Archive for October 2004

Roundup

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.

OOo 1.1.3

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.

Meetup, udev works

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.

Observations

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

Ubuntu/PPC

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.

RMS

Richard Stallman is in Melbourne for most of the week (till Sunday?), and today was at the Telstra Auditorium giving a very good talk about free software. Some rough notes from the talk entitled The Free Software Movement & The GNU/LINUX Operating System.

How lucky can we get? Jdub two days ago, RMS today. He’s also at UniMelb tomorrow.


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