Colin Charles Agenda

For some reason, the last few days have been quite busy, and I’ve been sleeping a bit more (and I haven’t even been having a life). Started working on an updated guide for the Fedora PPC installs, but have yet to complete it. Tried Rawhide on x86, and found that i8xx_tco (the watchdog drivers) cause the PC to constantly reboot within a 2-minute timeframe. Bad. All PC Gemilang owners will be affected.

Tried a USB scanner – the HP ScanJet 4100C. Just plugged it in, FC Rawhide on PPC just detected it, and I was on my scanning way! Talk about simply cool. No drivers, nothing required. I’ve not used a scanner since the mid-1990’s, and back then, support on Linux was horrible (parallel port scanners were cheap, and highly unsupported). GNOME 2.8 got released. I’m now popping Ubuntu Linux onto bigmac, so that’ll give me a chance to do a clean Rawhide install soon on the remaining space. Oh, also been playing with DidiWiki – I like it very much.

Open source ‘pirates’ to be prosecuted, says ministry – only in Malaysia, will they be pirating open source, eh?.

Noticed they picked up FreeBSD 5.0 (FreeBSD license allows pirating it), and RHEL3.0 (not so legal, because of the EULA and trademarks). However, this does not stop the pirates at Low Yat selling Centos for instance (or even Fedora Core). Heck, they could customise RHEL and call it Rat Hat Enterprise Linux, and that’s probably “legal” too (make sure all the logos and trademarks s/Red/Rat/g though).

So no, there’s no pirated OSS damnit. NSH is right in saying that the BSA might say some silly things (more likely add to the silly things). So in response to LcF and CS, these pirates probably didn’t do anything bad if they sold RHEL Sources (thats 100% legal, selling SRPMS – charging for the cost of the CDs or DVD), and yes, stop wasting public money and time, go pursue the BSA-related organisations (of which RH isn’t a part of, and neither is Novell) instead.

In other good news, the Malaysian Communications & Multimedia Commission (MCMC) backs the HITBSecConf2004. They’re even presenting a paper. If you get a chance to go, the HITBSecConf is a really fun place to head to. Lastly, Red Hat are back with their World Tour. Hitting Kuala Lumpur October 4th, and Melbourne October 12th.

A motherboard designed with feng shui principles?

Sleep works! Yay! pmud works. Yay! This laptop (iBook g3) is now 100% usable, the same way it was back when I used to run Debian on it many moons ago. With all the nice GNOME improvements of course :) system-config-display still is a no go, use pmud-0.10-1.1 (do not rebuild). Sound needs manual fixing, using dmasound_pmac, acme is a charm, eject though is still broken (but thats because cdrom drive isn’t a detected device). system-config-network still broken. But really, this is now production ready!

Was at AUUG 2004 today. Interesting keynote by Senator Kate Lundy, who mentioned the OpenOffice.org relation with the National Archives in Australia. Plenary was by the CTO at Sun Microsystems, with some interesting thoughts (sparse notes). Later on, learnt about Martin Schwenke’s ideas about Vital Product Data and using that for persistent device naming – now that udev is in place, and hal’s being used a lot (though he says HAL’s only for desktops; servers still can use VPD for hardware inventory or diagnostics) nowadays.

Got to see Jeremy Malcolm (from iLaw) speak about spam and the various laws that can help us get rid of this pest. Then Warren Toomey, about how C Code trees can be compared (his main aim was to extend Eric Raymond’s Comparator, but use lexical tokens instead). Interesting, might be useful anti-plagarism tool. Steve Bellovin talked about Privacy, Anonymity and Security on the Internet – most interesting to see him speak!

Interesting to note that the Victorian Greens (another political party, whom spoke for a bit), are using Linux. They reckon that when OOo 2.0 comes out, they’ll be using it as a “great communication tool” and will encourage it on Windows, OS X and Linux platforms. They currently already use it, with Evolution for e-mail, and RH9.0+LTSP for their office. Their database is going to be Postgres based, Plone is used on their main site, and they run a wiki using Apache internally as well. Go Bruce!

Attended the AGM, not much, except print versions of AUUGN are ending. Otherwise, battling sleep (APM) support with Fedora Rawhide on the Thinkpad T20; and today, I’m not getting my rsync trees, for some absurd reason, the Net’s really slow. Ah, also got me a few CDRWs, because I got tired of burning development boot CDs on CDRs (waste!).

Spent quite a lot of time fiddling with Rawhide from yesterday. Ran into quite a few bugs, all made it into bugzilla – airport giving anaconda the sig11, system-config-display still broken for the Radeon Mobility 7500, and worse, text mode install on the iMac DV failed (#131346). system-config-network is also broken (well, kudzu it might seem? – #130719). Getting seemingly close to feature freeze, so I’m getting a wee bit worried that test2 ISOs might not be as functional as they should be. Plus we still need to run yabootconfig to get the Mac booting… Sleep is definitely not working, its not a GNOME issue any longer though since brightness and volume control works now; so its time to poke at what changed in the kernels.

MySQL 4.0.21 will not make it into Fedora Core 3 test2, because they’re (MySQL themselves) are having trouble building packages. No package with new license, no inclusion in Fedora.

BTW, does anyone know how to upgrade my iMac DV SE+ firmware so that I can install Tiger on it? Heck, I couldn’t even get Panther on that machine!

Some useful trackers…

• Open PPC bugs.
• Closed/resolved PPC bugs included
• The tracker itself, so we can keep watch

Feeling sad that YellowDog will not run on your OldWorld Mac anymore? Apparently Fedora Core 2 does ;-) If I had an OldWorld Mac, this might make more sense, as I’d play with BootX… Actually, you can boot your kernel directly from OpenFirmware, thus not requiring a bootloader (at least on the NewWorld stuff I own).