Colin Charles Agenda

While using jhbuild to build GNOME is cool, some might find using GARNOME better. Dan Daggett has scripted up his experiences of building GNOME 2.6 with GARNOME.

Figured the Malaysian Linux scene needed a little boost, so #myoss is born (on irc.freenode.net). All Malaysians in the open source community should join, participate, at least for some real-time chit-chat. The list is good, but IRC just gives that further interaction. Seems there’s International Open Source Meetup Day in KL - we apparently have on in Melbourne too.

Jeremy has posted some anaconda screenshots for ms_MY - these are Malay language translations for a Fedora install. I think improvements are due, and now’s a good time to contribute.

Because work is still done on the fedora ppc line of things, I track Sid (Debian unstable) on one of my iBook’s, to keep me relatively updated in the land outside of Fedora. Decided to dist-upgrade today, pulling in about 600MB of packages, with lots needing an update. libxft-dev gave me grief, Debian Bug reports gave me an answer - ended up just moving the file, and making it all well again. Seems dpkg-divert is borked, so it isn’t the XSF’s fault.

More grief though: acme is now something gnome requires; pbbuttonsd/gtkpbbuttons conflicts with acme, and if its installed, gnome goes away. Not fun. I like gtkpbuttons with its display of increasing or decreasing contrast/volume values, which acme doesn’t give me. Why can’t software not “conflict” with each other, and let the user decide which he/she wants to use? I’d definitely disable acme…. if I could. Ideas, anyone?

Update: Because oss “just works”, and ALSA is a whole bag of bones, getting mplayer to work is fun with a new switch: -ao oss. No alsa usage, just nice working, oss.

GNOME 2.6 release notes are what I’ve been doing for most of the day. We have quite a lot of modules I notice :)

Interesting GNOME Translation Statistics that have those cool graphs and what have you not. GNOME 2.6 release party is being planned, and it should be on the 24th of March. Maybe we can run one in Malaysia on the 25th of March, when there’s this AOSG thing happening at APIIT.

Spent some time writing those GNOME release notes; they’ll be good to go by the weekend I’m sure. More time was wasted earlier on my commute to the Indian Consulate (~2hrs each direction).

Novell’s doing interesting things in terms of OOo - Ramesh Babu has gotten a weekly development report (statistics), while Krishnan has gotten Planet OpenOffice.org working (no official launch yet, iirc). Garrett (at RedHat) has some OOo icons - so we’ll have BlueCurve stuff, as well as the Ximian-ised icon-set (GNOME) and the standard Sun one. Too many icons if you ask me, and a lack of consistency.

Fedora on PPC beginners guide might be handy; when time permits, I’ll write one up. In the meantime, tracking the ruffpack at http://cvs.terraplex.com/yum/ and using fedora-devel-ppc stuff at http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/development/ppc/ will do well in yum.

Oh, saw The Fighting Temptations in the cinema today. Consequently had tea and dinner outside. Breakfast was out too. Costly++ day.

Well, the one home, one PC campaign (PC Gemilang) has been launched. 100,000 PCs are available, for RM998. Celeron 1.7GHz, 128MB RAM, 40GB disk, and Gigabyte motherboards. Including monitor, and full multimedia set; Microsoft XP Home and Microsoft Works Suite costs an additional RM149 (also known as Package B). Upgrade to a P4 2.4GHz with an additional 128MB stick is RM400.

This package is “cheap” (I wish there was more RAM though). There’s a support network out there (55 support centres as well as 200 retailers nationwide), and we’re going to be building it more than anything. March 15th, orders “open”, and once they reach the expected 100,000 mark, they will stop. I reckon TMNet will be providing Internet access as well.

Pleased to note that the Minister of Energy, Telecommunications and Multimedia spoke English most of the time. The MoU was signed, and the open source PC’s will have Fedora Core, OpenOffice.org and GNOME. This is a big win for all the projects dear to me - 100,000 possible Fedora, OpenOffice.org and GNOME desktops. Rock on!

What did I do? Prepared a presentation (with lots of screenshots) to run on the naked Fedora Core 1 machine. When the Minister (Leo Moggie) unveiled everything, Microsoft had some chit-chat, and I presented what Linux could do (tried very hard not to bag Microsoft, and only mentioned virus outbreaks rather than other nasties). Microsoft had so much lead time to set up their box and they even had a bloody TV card in it. I had no Internet connection, a complete Personal workstation of Fedora, I couldn’t even get a VCD playing. Good thing I had my OOo presentation :)

The Ministry has greater aims than PIKOM - they want 500,000 cheap PCs by the end of the year. Leo Moggie has mentioned that consumers now have a “choice”; Will the average Malaysian pay RM149 for XP Home/Works, when they can get it for RM20 at the pirates? More Fedora machines ought to go out I hope… They’ve admitted that they have learnt a lot from Thailand and their Linux roll-out.

Windows is going to be a Bahasa Melayu version only, but there will be an upgrade to an English version if users want it; so this means that you’ll pay. Consumers, beware. About RM400, off-the-cuff, from Butt Wai Choon, Microsoft’s marketing man (pricing is not finalised). And there’s no option to upgrade to Office… Vendor lock-in is prevalent here, and I’m surprised Pikom didn’t push harder to not allow this - Thailand after all told Microsoft to go fool other countries (in not so many words, when they turned down the USD$35 versions).

There will be two mobile unit that will go around the country, to promote awareness. Cost of owning the PC, via a per capita income basis, used to be about 13%; it’s going to be reduced to about 7-8% now. It should also be clear that this is a private sector initiative, and the government is only facilitating this (so there’s less chance this will become another failed EPF OdaSaja scheme).

Update: Thailand has gotten this “Package B” idea thing happening too. Well, I guess competition is good; keeps us FLOSS folk on our toes. Again, the Pikom guys deserve a pat on their backs, and Xavier, and all rock!

On other notes, Novell is trying out Linux in Malaysia too it seems. For one company. Hmm, makes me wonder… Got to contact some birds there.

Posted the Wednesday review, on the way towards a GNOME 2.6 release. I want release notes people! So if you haven’t already sent it in, now’s a good time.

Thanks for the response from yesterday. I think my Dad felt rather happy :)

Was at Equatorial Hotel for a presentation by Apple - Xcode, Interface Builder and some of their other developer tools that come with 10.3 (Panther). Impressive stuff, I’d say - a monkey can build a web browser.

Installed the Java SDK from the Apple Developer site, since 1.4.2 has been released. Started building cws_srx645_ooo111fix3 on OS X. Making OS X understand my commands like “Switch to Terminal” and so on is cool too - we need this sort of assistive technology on Linux to work real well.

Spending lots of time sending out e-mails to module maintainers for the upcoming GNOME 2.6 release. And getting responses quite quickly too might I add. Rock on!

With the CAL’s that Windows server users have to pay (per client), and all the added costs, how can the TCO be lower? IT Managers Journal has a cool Migration from Windows to Linux saves thousands write-up.

And, Getting to know GNOME is rather useful. In some aspects, we’re really better than Windows/OS X. We still have plenty more work to do, but we’re getting there. All we need to do is reach there before Longhorn is released. Longhorn has promises - it has pre-announcements of features and products; features that will be around in 2 years. So don’t be fooled.