Utah Open Source Planet

So its soo close.  So very close, to the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.  Only, I have to write this paragraph about the conference itself and what it means to open source in Utah.  What it means to be involved in this amazing conference.

This blog post is supposed to be about something useful, but I think its just going to be a rambling session about all the things I think that are neat about open source, freedom, Utah and the benefits of holding UTOSC every year.

So what do I think, well… I think that UTOSC is my favorite thing I’ve ever done as a tech person.  I have an 8 year old boy, which is much of the reason I do this sort of thing.  He’s the reason I try to get webcams working with Ekiga, or try to record videos to send him with Cheese.  I love my boy, and I want him to be proud of his papa, and this is one way I can make a mark on society, to change the world if you will.

When I talk about changing the world, I don’t mean changing every aspect, but just doing something so simple that you love, to change the way others look at the thing and say, “wow!”.  That’s the thing I mean about changing the world.

I mean, geez, what do we have this year anyway?  Let’s see.  Oh, to start off with, a great theme ‘HOWTO’.  It really can’t get any better than that, can it!?  It points the way to learn how to do something in open source.  A contributor, a learning mechanism, a simple text document that started the whole thing.

We also have a great team of folks involved in making it happen this year.  I would be remiss if I didn’t thank them.  They’ve been instrumental in getting this to be the world class conference I hope it to become.  We’re not there yet, but give us a couple more years to learn all of those little tips and tricks.

Software, that’s another thing we have that’s great.  This coming year, I plan to take the UTOSC conference site and remake it again, this time with a better feature set.  I have to say, however, that the system we put into place more than 8 months ago, has turned out to be a great asset.  I thank those who’ve helped us make conman, our conference management software.  You know who you are, and I appreciate the help.

Because we’re running the conference and are also computer nerds/geeks/etc, we get to play with cool hardware, dink around with printing, do audio, video and invite families to participate in our wondrous extravaganza every year. But we also get to do something else that much cooler, we get to share our joys and passions with others.  Show others why open source is the way of the future.  Why its important to us and why we think that paying for software or having limted access to software is just wrong.

Learning is always part of a hobby.  This great, wonderful, exciting hobby of ours is so great we want to share the wealth with you all.

A couple things that I think are great about UTOSC 2008 are Family Day, I’m excited to set up the try-it lab on Friday night for the kiddies.  The fact that we’ll have booths for all three of the major Linux distributions (Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu). But there’s more.

On Thursday evening, Paul Frields will kick our conference into high gear with Fedora, first.  Friday comes and Joe Brockmeier will entertain us with some community talk.  And finally, on Saturday morning, we have Christer Edwards whose been instrumental in much of the Ubuntu community growth over the past couple years.

I’ve been influenced heavily by the Fedora Project.  And as an North American Ambassador, I’m also in charge of the Fedora booth.  We have a few volunteers and they’ve been great.  I anticipate the booth to be filled with people asking questions all three days.  One thing I wanted to mention, is that the booths/expo area is open to any/all that come through.  Spreading open source means allowing for the opportunity to use the software.  We want you all to come and listen to what our folks have to say.

Okay, so it sounds like my writers block really didn’t happen, but I wasn’t sure I could just sit down and crank out something this easily.  Off to write a simple 100 word intro to the Utah Open Source Conference.

Wish me luck!

Herlo

In the next 3 weeks, I will be among the busiest people I know.  Probably the only people busier are Presidential hopefuls, Olympic organizers and sadly, those fighting in Georgia.  The reason I am writing this post is to help me remember what I have left to complete between now and the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 on August 28-30, 2008.

Recently, I learned that our website doesn’t render well in Internet Exploder, Safari and some older versions of Firefox.  I’m guessing its due to the inability I have to create and maintain css, because well, I’m not a design guy.  Because of this, we’re having a hackfest tonight, both at my house, and online.  Feel free to come by at 8:30 and help out.

Prior to the hackfest, I will be working with Fedora Ambassadors to grow the North American region.  We’ll be discussing such things as AmbassadorKit, EventBox and of course, Fedora’s presence at UTOSC 2008.  This meeting tends to get a lot of good people making the world a better place.  I am interested in making this happen starting with North America.  If you are interested in helping out, or just lurking, feel free to drop by #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net at 1:00UTC (9pm EDT).

Prior to the Fedora NA meeting, I’m planning on working on the PCs that we’ll be using for the Utah Open Source Conference.  This will be done over at a friends house, who is loaning the PCs to UTOSC for the week of the conference.

I am attempting to record every presentation this year with either audio or video.  We have been rewarded again this year by having our friends over at KnowledgeBlue come and video record much of the conference, but they don’t have enough staff or equipment to simultaneously record 4-6 rooms.  So the plan went to me to setup recording devices in each room.

The plan is simple setup 6 PCs with Linux, install audacity and darkice.  This way we can stream the keynote audio live over our streaming server and also just record the audio from other presentations to be published at a later date.  I anticipate I’ll be able to install and complete this task pretty quickly.

Well, its now 7:40am here at my desk in my house.  I still have head into the office today for a bit of work, so off I go.  Feel free to come by #utos anytime today and wish me luck (or help if you are so inclined) with anything you can suggest.  Hopefully, today won’t be too long.

Herlo

I’ve been very busy this last two weeks updating pages and working on finalizing details for UTOSC 2008, held August 28-30, 2008.  For instance, the Fedora booth is coming along nicely.  For a conference of around 400, we should have a pretty good booth turnout.  I had Jeffrey Tadlock, Paul Frields (who’s also keynoting btw) and its possible other NA Ambassadors may attend.  I’m really excited about this development.

In addition, Joe Brockmeier of OpenSUSE will also be keynoting and we’ve got quite a list of presenters on our website.  Our goal is to help open source grow in Utah, and by providing this conference once a year, we can help our local LUGs and open source leaders.  We have approximately 50 presentations, plus events and other fun stuff up our sleeve over this 3 day conference.

One of the great events returning this year is the Guru Labs Troubleshooting Challenge.  We hope to have this event bigger and better this year, with cash prizes for the winner(s).  There will be sign-ups available on Thursday morning at the registration booth and the contest will run all day Friday, crowning a winner Friday night!

Another great return from last year is KnowledgeBlue.  With opensourceTV, they’ll be recording the video for several of our presentations and keynotes.  They’ll be working just like last year (only better) to provide interviews as well with some of the leaders of the open source community.  We expect you all will enjoy the videos as they go up on youtube.  This year, they will focus on multiple angles and getting a good quality presentation from the presenters.

