Colin Charles Agenda

• Happy Spring Festival / Chinese New Year / Lunar New Year to all those celebrating it. Most things in Malaysia are closed for the festival. William Hung (remember, American Idol fame?), starred in “Where is Mama’s boy?”, a Cantonese flick - don’t bother watching it, at all. Girl and I agreed its the stupidest thing we’ve ever seen in our lives.
• Excellent reading material about how other projects handle contributors (something we want to really work at and get right, at The Fedora Project): FreeBSD Release Engineering, FreeBSD Release Engineering for Third Party Software Packages (Extras), Joining the GNOME Project (we need a Joining the Fedora Project, with contact information of people, etc…), gnome.org Account Policy (for cvs, shell, mail aliases, etc…), Debian Developers’ Corner (so many resources; all interesting), Gentoo Developer Handbook (conflict resolution, more developer guides).
• Seth did a great job setting up the FUDCon site; I’ve re-cleaned it up now, and its more presentable rather than just being a wiki dump. Yes, go to the official FUDCon page at http://fedoraproject.org/fudcon/ and not the wiki! Notice the nice logo there? Everyone thank Diane!
• 2004 LinuxQuestions Members Choice Awards results are out. OpenOffice.org won! Fedora came in a close second to Slackware (?).
• Skype 1.0 for Linux is out. Grab the FC-2 RPMS and install them; mildly pleasing experience, talking to jaboutboul and thomasvs earlier. Linux conferencing is however, broken.

And today I’m thankful to be alive. Lapse in concentration at around 6pm (broad daylight mind you), on a highway, almost got me killed. Note to self: always carry Penguin Mints, and some form of cola drink in the car. Days mostly spent going out with the girl, to various shopping places, and so on…

In Fedora news, Mike has got Fedora/ppc running on his Mac Mini. Rocking. My external USB hard disk has started working again with Fedora, so an instant 40gb of space for me, allowing me to do various things like pulling down trees and all.

Want some nice PDF posters to laugh at? Some anti-piracy ones for your pleasure. I wanted to buy a Canon EOS 300 D (digital rebel), but it seems next week on Valentine’s Day, they’re releasing the EOS 350 D, with 8MP and newer features, only for USD$100 extra. So I’m waiting it out.

Left Bangalore, and back in Kuala Lumpur for a while. Evening circle on the last day almost brought tears to my eyes - being in a “camp” with 100 great individuals from over 40 countries, almost 24/7 for about eight days, was actually great. Well, reality hits now, and I’ve got a tonne of things to do, before FUDCon. Caught up with sleep, saw the girl, and went to see Racing Stripes - nice show, its got to be the first show I’ve seen in a while without a love theme to it (well, except between animals).

Fedora Extras
As Sopwith announced, the official Fedora Extras tree is now open. Make sure bug reports are at RH Bugzilla.

[Extras]
name=Fedora Extras
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1


That can be placed in /etc/yum.repos.d/extras.repo. You’ll need the GPG key, which is available at http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/RPM-GPG-KEY-Fedora-Extras. Great going on getting a build system skvidal!

FUDCon
FUDCon is taking shape. We’d get an announcement out soon, and a logo is being designed thanks to Diane (thanks dfong!). Its all coming together, and I think Boston University is going to be a rocking location! Boston itself, will be rocking ;-)

Field study to a school today. Well, a series of local schools. The marriage of ICT with the regular teaching method is nice. The local educational software is made up of about 67 CDs, each CD being tri-lingual: English, Hindi, and the local state language. Its reached nine states already! The sad part is that the government of India literally sold its soul to Microsoft - they have got cheapish/free licenses; the other company that got the tender ended up doing some ugly Mandrake Linux hack that is broken (so they’re locked into MS Windows).

I have finally watched Revolution OS. Can’t really comment much on it, considering lots of things have changed in the Linux world since then, but good effort.

More migration things today. I see where Synaptic on Ubuntu fails for complete end-users. I see where getting folk to edit the yum.conf file fails in Fedora. I see a lot of complete end-user failure points in package management that make it too hard for the average small office/NGO with no technical capacity to even want to bother with installing software, yet alone to getting updates. Don’t even mention source packages. I can’t wait for PUP to become a Fedora reality, I think I have my test-base to make sure it “just rocks”.

The other major weird thing we should all worry about is how Nepal’s king has taken over and screwed democracy. Spare a thought, yes.