind, I just saw difficult java, but at least I have an understanding of JavaDoc.

June 23, 2008 03:35 AM

Jeremy Katz

A productive Sunday

Unlike many Sundays, today was actually pretty productive. I woke up this morning with the intention of getting in a good ride and I succeeded in doing so. I met up with the Quad crowd down at the shop and went out for a good, relatively high intensity ride. Kept it on the shorter side (45-ish miles), though given all of the other things that were on my plate for the day. After the ride, I picked up some Cytomax quickly at the shop and then headed home. Took a quick shower and then popped over next door for the birthday party for our neighbor's one year old. Talked with people and then bowed out so that I could spend some time working on getting the homework that had piled up done.

This was where I expected to need to spend a lot more time today and really, I'm pretty happy with what the time requirement actually ended up being. The biggest problem with the System Dynamics homework was getting VenSim working. Unfortunately, wine seems to not want to work for some reason now and thus I had to fall back to doing a full machine emulation of Windows 98 (I knew I kept that CD around for something :-). But kvm running Windows 98 seems to hit some bad code paths, so eventually, I ended up using just bare qemu. Which mostly worked, although I still had to deal with a litany of Windows being stupid. But eventually I got things up and running enough that I could install VenSim and do the homework set. Seemed pretty straight-forward and I think that thus far, I "get" what we've covered in the class.

The Systems Engineering homework I had started on some over the past couple of days in short little spurts just gathering my thoughts for the questions. So it was only a small matter of putting everything together to finish that up.

This puts me in a much better place for tomorrow than I expected as I should be able to head into work and get a good day's worth of work in without having to cut out early to finish things up. There will be some final touches to put on things, but it should be reasonable enough to do them instead when I get home rather than having to do them earlier in the day. Now, on to the folding of laundry...

June 23, 2008 01:50 AM

Yuan Yijun

Firefox 3 发布

1. 吉尼斯世界纪录，蛮好的主意，让大家心里都有这么个事情。嘲笑它做什么呢，嘲笑本身更是无用功。FOSS 任重道远，还有别的推广方式没有？

2. Fedora Linux 上运行 Firefox 3 还是不够流畅，从试图输入地址(ctrl-L)到看到页面载入反馈，中间要很久。和 GNOME 的“运行”对话框有同样的问题，也是 Gnome-Do / deskbar 不讨人喜欢的原因。

3. Fedora Linux 仓库中的 Firefox 一直是 Beta5，很久没有更新了。因为不被当成 Firefox 3 看待，所以 firebug 插件没法安装。:( update: 仓库中看到正式版了。

4. Firefox 3 的 RC 一直可以自动更新(win32)，很顺利。然而最后一个 RC 不会自动更新到正式版，大概是这个 RC 就是正式版吧？或者是为了创世界纪录而做出的设定？

5. 我公司的电脑是 win32，家里是 fedora，那么在 market share 中我是不是占了双份……

6. 最近在稀里糊涂地用 Weave 插件。历史功能或者书签对我没有意义，因为我总是用 Google 查关键词，这样反而方便些，一次可以看到多个链接。

另一个稀里糊涂的插件是 Personas，从 0.9.x 升级之后就再也连不上服务器了(win32)，家里则是任何 skin 都没有图案，只有背景变暗，菜单文字变浅，混在一起。 --update: 需要在 noscript 里允许某台 mozilla.org 的机器啦

June 23, 2008 01:28 AM

Michael DeHaan

The Best Thing to Come Out of FudCON

I was not responsible for this. I wish I was.

June 23, 2008 12:18 AM

Nigel Jones

Exit Polls... Exit Polls. Come and get your exit polls!

"Hello and welcome to CNN, I'm Wolf Blitzer"

We have some initial data for the Fedora Board Primaries coming in showing that all seven candidates have performed extremely well all attaining some sort of vote from 100% of voters.

Our computers have generated the following very colourful map showing the vote distribution and the winners of several of the precincts. Unfortunately our computers are so "state-of-the-art" (just look at this fancy touchscreen here that displays porn for us during the commercial breaks) that we don't know WHO actually won...

Hopefully official results will be out shortly...

P.S. Please take this in the spirit intended... A joke/parody... REAL voting data will be available shortly...