Lastly, I’d like to talk a little bit about Family Day at UTOSC, August 30, 2008.  If you take a look at the presentations on Saturday, you’ll notice a bit of a trend.  With a few exceptions, presentations are intended to help the family. Also, we are working on activities for the kiddies such as an OLPC, videos on MythTV, edubuntu, Fedora Electronics Lab demos and more in our try-it lab.  We’re also working to acquire a moon bounce and sumo suits (for the big kids).  Saturday looks to be a ton of fun.

NOTE: This doesn’t mean that we have enough family stuff, and in fact, we really don’t.  One thing I’d like to see, is a presentation on content filtering for the family.  Something like “Howto use Dan’s Guardian effectively” or a discussion of pfsense, smoothwall or other firewalling/filtering tools.  If you have a presentation you’d like to suggest in this area, please let me know by commenting or emailing me.

I hope to see many of you there as the cost is quite low at $70 and if you are LUG member, its only $35 until August 7 for the early bird pricing.  Read more on our website at http://2008.utosc.com or register directly with eventbrite at http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com.

See you all there.

Herlo

One of the things I’ve been working pretty heavily on the past couple weeks is getting more involved in the Fedora Ambassador program.  And let’s just say its been a blast.  I love the new direction of the North American Ambassador program and am excited to be a part of the newly rejuvenated program.

A couple reasons more why I’m extremely excited have to do with the people I’m working with, Alex Maier, GregDek, Jeffrey Tadlock, David Nalley, John Rose and Rashadul Islam among others.  Each of these folks is a leader in their own right, and I’ve especially enjoyed working with David Nalley.

He and I have been working hard to reshape and reinvigorate the NA Ambassadors program.  I suspect others are working tirelessly as well, and I’m excited about that prospect.  David and I are the architects of the new ‘Regional Ambassadors’ in North America.  The idea is to work in our respective regions to get a Fedora Ambassador in every State/Province.  Once we’ve done that, we’ll start working toward major metropolitan areas.  The regional ambassadors currently assigned are:

• Eastern US: David Nalley
• Central US: John Rose
• Western US: Clint Savage
• Canada: Rashadul Islam

This doesn’t mean that we’ve limited the regions to these areas, just that they are a good start.  Regional ambassadors will be the central point of contact, distribution of swag, etc. for each ambassador in that region.  The goal is to make it easier for Ambassadors to go out to events and promote Fedora.  Regional ambassadors will also be responsible for mentoring, providing tools, media, swag, etc. for each ambassador.  All the things needed to make Fedora look like the world class organization it has become.

In the next week or so, I’ll be sending out an email to all of the Ambassadors I can find in the western US.  If you don’t get an email from me soon, feel free to email me and we’ll get you going.  The plan is to get your opinions, have you start coming to meetings and join the mailing list.  Participate where you can, and we’ll help you grow your state/province/city.

As NA Ambassadors, we’ve set new goals too, here’s the bullet points:

• Contacting existing Ambassadors
• Mentoring new and existing Ambassadors
  • Help to remember why they joined ambassadors in the first place
• Delivering media in a more timely and better process
• Working closely with FAMSCo to get a good budget to help NA Ambassadors expected growth

We’ll be discussing much of this at our next NA Ambassadors meeting, as well as progress on contacting all of the current ambassadors.  If you are interested in participating, join us at #fedora-meeting on Wednesday July 30 @ 1am UTC (Tuesday 9pm EDT).  Current agenda and task list are being formed now, so feel free to contribute.

Cheers,

Herlo

Well, its been more than two weeks since my last post about FUDCon.  I figure its high time I posted something about what’s been going on in my neck of the woods.  Things have been quite busy and are bound to continue at this phrenetic pace for a bit longer.

DarkIce - Audio Streaming

I’ve been working this past week on getting darkice packaged for Fedora.  Darkice is a front end audio recording tool for streaming servers like Icecast.  I much prefer it over ices and any other streaming client I’ve tried.  It does have bits for mp3/mp2/faac as well as ogg/vorbis, so I’ll be packaging it for only the latter.

It seems rpmbuild is a bit more cryptic from my last foray into building RPMs and I have to hunt a little harder for the libs and the binaries.  Its coming along nicely, now that I have my virtual machine back in place.  I’m also hoping that darkice will be easy to integrate into Fedora Talk as I’ve never dealt with the asterisk end before.

Utah Open Source Conference

This past weekend, we spent a good bit of time reviewing and selecting presentations for the Utah Open Source Conference.  I am the head organizer and founder of this all volunteer conference. In fact, our very own FPL, Paul Frields will be keynoting on Thursday evening.  Keep an eye on this blog for future updates about the conference.

A New Interest

I’ve recently started to see someone of the female persuasion.  Many of my friends have met her, and I’m guessing they like her as I do (well, not quite as much).  Here’s hoping things go well with Jennifer

There’s more here, and I’ll try to be more vocal about it as I think its good to share.

Cheers,

Herlo

So I am sitting in my hotel in Los Angeles, preparing to head back to Utah, its 2:37am PDT and I have been meaning to post the rest of my experience at FUDCon.  First off, I’d like to thank Mo and Ray for letting me stay at their home with them.  They were great hosts!  I’d also like to re-thank Max and Paul and the FedoraProject for sponsoring me out to Boston on such short notice.  I still feel grateful to be part of such a great community!

FUDCon F10, for me, was a time of realization.  Understanding what it is to get involved in projects that scratch that itch.  For providing services toward something I’m good at, into a larger community who could really take advantage of that service.  And while I am still feeling my way through the Fedora world, I think a few things are clearer now after reflecting on this last FUDCon.

I want to record and stream audio and video.

I’m thinking that along with the Fedora Talk project, I could configure and use tools to provide a non-interactive streaming server for certain events/presentations.  What I am thinking of here is things like FUDCon keynotes and sessions.  In fact, I plan to purchase a higher quality microphone / mixer combo to better record the audio at the source.

Video and screencasting in real-time seems a bit more of a challenge.  Putting that together with the streaming audio seems like a fun project and scratches several itches I’ve been experiencing lately.

I need to learn how build better RPMs

Spot taught a great session at FUDCon F9 in Raleigh about RPM packaging, and Rex Deiter talked this time about becoming a package maintainer.  I’ve got a few packages that I’d like to get into the fedora tree, and I think by the end of this year, that can happen.  I’m okay at packaging, but haven’t ever submitted a spec file to spot.  While I’m nervous about how ugly the first package will look, I’m also excited at the prospect of learning better and more efficient ways of building useful tools for the masses.

