Colin Charles Agenda

Today, there seemed to be several interesting news items, so let me elaborate on a couple of them.

Besides the fact that the Mandrake founder Gael Duval isn’t part of Mandriva anymore, the part that interested me was the fact that he was running Mandriva’s Community Department. Their goal was “to improve Mandriva’s image in the open source arena.” Swap Mandriva, with MySQL, and thats me. From engineering grit right up to attending conferences, thats what Community does. Its funny thats what Mandriva chose to close first, seeing their dismal quarter results - basically without an OSS community, you’re nowhere in the OSS world.

I’m a regular lurker on #conary, and reading rPath Creates Malleable, Serviceable Linux Distribution made me rather happy. I’ve played with it, and its a lot of fun. They list a bunch of ex-Red Hatters, and the only silly line out of it would have to be “All of this begs the question: Who is working at Red Hat? But anyway.” They probably should’ve mentioned Justin (fedora/x86_64 man) Forbes who works remotely (see, they’re not all in North Carolina!) and Tim Gerla (ok, Tybstar, a GNOME man). Think they missed Ed Bailey from the ex-RH list as well. Give rPath Linux a try, its pretty damn swanky. Oh, and Planet Conary is a well worthy read.

Anyways, in other health related matters, I’m actually better. The artificial skin has grown over, and I’ve removed my dressing. Just got to let it heal, and give it time, of course.

Seems the FC-3/ppc test tree got a little review at ppcnerds. Just a few minor/quick comments.

You can extract boot.iso from the CD1 - just loop mount it. Installation is best done via NFS, as the guide tells you to. Otherwise, its a case of paperclip eject and if you don’t have that, you’re kinda not getting anywhere without NFS (or http, or ftp).

If the reviewer did see yum dependency problems, that we didn’t satisfy out of Core, it’d be great if he could file a bug. Also, with regards to nicer, newer kernels with patches that aren’t in mainline, but are benh generated, dwmw2 has been keeping a repository at ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/people/dwmw2/fc3-kernel-ppc/.

That said, I updated the Fedora Core on your Macintosh (Fedora PPC) guide today as well, to include that newer information. Also for fun, for easy drop in to /etc/yum.repos.d/ is fc3ppc.repo which has all the necessary repos you can use (for a nice stable FC-3 system that is). I especially like:

“There are now two Fedora ports for PPC out there: this official FC3 port in test stage and Yellowdog Linux, which is Fedora-based and in sync with Core 2. What’s the difference between the two? What will be the difference? For now all I can see is that, as expected, Yellowdog is fine-tuned on some hardware recognition there where Fedora still fails. But, being the Fedora port in a test stage, there is much room for improvement and soon we could see a stable release that will fix all of the small problem one meets now.

Oh, there’s now Planet Conary, and finally, I think, Specifix Linux might be PPC compliant in due time (sure, Anaconda needs fixing first…). A bootstrap system is in the near future, I’m guessing. Conary ran fine on FC-2/ppc, and it did so in FC-3/ppc as well. You need sqlite3, iirc, I don’t think I used fedora.us packages then though. This was 0.10.6 though - 0.12.4 is out…

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…