Archive for August 2004

Fun bugs

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?

iMac DV Linux/PPC

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 Marketing; PPC G4 issues

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).

Knowledge Banks

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.

Tip blogs

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).


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