Cambridge Beta!

We couldn’t think of any better way to celebrate Fedora’s 5th than delivering a fresh new Fedora 10 Beta. This is the point where we ask all community members to spend some time getting and testing the release, so we can make it as fantastic as possible.

Here’s some tasty links for your viewing pleasure:

• F10 Beta release notes — read these!
• Official F10 Beta announcement
• Red Hat press blog entry
• Download Fedora 10 Beta now!
• Get involved.

So that’s where I put those spare minutes.

Things accomplished so far this weekend:

• Held a FredLUG meeting, except none of the new folks showed up — probably a combination of Saturday morning and ugly weather. Two of them have won some nice giveaway schwag, though, so I expect we’ll see them at a meeting soon.
• Watched the weather turn from rainy to unberably humid, back and forth several times in succession. Yay.
• Worked on Release Notes repository, mainly getting the notes building with the latest Publican. I found some discrepancies that will take a tiny bit of release engineering retooling on the side, hopefully nothing horrible. Once again I failed miserably at figuring out why anyone would think that running sed-ish Perl scripts is a good substitute for proper XSLT. More collaboration would have helped a lot in publican’s development, IMHO. In championing this tool as a way of increasing that collaboration, I feel like I might also be shooting the Docs Project in the foot. We still have time to revert to our previous toolchain if needed.
• Did some expense reports for the office, which are a PITA but a necessary evil.
• Learned some more about git, by paying partial attention to some videos that RSS was kind enough to throw in my direction.
• Installed a new showerhead in one of the upstairs bathrooms. Hopefully this will save some water, but my ulterior motive came from having to shower in that bathroom while our master bath was being restored this summer. The original, crappy, contractor-grade showerhead was still installed there, so I decided to do away with it this weekend finally.
• Worked with Evie on some extra math enrichment stuff from her second grade class. She’s pretty much a pistol at everything so far. Some of the problems were subtraction, so when it came to a problem like “34 – 19,” I asked her in mock surprise, “Uh-oh, how do we handle four minus nine?”, and she answered matter of factly, “That’s negative five, Daddy.” (Next up, algebra.)
• Got the book Snake Wrangling for Kids installed on her OLPC XO, which she’s already enjoying.

I also found out how to do some pretty boss CVS importing to turn some of the Docs content into git repos.

Many happy returns of the day.

If you haven’t seen the lovely and festive new banner on the Fedora home page today, check it out! Today is a celebration — FIVE GREAT YEARS of Fedora so far. Yes, five years ago, fedoraproject.org was officially born, which is, I think, a great date to mark the occasion. Happy Birthday, Fedora community!

I’m digging the banner especially, because it spells out what makes Fedora great — our community of code and collateral developers, contributors, and users. I’ve been part of the Fedora community almost since it started, and I can look back on each year and see the way this community has grown and thrived. We may not get things perfect every time, but Fedora is about being willing to aim high and try hard, as often as needed and as fast as possible.

That’s what the open source model is about — innovating through iterating. Not being content to let others bear the burden. Reaching out to the wider community, and always offering solutions that are unencumbered, open, and free. And remembering that we’re always strongest when we pull together. THANK YOU ALL for your contributions, support, time, effort, and devotion to software freedom. You guys don’t just talk the talk, you walk the walk, every day.

I’m absolutely proud to be a member of this community for five amazing, educational, challenging, and rewarding years. There’s so much still ahead for Fedora — make sure you stick around for the cake and ice cream! If you want to sing the “You smell like a monkey” version of “Happy Birthday,” that’s OK too.

And if you get a chance today, blog a Happy Birthday message to Fedora and spread the love.

Soon with more tubes.

I love the idea of obby/gobby — I just can’t stand the editor. I’d much rather use my beloved Emacs, or even gEdit. But it looks like things are coming together for a more sophisticated D-Bus solution. Once there are network bits tied in, you could use Vim and I could use Emacs, and we could collaborate on a document through the obby protocol or Telepathy. I hope some of the freedesktop.org hackers reading this planet are watching…

They try to make him go to rehab, he says no no no.

I could spend a lot of this blog talking about how incredibly insane it is for our government to be spending another $700B bailing out the greedy, the stupid, and the clueless. I could rail equally against both sides of the aisle for acting as if this wasn’t the exact outcome predicted by the last several years of credit overextensions, lack of oversight, and blind investor greed. Anyone who thinks that somehow either the Dems or the GOP have the answer to this problem, after the blithering idiocy and pandering of the last several days, needs to have their head removed, scrubbed with a Brillo, and reattached right side up. But no, I’d rather spend this blog talking about how I avoided thinking about this stuff too hard for the last few days.

Saturday we had a lovely Software Freedom Day 2008 celebration in beautiful downtown Fredericksburg, complete with balloons, freebies, and of course lots of free software for everyone. We had many, many people stop by — I was shocked at the turnout for a small town. Many of the attendees wanted to talk about their horrible experiences with specific proprietary software companies, which made it very difficult to keep the conversation positive, but we did our best. We gave out copies of the Open Disc, minus the USA-illegal bits, and lots of Ubuntu and Fedora discs (the latter preferred by most of the attendees). A respectable number of attendees followed up with memberships to our LUG and its mailing list.