June 23, 2008 12:01 AM

June 22, 2008

Michael Stahnke

Official Red Hat Goodies

So, I have posted a flickr of all the goodies I got from the Red Hat Sumit and FUDcon. Hmm, I guess I missed the USB thumb-drive, and a few stickers. Oh well.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mastahnke/2601673053/

I would have just put it inline, but I think you miss the notes on it then.

June 22, 2008 11:52 PM

Máirín Duffy

Are You Fedora? (Video 1)

How This Was Done

I filmed various folks introducing themselves at FUDcon. I got around 40 or so videos (some were do-overs). :) This video includes the first batch of individual videos I trimmed. I tried to use PiTiVi but the video it exports doesn't appear to be playable. It crashes when I add an audio track and then export as well. So there's no swanky background music on this video yet. I ended up using kino, which unfortunately meant having to use a non-Fedora repository. :( However, the final product was rendered to ogg.

If you have flash working the following link will be more convenient for you maybe: I Am Fedora: Video 1

Do You Want To Be in A Video?

Have a video camera or a webcam & cheese? Send me a video of yourself (look straight at the camera) saying, "My name is [your name], my IRC nick is [your IRC nick], and I am Fedora" and I'll add your video to the pool of video clips for making more videos in the future.

PiTiVi Help

Is there anyone reading this who has some proficiency with PiTiVi willing to give me some tips on getting usable output and getting imported audio tracks to work? My use-case is simple: I want to take an already ready-to-go video and just layer a background music track on top. Kino doesn't seem to handle extra audio tracks at all. :(

(I really like the Burnt Toast for Breakfast album by Sum-1 and thought it would make some good background music. I was thinking of using track 9, called "Monkey Business." The album is Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.)

June 22, 2008 10:03 PM

Yaakov M. Nemoy

What are the best kinds of Fedora users?

Today I gave a presentation with the help of Thomas about the different kinds of Fedora users. I gave the presentation in English, and Thomas translated it on the fly into French. Although my French skills are poor, the parts I did understand seem to express what I was saying. I thank Thomas for helping out.

The presentation itself was mostly a ripoff of a previous presentation I found on the wiki with a few touches of my own. It can be found here (Impress) and here (Evince). I apologize, but the Impress version needs the fonts Copperplate and Calibri to be displayed properly. If you want to use this presentation as your own, please feel free. I ordered the slides to be provokers of discussion, rather than pure factual information.

The trend seems to be pretty simple. Users show up in the Linux world as just users, and progress through various stages of being a power user before they become a contributor of some kind. One of the common speaking points on the American side of the pond is that in some ways we need to encourage all our users to be more than just users. If anything, we want there to be as few barriers to new contributions, in order to encourage this process.

One of the slides in particular is a favourite of mine. It's a set of various 'ideas' that led to the development of some of the more heroic efforts in Fedora. This includes projects like Revisor, Func, and even the Bug Triaging team. They were all started by individuals both inside and outside of Red Hat who simply stood up and got to work. This was the point I hoped to get across. (The people behind these projects, you know who you are, so feel free to stand up and take a bow, even though no one is watching.)

I hope that this approach can also be useful to the French speaking Fedora team. There is a strong language barrier between the French group and the rest of the Fedora world, and because of this, the attitude here is pretty insular. I spoke with alot of people here about it, and I have some definite things to work on to help bridge the gap, but I also want to make sure that this message is available to the French speakers in French. There is a strong and fast developing user base in France thanks to the efforts of all the French Ambassadors. Hopefully my presentation and material can be incorporated into the French team's work as well.

June 22, 2008 09:36 PM

Paul W. Frields

Whittle while you work.

The community came up with a list of over 60 possible names for the Fedora 10 release. That’s a list that’s far too long to send to Red Hat’s legal department for trademark searching, so to conserve some time and resources, the Board voted, using the new election system, on a “top ten” list that was more likely to come back from legal before the actual release. The list, in alphabetical order:

Eureka
Kilimanjaro
Mercury
Monarch
Neon
Popcorn
Red Hat Linux
Styx
Thor
Water

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

June 22, 2008 09:05 PM

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June 23, 2008

June 22, 2008

How This Was Done

Do You Want To Be in A Video?

PiTiVi Help