Colin Charles Agenda

So, Sebol asks what has become of the OOo ms_MY project? And rightfully so, the lists are dead, the ms project is stagnated, and has been around for nearly a year. Amazing isn’t it? When there was some remote activity, and a press release was done, it brought on an onslaught from the Malay community on myoss. When I uploaded a website in “dismal” Malay, more onslaught. But when it comes to doing work, does anyone? MIMOS thought they’ll internalise it, since the external coordinator was unreliable - they even released beta CDs. After that, what happened?

So, the Malay language thing is in the media, eh? Here’s some fun reading at Microsoft’s site. The head at Dewan Bahasa has this to say: “The availability of Windows in Bahasa Melayu — the most widely used language in Malaysia and in many other parts of Southeast Asia — will accelerate IT literacy among the Malay-speaking community and help to bridge the digital divide.”

Firstly, I never knew BM was widely used in many other parts of SEAsia. It isn’t, he lies. Accelerate IT literacy amongst the Malay-speaking community and bridge the initial divide? Yeah, why not. What happens when they actually need to get 3rd party resources that are usually in the English language? What happens when you need to communicate with the rest of the world? What happens when you connect to the wonderful Internet? Get over it Malaysia, wake up, play it with English, or you’re not going to play at all.

Besides how’s a cut rate Windows going to help? Lower resolution graphics, fewer networking options (worse than XP Home?), and crappy multitasking (3 apps, only). So when on the Internet, let’s say I run Firefox, and Thunderbird, then I run OpenOffice.org, and that’s it - no chance of me editing my digital photos in Photoshop! So yeah, let Microsoft con Malaysia; they’ve already tried with the BSA at work.

Yes, localisation is important. But does it really help a small country like Malaysia, where competition with the international market is great?

Update: If its really Bahasa Melayu, which is widely used in Indonesia, rather than what DBP push out as the Malay national language, there’s some merit in this. Language isn’t the only barrier that Malaysians face, but its one that can be easily fixed if some pride is shed off. Was it not someone wise who once said, “pride goes before a fall”. Also, the work Sebol does is amazing - very consistent, full 100% respect for him.

Every once in a while, Bugzilla turns up something fun. Birthday wishes for sebol, and now girlfriend wishes from Stewart! People keep lists of fun CVS commits, or bloopers on IRC channels, wonder if there’s a fun bugs list?

No big feat, but Linux is now installed on the iMac that arrived yesterday (but I was out all day, so NFS installed it while in bed). Everything install for FC2 is 5881MB, from the known good tree at duke. Still no Mac images being generated for boot.iso (in spite of the script being fixed last Friday).

X took some massaging to get working. Firstboot still doesn’t run. DHCP from the Netgear that gives me hell, also doesn’t work. Sound hasn’t started working in spite of s/dmasound_pmac/snd_powermac/g in /etc/modprobe.conf (this is possibly due to the fact that iMac’s have issues playing audio CDs). The console is yellow-ish rather than a usual black - fix that with video=aty128fb at boot. Popped a DVD inside (Pretty Woman), and it got to the main menu screen where it was time to select the language; once that was done, it bombed. xine that is. Lot’s of work still needs to be done, it would seem.

Fedora super-secret-project
So, the wiki is setup, and a big thank you to Seth for that. If you’re reading this and are mildly interested in promoting Fedora, increasing its usage, and get your hands dirty harnessing folk, the fedora-marketing-list is a good place to hang out at. For the various brain dumps that Jack/me have come up with, read the August archives. We also have fedora-marketing in Bugzilla to track “bugs” for the project - which will have to get a webpage and all the material from the brain dumps up to spec. There’s been no PR/launch of this project yet, but let’s see if this “post” gets more folk on the list (with ideas, etc…)

Fedora PPC update…
So, if you’ve got some funky new G4, especially if its a laptop, the duke tree will most likely not work for you. It needs some newer support for laptops as well as some Branch Target ICache (BTIC) disabling. Of course naturally, you’d only find out when folks are actually doing an install :P

There might also be a bug in parted in that tree. “Attempt to read sectors 2-3 outside of partition on /dev/hda”. Bah. Can’t say if this will appear on all new laptops/desktops, but its definitely a possible problem that one should be aware of. mac-fdisk is what needs to be used in that case (use it manually in a console, so when anaconda gets to it, its all magically there).

This is what I proposed we startup back in the day when we planned for national Linux roll-out’s. MAMPU have got their OSCC Knowledge Bank ready, and it sure seems neat. Will this survive? Will this be used?

Whatever you may say, Apple has a good knowledge base - information in one central location is very important. Even Microsoft got it correct (even though some of the information they place there is laughable at). Red Hat have one too.

Which major open source project has one though? A good support knowledge base is integral to making your software work for end-users. I tried with OpenOffice.org - many different “leaders” with different vested interests (merging up to 3 sub-projects was never going to be easy). That’s okay, Fedora can start off the right way.

A few days back was the LUV AGM, and I’m now a committee member. Wrote an OpenOffice.org developer-styled article, which I’ll place online right after it gets published. My PPC “build system” still hasn’t arrived, but that’s okay - I just recently only managed to get the keyboard & mouse for it. Working on the super-secret-project that will make Fedora popular (FUD smashing!), which I think will be launched real soon now.

Are there more tip-related blogs like Steve’s Fedora GNU/Linux Blog? Or GNOME Tips ‘n’ Hacks. If you’d comment on this post, I’d love to see more, be it Linux-based, Fedora-based, OpenOffice.org-based, GNOME-based, etc… (you get the picture).