FOSSMeet at NITC.I was recently invited to give a presentation to the FOSSMeet 2008 conference at the National Institute of Technology Calicut. The conference is happening this weekend, and looking at the user list for their site, I see a number of our contributors there, including Kushal Das and Tejas Dinkar. The organizers and I tested the videoconferencing link this morning using Ekiga and had no trouble. Unfortunately, that may have been because in part I was trying this weekend to connect to them using Fedora’s Rawhide version of Ekiga, which is… problematic. Fedora 8 had no problem this morning so the speech can commence next Saturday morning (for India, Saturday evening). Thank you to the FOSSMeet organizers for graciously inviting me to talk to their attendees about Fedora. I’m looking forward to my first speech by teleconference! |
Persistence of vision.In between bouts of fighting one of my broken systems at home, I’m trying to spend some time working on our Single Source Summary page on the wiki. In doing that, and in talking to some other people about the Fedora 9 Beta, I found out that some of our keen new features may not have all the exposure they deserve — one of those is the work our resident ninja master Jeremy Katz has done on persistence for Live images. Persistence means you can insert your Fedora Live USB stick into a USB-bootable machine, boot from the stick, run Fedora for a while, and save your work. When you’re done, shut down and remove the stick and carry it to your next home away from home! To use the feature on your Fedora 9 Beta (or Rawhide) system, install the livecd-tools package and run: livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 256 image.iso /dev/sdc1 The example assumes you want 256 MB of persistent data in addition to the ISO image, and that the partition on your USB stick is /dev/sdc1. (If you’re not sure of the latter, look in /dev/disk/* for hints.) Just another great piece of new technology that you always get first from Fedora! So why all the hubbub about the Single Source Summary, then? The idea is for that page to hold all the text from which we would draw a number of other general-purpose pages, such as the Release Summary, the Release Announcement, and the Overview. Unfortunately, wild growth on the wiki means we frequently have pages that repeat content or are inconsistent, meaning the people costs of maintaining those pages rises dramatically. The SSS page will give us a place for people to write content centrally, and then include it anywhere they like using the wiki’s Include function. So you can see content crowing about features such as the one above in more places with consistency and accuracy. |
She who must be obeyed.The other night, I gave a little explanation of the technical mumbo-jumbo behind SELinux, and how it works in Fedora to make your system more secure, to my wife. She then came back to me with the best non-geek explanation ever: “It’s like a valet key for your services.” |
FUDCon lodging.Having the North American FUDCon for F10 colocated with the Red Hat Summit in Boston has a number of great benefits that go along with it — lots of enterprise, SMB, and individuals gathered in one place for open source content; plenty of space for workgroups to form around discussing innovative ideas, or to hack on some long-standing issues; getting new blood interested in the Fedora Project and our commitment to freedom and openness at every level; and of course, the opportunity for all of us to renew bonds from every point in the community. Along with that, there’s always a couple logistical issues to solve. One of those is hotel accommodations. As the co-organizers, the illustrious Max Spevack and I are trying to get a handle on our true hotel needs for the event. To that end, I’ve made a couple changes to the FUDCon planning page so we can gather information on who needs lodging for the show. PLEASE visit that page and add your information to the table of attendees. We’re asking who’s attending the Summit as a customer so we can weigh the logistics of using “shoulder dates”* at the Red Hat Summit-affiliated hotels to house our FUDCon attendees. There are a number of factors to consider, including but not limited to cost and convenience to the FUDCon location. |
Be true to your code.As my good friend Karsten pointed out, the deadline to sign up as a Google Summer of Code mentor is fast approaching — 31 March to be exact. Ideas are super, but ideas need people power behind them to help guide and monitor the summer coders in their efforts. Please give some consideration to lending your skills not just as a hotshot yourself, but in growing the next generation of hotshots for the open source community! We now return you to your regularly scheduled bug-stomping, already in progress. UPDATE: Karsten points out we actually have a lot of mentors now, but we need more of them to speak up and stump for their proposals. The students don’t always know where to find our ideas, so make noise! |
Capsules.Rendition: Even great actors like Meryl Streep can’t save a hack, one-sided script with no room for the audience to mull over the moral and political questions it should have asked. Wishes it was In the Valley of Elah; waste of time. Margot at the Wedding: Superb character study piece, but will try the patience of those who either don’t do a lot of indie, or aren’t related to a therapist. Tends to navel-gaze; use sparingly. Se, Jie (Lust, Caution): Made up for both of the others, living up to the Ang Lee tradition — that is, the film equivalent of fine, dark chocolate. Explicit content means don’t invite parents to a viewing; stately, measured, and sublime. |
I’ll say it’s true.I’ve got a new favorite… Archive Mounter. I had a collection of .iso files (CD and DVD images) on my Desktop for various purposes, and today I discovered a new feature in the Fedora 9 Beta, courtesy of GVFS. Right-click the file, choose Archive Mounter, and voila! The CD is mounted on your Desktop, and under ~/.gvfs/volume_name, for use like any other user-mounted volume. Love it! With apologies to A. Krauss. |
Fedora 9 Beta is out!You can read the release notes to see what’s in store, and then… They’re good for you, we promise. |
Wenn man sich in Rom.I am really looking forward to my trip to Berlin in May for LinuxTag 2008. I’ll get to meet a lot of the Fedora Ambassadors from Europe who make up such a thriving part of our community, to see Europe’s biggest .com-meets-.org Linux trade show, and (hopefully) to realize how little I remember of my high school and university German classes. I got a chance to talk briefly today on IRC with one of our German contributors and subject him to some of the awful (and probably second-grade, or “zweiter Klasse”) German I remember… Gabi, es klingelt! Geh doch mal ran! And most importantly, Helfen Sie mir, ich bin ein Dummkopf. That one will come in REALLY HANDY. |
