Colin Charles Agenda

Whoa. Asia Source is totally a different experience for me. I’ve been in a hotel for the past two days, and even visited MG Road in Bangalore to grab lots of goodies to take home; last night was the first time I got to see Visthar. Really a camp style atmosphere, something thats really new to me I guess. But its going to be fun.

Sorted out the migration stuff today, and tomorrow the camp proper starts. Finally got to e-mail, and posted a bunch of things out. The important bit I think, is fedora-ppc bits that anyone interested in seeing FC-4 running on PPC needs to look at. We’ve got some issues and niggles that we really need to fix. And according to the schedule, freeze is 14th Feb, but we can still continue hacking afterwards I think….

We all knew that they were evil, but who thought Microsoft would refuse to give Windows licenses away, because the apps built on top of it were going to be open source based?

This is exactly the way they behaved when they refused to give XP licenses for notebooks that were to be used for relief work. Instead, they thought it was more than appropriate to charge $135 per XP license. The Sri Lankan’s were trying to build a disaster management system, open-source based, called Sahana. As described at the Sahana sf.net page, it handles all forms of crisis management, including refugee camp management (including match-making based on supply/demand), lost persons database, and more. They are looking for PHP/Mambo, Java, and MySQL blokes to help design the system and continue development.

I even noticed a post about running Mambo on an iPaq running OPIE. There’s a rather nice write-up about it at Linuz Gazette; at least now we all know, that pre-teen model is an evil bastard.

Microsoft, supposedly helping the tsunami victims in needIf anyone’s interested, The Electric Lamb Mission, a site setup within 24-hours using Drupal, with folk from Australia, KL, Sumatra, and Singapore all collaborating via e-mail, IM and SMS. Their aims are to “become an e-facilitation portal for mission-critical humanitarian and disaster relief initiatives by non-aligned volunteers.”

So alas, open source saves the day yet again, IBM are still heroes for giving away hardware, and Microsoft come out looking like crap.

Seemed like something I had to do. I’ve been waiting for native WordPress support for a long time, and the last time I gave it a twirl, the title bits didn’t work. I think they do now. Seth’s FC-3 packages don’t work – I’m guessing he has Python 2.4 installed on his system and it graciously picked up on it when building the RPM.

So I rebuilt them on a stock FC-3 system, and that’s now at http://www.bytebot.net/rpms/gnome-blog-0.8-1.i386.rpm. Only missing feature now is posting to the available categories…

If bloody tragedy in the form of an earthquake strike, along with the recent tsunamis in Asia, why in the hell must there be evil folk that rape ladies? Especially in Asian communities where its the victim that gets a stigma around her. Sigh. Good news is at AsiaSource, we’re going to try and run a track on ICT and Disasters. How can Linux help in a disaster situation – terrorism, natural disasters like earthquakes, flooding, tsunamis, etc… ?

Update: Seems Slashdot ran a feature on it recently

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…

While waiting for a compile, I popped WordPress 1.2.2 here. Its a lot nicer; my comment spam had been piling up to over 2,500, which took the moderation page about 499s to display – all zapped nicely thanks to a little comment spam zapper.

Spent some time installing and configuring OpenGroupware. Its nice. A lot nicer than Open Xchange, save for the fact that this one lacks a free Outlook connector (haven’t tried OpenConnector yet). If using Debian Sarge, the Noodle project is pretty impressive – its almost seamless when coming to setup OGo there; something Fedora needs, and I guess when time permits, work on it. And the promise of the Evolution connector is most useful.

Also started working on the OSS Migration and Adoption Track for NGOs, since this is a track that I’m facilitating at Asia Source, to be held in Bangalore from the 28th of January till the 4th of February. Anyone in Bangalore around that time and want to say hi?