Colin Charles Agenda

Fedora News Updates #16, is out. First, apologies for a late, tiny release! FC3test2 has been released, FC1’s has been passed on to Fedora Legacy. Fedora Bugweek is almost ending, participate! There’s some new documentation for translators as well. And there’s a lot of other bits and pieces, and expect a lot more in the next week or so. Get into the groove to make it better, there are still about 80 threaded messages that I have to look at for next week, which I better do.

Damn comment spammers read Security Focus.

So my Mom is down, and I’ve been doing nothing but shopping, sightseeing, and obviously not being at home. In my absence, I pushed a Fedora Core 3 test2 PPC tree; don’t fret, stable FC2 is still there.

The tree is before dev got removed, and udev is supposed to take over, so its somewhat pre-test2, but its the closest working thing out there. (i.e. less hackage required). #133684 is the reason why the udev/dev thing doesn’t seem to work on PPC… Also OOo PPC builds have been disabled, hopefully that’ll get fixed soon. I should mention that Grant should be thanked, as I had (being silly again) forgot to save a backup of a tree.

Whoa. Lots of uni work, spent Friday living, also playing with lanterns, since it was the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. Took a stab at getting the Fedora lists under control, which meant I started taking various stabs at writing the news updates. This needs to get more dynamic with a CMS of some sort - and lieutenants are always welcome. Started pushing a FC3test2 PPC tree, which should be online in due time (my upload speeds are capped at 128kbps). Charms had a house-warming thing, so most of Saturday spent there, then more study, and catch-up.

Quick tab catch-up:

• OfficeFMT - some OOo filters, including LaTeX output, with better XHTML exports. Requires JAVA, so will not run on stock Fedora releases.
• In case ya’all didn’t already know, OOo 2.0 will be released in a native Linux format, and thats RPM folk. If you’re stuck on a non-RPM distro, here’s the Debian fix.
• Wikipedia in OOo - yes, I think Laurent wants translations, but rock!

Caught Suddenly 30 today. Been playing with Bluetooth, and gnome-bluetooth. Seems the one in Fedora crashes gnome-obex-server when its time to receive a file, so there’s no fun there. But its cool to have nice looking pictures from the digicam sitting on my phone!

So the quick checklist: /etc/init.d/bluetooth start (or in ntsysv make it start automagically); start Bluetooth File Sharing; edit /etc/bluetooth/pin to have a password thats remotely sane. All this fun when Ericsson unplugs personal wireless.

The weekend was good, if anything, spent quality good time (away from the computers). Caught Ghost. Also notice the OOo Strategic Marketing Plan 2010 has come out - go jpmcc! The book is also sold at Lulu.com. Spending a lot of time reading on Conary, and just started on jffs2. FC3 test2 is out, no PPC ISOs, because I can guarantee udev breaks things like parted, and yabootconfig. Some form of /dev is still required, I’d say. Oh, also the Australian open source landscape as Pia sees it, is a good understanding for anyone delving into the OSS movement here.

So a lot of people are worried about Sun selling out OpenOffice.org to Microsoft. Its been creating a lot of noise on the lists, people worrying that as users they’re in trouble; developers worrying that by signing the JCA, they’re in trouble.

Scratch whatever I was going to write, because it seems there’s an FAQ out there about the whole situation, titled: FAQs about OpenOffice.org and its mission. Hmm, without CC approval; but there’s an assurance that it’ll get fixed by next week. Couple that with Louis reassurances, as well as Danese Cooper’s comments, I think we’re relative safe.

For some reason, the last few days have been quite busy, and I’ve been sleeping a bit more (and I haven’t even been having a life). Started working on an updated guide for the Fedora PPC installs, but have yet to complete it. Tried Rawhide on x86, and found that i8xx_tco (the watchdog drivers) cause the PC to constantly reboot within a 2-minute timeframe. Bad. All PC Gemilang owners will be affected.

Tried a USB scanner - the HP ScanJet 4100C. Just plugged it in, FC Rawhide on PPC just detected it, and I was on my scanning way! Talk about simply cool. No drivers, nothing required. I’ve not used a scanner since the mid-1990’s, and back then, support on Linux was horrible (parallel port scanners were cheap, and highly unsupported). GNOME 2.8 got released. I’m now popping Ubuntu Linux onto bigmac, so that’ll give me a chance to do a clean Rawhide install soon on the remaining space. Oh, also been playing with DidiWiki - I like it very much.

Open source ‘pirates’ to be prosecuted, says ministry - only in Malaysia, will they be pirating open source, eh?.

Noticed they picked up FreeBSD 5.0 (FreeBSD license allows pirating it), and RHEL3.0 (not so legal, because of the EULA and trademarks). However, this does not stop the pirates at Low Yat selling Centos for instance (or even Fedora Core). Heck, they could customise RHEL and call it Rat Hat Enterprise Linux, and that’s probably “legal” too (make sure all the logos and trademarks s/Red/Rat/g though).

So no, there’s no pirated OSS damnit. NSH is right in saying that the BSA might say some silly things (more likely add to the silly things). So in response to LcF and CS, these pirates probably didn’t do anything bad if they sold RHEL Sources (thats 100% legal, selling SRPMS - charging for the cost of the CDs or DVD), and yes, stop wasting public money and time, go pursue the BSA-related organisations (of which RH isn’t a part of, and neither is Novell) instead.

In other good news, the Malaysian Communications & Multimedia Commission (MCMC) backs the HITBSecConf2004. They’re even presenting a paper. If you get a chance to go, the HITBSecConf is a really fun place to head to. Lastly, Red Hat are back with their World Tour. Hitting Kuala Lumpur October 4th, and Melbourne October 12th.

A motherboard designed with feng shui principles?