I think everyone should build their own spin of Fedora

After the 5+ hour session on Friday’s hackfest regarding the spins website and what the spins SIG has already accomplished, I’ve taken some initiative and started to create content to help the prospective spin enthusiast.  I’m a big fan of the Eee PC and am looking forward to purchasing the 901 in the winter.  Until then, I’m planning on helping improve the spin process so we don’t fail to release spins again.  The custom and official spins ‘built with Fedora’ can be so much more prolific if we just provide the right tools to build a spin.  It really should be nothing more than, here’s my kickstart, build me an iso.  This would of course have to follow the general standards for acceptable software.

The relationships (FUDBuddies) made at FUDCon are up my alley

I met Rex Dieter, Mo Duffy, Ray Strode, Dennis Gilmore and Ian Weller this time.  We had great conversations about the world and of course Fedora.  I also got to talk more to Toshio, Greg and J5 who I had met previously at FUDCon F9.  I indeed learned a bunch from Toshio about TurboGears too.  Its something I’ll treasure for releases to come.

To end this post, I’ve got some audio of the olpc session and paul’s keynote, as well as some photos I’ve posted around the interweb, enjoy.  Paul’s keynote will also be up on our new FedoraTV Miro channel, check it out!

Cheers,

Clint

Got to FUDCon today after a nice semi-sleepy red-eye flight.  I was surprisingly awake for a person who has had less than 3 hours of sleep in the last 24+ hours.  As I arrived, following Max’s instructions to the Hyne’s Convention Center, an announcement.  The spins hackfest was beginning.

I quickly grabbed some coffee and an apple and headed in after Max.  Little did I know how great this fest was going to be, all 4+ hours of it.  After a good list of goals, Max handed control over to Mo and off we went.

Discussion surrounded three main stories, one for a user wanting to download a spin, one desiring to submit a spin and one for reviewers of spins.  As it turns out, developing stories for the first two were pretty easy, and just before 11, we had a good idea of how to implement applications for these two users.

However, the third story, the one for reviewing.  Yeah, that one.  Well, I guess I just need to ask one hard question.  The question I had was a simple one, but the answer is apparently much more complex, including both technical and legal questions about third-party distributions.  And while it seems like a simple distinction, I brought this upon myself, uncovering a discussion that has been going on for 2+ years now.

The biggest problem is for those spins that include software not in the fedora repositories.  How do we treat these spins?  The discussion ended up being that while hosting these spins might not be feasible, we’d like to have a way to market the spins as built on Fedora or something similar. It seems that this is a good choice, but it needs to go through legal.

After an hour long discussion about these details (which I caused), we tabled it and came up with a good list of tasks to get the project started.  Thanks to Ian Weller, there’s a good wiki page covering much of this discussion.  In fact, I have a couple of tasks to complete this week.

At the end of the day, I ended up with some Red Hat folks at Legal Sea Foods, good wine, great company.  If I wasn’t so tired, I’d have stayed much longer.  Good times…

Tomorrow’s FUDCon barcamp looks to be pretty interesting.  I plan to attend the video tools, the getting contributors and bug triage.  In addition, there will probably be a couple that will come up tomorrow morning, so we’ll se how it goes.

Cheers,

Herlo

As I was watching Dr. Who this afternoon during my packing up of my clothing and power cords for FUDCon tomorrow and Saturday, I was thinking a bit more about how I could help.

It turns out, that while we have some great presentations, a suggestion was made to put the User back into FUDCon.  I think this is a great idea.

While I was reading Jesse’s post, I was thinking what could little old me do to help users of Fedora.  I was thinking a simple bug triaging process management, or helping users find documentation for which things they are looking.  But each of these things as I thought about them were more on the contributor side, which seems more like what we want.

A basic user in the Fedora Project, to me, while useful, might not really be those who attend FUDCon, but more of a person who is a user, interested in contributing back to the community.  I feel I fit in that realm.

Not knowing much about the FedoraProject a year ago, and still feeling pretty naive, I have wanted to get more involved.  As such, I’ve made some forays into helping, including my attempt at helping to do some videos and screencasts for the marketing team.  Watch for me this weekend as we will be attempting to record your mug :)  I’ve also done a little bit in the documentation area, logged a few bugs and been a generally good ambassador by handing out tons and tons of LiveCDs and DVDs almost every week.

I’ve also been thinking about how we can get more people from that ‘well, I like Fedora’ user, to a ‘cool, I want to give back’ user.  I think the Fedora Project is built very well for this kind of user (and possible future contributor).  While the project can sustain users who just participate, I’d like to see some education surrounding how one can help with things that are either less technical, or helping someone get into the more technical areas, with something like mentors.

During FUDCon, we could come up with a simple presentation or two about tools that help individual users contribute.  Things like smolt, logging bugs, testing and other items can really be helpful tools to get people attending FUDCon involved in hleping the actual process.  I also think it’d be great on hackfest days to have a ‘how to help’ intro for a few who might want to help, but really don’t know where to start.

I’ll be talking with others as I think more about these things this weekend.  I look forward to a fun two days!

Cheers,

Clint

So it looks like my whining and moaning paid off!  I didn’t expect that anyone could help me, the money had been spent, things were cancelled and I was screwed!

I recieved a comment on my blog from Mo inviting me to stay at her and halfline’s place for the weekend of FUDCon.  So nice, but I still didn’t have the $600+ it would cost to come to FUDCon.

And then I received this email:

Clint,

Don’t cancel your trip.

Give me receipts,…

–Max

Wow! So I’m coming to FUDCon.  I’d like to thank Max, Mo, Paul (and any others I don’t know about) for helping me get to Boston.  I’m sure it’ll be a blast.

I’ve got some serious plans to make it worth Fedora’s while :)  I don’t think there’s a better way than to be included in the community than to know people care about you and want you to be a part of the community as a whole and to succeed.  I’m going to do all I can to make sure the money will be well spent.

So as I said in my reply email to Max.  Thank you! thank you! thank you!  FUDCon will be a blast!

Cheers,

Herlo

PS - I would also like to thank my employer, Guru Labs, for being so kind to let me attend my second FUDCon.

Welcome to my disappointment.  Welcome to my frustration.  Welcome, welcome to my not being able to attend FUDCon!  Did I mention I was frustrated and disappointed?  Well, if I didn’t, I am!

