Colin Charles Agenda

Today I saw an interesting opinion posted on a mailing list. I’ll quote from the fedora-list post:

What folks say here cant be taken as Fedora toting anything. It is just some user opinions.

Some of those "user opinions" came from @redhat.com addresses, I actually don't take any notice of @anydomain.blah posters, as they are just like I, posting a personal opinion, but when you post with @redhat.com, it is next best thing to an official comment.

And I’m wondering, is this true with all users? Does it matter if the post comes from @projectname.com or not? Are your opinions more valued if you’re employed by an open source company or the project in question?

I personally think its silly. If I make a post to mysql-list, with my @mysql.com address, I don’t expect that to be an official comment or a reflection of our excellent (albeit, paid for) support. Are my opinions on fedora-devel-list any lesser, when I don’t have an @redhat.com address (or maybe, don’t use my @fedoraproject.org alias?). If anyone has any thoughts from the @canonical.com vs. @ubuntu.com in the Ubuntu Community, I’d love to hear about it.

Got to tread carefully if this is what goes on in minds. User opinions becoming the gospel? Tsk tsk.

Technorati Tags: community, alias, domain name, opinions, official comments

Its the end of another month, maybe I’m entitled to be a little peeved?

Thunderbird. In Linux, its Edit -> Account Settings. On Windows and OS X, its Tools -> Account Settings. On OS X, its Thunderbird -> Preferences, on Linux is Edit -> Preferences. Yes, I see the importance of making local users a lot happier about where to find things, but I’d very much like it if it was made easier to support (so no matter what OS I use, I know if said application is to be used, I can guide someone over the air, on what to do).

Ekiga of late, thinks I have a non-full-duplex sound card. Yes, I know, laughable, in the 21st century. Look at this in amazement:

Could not open audio channel for audio reception

An error occured while trying to play audio to the soundcard for the audio reception. Please check that your soundcard is not busy and that your driver supports full-duplex.
The audio reception has been disabled.

Yes, that’s right. I can’t have Rhythmbox playing, and Ekiga working, at the same time. I can however have Rhythmbox playing, and make/receive a Skype call just fine. How ironic.

However, I’m still a big fan of Ekiga. Its not proprietary like Skype. In fact, if more had Ekiga accounts, it would rock (I’m colincharles at ekiga, just like skype). Skype on Linux looks like arse when you’ve used Skype on OS X (or Windows). Not only does it look bad, it actually has so much less features, than the other Skype platforms. Is Skype 1.3 ever going to die, so we can see at least Skype 2 on Linux?

One of the reasons I registered a Gizmoproject account was so I could make SIP calls and GizmoOut calls via my N770. Seemed viable then, but the service quality is pretty bad (sadly, Skype’s actually better in that respect). Skype mentioned that video calling was coming for Linux on the Nokia N800 – is it? On that tangent, I’m glad I still don’t own one, as people seem to be having failures – reboots and window problems.

Technorati Tags: skype, ekiga, sound cards, drivers, sound drivers, full duplex, thunderbird, software

Maemo 3.0 (Bora), and Scratchbox APOPHIS installs just fine on Fedora Core 6. Its important to probably follow the install documentation, and do just a few other things.

First of, it starts with the installation. If you’re on an x86_64 platform, it is suggested that you have some kind of chroot environment setup. In Debian land, you might find reading Maemo 2.0 on AMD64 handy, however in Fedora-land, there’s a great utility called setarch.

SELinux should be disabled before installation. As root, type echo 0 > /selinux/enforce. Then proceed to install via:

setarch i386sudo ./maemo-scratchbox-install_3.0.sh -s /opt/scratchbox -u username

The above installs it to the path /opt/scratchbox, and adds username to the sbox group. Now, while in your i386 “chroot”, run, sudo /opt/scratchbox/sbin/sbox_ctl start, and try running /opt/scratchbox/login. You should be greeted with a prompt like: [sbox-SDK_X86: ~]>.

Outside of Scratchbox (I suggest you exit it), run bash maemo-sdk-install_3.0.sh -s /opt/scratchbox (the -s specifies the path, if you installed it in /scratchbox, its not necessary). Continue following on the instructions in the install documentation.

Pull down Xephyr via YUM – its xorg-x11-server-Xephyr. Remember that all this won’t work unless you’re in the sbox group, so if things seem to be broken, run id and see if you can see that you’re a member of the sbox group.

At startup, just run setarch i386, then don’t forget to start scratchbox via sudo /opt/scratchbox/sbin/sbox_ctl start. Fire up Xephyr, via Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 800x480x16 -dpi 96 -ac (this should be done outside your setarch-ed environment), and then login to scratchbox, export the display to :2, and run af-sb-init.sh start. You should have the Maemo environment running now.

Update: Russell Coker dropped me a line, and yes, while I don’t simply encourage the turning off, of SELinux, this was not implied by me. There’s a test in maemo-scracthbox-install_3.0.sh that checks on this (lines 420-427), and it recommends that it should be dropped to permissive mode. You can also obviously use the setenforce tool. Also, if you’re looking for a guide to Xephyr, he’s got a resource that’s pretty good.

Well, its been a while since I dirtied my hands in the sysadmin forays. I was wondering why my system was not accepting mail for a domain that clearly pointed to it. Running host just pointed to the mailserver correctly, but when I ran it on the mailserver, there was an IP address mismatch. Thinking back a little, it seems that there was an IP change, just something I’d forgotten about. Oh how the great DNS, comes to bite you in the behind.