Sunday I went to the National Rehabilitation Hospital to visit my friend, ace guitarist Arch Alcantara. A few weeks ago, Arch had a subarachnoid hemmorhage — a ruptured aneurysm in his brain. He survived not only the event, the subsequent cracking of his head when he fell over on his face, the coiling surgery to make the bleeding clot, and the risk of vasospasm the week afterward, but also the medical staff who weren’t used to someone with such an advanced case of biting sarcasm in the ICU, nor his tendency to burst into song. (There’s something to be said for a guy who sings “Head Like a Hole” the day after being extubated.)

Arch looked, as I told him, pretty fantastic for a guy whose head basically exploded three weeks ago. My friend Rich and I hung out for about an hour or so with him and Christina, basically just being happy that Arch was doing so well. We went out with him to the garden and sat for a bit to just soak up some fresh air, and commiserated on the hospital’s showing of 27 Dresses and the unlikelihood that it would be followed up by a Tarantino double feature. Arch has weeks of physical therapy in front of him, but I’m sure he’ll be able to conquer that with only occasional added grumpiness. On the way home, I appreciated relative good health and hoped that, in the same shoes, people would visit me to bring good cheer. A well spent day away from the computer, all told.

Certifiable.

I got my results from yesterday’s RHCE exam, and I passed, so I’m now RHCE recertified for RHEL 5!

I aced the troubleshooting section, which was cool, but I had hoped to do the same with the installation and configuration section and didn’t quite manage that. I suppose it would have helped had I not been trying to spend the majority of class time working on $DAYJOB stuff. But I knew when I walked out of the exam where I was weak, so I have the ability to bone up on that material when I have time.

Oh wait, time. Heh.

Today I’m headed out to beautiful downtown Fredericksburg on what’s supposed to be a perfectly beautiful day, to celebrate Software Freedom Day 2008! SFD 2008 is a worldwide event and I decided it would be awful not to have festivities here where I live. The local paper printed a big article about SFD, free software, and me in last Saturday’s paper, so I’m hoping that will bring more people out.

We have fun giveaways, including some nice schwag like computer bags, buttons, stickers, and of course, plenty of free software CDs and DVDs for everyone. Should be a fun time! Time to get all the gear in order and head out.

Like a free, teeny, tiny Nine Inch Nails record.

Fedora release engineering team leader Jesse Keating has proposed that we slip next week’s Fedora 10 Beta by two days, to Thursday, September 25. This is due to a power outage happening in the Red Hat Raleigh office over the weekend. Check out his post on fedora-devel-list and feel free to comment there. The intention is to leave the rest of the release schedule untouched, and just make up those two days.

I saw a bright light, and I thought we were on.

Well, this post from Mitchell Baker was good to see as a follow on to yesterday’s post from Spot, especially considering it’s what we would have preferred all along. The MPL is a perfectly useful and trustworthy license for binaries and source code, and we’re glad Mozilla is putting more faith in it. I do look forward to seeing the “materials” Mitchell refers to, nevertheless…. Mostly, I’m glad that Fedora was involved early in this process, making the point that the EULA Mozilla now is removing wasn’t the answer.

We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.

There’s a new feature coming in Fedora 10 that is going to be very apparent to users trying the F10 Beta as their first introduction to the release. Plymouth uses X modesetting to drop the aging rhgb graphical boot engine in favor of a sleeker, faster system. However, the feature doesn’t work seamlessly for every video chipset. There are a few easy ways to overcome issues, fortunately.

We already have old Alpha documentation in the Beta release notes about Plymouth. That information needs to be updated to reflect the current state, including what Plymouth is and how it works, including expectations, known issues, and how to get out of any trouble it might cause. I’m sure this is planned as part of the general cleanup and update of the Beta release notes, but bears mentioning.

It might also be VERY useful to have a screencast of expected Plymouth behavior, possibly including some helpful narration on how to use the information in the previous bullet. So if you’re looking for a way to contribute a screencast that shows off a new feature and helps the user and testing community, here’s your opportunity.

Recall that the Beta is a release where we ask for much wider community testing. We should be prepared with answers to the questions users and testers are likely to ask when they try it. Having those answers in the Beta Release Notes already makes it easy to politely hand folks a URL for reference. The people helping in IRC #fedora and on fedora-list will appreciate it.

Cheers to James Laska for the screencast idea — I’m lucky I get to tap his brain, thanks to sitting next to him in my RH300 class this week.

It’s coming.

Including free software discs (of course!), buttons, stickers, free giveaway drawings for cool schwag, and lots of information about how to free yourself and your computer from worry and struggle.

Come join the millions of people who’ve found a better way to make using their computers fun again!