Archive for May 2004

Another day, another review

This time, it’s Ken Barber’s review ofopinion piece on Fedora Core 2. For Linux.com to publish this sort of drivel, scares me. Most of the useful comments state it all, but something caught me:

It is bleeding-edge technology that will become mainstream in a year or so, and as such is an important distro for people who will be working with next year’s technology.

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Firewire is borked because the upstream kernel has a borked Firewire; the YaST discussion has come up on fedora-devel-list before (archives!); Fedora “just works” for a lot of people; GNOME 2.6 is not broken. Well, going by popularity, everyone loves Fedora Core, they’re just to shy to say it :)

Novell’s novel move to OpenOffice.org

While it is a novel idea for Novell to migrate to OpenOffice.org, is the end of the year a more viable alternative than a end-of-July 2004 dateline?

Even up to this date, employees aren’t exactly convinced – OpenOffice.org might be installed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its being used. Forcing it down throats is what’s happening. And OpenOffice.org still isn’t cutting it for an average person involved in dealing with external customers (unless they get a lot of migration assistance):

  • Writer is doing quite well, importing quite the number of Word documents without issues – however, certain data fields don’t show, watermarks don’t import properly, and for some reason, a document with the watermark created in about two revisions earlier, was still displayed. But most documents are fine, save for the weirder bullets issue.
  • Calc’s importing of Excel documents are still hit-and-miss. Simple =SUMIF’s actually broke during the conversion. VBA macros obviously break.
  • Impress imports PowerPoint presentations fairly well, but drawings like boxes do run quite the bit.
  • The Document Converter AutoPilot seems to crash OOo 1.1.1 on machines with about 128MB of RAM in Windows when the document count was around 280 or so. I’ll be playing with this a lot more, I’m sure.

So as a check-list, Michael Meeks and team seem to be working on getting the VBA macro support in OOo – this is going to be very important for the migration to work. I don’t know what miracles we’re going to make on the import/export of files – they have to “just work” (no, PDF’s for clients aren’t useful, when they have to work with you) – so that dealing with clients using the other Office suite, is not an issue. Calc needs to be further enhanced, definitely.

It’s interesting to note that a Florida health organisation actually performed the migration for 3,500 PCs first, even before Novell did! Good beta testing ground, I’m wishing to hear more of their document migration issues, more than anything else.

So did they really start? Not quite, but they’re breaking it down for the staff, and they’re getting their first take at OOo usage – for most, it seems to be similar, with workarounds for the common things to use. For others, problems listed above, exist (among a few minor niggling effects).

XP Dual Boot problem fix?

You think Fedora eats babies? Find that it’s irresponsible to release code that damages your other partitions?

An anonymous wizard has written: Prevention and Recovery of XP Dual Boot Problems. Read it, breathe it, report back to us if it works. Constructive comments folk – yes, it may sound technical, but good constructive comments will help everyone.

In other news, Jack has made a fairly good stand on the MySQL licensing issues and why FC has yet to bundle it in. Joe Orton too. Don’t say “Novell do it, they’re not stupid” and expect that to stand as an argument – we’d be shipping Mono apps otherwise, too.

Update: lwn picked it up… SuSE 9.1 users are complaining too (KB entry to fix it), as are Mandrake 10 users – they just released their final version, will that eat babies too?

Building GNOME 2.7 with GARNOME

Some useful resources for those running Fedora, and needing to build the latest tarball releases of GNOME. I decided to use GARNOME, instead of jhbuild this time, which meant I had to learn how to use GNU arch. Fedora/Fedora.us don’t have arch, so I rebuilt a source RPM and it installed fine.

Alternatively, read the GARNOME TLA (GNU Arch) HOWTO and there are links to some arch RPMs. That’s basically all you need to read to get started with garnome. Bob Kashani has further information at his site, and a useful script would be the FC2 dependency installation script.

Building it just takes some time, and when its done, create the garnome-session file, and then add a garnome.desktop (an example of the jhbuild equivalent). Happy usage! More details at the 2.7.x Development Series. Also, on the plus side, my Evolution issue has been fixed now :)

gnome-blog works?

Well, here’s me testing to see if gnome-blog works with WordPress. It seems to, so yay to that. Just remember to set the blog to a self-run other, use the BloggerAPI, use your “xmlrpc.php” file as the URL, enter the username/password, and post away. Only disadvantage seems to be I can’t fiddle with categories here, so everything gets filed as “General”.

Otherwise, titles don’t actually get set so thats definitely a disadvantage. It gets embedded into the post itself. So, WordPress might not be for you Jesse (but I’m sure poking at either gnome-blog or WordPress will fix it eventually).

Fedora News Updates #12

FNU #12 covering Fedora Core 2’s release, and some migration topics. Arjan, talks about why ‘sg’ isn’t needed for regular burning/ripping of CDs, while aoliva has some great stuff on Firewire. Fedora Legacy has interesting news of stopping support for RH7.2/8.0, and Fedora works on a Mac (doh!). Excellent public discussion of performance tuning the Fedora Desktop – I wish more posts were like this :)

Playing with GPE a lot. I managed to install Minimo, and that’s a browser that seriously rocks. Next task is to get GAIM going, which seems to be missing some packages. Grr. gpe-irc is just crashing upon input, but I’m sure I’ll win eventually.


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