Colin Charles Agenda

Dear Interweb (really Linux on Laptop people),

Do you recommend a Turion 64 X2 or an Intel Core 2 Duo in a laptop?

My main aim is to make it run Fedora with all its bells and whistles (and hope it lasts longer than 2 years; the older IBM can’t do Xen in FC-6).

Are Dell’s a good buy? Are their three years comprehensive warranty worth buying (much like its a necessity for the Apple stuff)? Is the Inspiron or Latitude the more affordable versions of the Dell? Why can’t I see Firewire in their specs? Whatever happened to good ‘ole PCMCIA slots?

Size isn’t really a factor, I’ve become used to lugging 15″ wide screens for a while now, even during travel.

One thing I’ve found funny with the Dell website - I can’t untick MS Windows or even MS Works. I apparently need to have them. Can I return them without hassle?

So, a while back, Dr. Nah, announced that my-opensource.org will be no more. I guess its a sad day, because the ever (in)famous myoss@my-opensource.org list, which has been around since 1998 (or earlier?) is now, no more.

It is now at myoss@lists.foss.org.my it would seem. And Khairil, who runs the box has created a rather important list for the newbies: one to get their Questions answered.

Of course in myoss tradition, it has expanded the discussion into one that asks if a forum is better, and a whole bunch of other things. Knowing them, it’ll get a lot larger, but its fun reading ;-) And if you’re new, and have a FLOSS related question, don’t bother about the rants on myoss, just post to the Questions list.

Technorati Tags: foss, malaysia, myoss

I was just reading a text on effective communications, and there was something interesting I noted. With different values and backgrounds all over the world, a lot of things happen (use of colloquisms, etc.) with regards to people understanding each other. When there’s face-to-face meetings, there’s also non-verbal communication to keep note of.

It turns out in South Africa, they call it Ubuntu (we’re much more familiar with its “humanity for others” meaning by now, for sure). They value collective efforts in solving issues that impact the members of the community. And if you’re ever face-to-face with a South African, limited eye contact often shows respect and humility (this is similar with Japan, its polite). In the Western world though, we need eye-contact for confidence purposes, and to show that we’re sincere.

Its also worthy to note (yes, this post had a point) that on the MySQL 5.0 downloads page, there exists Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) downloads. Its the first time there are DEBs there.

Sure, its best to just sudo pat-get install mysql-server, but that also effectively means MySQL has recognized DEBs, and with Ubuntu at that. Its LTS as well!

I heard Cory Doctorow about a week ago (yes, we have cool international speakers here in Melbourne all the time!), and if there was only one thing you’re really meant to take away from his talk, I think I found the gem.

Cory signs a book

We’re usually told content is king. He says thats a myth. Have you seen the six trillion dollar industry, that is telecommunications? (okay, I don’t know if that stat is remotely correct…) So the content is king idea is bollocks. What is really king is community and inter-personal communication. Getting people to talk about it. Humans are terribly social beings, so yeah, go community.

“Trying to kill MySQL by acquiring open source is like trying to kill
a dolphin by drinking the ocean.” — Marten Mickos

And yes, that quote ties in well with the Oracle Bought InnoDB Without a Clue article… MySQL has a great community. And of late, we’re getting a lot more great community contributed content. I do think content is important, but the community is too. And being around over 1,500 MySQL users, all I can say is that there’s great community here. From financial analysts, to DBAs, to students, to storage engine creators. This is one damned good community!

Fedora gcc-isms
Decided that it might be fun to start taking a stab at failed packages in Extras/ppc that didn’t build, and figured out why the x86/x86_64 builds are way ahead of us. No mass rebuild! And yes, GCC4 is to blame. Example is very linux_logo centric: No using (char *) (casts) if the type of new_logo is a pointer for example. Earlier on I remember, for ppc kernels to compile it was typedef related magic. Some quick google’s later, here are some pointers on what might need changing (I’ve not really found a good gcc4 document that people can enjoy): fix invalid lvalue assignment, use of cast values as lvalue is deprecated (more), and getting op -> foo (a,b,c) changed to (op->foo) (a,b,c). Read the long object size checking post too, its rather useful.

Expressions
So today we had a discussion about “capitol” and “capital”. Greg assured us it was “capital” (I always thought it was a American vs. British English thing). The following shows how expressions differ for Australian vs. American English. Just interesting to note, its so common to say “mate” in Australia, I’d never have thought someone would take offence to it.

<wmealing> oh, i called a yank ive been talking to for about 3 years, "mate" the other day
<wmealing> he went OFF
<wmealing> "im not gay, etc etc etc"

Life
So to add to my collection of phones, which I completely don’t use and disgust, I now own an LG U8138, and have a new Three line. Free calls are abound now it seems. And I can do video, and get on the Internet via a USB cable or even IR - now to see if it all works with Linux will be the fun part. Hats off to Francine, she’s a good sales lady, and I just bought a unit without thinking a little more than twice. Good to note that my credit check is still nice and positive :P

Also forgot how fun it was to just go and hang out. Met up with Andy, someone from Asia Source to talk about video distribution stuff. Took Darren along, and it was just some aimless coffee, talk, walking, and juice drinking. Probably really needed all that. Good conversation till the wee hours of the morning with my best friend, and my morale has definitely been boosted to some degree.

