Archive for July 2004

Fedora News Updates #14

Fedora News Update #14 is out. More interestingly, Fedora has made the top-level of redhat.com – we have our own page at http://www.redhat.com/fedora/. And to top it all off, Red Hat Blogs exists, feeding Fedora People, as well as the executive blogs (which will get populated sometime this week?).

Guide updated; XFce4 for sleep

I updated the Fedora PPC guide sometime yesterday. Sleep issues on the G3 definitely down to acme/gnome-settings-daemon causing a conflict with pmud. Simple way out of this for all users that want sleep to work is to use XFce4 or even KDE (as per my post). Can’t find pmud conflicts at Debian or upstream GNOME bug trackers, so I’m wondering if its something Fedora specific.

FC3test1

I’m finally with the times, running FC3 test1. PC Gemilang now runs an everything install, and an upgrade is being performed right now – I think it can be permanently set on Rawhide or something from now on. Another shitbox with SiS hardware all over it also has gotten FC3test1 on it – everything seems to “just work”. Just remember to exclude curl* at the moment. Have the Conary (Specifix) ISO sitting here, I should pop that on soon.

If you haven’t already seen this, Gay Boyfriend is hilarious. Caught a glimpse at Apple’s Design Awards last month, I finally have a copy of my own now. Additional fun from the Debian crew as hadess points out.

OOo 2.0 changes

Some OOo 2.0 improvements (which you’ll see in the latest milestone releases that crop up):

  • MS Office (Word) has a Format Painter that people love, and the Stylist really does have a workaround. But the birth of the Format Paintbrush will make OOo 2.0 more MSOffice like.
  • A new OASIS Open Office XML file format will also be out. This will make OOo 100% compatible with the OASIS XML file format. Its still under review, though the recommendation is to change the file format name currently (I don’t quite like this – think of MIME type changes elsewhere). Option 1 seems sane, but backward compatibility is an issue.

Now all we need is the DocBook XSLT filter to just work so that we have a useful editor for things like Fedora Docs.

Might as well add that there’s now an OpenOffice.org 1.1 Competitive Guide SMB targetted at the SMB market. There’s some COSPA OpenOffice.org Training Materials available for download; and Anthony Long (longtime OOo contributor) has got a support program ready.

Never ever rpm -Uvh your kernel

Really, never ever. Especially when you’re running Fedora PPC. Unbootable system, very quickly gotten. Rescue without another system handy is a pain. My evening involved an Apache 2 installation on Windows, and making it serve me /Fedora/base/images so I could get into mac rescue mode. And yes, FC3 test1 is out, and I think nasrat should have some PPC ISOs ready for testing (soon).

Otherwise, some troubles getting the Conexant HCF (controlerless) driver for the iBook G3’s modem working on FC2. Stock Fedora kernel’s don’t work (4k stacks vs. these requiring an 8k stack). And when they do compile on a standard kernel.org one, hfcusbserial tends to not load on a 2.6.7 kernel – anyone else have success?

Open source kills jobs?

Billg thinks so. Especially, since that’s what he seems to be fanning on his little world tour.

“If you don’t want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source. It is not something you do as a day job. If you want to give it away, you work on it at night.” So I guess all the hackers at Red Hat, Novell, Sun, and the numerous other OSS companies, are working only at night :)

Seems to think there’s no “guarantee” or “someone who stands behind your software” in the open source world – err, of course he discounts this and this and the numerous other firms that do it, in a local market.

Target message to the governments where piracy is rampant: a big loss in tax revenue. Let’s hope governments aren’t silly enough to infer that OSS also provides a possible loss in tax revenue…


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