Here’s the story.

Many of you probably know that I work for Guru Labs, and as such, I teach Linux for a living.  This coming week, I was on my way, I really was, to New York City to teach a Local System Administration class.

It was all set.  I was going to fly from NYC to Boston on Friday afternoon after my class.  The room was booked at the conference, I even had committed to helping do video recordings of each of the FUDCon attendees (something like 150 of them) on cheese.

Then Friday the 13th happened….

Normally, I like Friday the 13th, and with the exception of this event, it was a great one.  At the last minute, I was informed the class had been cancelled.  Now, this isn’t an abnormal thing and usually I’m not this upset about a class being cancelled.  Saying that means I was banking on some things which normally pull through, but they didn’t  All in all, I’m only frustrated that I can’t go to FUDCon!

I tried hard to still go.  In fact, I finagled and attempted to convince any of the other instructors I could into letting me teach their class.  I hit up my friends for $600, all to no avail.  The cost of the hotel was $400 already, adding another $600 is not in my budget, I’m afraid.  And people say that airlines don’t make any money!

So I will miss you all and the wonderful barcamp sessions I was planning on attending. I’ll miss Paul’s first State of Fedora address.  I’ll miss chatting Seth up about yum, Spot about RPM and politics in general, or Michael about cobbler and func.  In fact, I wanted to spend a bit of time talking with Jef about video and gstreamer, but I guess I’ll just have to wait until FUDCon F11 in 2009 :(

Could someone video record each of them and post them?  Or at least the audio?  Hehe, I know that’s a lot of work, but hey, it can’t hurt to ask.  In fact, if you are willing to stream audio, I have an IceCast server and I’d be happy to help configure your client to accomplish this task.

Cheers,

Clint

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-May/msg00007.html

Get yours today! http://fedoraproject.org

Be sure and digg it too:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Fedora_9_Sulphur_Released

Well, usually I forget to take pictures, because either A) I forget my camera [I brought it this time] or 2) I get wrapped up in the event and forget to bring it with me.  But this release party, I plain just forgot to charge my batteries for my camera, oops!

Fortunately, I was able to snap a few pictures with some of the spare, also not fully-charged, batteries I did have on hand.  However, others took many pictures and I’ve listed them below.

• Sheri Bigelow took some great pictures.  She is a great local photographer, web designer and the local webmistress.
• Tristan Rhodes, a local Asterisk Entrepreneur posted a good blog post.
• Here’s the pictures I took.  Not nearly as many, or as good.

To summarize the party, much celebration was had with foosball, a chess game on one of the largest chess boards around, video games, air hockey and much more was provided by CodeGreene.  The FedoraProject and Utah Open Source sponsored the food and prizes.  If you’ve never had a Chipotle burrito, they are the best burritos around.

I was able to spend time with about 5-7 people myself sharing the Preview Release of Fedora 9 (codename Sulphur) including two who had never had previous success with Fedora or Linux in general.  It was very satisfying to see things work for them.

The Ubuntu folks were there in strength as well.  The Hardy Heron (8.04) CDs were being passed out, while we Fedoran’s provided LiveUSB versions.  I even saw people taking advantage and obtaining both!  Its great to see communities come together and celebrate together.

The party continued at Salt Lake Pizza & Pasta for another couple hours.  Lot’s of talk about the releases, upcoming events, and general mayhem took place including having Heartsbane shoot beer through his nose when I swore at him!

All in all, quite a successful evening and I look forward to helping others in November at our next release party.

Cheers,

Herlo

UPDATE: Another 70+ pictures have been added, check them out!

In case you haven’t heard or read already, Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) was released just a few days ago (April 24). I certainly have noticed plenty of talk about it on blogs and tech news sites. Fedora 9 (Sulphur) was scheduled for release right about now, but the fine folks at the Fedora Project decided they needed a couple more weeks to work out some kinks. In the meantime, there is a fine Fedora 9 Preview release available which can be updated to the official release when it is out (May 13, or so they say).

So what does all this mean? It means it’s time to party like it’s v0.99!

Code Greene, a programming shop located in Salt Lake City, is graciously hosting a release party THIS SATURDAY to celebrate these two latest distribution releases. What?! You’re a OpenSUSE enthusiast? A long-time Slackware user? That’s okay! You can still come and enjoy good food, good company, and fun and games. (Rumor has it these Code Greene people don’t actually do any real work, they just play foosball and videogames all day.)

Here are the vital details:

• Date/time: Saturday, May 3, 6pm to 8pm
• Address: Code Greene, 44 Exchange Place Salt Lake City, UT 84111

Now, if you’re coming, you should take a moment and RSVP via this friendly and easy-to-use Upcoming link.

This release party is being sponsored by us- the Utah Open Source Foundation, the Fedora Project, and Ubuntu Utah.

The following two articles were published in the past couple days.  When they were published and made known to me, I was saddened:

Report: OLPC may eventually switch from Linux to Windows XP
Nicholas Negroponte on Sugar and One Laptop Per Child

It appears, that Greg DeKoenigsberg responded (it appears) to these two articles with a great rebuttal in this article:

OLPC Developers are *not* fundamentalists

Thank you Greg, thank you for saying what I feel inside.  As an open source advocate, I see the value and benefit of free software and its power.  I feel good inside when I contribute and don’t feel anything like a fundamentalist.

Again, thank you Greg.

Cheers,

Herlo

As many of you may already know, Fedora 9 (codename: Sulphur) has been pushed back 2 weeks to May 13.  Being the organizer of the Utah Fedora/Ubuntu Linux Release Party on May 3, its kind of hard to push it back because Ubuntu’s release is still on time.

I’m glad though that the major parts of this release are feature complete and its just a few blocker bugs holding it back.  I’m also really happy to point out that because the folks at the Fedora Project are willing to push the date back, the release will be much better off in the end.

This also goes to show that while many businesses would consider releasing anyway.  Mainly because they promised something, and not releasing would cost them revenue and possible customers.  Open source people don’t follow the same mantra, and I’m proud to say that while I like meeting deadlines, if deadlines slips a little to make a better product, timelines should slip.

In the meantime, enjoy the preview release made available yesterday.  Utah will party with this preview.  Shortly after the party, an update will be made available via yum.  There are some amazing things coming out in a few weeks.  Keep your ear to the ground and enjoy the new Sulphur in your life!

Cheers,

Herlo

So I’ve done it.

Yes, I really have done it this time!

Well, maybe…time will tell.