So it was nice to see Coastguard from Cybersource. Using IceWM, Knoppix, and Firefox for all its functionality, which involves Internet banking. FWIW, I bank with several banks (ING, ANZ, Commonwealth), and they all seem to work well on my Linux box running Firefox. Granted I have the Java plugin, I’ll have to try it at some stage with the Java integrated stuff in Fedora to see if it’ll just work.

Fedora/ppc
So, more things are entering Extras. Take a look at what Repoview has to show you. General slow-down is that packages with dependencies need to have their dependencies met, so that takes some manual massaging. We’re down to about 70 unbuilt packages because of dependencies, and about 93 failing builds on ppc (which is the reason we have unbuilt packages, mostly).

Package maintainers, take a look at the failed build-logs, fix your packages, and lets get ‘em rebuilding (might be worthwhile to check and see if i386 fails as well first before beating your head).

For all Mac Mini fans, the Installing Debian GNU/Linux on the Mac Mini guide is a pretty good one. IIRC, sound still doesn’t work, so play OFPong instead :)

Stuff
Otherwise, while surfing the web, I noticed the Clemson Linux Initiative. Its got nice howto’s for laptop’s, and getting them to work with FC3. The Fedora HCL could definitely get a boost with links to interesting things like this, IMHO.

Now, to go get debauched for the weekend.

The last few days were spent hanging out with the girl, doing random last minute things, getting hair cut, flying off to Melbourne, looking at my new room, unpacking, re-arranging, getting reconnected to the Net, and other random boring things. Caught Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason on the plane ride back.

Pegasos PPC
Finally unpacked the Pegasos II PPC box that’s been sitting around for months (while I was away). Its a 1GHz ODW, and I was surprised to find a keyboard and mouse in the packaging. Nice touch.

The hardest part to getting it running might seemed to have been me not reading my e-mail properly. CPU wasn’t plugged in, so I had to open the box. Remember, push outwards, not inwards towards the back :) After plugging it in, there’s various Debian’s (default is a 2.6 kernel), MorphOS, and YDL3. Nice featureset, its a CHRP Pegasos box (from /proc/cpuinfo) with 256MB of RAM, and I hope to start fiddling with getting Fedora on it. FC-4 if we can, though prime importance is getting FC-4/ppc working.

Seems folk hang out at #pegasosppc at your favourite OSS based IRC network…

Other goodness
The RULE Installer for FC-3 is out. Now you can run Fedora Core 3 on machines with 32MB of RAM, with KDrive as an X server (as opposed ot Xorg).

Been noticing that Centos/ppc is up and about. Its ppc64 in general, but they’re going to try get ppc32 patches and make it rock. Probably all thanks to Karanbir Singh, who has an interesting blog to watch. Is there a Planet Centos somewhere out there? #centos-ppc is another fun place to hang out.

FESCO
Meeting Minutes from Meeting #1 for the Fedora Extras Steering COmittee. Next time, I hope it goes out a few days before the meeting even. And we have some form of way for others to contact fesco folk…

So, its the 30th of December here. But that’s no excuse for the dismal service that Tanjong Golden Village Cinemas (running Microsoft IIS nonetheless) has to provide. Meet the Fockers is premiering in Malaysia today, so the natural thing to do is to go watch it. So, here comes my tale of trying to book two tickets…

To make an online booking, I need to sign-up at the website. Except they ask for some ridiculous personal information, like your Identity Card/Passport number - why?. I don’t like giving away this information, especially over HTTP, but I comply. After the signing up, I quickly hop on into their ETicketing service (UI Improvement: when clicking on showtimes -> and “book now” for a movie of your choice, it takes you to the e-ticketing feature, but I still have to manually choose everything again (I’d expect the movie to be pre-selected for me already)). I choose my cinema, the movie, and the time, and enter a value for tickets to be purchased, all of which work really well. Then it contacts the cinema, or tries in vain to do so, and when its done after over a minute, it complains that I lack the Java VM, and I can’t get tickets allocated.

I install the JRE, link it correctly, restart the browser, and attempt to do this again. Now, the server is non-responsive - i.e. it says it can’t process the request. I also get the occasional IIS error page, which stupidly sends me to a page at Microsoft to resolve my error. (UI Improvement: Better error messages, rather than going to the IIS administrator page would make more sense - customise the 404).

Now I call the number that’s listed at the website. Go thru the menu, and what error do I get? One that says their system is down, so contacting the cinema directly would be my next best option. So I take the number down, and try dialling it repeatedly, to no avail. At the same time, I’m trying to get the e-ticketing stuff to work.

I finally get lucky, and it allocates my two tickets. I can’t choose my seat allocation, it seems broken (and now, I have the JRE mind you), so I get auto-allocated to the fifth row from the screen. Semi-happy that it worked, I take down the booking number, and agree to pay the extra RM1 premium for online booking. (UI Improvement: I don’t want to re-enter my mobile phone number, and other random information thats already in my user profile - mine the data for me, so it saves me typing, thanks.)

Contrast this with my experience with trying to do this in Australia. I booked my seats at about 2.45am on the day the show was playing (TGV closes at 1am), paid for it all via card, and just hopped over to the cinema on the day itself and got the machine to spit my ticket out when my card was inserted. Never had to see a human, at all. Didn’t waste time from 10.49am right up to 11.26am.

I don’t mind paying a premium for convenience. But when a cinema doesn’t value my time, and makes me waste over half an hour just to get a ticket, it seems rather silly. Well, its either that or battling queues that might take you just as long, and you’ll probably not get a movie on time either. And I paid full price today as well, no discounts, whatsoever.