MediaWiki these days likes PHP 5 (5.1 being preferred). I’ve discovered why Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 might suck – they only ship PHP 4.3.9, which is nowhere near as adequate for modern applications. So if I were a corporation and wanted to run the latest greatest Mediawiki on my corporate wiki, I’d be in a bind if I’m on RHEL4. Luckily, this is where the centosplus repository comes into active play – its got a modern PHP, and modern databases.

I’ve gotten out of the Planet game. After running Planet MyOSS for a countless number of years, I’ve just decided that the final migration should happen today – and it did thanks to a Redirect 301 / http://planet.foss.org.my/. Update your bookmarks, feed readers, etc.. as Planet MyOSS now resides at: http://planet.foss.org.my/. (except I checked it just now, and foss.org.my was down… it seems to be regularly down, why?)

Those having to deal with MYNIC, keep in mind that their online forms differ if you’re logging in as the Administrative or Technical contact (the latter is where you get to change DNS servers). And no, its not instant, they say its a 24-hr waiting period.

Back to RHEL/Centos. Why does the Linux Standards Base (LSB) stipulate that servers need to have CUPS installed, to be LSB compliant? I’ll probably talk more about the recent cleanups I’ve been doing at another stage.

Just when I wondered where Eric Raymond had been, it seems he surfaces on fedora-devel-list. Read the interesting thread, titled Goodbye, Fedora (notice the CC-lists as well).

I have a few comments about his comments…

• Chronic governance problems? Yes, its called growing pains. And for a company to open to the wide outside world, its not the easiest thing. Trust me, I know this firsthand, these days. I think the likes of Max Spevack, Greg DeKoenigsberg, the Fedora Advisory Board, FESCO, etc. have really made Fedora happen and fixed most of his so-called “governance problems”.
• I do think the repositories are sane. I do agree that the submission process for Extras or any package tends to be overcomplex. And I don’t like some of the Packaging guidelines (for one, if I wanted to read my Bible on Fedora, it should be a yum away, really).
• RPM development might’ve drifted when jbj left Red Hat, but Paul Nasrat has taken over. I don’t see that as necessarily bad. And YUM has gone through leaps and bounds, its actually really nice software.
• The struggle for the desktop market share is a fine balance. I don’t think Fedora makes it unwieldingly difficult to install proprietary codecs – in fact, on a stock FC-6 install, you just fire up your web browser, and at the bottom there’s a link to the Unofficial Fedora FAQ. Guess what that does? It tells you to enable Livna, and enjoy playing MP3s, DivXs, and so on. Not including binary drivers for the latest greatest Nvidia card? Good, because nouveau wouldn’t have been born without it.

Ubuntu does have its advantages (single CD install, usually everything works out of the box on the desktop [until they upgrade your X server and it stops :P]) but even there, multimedia support isn’t the best. Sure, its a repository away, but it still requires work. Ubuntu on x86_64? They’ll actually tell you to use the 32-bit desktop release, because I fear dpkg/apt still have multi-arch problems. And I dare argue, that their governance is no better than Fedora’s.

Fedora has advantages. Its development team is extensive. Thats one thing you have to give Red Hat – they invest in prime quality engineers, they innovate (NetworkManager, written by a one-time OpenOffice.org hacker, SELinux integration, rocking GNOME desktop, etc.). Ubuntu is smart – they watch Fedora, to make “a better Fedora than Fedora”. And they compromise (though recently, Shuttleworth has stated otherwise).

I met Eric at the very first FUDCon. He spoke on some man page utilities for about fifteen minutes, then went on to tell us why Fedora sucked. There might actually be video footage of this, or not, since it was my first time recording video to disk, as the rest of the FUDCon crew ran away from the room. Lots have changed since then, and yet, Eric’s thrown in the towel?

This time, he’s installed Edgy Eft, so its confirmed that he’s leaving Fedora-land. From the comments, I don’t think many are going to miss him. I do think, Alan Cox says it best (notice the .signature as well!). Goodbye, Eric.

gnash

I’ve not exactly seen much working with Gnash, which is what I have installed: gnash and gnash-plugin. A quick visit to Youtube, confirms that gnash is still not exactly usable, and the bug seems to be with ActionExtend and Super (AS inheritance) not being implemented yet. There is hope nonetheless, as Lulu TV also use these features, and are hosting the Gnash developers wiki, which might mean there’s some corporate backing of gnash development.

gnome-dictionary

gnome-utils provides the Dictionary, which is just a front-end to an online dictionary. This is great, but works horribly if you’re offline. Mac OS X clearly has the upside here, as I can just use the Dashboard dictionary applet to find words. It also comes with a working thesaurus, something the “Similar Words” feature in the GNOME Dictionary doesn’t seem to grok.

Deskbar

Like Quicksilver? You’ll definitely like the Deskbar Applet (deskbar-applet from Fedora Extras). Its not Ctrl+Space controlled, which it instead has picked up on Alt+F3 as the keyboard shortcut of choice. It has Beagle (Spotlight equivalent) integration, can connect to the Fedora bugzilla just via a bug number, and do so much more. I don’t have Thunderbird integration, and notice that its a planned feature for the future – I can’t hardly wait.