I’ve gone and posted an idea for a project on the Fedora wiki page for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), but that’s not all, no!

In addition, I took the time to apply to be a mentor at the Google Summer of Code Project page.  And what’s weirder, is I hope I get the opportunity to make this idea a reality, because I think its something that Fedora could really use.

I’m somewhat surprised it hasn’t already been created. A couple of people found this idea too, and have emailed me about it, and I need to reply.  Soon that will happen.

I am really excited.

Cheers,

Herlo

Get yourself some of that sulphur love!

From the mouth of the daring Mike McGrath:

The beta is live.  Go out, get people and try to crash the servers!  The
challenge is on :-P

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

Personally, I’ve been on Rawhide (the development tree) since February.  While there have been some bumpy roads, most of it has been smooth sailing.  These Fedora guys really know what they are doing :)

Tell me what you think of the latest and greatest of Linux releases?

Cheers,

Herlo

UPDATE: Feel free to digg this article if you like the beta

http://digg.com/linux_unix/The_Fedora_Project_releases_Fedora_9_Beta

Yesterday, my new laptop arrived. KnowledgeBlue purchased it for me as my HP Pavilion ZV5000Z was about three years old and was starting to show its age. KnowledgeBlue has standardized on Dell as its hardware supplier and, while I don't care for their desktop machines at all and I'm okay with their servers, I really had no clue what to think about their laptops.

What is nice about Dell is they have a line of Open Source laptops. These laptops have been certified as being friendly with open source operating systems like Linux and are available for purchase without a pre-installed operating system (the laptop does come with FreeDOS installation media).

HP also offers FreeDOS as an operating system option on many of its Business laptops for those people looking to run an open source operating system or simply avoid paying HP for a preinstalled Microsoft product.

So, anyway, I got a customized Dell Latitude D830. Here are some of the features:

• Intel Core2 Duo CPU T7700 @ 2.40GHz
• 2GB RAM
• 120GB hard drive (w/ free fall sensor)
• DVD burner
• 9-Cell battery
• NVidia Quadro NVS 140M (256MB)
• 1920x1200 widescreen LCD panel
• Intel 3945 802.11a/g wireless

Let me just say I am impressed. So far, this laptop has been nothing but awesome. The screen is absolutely beautiful. Most impressive is the fact all the hardware seems to just work in Linux. After all the hurdles I had to jump to get my previous laptop working with Linux, this was a paradisical experience.

I did a network install of Fedora 8 after booting from a CD burned from the distribution boot.iso. The software properly configured the video card to use the open source nv driver and accurately identified the characteristics of the display panel. Sound worked fine right out of the box. I was worried about wireless networking and was prepared to install a third-party driver from a site like Livna or FreshRPMS, but when I enabled NetworkManager, it just worked! I could scan for wireless networks (it saw more than my Atheros card ever did) and connected to my home network (encrypted with WPA2) with no problems at all.

One thing I do like about my HP laptop is the ability to disable the trackpad so that when I'm using a USB mouse, I don't have to worry about brushing against the trackpad while I'm typing. Speaking of pointing devices, the D830 has taken a cue from IBM/Lenovo and provides both a trackpad and a eraser-point stick thingie with a second set of left and right buttons.

One thing that has been a bit of a concern is the sound card. Maybe I need to dig deeper, but the mixer support seems really weak. The only controllable channels I've seen in my mixer is PCM and Front. From what I've seen so far, the headphone jack is not independently controllable (it is on my HP) and I haven't seen channels for Line In or Microphone.

Battery life seems good. I haven't timed it yet, but I think I'm getting about 2-3 hours off a single charge and I haven't really tried any power saving settings. I know the Intel chipset offers a lot of options in that department.

I haven't tried any kind of suspend or sleep stuff yet. I'll have to report my findings about that in a later post.

Recently, I’ve been very interested in getting involved more and more with the Fedora Project.  In fact, the latest project in which I’m involved, the Getting Involved Guide (GIG).

I started with this guide because my so-called friend Jared Smith (hi Jared!), introduced me to the original creator of this document, Paul Frields at FUDCon a couple months ago.  I started the hackfest portion, not entirely clear where I’d end up, but somehow I rolled back to hang with Jared and Paul while they were working on this Contributor Guide, if I remember the name correctly.  I got involved late in the day, and either my misunderstanding, or pure genius took over and the Contributor Guide (intended mainly for developers), quickly turned into the Getting Involved Guide or GIG, which had a much broader focus.

While I am happy to be a part of this guide, and have had a hand in changing its purpose, I’m not at all familiar with much of the Fedora Community processes.  Which, for this document to be successful, I am going to have to learn, since that’s the point of this guide to begin with, helping others get started when they want to help the Fedora Project.
Think of it this way, if you are a corporate entity, an individual, or a small non-profit group (like my UTOSF group) and want to give back to the community that has helped you so much.  How do you do that?  What’s involved in getting started?  What projects are out there where we can help?  Do we need to be developers? If not, what else is there for us to do?  Well, those are all good questions, and I am sure there are many, many more we haven’t yet considered.

I guess what I am doing here is soliciting from the general communities at large, what they’d like to see in this guide.  What confused them about joining a large project.  I’d also like to hear stories about being a contributor to the Fedora Project, and why you think its a good idea.  I want to take these ideas and integrate them into the Getting Involved Guide.  I want to take these issues and make it clear for others how to get involved, why its important, and show that value.

Currently, if you are a Fedora Project member, I have a document in gobby.fedoraproject.org called GettingInvolvedGuide, which you are welcome to modify as you feel necessary.  I may also be hitting you up to answer questions regarding particular processes in your group as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

Its been a very long time since I’ve done the Product of the Week, so I am going to change the name to Product of Whenever. This suits me better.

In July of 2001, I was introduced to a little editing tool many of us now know fondly, the wiki. I was travelling to New Zealand looking for work. During my month’s stay, the fellow I traveled with showed me his wiki-wiki. He explained how collaboration could work and the simplicity of the system made it even great for a one person quick web page. Immediately, I was hooked. When I returned from New Zealand and enrolled in school, my mind quickly went back to this funky wiki-editor thing I’d seen. Being a geek even back then, I promptly installed one.

