Colin Charles Agenda

• Some shell magic (courtesy of mkj, a while ago): sed ’s/[^,]//g’ matrix - that counts all the commas in a line to see if they match up. Real useful for matrices in Mathlab.
• I can understand davej’s issues with heat in the room… mine’s no better, and its almost approaching winter; pray tell what I do during summer!
• Let’s all support our man Rex, in saying that not publishing a SPEC file is a GPL violation. The thread for reference.
• Apple looking at Intel chips? Now that’s absolute crack. I hope this isn’t the crap they announce at WWDC2005. What else will I run Linux/ppc on, anymore? Big iron IBM hardware? Pfft.
• Eugene came down from Brisbane last night (Monday). Ended up meeting up with Mark, Dylan, Chu, Anne, having some good nasi lemak and some wonderful Max Brenner chocolate later. As always, its fun to have a chit-chat with the rest of #bangsar, even if its only the Melbourne chapter that managed to meet up :P
• Dinner. Very awkward, very silent, what joy. *must stop torturing self*
• I’m going to be writing the FC-4 article thing, similar to what we did for FC-3. Anything pressing, now would be a good time to e-mail suggestions down my way. I know the docs team already sent a semi-snippet of what’s important for the next article.

Something caught my eye when reading Paul Graham’s Undergraduation: Don’t be put off if they say no. Rejection is almost always less personal than the rejectee imagines. Just move on to the next. (This applies to dating too.) Want to break a wireless network? TomsNetworking has a guide, thats almost step-by-step; definitely a good resource to keep around.

Been looking at Fedora on the Mac mini, and varying bugs that might plague it according to Bugzilla. If more Macs are going to come like this, with varying displays and what not, its going to be a fun bug-hunt (CLOSED->WORKSFORME). Clock losing ticks seems to be a real issue, as the probed data from OF is probably wrong. Sound works, but s-c-soundcard is still broken. I have to start fiddling with the modem at some stage (seeing if Linuxant provides something useful), and maybe think about Airport Extreme a little more - see how far wmealing made it the last time… Ubuntuforum post about it thats particularly interesting. Fan control doesn’t work (no therm_adt746x, therm_windtunnel or therm_pm72) - the temperature monitor is a max6642 on the i2c bus of the PMU; benh shall try to see if its diggable outta OF soon.

Installing Fedora Core on the Mac mini is the article thats out this month in Red Hat Magazine. Go read it! Yay, that was some sweat from last week ;-)

In other news, been slowly getting the Macs in the lab up to scratch with a modern version of Fedora. Doing 1.5GB of yum updates seem to take the better part of the day. Gotten to a stage of getting the one testbox up and running with all sorts of esoteric Windows goodies. Office 2003 files seem to be well read by OOo 2 (snapshot, m100), and VirtualPC is something I want to give a go to. Services for UNIX is a joke, really.

Update (16/08/2005): To reiterate on what Paul Graham said, Barrybar also comments about taking no for an answer and getting used to it, in terms of photography. The important thing is to learn to take no for an answer. It happens all the time … no for a job, no for a date, no for a loan. It’s normal.

So, it was the girl’s birthday. Yum cha breakfast, 21 roses, iPod mini, almost-life-size Eeyore and just a long day of fun. Been a busy weekend, so I’m glad its mostly over and its time to get back to the real world. Let’s hope my 21-st isn’t going to be as hectic.

UNDP/IOSN LiveCD
Spent some time customising a LiveCD based on Ubuntu. This is for the UNDP/IOSN project. Some good customisation guides include: LiveCDCustomizationHowTo on the Ubuntu wiki page, and the GnomeLiveCD howto. Sure the LiveCD could ask less questions during setup (a more Knoppix styled “just works” thing). And no matter how much I wanted to use Fedora, I’d have to do some more infrastructure work that won’t make deadlines.

So what did I do differently? I installed flashplugin-nonfree, brought in the ruby dependency, and popped a lot of content into /srv/content (>98MB). Customised Firefox - /etc/mozilla-firefox/pref/firefox.js with pref(”browser.startup.homepage”, “file:///srv/content/html/index.html”); What still needs to be done?

• Add UNDP/IOSN logos appropriately
• Probably beef up the way the index page looks like
• Priority 1 - Update the content to Ubuntu/Hoary style where appropriate (just the end-user-guide basically)
• Fill in the holes that still exist in content (or types); add more primers possibly
• More extensive testing with hardware out there - its not been tested as much as I’d like it
• Release early, release often. And resync with a newer upstream Hoary
• Fix bug where Firefox still doesn’t notice that its supposed to load the index page. So now start Firefox and type: /srv/content/html/index.html in the Location toolbar
• Test Flash. All of you, test the Flash stuff thoroughly. Seems to work for me, but its in beta at the website itself anyways, so go give it a go (try it online - requires Flash 7)

Yes, casper is actually a very nice system to use. It was completely well thought out, I’m glad jdub told me to hang in there back when Warty was released, saying the LiveCD stuff was in the works.

Fedora LiveCD
So, is Stateless Linux without a state at the moment? With Xen around, and possibly soon installer (anaconda) support alongside Xen, the only thing left from stateless seems to be the LiveCD. While developers themselves don’t find LiveCD’s incredibly useful, its a great marketing tool, to say the least. There’s Basilisk, with an installer almost along the way, and then there’s Rookery. The Rookery looks pretty interesting and possibly only requires some namespace merging before it starts churning out LiveCDs. Both are written in shell, so merging/integrating them would make for a better integrated system overall.

Fedora’s success
Fedora takes off as Red Hat declines is headline news today. Generally circling around web server usage, is probably unfair, as RH do have quite the number of paying customers for RHEL. Its nice to see Fedora gain ground, at such a timely occassion that FC4 test1 is out today as well.

Update: Since it didn’t make it online at the UNDP website, its http://www.arenatechniques.com/undp/iosn-hoary-live-i386.iso there now. Be gentle to the server, thanks.

Safely in Beijing now. No LiveJournal or Blogspot it would seem, but everything else rocks. Quick roundup: Red Hat Magazine launched, my (and Warren’s) Meet Fedora Core 3 article is out and it hit /. Otherwise, Linux Magazine also has something about FC3 that hit the marketing list… And I’m on blug-tech/blug-general from the Beijing Linux Users Group now too…

Fedora Core 3 is out. Go Heidelberg. Now, for a sample chapter from Fedora Core: Made Simple, go take a look at Installing Fedora. I’m told that the more screenshots the better for the user, so go buy your mom a copy of the Made Simple guide ;-)

Warning, its 2.3MB in size. Screen optimising just made it look bad, so its print optimised. Have fun, feedback via e-mail please at byte@aeon.com.my - no comments, thank the comment spammers for that.

The girl installed Fedora Core 3 (well, some release candidate of sorts) on a box here. Using the guide. All by herself. And it was successful. No breakages, she logged in, found her way around it, and might end up using it a lot more. She’s a thoroughbred Windows user… Questions like “what is GNOME?” or “what is a desktop environment?” came up, so maybe its time to explain that more liberally in the guide.