Posted on 6/5/2004, 3:35 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
It’s out, FNU #11. I think this is a must read for most, since it contains special features: Cristian Gafton, the Fedora Project fearless leader talks about his tasks ahead, and Jesse Keating, the Fedora Legacy Project lead talks about how the project is evolving. There’s the usual other stuff, like some FC2test3 notes, some new documentation, useful scripts, and software.
Posted on 5/5/2004, 11:14 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Seth, dude, you rock. You’re my hero for the week.
(and with everyone getting some line from Page 23 out of a book, maybe we should try hero’s for the week next :P)
Posted on 4/5/2004, 11:44 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
It’s just got growing pains.
It’s not that the aims are to create another Debian, or even that its to have the size and scope of it (i.e. Fedora doesn’t aim to run on as many architectures as Debian does, not in this early stage at least, till the volunteer base builds up).
A good summary of the issues are even now on LWN, but icon really did portray whats going on. We (the OSS community) know there’s a lack of communication – this can be fixed. We know Red Hat is interested in fixing the Fedora Project – they talked about it at their world wide conference.
Think about it, companies just don’t just open source their babies overnight. It takes time. Patience is a virtue, but normally, patience comes when good communication exists, so we’re back again to lacking communication with the outside world (i.e. those not @redhat.com). The recent outbreak at fedora-devel-list exists because of lack of communication – read soon & eventually from the participate page, as thats an attempt at some communication.
So, stop and think for a moment. You want CVS access? Surely RH can’t give you access to the build system (lest you screw up RHEL, their new RH Desktop, etc…). We want rh_sales to stop bagging Fedora – we need our own “sales team”, and definitely we need to make sure that whatever brainwashing rh_sales goes thru removes such thoughts. And yes, we’re always going to have to deal with rh_legal, because this is a project “sponsored by RH” – maybe a public forum for some of the legal blokes to hang out at (fedora-legal mailing list?).
Things are slow, but patience always means good things happen eventually. Wait for the next Fedora News Updates, there’ll be some interesting scoop there :)
Posted on 3/5/2004, 12:41 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
The Linux in Education push is going strong – here in Victoria, Novell wants to rule them all. (Red Hat sleeping on the job, again?) Linux is, after all new life for them.
Chris Pratley has an interesting weblog, where he seems to think that OSS software lacks creativity and has the main aim in cloning equivalent products from Microsoft. That aside, the comments are most interesting (and he agrees that the OOo team isn’t just cloning Office ’97).
Otherwise, while a little dated, Kurt Seifried writes Notes from a Red Hat User/Admin, which does prove to be an interesting read/comparison
Posted on 2/5/2004, 4:08 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
- Bought The Official GNOME 2 Developers Guide and skimmed thru it. Definitely going to be a good read and reference point, though it does assume some fairly strong C skills – this is where a gap exists for complete newbies. So I’ve made my donation to the foundation :)
- Want GAIM, the CD player, or even up2date to sit on your “system tray”? Right click the GNOME panel, Add to Panel, Utility, and select Notification Area.
- Browsing JB Hifi (where I bought some CDs incidentally), I saw mini-CDR’s going for about $1/CDR. That’s about 185MB of storage, and being mini-sized, it struck me. Seems like a good marketing tool to push some open source software, that runs on Microsoft Windows to “to-be converts”. MozOO.org distributes CDs that are full-sized, but their package set is definitely small enough for something like this.
- If Siemens thinks StarOffice is mature enough, this is definitely good news for the OOo camp. A conclusion that training didn’t cost more – in Malaysia, “open source training” costs a bombshell – maybe costs can be drastically reduced by getting in-house training sorted by ByteBot.Net Training Materials. Also, keep in mind that eWeek conducted an independent study to show that OpenOffice.org is cheaper than Office 2003 in the SMB market.
- Dick Smith, in New Zealand, is now selling OpenOffice.org among a few other software packages for NZ$4.95.