Colin Charles Agenda

The OSDL has hired Paris Hilton to be the new face of open source. Pamela Anderson lost out because of shorter legs. I can’t wait to see this video.

So it was nice to see Coastguard from Cybersource. Using IceWM, Knoppix, and Firefox for all its functionality, which involves Internet banking. FWIW, I bank with several banks (ING, ANZ, Commonwealth), and they all seem to work well on my Linux box running Firefox. Granted I have the Java plugin, I’ll have to try it at some stage with the Java integrated stuff in Fedora to see if it’ll just work.

Fedora/ppc
So, more things are entering Extras. Take a look at what Repoview has to show you. General slow-down is that packages with dependencies need to have their dependencies met, so that takes some manual massaging. We’re down to about 70 unbuilt packages because of dependencies, and about 93 failing builds on ppc (which is the reason we have unbuilt packages, mostly).

Package maintainers, take a look at the failed build-logs, fix your packages, and lets get ’em rebuilding (might be worthwhile to check and see if i386 fails as well first before beating your head).

For all Mac Mini fans, the Installing Debian GNU/Linux on the Mac Mini guide is a pretty good one. IIRC, sound still doesn’t work, so play OFPong instead :)

Stuff
Otherwise, while surfing the web, I noticed the Clemson Linux Initiative. Its got nice howto’s for laptop’s, and getting them to work with FC3. The Fedora HCL could definitely get a boost with links to interesting things like this, IMHO.

Now, to go get debauched for the weekend.

The last few days were spent hanging out with the girl, doing random last minute things, getting hair cut, flying off to Melbourne, looking at my new room, unpacking, re-arranging, getting reconnected to the Net, and other random boring things. Caught Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason on the plane ride back.

Pegasos PPC
Finally unpacked the Pegasos II PPC box that’s been sitting around for months (while I was away). Its a 1GHz ODW, and I was surprised to find a keyboard and mouse in the packaging. Nice touch.

The hardest part to getting it running might seemed to have been me not reading my e-mail properly. CPU wasn’t plugged in, so I had to open the box. Remember, push outwards, not inwards towards the back :) After plugging it in, there’s various Debian’s (default is a 2.6 kernel), MorphOS, and YDL3. Nice featureset, its a CHRP Pegasos box (from /proc/cpuinfo) with 256MB of RAM, and I hope to start fiddling with getting Fedora on it. FC-4 if we can, though prime importance is getting FC-4/ppc working.

Seems folk hang out at #pegasosppc at your favourite OSS based IRC network…

Other goodness
The RULE Installer for FC-3 is out. Now you can run Fedora Core 3 on machines with 32MB of RAM, with KDrive as an X server (as opposed ot Xorg).

Been noticing that Centos/ppc is up and about. Its ppc64 in general, but they’re going to try get ppc32 patches and make it rock. Probably all thanks to Karanbir Singh, who has an interesting blog to watch. Is there a Planet Centos somewhere out there? #centos-ppc is another fun place to hang out.

FESCO
Meeting Minutes from Meeting #1 for the Fedora Extras Steering COmittee. Next time, I hope it goes out a few days before the meeting even. And we have some form of way for others to contact fesco folk…

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.

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.