Colin Charles Agenda

Two power failures in one day - that sucks. Well, Melbourne’s weather has been mighty crazy, but its supposed to get better tomorrow.

It did. Then I got my phone bill… How is it 7c cheaper, per thirty seconds to call a mobile in Malaysia, than it is to call a local mobile, for someone who’s about a five-minute drive away from me? Peak phone call rates seem to be the suck, as does the amount due on my bill. Grr.

Got ill a few days ago too, it’d seem. Taken drugs to help rectify the problem. I’m just hungry and and not sleepy any more.

Red Hat Partner Community announced; of some semi-interest is the Red Hat Developer Connection - but at USD$299, I’ll be giving that a pass. We definitely need the Fedora Partner Community program or something, to keep people happier.

Thursday was the Red Hat/Fedora SIG. Mike Barnes did a good job giving us an intro to re-building stuff on the Alpha platform… They used a RH7.x bootstrap, but FC2 is mostly there. Pity many didn’t show up for the talk - maybe it was the new location. But it definitely was interesting.

SpentWasted much time with Windows XP’s cock-up over some files that were encrypted, thanks to their Encrypting File System, for someone who has some work and Kodak moments on disk (and no backups). After Windows forces you to reinstall itself because of various issues, it takes along with it its keys when you do a format, and there is no other way to recover said files. Sharing it, using Knoppix to copy it, etc… all useless. Anyone know of any workarounds?

Couldn’t sleep much, that’s never a good sign. Brazillian F1 today, last race for Coulthard to drive a McLaren.. Sad, sad. Good one for Kimi, hopefully the synergy with Montoya goes on thru next year.

Rebuilt cho, with OS X 10.3.5, pulled down the cws_srx645_ooo113fix2 which is OOo 1.1.3 and started the build (after getting a sane build environment - which now includes XCode 1.5). Dead Code Stripping is a document worth reading… Pulling down SRC680_m57 now.

Updated the planet code on Planet MYOSS. And RMS was in Kuala Lumpur, and as always NSH has a good report. I like his analysis of Malaysian wastage - brings a grin to my face, to be honest.

This Thursday, is the Red Hat/Fedora SIG Meetup in Melbourne. Come, listen to Mike Barnes talk about Fedora on the Alpha platform!

[cc@bigmac ~]$ rpm -qa udev; ls /dev|wc -l
udev-038-2
195

So, as long as dev was installed before, udev gracefully removes it, and /dev is still at 195 entries and things are working well on the Mac.

Busy, busy with lots of school work. I cheated, I’ve got Fedora PPC back on the iMac DV SE with Rawhide latest - I installed the dev package again :) Must read more udev documentation to get sort out its breakage for me (and if its soon, FC3 will “work”). dwmw2 has it working on a few machines though, with no udev breakage (except for /dev/console).

Busy writing bits for the books as well. OpenOffice.org turned 4 a few days back. We’ve come a long way, baby. Been dealing with a lot of Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, realising that OOo really only handles Word well. Powerpoint/Impress needs _a lot_ of work - animations, fonts, etc… Excel vs. Calc is not even worth talking about, though sc has got good project plans.

Melbourne leg of the Red Hat World Tour, in the APAC region. Their Partner Development Manager, from America decided to spread some Fedora FUD (bad, bad):

• “Fedora have nightly builds, and things can break on a nightly basis with the introduction of new undocumented features”
• “We do our testing on the Fedora Project”

Some dude in the crowd, with a Microsoft Most Valued Professional tag, asked why there’s a lack of binary RHEL builds. The usual, if we do that, people sell it and imply there’s support for the product. I thought to myself, that’s okay, they’ll just pirate ya’all.

Haven’t seen any mention of this anywhere, but RH are launching what they call the Red Hat Driver Programme. Critical for business drivers are in that list, and its rumored that Nvidia, Broadcom, and more are there. No idea of what they’re doing with the binary driver list, but time will tell (timeframe from next week to two months).

All in all, they ran the machine that presented the entire thing not on the Red Hat Desktop, but on Fedora Core! “This is a preview release of Red Hat Desktop,” Mike said. Pfft. Chris has a little report of what happened in Kuala Lumpur.

Hung out with Russell for most of the tour, didn’t stay for lunch, since she got back from the weekend holidays. I cooked prawn mee (with huge tiger prawns!), which was a wee bit too spicy for us.

Durian cake got baked

And I got a wand!

I’ve been on the nahant-beta-list for a while now and don’t notice a heap of posts there, like the users you’d get on Fedora lists, or the testers on fedora-test-list. Either RHEL4-beta “just works”, or many aren’t testing it as rigorously as they are Fedora. I wonder what Red Hat’s thoughts on this are, as they created the “split”.

Also notice many hundreds of posts on fedora-list that are still Fedora Core 1 related. These should all be on Legacy list, or should not exist at all - its unsupported already (unless its security updates via Legacy). Why are end users still on FC1?

Panu brought up the topic of the default browser in FC3. We now include Firefox, Mozilla, and Epiphany, with the default being set to the latter, as opposed to Firefox. The GNOME choice is Epiphany, and Fedora sticks with upstream right? Ironic that down in Ubuntu land, they’ve gone Firefox too (with all the GNOME big ‘uns there).

Popped the nice new Specifix Linux 0.11 alpha. It now sports a graphical installer, which worked on the i845-based graphics card for the installation. Upon start-up, manual loading of i810 to get X working was required. Some of the Specifix Linux anaconda snaps…

Wow. Just installed Ubuntu (daily ISO) on the iMac DV SE. It all just works. Sound is auto-configured, X is auto-configured (like everything!), nice 2.6.8 kernel, mouse button emualtion works out of the box. smbfs isn’t installed by default, it lacks MP3 support (doh, all sane distros do), but everything about it and its GNOME integration make it very clean. Interesting to note that Epiphany isn’t installed, but Firefox is the default browser! Apple Pro keyboard is a little weirdly configured, anyways, Bugzilla.ubuntu has seen some of me.