Colin Charles Agenda

Spent quite a lot of time fiddling with Rawhide from yesterday. Ran into quite a few bugs, all made it into bugzilla - airport giving anaconda the sig11, system-config-display still broken for the Radeon Mobility 7500, and worse, text mode install on the iMac DV failed (#131346). system-config-network is also broken (well, kudzu it might seem? - #130719). Getting seemingly close to feature freeze, so I’m getting a wee bit worried that test2 ISOs might not be as functional as they should be. Plus we still need to run yabootconfig to get the Mac booting… Sleep is definitely not working, its not a GNOME issue any longer though since brightness and volume control works now; so its time to poke at what changed in the kernels.

MySQL 4.0.21 will not make it into Fedora Core 3 test2, because they’re (MySQL themselves) are having trouble building packages. No package with new license, no inclusion in Fedora.

BTW, does anyone know how to upgrade my iMac DV SE+ firmware so that I can install Tiger on it? Heck, I couldn’t even get Panther on that machine!

Skiing was very fun, Falls Creek has improved since the last year - new ski lifts (some replacing poma’s too). Got nothing done, in spite of taking the laptop with one of the latest Rawhide installs from last week. For some interesting reading, GNU believers is definitely a good read - plenty of GNU/Linux software for Christians!

Some useful trackers…

• Open PPC bugs.
• Closed/resolved PPC bugs included
• The tracker itself, so we can keep watch

Feeling sad that YellowDog will not run on your OldWorld Mac anymore? Apparently Fedora Core 2 does ;-) If I had an OldWorld Mac, this might make more sense, as I’d play with BootX… Actually, you can boot your kernel directly from OpenFirmware, thus not requiring a bootloader (at least on the NewWorld stuff I own).

UN body releases desktop Linux guide courtesy of ZDNet UK. “Our choice of Fedora was controversial. I think it is the least frightening version of Linux to a new user…” That’s right Sunil, Fedora is the way to go.

Last week, I made a presentation at the Red Hat/Fedora SIG about Fedora Core 3 improvements… The talk never got “complete” thanks to the fact that I forgot to carry my laptop power supply. Argh.

Photos! Wales with some friends, London with Nasrat, San Francisco for some Apple WWDC2004 stuff, a bit of India and a lot from Switzerland.

Sometime last week, the End User Linux Manual (local mirror/my version) based on FC1/GNOME2.4/OOo was released, and today apparently, someone decided Slashdotting it. Since I don’t actually read slashdot (only going there occasionally when recommended), its really interesting to see the comments that get spewed. Oh well. Ken makes a sensible comment (because he’s ex-UN :P)

“Living” again (so my disappearing is explained!), saw White Chicks last week, and New York Minute in the weekend. Seeing that Seth has already mentioned fedoraproject.org, this was quite a lot of super-secretness in there ;) Contact me via e-mail, its best, and I’ve got to get back on track to committing more time down this way too… /me dreams of marketing…

Issue 15 of the Fedora News Updates is now released.

It covers the announced EOL for Fedora Core 1, many new updates in the Docs project, and plenty of talk about porting Fedora to other platforms - Intel IXP2400, SGI’s Altix (ia64), and even Alpha. Some developer talk about updating current releases, as well as developing test suites for Fedora. And plenty more…! Err, it also includes the conferences that Fedora was represented at, and now, it sports the LinuxWorld panel discussion summary as well as the presentation given.

Otherwise, Are you an open source bigot?

OK, I lied. Fedora News Updates still being written, so much for the attempted 2-week releases. Wanna help? Anyways, here’s what Fedora PPC as of Rawhide on 13/08/2004 looks like (6302MB of installed packages now):

• Anaconda needs to be rebuilt, because of the new glibc (probably fixed in 14th’s tree, #129747).
• The vesa driver is used, so you can actually get anaconda to start up nicely with X, rather than using text-based installs.
• Apple Bootstrap still doesn’t show. Creating it isn’t a problem, but it isn’t graphical. This was supposed to be fixed, but now, I’ll get a screenshot soon and see what can be done about it.
• Getting screenshots are a chore - Shift+PrintScreen will not work on the iBook. It lacks a PrintScreen key!
• No mkofboot magic at the end. /etc/yaboot.conf exists, but without the mkofboot magic, it can’t boot Fedora. Once started, notice no rhgb present.
• If everything install is performed, Starting the IIIMF input server will result in it just hanging there.
• firstboot starts, with fbdev, maximum resolution is only 800×600.
• X does not get configured on the iBook G4 yet. ddcprobe however, is fixed and works a charm.

Everything else just works, as expected. Looks like its just a few minor niggles here and there, before we get something that works really well (soon).

Setup a FC1 box, with the everything install. 550MB of packages later, it seemed to work. The distro has come a long way since that release, that much I can say (even the updates to it are a testament). 5881MB for an everything install, just in case anyone wants to fiddle with it. I’m going to commit that to doing Fedora Legacy stuff, since FC1’s EOL from Red Hat is nearing.

Started syncing a Rawhide PPC tree. We have boot.iso back, so this pretty much means test ISOs shall be out soon. This is doing wonders to my bandwidth quota… x86 Rawhide seems to work well, GNOME 2.7 stuff and all. Evolution is nice, but if you’re running it on a machine with 128MB of RAM, and doing junk mail filtering, you’ll not be a happy person (POP timeouts are commonplace). So the testbox got another 512MB stick, and its a lot happier now.