Fast-forward almost 7 years. We’ve seen the wiki evolve from a little app that could be used to make an entire website of information so grand that even the largest collectors of physical data can’t compete. We’ve seen tools like DocuWiki - the documentation wiki, MediaWiki - which needs no introduction and Tomboy - the little desktop wiki. Many other wiki’s emerged to help people collaborate all around the world. How great a time it was…

This article isn’t about wiki’s, rather it is about collaboration. This article is about a different type of collaboration, one that’s more real-time than a wiki can be. In some ways its more limiting and in others, much less. The feature I’m referring to is real-time collaboration. And the tool that enables this, gobby, and its closely related cousins, sobby and obby.

INTRODUCING GOBBY

Gobby is a collaborative text editor, with a bunch of cool features. While gobby is still young and not quite feature-full, its quite amazing what it can do out of the box. The collaboration abilities of gobby come straight out of the box. One can choose to create a session on the local network, or create a server version, with sobby, where everyone can connect to a centralized server to collaborate. I’d like to also point out this application can also run in Windows according to the authors’ website, though I’ve heard rumors that it doesn’t work as I’ve not personally tried.

To get started with gobby, its easily installed:

# yum install gobby
.. snip ...

Once its installed, gobby will easily load from Applications -> Internet -> Gobby Collaborative Editor. Up pops the window we showed you above, albeit a little more bare. The toolbar is the most important piece here.

There are two distinct features here, plus the ability of a regular text editor. On the left, are the connection buttons, one can join or create a session. On the right hand side, are user and document lists, and a chat button. The left hand side controls how to connect, the right controls once you are connected. Of course, the middle does have tools of a normal editor.

Clicking the Create session button provides this dialog, allowing for a local session to be created and maintained.

This session can be just one person, but is definitely better with at least two. Notice that you’ll need to pick a colour. This feature is what makes it easy to tell who’s edited what parts of every document in gobby.

The other option is to join a session. Joining a session also lists any local sessions currently available.

Once the session is created and/or joined, its just a matter of using gobby like an editor. The fun part about gobby though, is when the collaboration begins. When working on a document, others can work on it as well, at the same time. Which can be confusing, and troublesome the first time you play with this tool. Give it some time and you’ll be hooked.

In addition to creating an obby session with the gobby application, its also possible to create a persistent connection with the sobby server. Unfortunately, sobby doesn’t have features that let it run as a SYSV service, but it is possible to get a server up and running quite easily even still. The organization I run, UTOSF, has one currently up and running at gobby.utos.org. If you want to join up, please let me know and we’ll get you connected.

Take the time to get to know this awesome collaboration tool, and start working with your friends who code, or document or even just for simple brainstorming sessions.  The possibilities are endless.

Cheers,

Herlo

I will be home for the entire week next week, which is the first time that’s happened this month. Not that I am complaining, but once I get home I have a very long laundry list of items to complete and only 6.5 days to complete it in until I go back on the road. So here’s the short list:

• Generic stuff that can be done anytime during the week
  • Laundry from the past week
  • Put my bed together at my new home - I have been in this house now for two months, still no real bed
  • Finish unpacking all of the boxes left under the stairs - working on not being a packrat so much of the stuff is bound to get tossed out
  • Put an ad in the paper for a roommate - save money this way
  • Work on the Fedora GI Guide
• CodeAway Saturday from noon to 6pm - good times
• UTOSF HackNight Saturday night, 7pm - more good times (gotta get call for papers out)
• Sleep in all day Sunday - my only real day of rest, but that’s the life I lead, this may lead a little into Monday as well
• BoardGames on Tuesday night with friends I’ve not seen for a couple months - that’ll be nice
• Lunch with my friend Tristan on Wednesday afternoon
• Two meetings Wednesday night at Applebees in Draper
  • Centralized Calendaring among multiple communities - 6p
  • UTOSC Planning Meeting - 8p
• Two events as well on Thursday I’d like to attend
  • CTO Breakfast Thursday morning would be worthwhile, we’ll see if I make it down there
  • Geek/Blogger Dinner on Thursday night
• Friday will bring something, but currently, there’s nothing. Maybe I’ll try to keep it free.
• Oh, and I still have to work on Thursday and Friday, so I guess I’ll work that in somehow as well

Whew! I’m excited to be home though, and am sure this list will grow!

Cheers,

Herlo

Just left Jono Bacon’s presentation on “The future of the Linux Desktop”. He’s quite an awesome presenter. Afterward, I went down to the exhibit floor and got to say hi to Tom Callaway and actually met Thomas Chung from the Fedora Project. Both of these guys have such exuberance and joy, I love being part of the fedora project.

The next presentation was ‘ifdown -a Now! Becoming productive offline’, by Don Marti. It was awesome! He spent a bit of time talking about git, ikiwiki, blosxom, OfflineIMAP, Mairix and some ssh config rules to help productivity. There is some definite things that will help me become more productive with these tools.

The next presentation I attended was the video codecs presentation, but what was being discussed was stuff I’d already learned. So I headed over to ‘10 Years of GNOME’, with Ken VanDine (also the creator of Foresight Linux). GNOME features are definitely getting cooler, and discussions about Gimmie and the OpenSuse SLAB menu were held. Ken wants to see more involvement in the GNOME project, called GNOME Love. If you love GNOME, they’re making it easy to share the GNOME Love.

I was able to catch the last half of the Second Life presentation as its always been a curiosity to me.  I’m thinking of actually running it and seeing what its all about.  Thanks Liana!

At the end of the day, I skipped the reception in favor of a spirited talk with the folks from BakBone, then spent time talking with the organizers of SCaLE and was able to chat with the developer for the conference management system here.  Looks like they’re open sourcing there django app too, so we might be able to work with them too.

Tom Callaway was in the Fedora BoF, so I was required to go by that at 8pm and annoy him.  Turned out, I spent the next 3+ hours discussing everything from PulseAudio, RPMS, RHCE and PackageKit to Obama, Iraq and Ron Paul and the value system of patents in our nation.  It was a great evening.

Its time to sleep and another day of SCaLE will be upon us.  See you all then…

Cheers,

Herlo

The latest and greatest Rawhide of Fedora has been put into an Alpha Release.  I downloaded both the LiveCD and the DVD isos yesterday, which took 15+ hours.

Just a reminder that Alpha means its not ready for your production box, so test it extensively and give feedback.  When the Beta comes out in March, I plan to move my lappy over.  Until then, I’ll just keep testing.

You can get yours from:

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/9-Alpha/

A list of the upcoming features for Fedora 9 are available here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/

Cheers,

Clint

As I usually do while teaching class, I installed a Fedora 8 machine, and ran yum update.  Today I noticed a strange amount of time for one particular download:

While this is hilarious, its shouldn’t happen.  Any ideas?  I know it didn’t take 28927 seconds (or about 1/3 of a day) to download that foomatic package.

