Colin Charles Agenda

Issue 15 of the Fedora News Updates is now released.

It covers the announced EOL for Fedora Core 1, many new updates in the Docs project, and plenty of talk about porting Fedora to other platforms – Intel IXP2400, SGI’s Altix (ia64), and even Alpha. Some developer talk about updating current releases, as well as developing test suites for Fedora. And plenty more…! Err, it also includes the conferences that Fedora was represented at, and now, it sports the LinuxWorld panel discussion summary as well as the presentation given.

Otherwise, Are you an open source bigot?

OK, I lied. Fedora News Updates still being written, so much for the attempted 2-week releases. Wanna help? Anyways, here’s what Fedora PPC as of Rawhide on 13/08/2004 looks like (6302MB of installed packages now):

• Anaconda needs to be rebuilt, because of the new glibc (probably fixed in 14th’s tree, #129747).
• The vesa driver is used, so you can actually get anaconda to start up nicely with X, rather than using text-based installs.
• Apple Bootstrap still doesn’t show. Creating it isn’t a problem, but it isn’t graphical. This was supposed to be fixed, but now, I’ll get a screenshot soon and see what can be done about it.
• Getting screenshots are a chore – Shift+PrintScreen will not work on the iBook. It lacks a PrintScreen key!
• No mkofboot magic at the end. /etc/yaboot.conf exists, but without the mkofboot magic, it can’t boot Fedora. Once started, notice no rhgb present.
• If everything install is performed, Starting the IIIMF input server will result in it just hanging there.
• firstboot starts, with fbdev, maximum resolution is only 800×600.
• X does not get configured on the iBook G4 yet. ddcprobe however, is fixed and works a charm.

Everything else just works, as expected. Looks like its just a few minor niggles here and there, before we get something that works really well (soon).

Setup a FC1 box, with the everything install. 550MB of packages later, it seemed to work. The distro has come a long way since that release, that much I can say (even the updates to it are a testament). 5881MB for an everything install, just in case anyone wants to fiddle with it. I’m going to commit that to doing Fedora Legacy stuff, since FC1’s EOL from Red Hat is nearing.

Started syncing a Rawhide PPC tree. We have boot.iso back, so this pretty much means test ISOs shall be out soon. This is doing wonders to my bandwidth quota… x86 Rawhide seems to work well, GNOME 2.7 stuff and all. Evolution is nice, but if you’re running it on a machine with 128MB of RAM, and doing junk mail filtering, you’ll not be a happy person (POP timeouts are commonplace). So the testbox got another 512MB stick, and its a lot happier now.

So, Sebol asks what has become of the OOo ms_MY project? And rightfully so, the lists are dead, the ms project is stagnated, and has been around for nearly a year. Amazing isn’t it? When there was some remote activity, and a press release was done, it brought on an onslaught from the Malay community on myoss. When I uploaded a website in “dismal” Malay, more onslaught. But when it comes to doing work, does anyone? MIMOS thought they’ll internalise it, since the external coordinator was unreliable – they even released beta CDs. After that, what happened?

So, the Malay language thing is in the media, eh? Here’s some fun reading at Microsoft’s site. The head at Dewan Bahasa has this to say: “The availability of Windows in Bahasa Melayu — the most widely used language in Malaysia and in many other parts of Southeast Asia — will accelerate IT literacy among the Malay-speaking community and help to bridge the digital divide.”

Firstly, I never knew BM was widely used in many other parts of SEAsia. It isn’t, he lies. Accelerate IT literacy amongst the Malay-speaking community and bridge the initial divide? Yeah, why not. What happens when they actually need to get 3rd party resources that are usually in the English language? What happens when you need to communicate with the rest of the world? What happens when you connect to the wonderful Internet? Get over it Malaysia, wake up, play it with English, or you’re not going to play at all.

Besides how’s a cut rate Windows going to help? Lower resolution graphics, fewer networking options (worse than XP Home?), and crappy multitasking (3 apps, only). So when on the Internet, let’s say I run Firefox, and Thunderbird, then I run OpenOffice.org, and that’s it – no chance of me editing my digital photos in Photoshop! So yeah, let Microsoft con Malaysia; they’ve already tried with the BSA at work.

Yes, localisation is important. But does it really help a small country like Malaysia, where competition with the international market is great?

Update: If its really Bahasa Melayu, which is widely used in Indonesia, rather than what DBP push out as the Malay national language, there’s some merit in this. Language isn’t the only barrier that Malaysians face, but its one that can be easily fixed if some pride is shed off. Was it not someone wise who once said, “pride goes before a fall”. Also, the work Sebol does is amazing – very consistent, full 100% respect for him.

Every once in a while, Bugzilla turns up something fun. Birthday wishes for sebol, and now girlfriend wishes from Stewart! People keep lists of fun CVS commits, or bloopers on IRC channels, wonder if there’s a fun bugs list?

No big feat, but Linux is now installed on the iMac that arrived yesterday (but I was out all day, so NFS installed it while in bed). Everything install for FC2 is 5881MB, from the known good tree at duke. Still no Mac images being generated for boot.iso (in spite of the script being fixed last Friday).

X took some massaging to get working. Firstboot still doesn’t run. DHCP from the Netgear that gives me hell, also doesn’t work. Sound hasn’t started working in spite of s/dmasound_pmac/snd_powermac/g in /etc/modprobe.conf (this is possibly due to the fact that iMac’s have issues playing audio CDs). The console is yellow-ish rather than a usual black – fix that with video=aty128fb at boot. Popped a DVD inside (Pretty Woman), and it got to the main menu screen where it was time to select the language; once that was done, it bombed. xine that is. Lot’s of work still needs to be done, it would seem.