Colin Charles Agenda

Sleep works! Yay! pmud works. Yay! This laptop (iBook g3) is now 100% usable, the same way it was back when I used to run Debian on it many moons ago. With all the nice GNOME improvements of course :) system-config-display still is a no go, use pmud-0.10-1.1 (do not rebuild). Sound needs manual fixing, using dmasound_pmac, acme is a charm, eject though is still broken (but thats because cdrom drive isn’t a detected device). system-config-network still broken. But really, this is now production ready!

It’s always tough crack to get people to realise they’re doing off-topic things. I respect Mark totally for how he handles desktop-devel-list on the GNOME front.

Caught The Bourne Supremacy as well.

Got my iBook back. Everything intact, minus yaboot. Easily fixable with Option key goodness for booting. I can actually start “work” again. 100% free, and I got a new screen even (in addition to the logic board).

The Fedora Universe is going to be a book. It will be written, and transferred online as and when a chapter gets completed. In all its open source goodness, so to speak. Nice GNU FDL or a CC license, or dual-licensed even, but I’m open to comments at this stage. Comments, brickbats, etc… welcome (you can reply to this post, rather than enter my already lengthy e-mail queue, so this might be like a Bugzilla for comments or something).

Got myself Reo Speedwagon (I Can’t Fight This Feeling), and Britney Spears (Everytime) on CD today, just for one song that I want from each album. This lack of me wanting to download singles (because it can’t be done?), is making me spend money unnecessarily. Oh, also finished reading Eric Raymond’s The Art of UNIX Programming in my copious train rides this week

Having a life again. Whee. Gave a talk on the upcoming goodness of Fedora Core 3, well, the user-visible changes that you can get out of Rawhide/FC3t2, at the Linux Users of Victora. There was also OpenOffice.org 2.0 bits, but that was more chit chat. The presentation for your viewing pleasure.

Update: Okay, this seemed to have been linked elsewhere and heaps of folk are coming here. Just some quick factual corrections: FedoraForum sits at 7,500+ members, NetworkManager has no screenshots (you’re seeing what GNOME 2.8 will have), and err, if you’re looking for the current tree, which is the second run of a candidate for FC3test2, http://fedora.linux.duke.edu/FC3-re0908.0/. Also, don’t use gPDF, but xpdf instead, unless you’re running a nice new gPDF (re #140337). Yes, it works if you’re running rawhide latest (doh!)

So, I’m now moderatingadminning some of the Fedora lists… Cleared a gazillion posts, and there are a few in the pile that I need to look at later. From now on, if there are off-topic posts to say, fedora-devel-list, there’ll be a sort of #include <std_warning .h> to a poster. Please suggest improvements, examples could definitely do some work.

Popped rawhide (yesterday) onto the iMac DV. X colors are all weird, even when you boot with video=aty128fb. hal/udev doesn’t detect the CDROM drive (well, DVDROM on mine) automagically, so manual mounting is required. Syncing the remade tree, after the iso’s got made… Now for some fun later. I also just realised I think I answer Bugzilla queries more often than I reply to e-mail…

Otherwise, drinking again. Mope. Seems wmealing probably has his sig11’s on the iBook sorted, but with car accident tragedy involved. Spot’s lock-out, Warren’s key loss. I tell ya all, its a tragic week for the Fedora people.

So, AUUG conf ended today. Yesterday’s rawhide kernel corrupted ext3, and modprobe died horribly too. Fixed it today morning, went to AUUG a little late, and the iBook started acting erratically. Great, sent it to the Apple Store, for a logic board replacement. They’ll look at my machine come next Wednesday, and hopefully I’ll get it by weeks end. I thought it was the radeon driver being wonky, then remembered I killed pmud, and OS X could repeat such errors too. Then had a horrible lunch (the food wasn’t too half bad; should’ve just eaten at AUUG and kept quiet, right?), ended up back at AUUG, listened to more government, talked to Pia a bit, left, bought a couple of cakes from Crown Cafe, roses, delivered, party later, end-of-day. Will have to transcribe conference notes soon… (and not lose them).

Was at AUUG 2004 today. Interesting keynote by Senator Kate Lundy, who mentioned the OpenOffice.org relation with the National Archives in Australia. Plenary was by the CTO at Sun Microsystems, with some interesting thoughts (sparse notes). Later on, learnt about Martin Schwenke’s ideas about Vital Product Data and using that for persistent device naming - now that udev is in place, and hal’s being used a lot (though he says HAL’s only for desktops; servers still can use VPD for hardware inventory or diagnostics) nowadays.

Got to see Jeremy Malcolm (from iLaw) speak about spam and the various laws that can help us get rid of this pest. Then Warren Toomey, about how C Code trees can be compared (his main aim was to extend Eric Raymond’s Comparator, but use lexical tokens instead). Interesting, might be useful anti-plagarism tool. Steve Bellovin talked about Privacy, Anonymity and Security on the Internet - most interesting to see him speak!

Interesting to note that the Victorian Greens (another political party, whom spoke for a bit), are using Linux. They reckon that when OOo 2.0 comes out, they’ll be using it as a “great communication tool” and will encourage it on Windows, OS X and Linux platforms. They currently already use it, with Evolution for e-mail, and RH9.0+LTSP for their office. Their database is going to be Postgres based, Plone is used on their main site, and they run a wiki using Apache internally as well. Go Bruce!

Attended the AGM, not much, except print versions of AUUGN are ending. Otherwise, battling sleep (APM) support with Fedora Rawhide on the Thinkpad T20; and today, I’m not getting my rsync trees, for some absurd reason, the Net’s really slow. Ah, also got me a few CDRWs, because I got tired of burning development boot CDs on CDRs (waste!).