Cheers,

Herlo

So I’m back at work today after a very hard Sunday (fudpub was not friendly to me) at the slack^H^H^H^H^Hhackfest. However, I have to say that it was probably the best learning experience one could have at a conference. The BarCamp concept really worked well and I think it gave me some much needed information to move ahead on projects with which lately, I’d been struggling.

In addition to all of the learning, I was able to meet some really cool people there. Of course, there were my friends, Jared Smith, Evan McNabb and Derek “goozbach” Carter, and it was great to see them.

But I didn’t just come for my friends, and it was great to meet so many others.

I met Paul Frields when Jared introduced me. He quickly informed me, that Paul would be the “New Max”. After spending the last 2.25 days near or around Paul, I think he’ll be a great leader. And to be honest, it feels to me as he’ll put his own stamp on things. Not to take away from what Max has done, and will do, but I think Paul will be an awesome leader and I look forward to his friendship and leadership.

I was able to visit with Jim Whitehurst, the new Red Hat CEO. He stopped me to ask about my Eeep c and what I thought. We talked for a good 5 minutes before I realized who he was, and then I congratulated him on the job and said I expected great things :) He was quite excited to see the Eeep and it was awesome to know how passionate he was about Fedora. And to take the time out on a Saturday, that’s awesome!

A few more people I met who were awesome and friendly: Michael DeHaan, Karsten Wade, Seth Vidal, Russell Harrison,Toshio Kuratomi and another who’s name escapes me (who I helped get lost somewhere near Cary and Apex) and so many more names I cannot recall, though I’ll not forget your faces. Thank you for your valuable time and helping me get acclimated to this awesome community. I’d like to thank everyone who spent time helping us naive souls learn the way of the Fedora.

In the future, I plan to take much of what I learned and start working with it in my spare time. I’ve also started the process of joining the documentation project and look forward to helping them. My ambassador duties are simple enough that I can continue doing that as well, so this year should be a good year.

Thanks again to my company Guru Labs, for helping me arrange my schedule around FUDCon and hopefully they’ll be as accommodating for Scale next month.

Cheers,

Herlo

This little machine is pretty nice. I’m getting used to the interface right now as the keyboard is a bit smaller than my normal T60p. A few keys are in a different spot, but overall, this little machine rocks!!

Probably my biggest headache right now is the right Shift key is further over than I regularly expect it to be. Have a look at the specs:


# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 630.081
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe up bts
bogomips : 1261.18
clflush size : 64

# cat /etc/*release
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)


I’m hoping to take this over to FUDCon later today and help get it more solid for F9.

Pictures to come.

Cheers,

Herlo

I arrived in Raleigh today for FUDCon.

What? A little early, you say? Sure is, but I thought I’d get an entire week’s head start and help out the crew with preparations.

Okay… That’s not really true, but I am in Raleigh already. Because of my employment at Guru Labs, I asked if I could fly into Raleigh after my classes on Friday. Instead, Dax, my boss made the deal even sweeter. He sent me to Raleigh to teach two Red Hat classes at Red Hat! Because of this, I’m currently teaching a RH133 this week, and a RH300 next week downstairs at the Red Hat home office.

On Thursday, my good friend Jared Smith, of Asterisk fame (and a good boardgame buddy) will be arriving just prior to FUDCon. I’m guessing he’ll be there to help F9 do more with Asterisk. Maybe we’ll have time for a quick game of Settlers or something, if he brings it - hint, hint Jared.

Over the weekend, I’ll be hacking away (or maybe just testing the eeepc) on the F9 release with the likes of Max Spevack and Greg De Koenigsberg. And since I’m already on Red Hat’s campus, I’m prepping my trip by making sure I know where all of the locations are for the events.

So, if you are at Red Hat this week and want to burn some time, come on by and say hi to me and my class. We’ll be learning about installation, filesystems, RAID and LVM, and much, much more.

I’m so stoked for this weekend! Its going to be an awesome FUDCon. Hopefully, I’ll be able to convince the boss to send me to the next FUDCon as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

In response to Herlo’s reviews of openSUSE here and here , I thought I’d give Fedora 8 a shot and give an openSUSE user’s perspective.

Lets start with the bad:
First, during the installation it detected my video resolution wrong (nvidia 6800gt) so I had to do my installation without being able to read most of the screen (didn’t see any easy way to switch to text mode, I was using PXE). I did not have this issue with Ubuntu or openSUSE 10.3 on the same computer but I tried a different computer with an Intel video card and couldn’t reproduce the error.

Second, for some reason the nspluginwrapper was installed by default and caused Firefox to be extremely unstable and crash on any website that had embedded audio or video, once I removed the package Firefox became much more stable. Having it installed by default really made no sense because the computer I was running was a 32-bit system and the point of nspluginwrapper is to allow PPC and AMD64 users to run 32-bit plug-ins.

Third, codecs (mp3, video) were not easily installable. I understand that Fedora can’t include these in the distribution but I would’ve loved an easy way to retrieve them. I had to add extra repositories manually (after googling and finding which ones I needed) and then install them. In openSUSE the community repositories are readily available in yast and all I have to do is enable them, there is also the 1-Click install so you do not have to locate/add any repositories. Codecbuddy is a noble attempt but I would like more options than Fluendo.

Fourth, Flash was not readily available (it comes by default in openSUSE 10.3) and I had to search around the Internet (again) for a repository that included it. Luckily Adobe does provide a Fedora specific repository but I think this repository should be included by default in Fedora (or easily enabled).

Fifth, By default Fedora has chosen the iwlwifi drives for my Intel wireless which is great because its a completely open source driver that does not require a service running. But there are some known bugs in this driver and required me to modify my home network so I could connect to it and I can’t connect to my work network at all. This decision would not bother me except that they do not provide the closed ipw3945 drivers in the repositories as an alternative (openSUSE 10.3 provides iwl as an alternative in the repos).

Sixth, I’ve eluded to this a few times already but openSUSE 10.3 provides many community repositories in yast ready to be enabled but it’s also easy to add and find new ones through webpin and the openSUSE build service and add them quickly through yast/zypper. With Fedora it is a little more complicated to locate and add repositories.

