Colin Charles Agenda

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

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.

Yesterday was great. How to plan a migration, and another part of the folk got to take a tour of the Linux desktop and other varied applications. Afternoon session was something on FLOSS and disabilities – got to see the software that Stephen Hawking uses, and got to take Gnopernicus with festival for a twirl in FC-3, which impressed everyone.

Today, further talks about migration, and we did a dual-boot install on a Windows-based laptop that was relatively new. Surprisingly, everything seems to “just work”. The ICT & Disasters talk was excellent – GRASS was demo-ed (now all we need is a nice front-end), as well as lots of other disaster-related relief information cropped up. Didn’t realise that there was so much free GIS/mapping data available online.

Culture jamming was something else that got covered (sniggle.net ?), and it seemed rather interesting. Lots of “activists” see this as “art”, what I sometimes see as an annoyance; but its rather interesting new viewpoint. Seeing Seth getting a scarf, funnily enough for Christmas, I got my first scarf too – the girl decided to knit one for me and it took her months! Now, thats literally one of my most prized posessions that goes along with my trenchie real well.

Yet another amazing day. Migration track actually got folk installing Linux on their desktops and then a Q&A session, with a user migration case study happened. Besides flaky hardware, the Linux installation process has been given a thumbs up. Later on, there was a good breakout session on how to use the Internet and mobile phones for gathering activitism, which was highly interesting (and gave me some ideas for mail marketing and signup forms).

Jeff Ooi showed up to talk about how he does grassroots stuff using the Internet, and gave us interesting knowledge about his portal usj.com.my for folks in the USJ area. Our first time meeting too; I stumbled upon Jac who’s a women’s rights person and it looks like there might be some collaboration for Net-based women’s empowering using FLOSS. A play happened, from a group called Rafiki – it was about opression in South Africa. 2-man show, I really enjoyed it.

Today was the proper start of the event. At 7.30am, Gunner started playing his guitar for the morning wake up call. Showering today was a new experience – since we stay in dorm-styled areas, the toilets are sort of “public” or shared. Water was cold! Breakfast, then some ice breaker sessions which brought up some mighty interesting topics.

• NGOs are misguided ICT shoppers. They just decide when they get funding to go and become wired, and they don’t know their requirements and they just generally get whatever is pushed to them at the computer stores. This includes horrible operating systems.
• NGOs should try to learn from each other as they face similar situations usually; but they never do this practically as they prefer to just go it their own way.
• NGOs don’t like to pay for anything – they’d rather have everything for free, even if they were receiving funding. This isn’t a base case, but it happens often enough.
• In Uganda, any telecenters for ICT that are setup need the buy-in from men. Otherwise, the women can’t visit these public Internet access points, since their husbands think they’re going to go find other men!

The Migration & Adoption track started today, and we got to meet the participants for the first time; lots of interesting questions, with lots of varying technical levels. Some haven’t even used a FLOSS app while in Windows, while some are well setup and are in-between migrations, keeping logs and so on. What surprised me is the low percentage (~10%) of users that mentioned hardware being a barrier/problem – looks like Linux on low-end hardware isn’t such a big deal for NGOs.