Colin Charles Agenda

• Bought The Official GNOME 2 Developers Guide and skimmed thru it. Definitely going to be a good read and reference point, though it does assume some fairly strong C skills – this is where a gap exists for complete newbies. So I’ve made my donation to the foundation :)
• Want GAIM, the CD player, or even up2date to sit on your “system tray”? Right click the GNOME panel, Add to Panel, Utility, and select Notification Area.
• Browsing JB Hifi (where I bought some CDs incidentally), I saw mini-CDR’s going for about $1/CDR. That’s about 185MB of storage, and being mini-sized, it struck me. Seems like a good marketing tool to push some open source software, that runs on Microsoft Windows to “to-be converts”. MozOO.org distributes CDs that are full-sized, but their package set is definitely small enough for something like this.
• If Siemens thinks StarOffice is mature enough, this is definitely good news for the OOo camp. A conclusion that training didn’t cost more – in Malaysia, “open source training” costs a bombshell – maybe costs can be drastically reduced by getting in-house training sorted by ByteBot.Net Training Materials. Also, keep in mind that eWeek conducted an independent study to show that OpenOffice.org is cheaper than Office 2003 in the SMB market.
• Dick Smith, in New Zealand, is now selling OpenOffice.org among a few other software packages for NZ$4.95.

All these Planets have those floating heads around them (aka hackergotchi). Jeff gave me some instructions a few days ago, and I said I’ll write them up after having success with them – so I present the official jdub method. BTW, congratulations Jeff & Pia!

1. Remove unnecessary bits out of the picture, so you just get the head
2. Select by alpha (Layers, Channels & Paths dialog)
3. Make a new layer
4. Feather the selection (growing/shrinking before might be necessary)
5. Fill with black – the black color thumbnail is mighty handy for this
6. Then change the opacity of the channel, and move the shadow down to the right, to taste

I’ve found that the Drop Shadow plugin works okay as well, but its not as good as manual intervention. Estimated time for completing a head can be around ten minutes or so. Preferred size is 64×64, so scale it in The GIMP, otherwise replace 64 with 80 or so, depending on the head.

Update: Wouter Verhelst has another guide too: my head has graphics as well.

Looking to making the switch to Linux? Wanting to know more about Fedora Core and how to use it? Want to train your community centre folk to use Linux? I give to you, http://training.bytebot.net/ – ByteBot.Net Training Materials for Linux.

Fully based on Fedora Core 1, and almost exclusively teaching based on the GNOME Desktop, it covers some OpenOffice.org basics, troubleshooting, and more. It goes hand in hand with the OpenOffice.org Training Notes, released in February. No, this time I missed a good birthday to release it on :)

Cautionary tale as to why you should not mix repositories. Dag might have some fun stuff, but it doesn’t play well with fedora.us stuff, sometimes. I had already removed it from my yum.conf, and I also got rid of the stuff in /var/cache/yum. Came home (after watching Kill Bill: Vol. 2) to a machine that had gone off with the power failure. Horror, Galeon wouldn’t start!

Good thing ~/.galeon/session_crashed.xml is nice and readable so I backed that up. The daunting task of removing GAIM, Mozilla, Epiphany, and some other depends, and then re-installing them with pristine fedora.us stuff took a few good moments. I still have 12 packages with the dag tag, so I’ll work on solving that later.

Well, everyone’s got a misconception of the new OOo Schools Mascot. It’s been blown out of proportion people, and there’s no point bombarding the marketing project – we’ve received quite a lot of crap for it. Here’s Bruce Byfield’s positive take on it; Sander’s got a more interesting way – lets feed the spammers! It will soon leave the main website, and just be moved off to the schools sub-project. Let’s leave it at that folk, stop the bombardment, use all this energy to make OOo better okay?

Lots of other things going on – fc2test3 is out officially; been using it for a few days already, its generally quite good. “Let’s fix Fedora” meeting was yesterday, talk became more active, new ideas are surfacing, only good things can happen (I’m overly-optimistic, some say).

And my-opensource.org will get its revamp soon enough – it now hosts its first HOWTO on Howto Configure QoS/Trafficshaping on Shorewall with Wondershaper. Rock. Ow Mun Heng should get a blog, and more should too; just added Kevin Francis to Planet MYOSS (which is now on Planet Planet as well as p.g.o’s planetarium).

I really want to sync mail between the desktop and the laptop, now that I have a working desktop. So I gave MultiSync from CVS a shot (requires evolution-devel, openssl-devel on FC). Not bad, it does Contacts, Calendar and Tasks, but no Mail (and really, I don’t use the other features often). Multisync however has a cool Opie plugin, so if GPE is still at the status it is at (haven’t updated my iPaq in a while), I may just reinstall it with Opie for a bit. Very promising software, and when it reaches 1.0, they’ll apply for GNOME inclusion – good.

That said, Evolution is now synced, with the wonders of rsync! Small script kills evolution on both desktop/laptop, and starts syncing the important stuff over. For a ~/evolution of size 1.6GB, it completes in under twenty minutes – thats a pretty long wait if I’m going to do this about once or twice a day. Guess I’ll start deleting mailing list archives, and stop being a pack rat, since they’re usually available online anyways. Oh, and a fairly good guide on backing up Evolution.