Seventh, Most of the system-config-* applications required a running X server, so I was not able to manage my computer remotely with the provided tools. (boot, date, network, packages, printer, selinux, services, time, and users). Not only did they not have a cli/ncurses based interface, some of them even crashed with python errors instead of letting me know I needed X or they gave me a notice that they are deprecated. Why would you want to enforce configuration tools to require X? These tools also did not provide a central “Dashboard” to use them, so a user has to “Just know” what tool to use for the job, they can’t just browse around an easy to use control panel.

Eighth, By default NetworkManager was not on, I can’t think of any reason not to enable NetworkManager by default on a desktop distribution, especially when a wireless network card is available.

Most of the issues aren’t that big of a problem to solve for relatively experienced Linux users but I think they would be show stoppers and scare regular users away from Linux, there are also some issues with Fedora that are more personal preference than bugs:

First, I think clearlooks is a much better theme than the default Fedora one.
Second, I prefer the SLAB menu from openSUSE. Novell did a lot of usability research that I don’t think should be overlooked and even if Fedora doesn’t want to provide it by default, it should at least be in the repositories or an option in the installation. I found it very difficult to find the things I needed, one example was I wanted to modify SELinux to be permissive instead of enforcing, so I went to System->Administration and it wasn’t there, I had to go Applications->System Tools->SELinux Management. What is the difference between Applications->System Tools and System->Administration and why doesn’t SELinux fit in the latter?

Now that we’ve hit the bad and ugly, lets end on a good note?

First, I really love yum over yast’s package management module/zypper. The console output is a lot more detailed and the GTK interface isn’t as invasive as yast’s (yast’s GTK interface takes focus as it runs updates, so its nearly impossible to use the computer while using it). Also, zypper/yast is unbearably slow, I turn auto-refresh off and only update when I know I have time to wait. Yum on the other hand is lightning fast and I wasn’t afraid to use it.

Second, Bluetooth support was enabled by default, although the default configuration didn’t allow me to connect to my phone, its nice to actually have devices detected and ready to be configured out of the box.

So, overall my personal preference is for openSUSE, I think the advantages out weigh the downfalls but at the same time I believe both distros could learn from each other.

I don’t know if I can last an entire week with openSUSE 10.3. I can’t believe I even thought it possible. I am jonesing for Fedora right now, even though any other distro would probably do…

What’s wrong with SUSE you ask? Just about EVERYTHING! I’m not comfortable at all in this rancid environment. It sucks the life right out of you. I hope some SUSE people come running to save me from this turmoil I feel as I currently hate using this distro. Here’s my first impressions: (beware, the list is rather long)

GOOD

The items below are positives and the openSUSE team deserves credit for all of their hard work in these areas.

• Wireless works (+1)
  • My Intel wireless card from my T60p is recognized and associates with my access points
• The nautilus-open-terminal package is enabled by default (+2)
  • This is the right-click on desktop –> Terminal option, (something severely lacking in fedora and not easily installed in a kickstart)
  • Having this feature, its very simple to get started with the terminal which is definitely needed for the power user in me
• Install allowed me to choose not to use their grub (0) [while this is nice, if I had installed their grub, it would have wiped out my fedora grub components]
• zypper is much improved over the previous rug (10.1) tool (+1)
  • still needs work though
  • easy to add repos compared with fedora
    • packagekit can solve much of the incontinuity in fedora
    • though its nice to have a simple gui to add repos, knowing which repos is still a bit of an exercise in futility.

Positive Score: +4

BAD

Whle there is some good in openSUSE, its apparent to me that there is much to be improved.  As noted below, many more things are in need of improvement, to put it nicely.

• The install takes much longer than necessary (-3)
  • Still uses ugly YAST text user interface
    • YAST didn’t recognize my video driver, but could have just used the VESA driver for the gui install
  • Asks too many questions about details that could easily be simpler
  • Did not work well with other OSes (GRUB)
    • YAST installer wanted to overwrite my fedora GRUB configuration, shouldn’t Linux play well with each other in this sense?
• One-click install is more like 10-click (-1)
  • From opensuse.org, you can do what is called a “one-click install”, and about 8-10 clicks later its installed. If its one-click, its should be one (maybe two) clicks total.
• The initial GNOME config of openSUSE is too Windows-like (-1)
  • If I wanted my Linux desktop to look like Windows, I’d use KDE (or even run Windows)
  • It has only one bar, and at the bottom, not enough room for status apps
  • I had to add workspaces as only one was provided by default, that seems limiting
• bluez-gnome doesn’t have hidd or any sort of recognition for my bluetooth mouse (or anyone’s bluetooth mouse, for that matter) (-2)
  • dbus fails to recognize bluetooth mouse
  • There’s even a bug on it blaming others, yet it works in Fedora - https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=330461
• The bash prompt is ugly - (0)
  • This one is a personal preference, but its hard to tell when I am the root user and when I am not. As such, I will modify my .bashrc and fix the PS1 value
• The wireless driver for my T60p is not the new iwl3945, but the ipw3945 proprietary from intel - (-1)
  • The open driver has been out for quite some time
• Proprietary codecs were not easy to find, nor install (0)
  • Fedora doesn’t make this simple either really.  Yet, when I found them in Fedora they worked first try, gstreamer failed miserably several times in openSUSE
  • an attempt at a codec buddy like tool was made, but doesn’t work…
• zypper does not inform you of the dependencies needed to install even though it reports how much it will download (-1)
  • I want to know what packages I’ll be installing before I install them

Negative Score: -9

Total score for day 1:  -5 OOPS - that’s not good!

To be honest, I think I’m being very generous in some of the points I’m giving.  OpenSUSE makes it very difficult for my lifestyle so far.  I’m not sure what they can do with 10.3 to make it better, but I’d like to hear comments and suggestions on ways to help.

I’m sure hoping that day two will be better.  I’m already starting my list and will be testing such things as; video, development, lvm, raid, kvm/xen virtualization and much, much more.  As I continue to suffer through this bluetoothless mouse world openSUSE has created for me.

Cheers until tomorrow,

Herlo

Its been a little couple weeks since I posted anything useful in my Program of the Week (POW) series. And while I still plan to keep that up in the near future, I am going to be doing a new series, Distro Comparisons, with Flare!

My plan is to install the other two major distros of Linux (OpenSUSE and Ubuntu) and compare them with Fedora, my favorite distribution. I’ll be comparing them on installation, features, tools and any other thing that I regularly use in my day-to-day life. Once the distros are all installed (in a triple-boot, no less), I’ll be keeping each one for a week at a time over the next few months.

Over each week, I’ll write down things that are awesome, good, bearable, or just plain bug me, and each will get a score.