Colin Charles Agenda

Tridge came over for the LUV meeting this month, and it was definitely a fun time listening to him speak for over two hours. He was giving us a status update on Samba4, with demos and the like (its cool, really!), and a bit of information as to what he thinks is happening with the future of filesystems. I took some notes down, at Samba4 Status – Andrew Tridgell (sorry, OpenOffice.org’s HTML export is pretty sucky – nested bullets aren’t supported it seems…), he has a presentation up on his website somewhere, and well, it was good. Talked about ldb (and how hackers are encouraged to join), streams and why we need them in the UNIX world, and so on. New pizza place even, this month.

Usual discussion came up about why’d governments should pick the BSD styled licensing scheme, over the GPL. I’m going with the GPL/LGPL, as the BSD styled licensing allows folk to take away code, make it proprietary, and probably never push updates out again – bad, bad. If Linksys didn’t use the GPL, we won’t have disruptive technology – a lot more of these devices exist, nowadays with phones, and more. Some interesting picks:

• Opinion: License to FUD – “While using the GPL won’t prevent competitors from using the code, it does keep them from making proprietary extensions.” Later on, when they talk about MS’s Kerberos implementation, its a valid point that gave the Samba team grief.
• GPL or BSD? Yes LG #75 – “GPL promotes freedom for the end-user; BSD promotes freedom for the programmer.” I like that it makes certain there’s no “better” license; also point to note that why would you work so hard to make someone else a millionaire? (Look at Microsoft’s stealing of the BSD TCP/IP stack). Kerberos is mentioned, in greater detail here.
• Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else. – good reading in general, to tell you why you’d use a GPL-compatible based license.
• The Role of Community in Free Software – “Developers who use the GPL are saying, in the clearest possible way, that their motives are not selfish, that they can be trusted to participate in the community without holding something back for themselves.”
• Social aspects of the BSD vs. GPL debate – a must read. Plenty of resources, great for the bookmarks on this topic.

Yes, the freedom of the community is a lot more important, I would think. Weak licensing doesn’t propogate the access regime.

This time, it’s Ken Barber’s review ofopinion piece on Fedora Core 2. For Linux.com to publish this sort of drivel, scares me. Most of the useful comments state it all, but something caught me:

It is bleeding-edge technology that will become mainstream in a year or so, and as such is an important distro for people who will be working with next year’s technology.

Firewire is borked because the upstream kernel has a borked Firewire; the YaST discussion has come up on fedora-devel-list before (archives!); Fedora “just works” for a lot of people; GNOME 2.6 is not broken. Well, going by popularity, everyone loves Fedora Core, they’re just to shy to say it :)

While it is a novel idea for Novell to migrate to OpenOffice.org, is the end of the year a more viable alternative than a end-of-July 2004 dateline?

Even up to this date, employees aren’t exactly convinced – OpenOffice.org might be installed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its being used. Forcing it down throats is what’s happening. And OpenOffice.org still isn’t cutting it for an average person involved in dealing with external customers (unless they get a lot of migration assistance):

• Writer is doing quite well, importing quite the number of Word documents without issues – however, certain data fields don’t show, watermarks don’t import properly, and for some reason, a document with the watermark created in about two revisions earlier, was still displayed. But most documents are fine, save for the weirder bullets issue.
• Calc’s importing of Excel documents are still hit-and-miss. Simple =SUMIF’s actually broke during the conversion. VBA macros obviously break.
• Impress imports PowerPoint presentations fairly well, but drawings like boxes do run quite the bit.
• The Document Converter AutoPilot seems to crash OOo 1.1.1 on machines with about 128MB of RAM in Windows when the document count was around 280 or so. I’ll be playing with this a lot more, I’m sure.

So as a check-list, Michael Meeks and team seem to be working on getting the VBA macro support in OOo – this is going to be very important for the migration to work. I don’t know what miracles we’re going to make on the import/export of files – they have to “just work” (no, PDF’s for clients aren’t useful, when they have to work with you) – so that dealing with clients using the other Office suite, is not an issue. Calc needs to be further enhanced, definitely.

It’s interesting to note that a Florida health organisation actually performed the migration for 3,500 PCs first, even before Novell did! Good beta testing ground, I’m wishing to hear more of their document migration issues, more than anything else.

So did they really start? Not quite, but they’re breaking it down for the staff, and they’re getting their first take at OOo usage – for most, it seems to be similar, with workarounds for the common things to use. For others, problems listed above, exist (among a few minor niggling effects).

You think Fedora eats babies? Find that it’s irresponsible to release code that damages your other partitions?

An anonymous wizard has written: Prevention and Recovery of XP Dual Boot Problems. Read it, breathe it, report back to us if it works. Constructive comments folk – yes, it may sound technical, but good constructive comments will help everyone.

In other news, Jack has made a fairly good stand on the MySQL licensing issues and why FC has yet to bundle it in. Joe Orton too. Don’t say “Novell do it, they’re not stupid” and expect that to stand as an argument – we’d be shipping Mono apps otherwise, too.

Update: lwn picked it up… SuSE 9.1 users are complaining too (KB entry to fix it), as are Mandrake 10 users – they just released their final version, will that eat babies too?

Some useful resources for those running Fedora, and needing to build the latest tarball releases of GNOME. I decided to use GARNOME, instead of jhbuild this time, which meant I had to learn how to use GNU arch. Fedora/Fedora.us don’t have arch, so I rebuilt a source RPM and it installed fine.

Alternatively, read the GARNOME TLA (GNU Arch) HOWTO and there are links to some arch RPMs. That’s basically all you need to read to get started with garnome. Bob Kashani has further information at his site, and a useful script would be the FC2 dependency installation script.

Building it just takes some time, and when its done, create the garnome-session file, and then add a garnome.desktop (an example of the jhbuild equivalent). Happy usage! More details at the 2.7.x Development Series. Also, on the plus side, my Evolution issue has been fixed now :)