Colin Charles Agenda

Fedora will engage customers is what hit the news sites, during FUDCon. And with Extras, and what happened, we seemed relatively successful with the meeting and then the launch of the committee. Then we also did the fedora-maintainers list, which seems to not have gone down so well, in-spite of the -readonly copy of it. Acceptance of it has been spotty at best, reading fedora-devel-list.

But it is a necessary evil. Power isn’t reserved for an elite group, and Seth points out quite nicely other private partys. But where do we draw the line is the question. I was part of the unanimous decision to create the semi-private party at fedora-maintainers, because there was no way all the @redhat’s were to sit at f-d-l, and there was quite the bit of noise. Its a fair requirement that if you maintain a package you get placed on another list. You are now a valuable contributor, as opposed to being a regular noise maker, no?

Take the recent “let’s slim Fedora Core 4 down” discussion. I’m even afraid to count how many messages there were for that. The point of -maintainers is that we figure people won’t bring up the “lets move GNOME/KDE to Extras” kind of discussion. The same discussion gets old. Read the list archives. But the core problem with open source is that everyone feels they need to have an opinion. And everyone feels that their opinion is right. And is the be all, and the end all.

So FC-4 is going to have 5 CDs. Abiword, Exim, bzflag and a whole bunch of other useful packages are disappearing from Core. But they’re not gone anywhere. They’ll be in Extras. Extras will even be enabled, by default, in /etc/yum.repos.d/, so if you’re missing bzflag, a simple “yum install bzflag” will get you happy again. “Core is what Red Hat maintains. Extras is what the community maintains,” aoliva says. And yes, Red Hat is part of the community.

Back to communication. We’re still not definitely good at it. But if there are wanting contributors, the Extras/IdeasSandbox is a good place to start. We have a public schedule for the “shit that needs to get done”. And the Fedora News Updates will come back, as Fedora Traffic; so if you were a wanting contributor, now’s a good time to send me some e-mail.

Last week it was hanging out at Nalin’s (he threw a great party) with lots of Fedora people, and one week later it was hanging out with the MYOSS people. Of noteworthy mention was NSH for a short while, and mainly Khairil, David Hakken & wife, Ow Mun Heng, Ditesh, Jaya, Prabu and Leon. Low Kian Seong came a little later, but stayed till the very end!

Lots to talk about, got a little history of how Bytecraft started and is being run (its most interesting), how Ditesh wants to expand and enjoy life (we told him to be a cool OSS maintainer :P), and the usual perils faced in Malaysia. Interesting to note why most vendors in Malaysia are becoming Novell Authorised Partners and while they still keep their RH status, they’re generally ditching it or not bothering with it because marketing and margins suck; ditto with support it seems. Malaysian’s are famous for the pyramid model of doing business… I pushed my usual “its good to build a model on Ubuntu and Fedora” as opposed to just wanting to sell SLES, which went down semi-well, but its a lot of work I’d guess. The other thing was “OSS companies” modifying software but keeping it in-house - never submitting patches upstream. No gains there for them, but it happens. Worthwhile for anyone to have shown up, though the best talk we had was the 2 hours standing around Ditesh’s car after the dinner place kicked us out at closing time ;-)

I’m back in Kuala Lumpur now, after flying from Sunday->Tuesday. Pooped by the flight, energised by the Fedora people (does that even make sense?). Again, what can I saw, it was fun++. Caught Raise Your Voice on the plane.

Wednesday was a mixture of driving around, seeing the girl, going to a Chap Goh Meh party, getting a cheap SMC router/wifi ap, and not getting enough sleep. Thursday was further going out, more in lieu since it was my father’s birthday. No special release of anything open source today to commemerate that, sadly (unlike last years training materials), but I do have a Communicator 9500 to fiddle with in Linux.

MYOSS meetup
Tomorrow, Saturday, the 26/02/2005, there’s a gathering say for supper for the Malaysian OSS folk. Come one, come all? Ditesh, Platypus Low Kian Seong, and others will be there. I will be too, this time around.

There’s a PHP gathering today (Friday, 25/02/2005) that folk are warmly invited to go for. I was supposed to make it, but I’m going to help the girl clean the house ;-)

Fedora
There’s going to be a slippage of Test 1 release for Core 4. GCC4 rebuilds are going to be fun, especially on PPC I guess. Because we’re so close to a release, and now we might have an assortment of other fun bits.

Fedora Extras Steering Committee had a meeting today. Our very first one. Minutes should be up online soon. We have a public schedule of what needs to get done, and we probably should get along to doing it.

Core is on a slim-fest, fast, and a whole bunch of packages have left it. The Extras/Orphaned Packages page at the wiki is particularly useful. Seeing that I’ve started playing bzflag, I’d like that to be imported into Extras… Err, yeah, this is a call for other package maintainers to come step up.

So, FUDCon is over. Boy has it been a blast for the last week. Fedora Meeting Status Report is generally a good read - it tells ya’ll what happened at the meeting, and was presented at FUDCon. Some of the interesting bits are:

• Extras build system should be released soon in public CVS; it doesn’t need to be complete, it can get completed over time
• For other architectures that need supporting (ppc/sparc/alpha/etc…), as long as there’s community interest, and there’s things happening, The Fedora Project will try its level best to get it into the build farm
• The website at http://fedora.redhat.com is to be revamped; the module should be available in CVS in due time.
• Packaging guidelines are coming right along, to make packagers happy.
• Regular meetings with relevant people; increased communication with the public.
• Creation of the Fedora Extras Steering Committee. More details about this as we update the leadership document, but the general idea is that there’s a committee, there’s going to be work done, and if we don’t, there’s going to be an avenue to complain about it.

What about FUDCon itself? I thought it was a blast. With a live stream, an IRC channel, both the rooms got their stuff recorded, amazing stuff open source is. FUDPub later was fun as well - we took over a relatively small-ish pub, had good food and drink, and the last to strut out were pjones, paul (from BU) and me. Thank you all for coming to FUDCon, thank you all for helping organise FUDCon, thank you for letting me come to this great event, just generally, thank you.

Now for the rumor mongers. FUDCon 2 should be happening alongside Linux Tag, in Germany, in the middle of the year. Interested? fedora-marketing-list might be a good place to express it. Want a FUDCon at your location? I’m sure something can be organised. We learnt a lot, and know how to improve for the next one…

Oye, oye! FUDCon is here. And you can watch it too. User track: http://128.197.127.23/. Developer track: http://128.197.164.36/. There’s a java client, or you can use Totem - just append :8800 to the URL. Talks will be uploaded as I get slides delivered (i.e. probably after each talk, since most are still being written). Also, there’s #fudcon on freenode in case you’d like to chat with some of the folk around.

Oops, test suites. A joke that I’m sure the fedora people will get. Yesterday was spent on the showfloor, meeting interesting people and converting them to Fedora. Dinner at the Google party was moderately okay, but the party was somewhat of a letdown; thats okay, the club Paul, Peter, Jesse and I rocked up to was lots better.

Today was our Fedora meeting day. Lots of good came out of it, and we all surprisingly didn’t come out of it with any bruises of any sort. Some very positive things came out of it, we now know who’s doing what, there are roles assigned, and I’m sure when I cleanup the meeting minutes (which is before tomorrow), there’ll be a presentation on it at FUDCon. Also just finished writing the fedora/ppc portion of the talk for tomorrow. Dinner was great, and I guess, just watch this space (and the announce/devel list) real soon now for some good, forward moving, Fedora news

• Fun Sunday. Woke up, lazed, Paul came to the hotel, as did Peter. Walked around a bit, landed in an Irish Pub, to meet Jack. Went to grab Warren from the airport, landed back at the hotel to setup wireless, and then headed down to the lobby. Waited for Seth, and poked fun at Ximian, without realising that Nat was sitting right behind us. Went for some nice Italian dinner, before we all resumed back to our places and IRC.
• Did an install of Fedora/ppc on the iBook. It Works. Installer is clearly only missing auto-partitioning, and running mkofboot; the /etc/yaboot.conf file is nicely generated so running yabootconfig is no longer needed. And X detection - running using fbdev at 640×480 is wrong. Stuck with an SELinux issue, i.e. the network works great when booting with selinux=0, but not when its running in targeted mode. A whole bunch of things seem to be semi-broken, but thats not a PPC issue (its just rawhide).
• Its Valentine’s Day now… Almost over on the side of the world I’m usually at, but I think the people that matter have gotten the gifts that matter. Ever wanted to know How Valentine’s Day works? Seeing that we were woken up by a fire alarm at about 3.45am, it seemed like appropriate reading material. Spent lots of time doing random things, setting up the booth, and also paid a visit to the Red Hat offices at Westford. Headed out to visit spot at the hotel, and we all went to a place called Dicks for dinner. Met mharris, and then we all went to join pjones and nasrat at a bar, for trivia night. If that wasn’t enough, came home about 1am, to meet Greg, skvidal and Jack at the hotel lobby to chit chat till about 4am. Bleh.
• LWE starts. Mad talk writing, deliver talk, Fedora Project: The {past,present,future}. Meet Gafton! Dan and I head out for a meeting reperesenting OpenOffice.org, which seems relatively useful, then its dinner and Paul’s house for some karaoke and drinks.

• People at Changi Airport (singapore) definitely think I’m weird. Two laptops setup, getting a fedora/ppc install going. Had to scrounge around for a network cable, but I’m sorted now, yay. Then anaconda exits with TypeError: postAction() takes exactly 3 arguments (4 given), and now I’m fedora/ppc-less. Alt/Option key booting during the OF stage to get back into OS X seemed like a viable option. Update: anaconda has been rebuilt.
• Arrived in Boston, after a grueling 30 hour journey. Caught Shall We Dance, which was rather enjoyable. Looking for food, and ended up with the famous Krispy Kreme 6-pack for dinner.
• Consequently missed the SpreadOpenOffice conference call. Heads up is that this is happening, and while we might not host it on our very own servers (thanks Justin!), it might be at the OSL, where SpreadFirefox currently is (or is moving to). Of course at ooo-marketing, there are issues as to if this campaign should go ahead or not; what do the rest of you think?
• Planet ASIASOURCE is now running (or has been for a while). Read on about how NGOs get around to using technology, and possibly interesting migration blog bits.
• Wrote an abstract for the OpenOffice.org mini-conf at linux.conf.au 2005, about OpenOffice.org on the PowerPC Platform. Covering X11, NeoOffice/J, as well as Linux options (upstream or ooo-build). EPM on OS X, why it took so long to get OS X/OOo to a build-able stage and so on.
• Like Pavel, I too am switching to using the milestone OOo releases. I started around the m74 days, but now I’m going to attempt to make a complete switch. Some words of caution:
  • Switching to the new file format? I might still be keeping backups handy.
  • rpm -Uvh will still keep the old OpenOffice.org “core” package around. So /opt will have the old core files lying around. Remove that, and reinstall redhat-menus seems to be a nice workaround.
  • Running on FC-3, till m78 that is, don’t forget to go to /opt/openoffice.org1.9.77/program and rm libxml2.so*. Fixed in m78, but I think m77 is what’s available for download now.