Bubble change.

Just so no one gets too surprised, I see that our Desktop team has subtly altered the notifications in F12/Rawhide. Notification bubbles now look like this:

These bubbles drop the gray theme with a color bar used in previous releases for the more prevalent “none more black” found in Ubuntu and some other distributions. While there’s something to be said for the old theme with its elegant shading and matching with our default theme, the newer notifications are more eye catching, which means they’re more effective at doing their job.

In general, I agree that fewer notifications are generally better, and that if the computer wants to take your attention away from what you’re doing, it ought to be warranted. Nevertheless, I did see a few minor issues with the bubbles, so I filed bug 525864 (which is already closed, yay Desktop team!) and bug 525867. On the whole, I’ve already noticed them more often (see? they work!) and used that recognition to tune the number of notifications I use in some applications, so I’m getting interrupted for important things.

Hamster on the move.

Very cool — the Hamster applet, which I use to track my time, is featured in the GNOME 2.28 release notes. I really enjoy using this application to keep count of my hours and the way I spend my time during the work day. Thanks to its flexibility for noting details about my major tasks, I can also use it to send summaries to my managers. Interestingly, it stores info in an SQLite database, so it’s easy to use Hamster’s data elsewhere if desired; and of course it exports to a variety of formats as well.

I posted earlier about Hamster, and I’m glad to see it getting some attention in GNOME 2.28. Of course you’ll see it available in Fedora 12 as well, so I hope some of you readers find it useful; if so, let the developers know!

FUDCon notelets, no. 2.

A couple tidbits related to the FUDCon Toronto 2009 event happening in a few months, of particular interest for travelers coming from outside Canada:

• Check with your mobile phone provider ahead of time, to check your coverage. Nothing sucks more than coming back from an event to find a huge phone bill waiting for you because you didn’t remember roaming charges…
• …Except for possibly not being able to enter the host country at the border. If you’re a non-US citizen who plans to fly to Boston and take our bus from there to Canada, make sure you check in advance with all the appropriate authorities for requirements for your successful journey. You may need, for example, a transit visa and supporting documentation. Do your homework now so we don’t have to leave you at the border!

I’m sure more of these little tips will come up as we go, and we’ll add them to the wiki page as needed.

I’m speaking at UTOSC.

I'm speaking at UTOSC 2009!

Coming up in a few weeks is one of my favorite events from last year — the fantastic Utah Open Source Conference 2009. It will be held October 8-10 in SLC and features a cross-distribution speaker lineup that includes people from projects all around the free software universe.

Ace community developer and all-around nice guy Clint Savage sent me a code you can use — FDRA — for a discount on the already extremely low registration fee. If you register before September 26 (that’s this coming Saturday!), the normal fee is only $70 for three days and over 50 technical sessions, plus birds-of-a-feather sessions and other exciting events. But with this code, you can get 50% off that fee and it’s only $35. Now I’ve been to UTOSC before, and I can tell you that $70 is already an amazing deal. How can you pass it up at only $35?

OK, sales pitch style is done now. Seriously, this is a fantastic conference and one thing I really liked about it is its very inclusive, family-friendly style. There’s even a special Family Day planned where you can bring the kids for all sorts of activities and a cookout.

I said last year that I would not be surprised if UTOSC, which has almost doubled in size every year, became one of the premier Linux community conferences in the USA. Yes, it’s near and dear to my heart because I know some of the wonderful organizers, and because I had such a great time there last year. I was even honored to give a keynote there. This time there are other superb speakers, and I’ll be giving a talk myself, along with holding a Fedora BoF session. But despite my obvious non-objectivity, from everything I can see about UTOSC 2009, I think that prediction’s already come true!

Even keel, arrr.

(I’m not ready for International Talk Like a Pirate day to be over, apparently, given the subject line.)

Spot, in response to your insightful post, your experience at Atlanta Linux Fest seems a bit different from the many distribution-agnostic events that happen every year, like SELF, UTOSC, LinuxTag, and Ontario Linux Fest.  I don’t think anything billing itself as a “Linux” event should favor distros, whether they’re Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, or what have you — especially when the majority of what’s covered (how to write better Django apps, tweaking Apache, kernel driver hacking, etc.) is completely independent of your chosen brand of Linux.

When Fedora gives money to Linux events, it’s generally because we believe the event is a cost-effective way for us to deliver a benefit to the whole Linux community. Of course we try to put Fedora Ambassadors and a booth at such an event, and welcome other distribution projects to do the same. It’s a supportive gesture, not an exclusive one! All of us are there ultimately to show people how easy, reliable, and socially responsible free software is for everyone.

At the same time, Fedora is continuing to move away from putting our FUDCon events next to major Linux events, for a couple reasons. One is to avoid the distraction of trying to essentially participate in two events at once. That’s hard not just on attendees, who want to be able to participate in both events, but also on organizers who themselves are eager not just to educate and contribute at FUDCon, but also to promote Fedora, Linux, and FOSS at the neutral event itself. Another reason is to avoid the appearance of “swarming” a distribution neutral event, because there are people for whom that reduces the incentive to attend, for whatever reason. Yet another reason is so we can seek out cost-effective venues at locations and times where people are looking for a FOSS event, so that we don’t end up repeatedly preaching to the choir.

In response to your point about upstream policy, the way Canonical has opened up pieces of the Ubuntu production system have been a direct result of the community’s continuing conversation with them, so I hope that conversation continues and spreads into areas such as upstream policies. I think that distros can benefit from a model of eschewing distribution-specific patches wherever possible, in favor of working directly with upstream to improve the consistency of Linux globally.

And on the subject of creepiness, Fedora has always shied away from “star worship,” where that equates to promoting one person (and/or that person’s “brand”) over the rest of the community.  While there are people who lead various teams, what we’ve consistently found about their leadership is that it promotes everyone else around them as opposed to themselves.  That also means our community efforts are scalable, and don’t hinge on name recognition as much as mission recognition. In Fedora, anyone is capable of being a rockstar, and we’d rather promote all of them than just one or two.

Star worship has other negative side effects as well. Since taking the job of FPL and, as a result, having the opportunity to travel around the world to different FOSS events, I’ve witnessed some really scurrilous or just plain rude hijinks from “stars” who seem blind to the damage they are ultimately causing their communities by reflecting negatively on them, or the way those actions can turn off potential free software contributors.

Individual egos, no matter how well-intentioned the owner, are just too susceptible when they don’t answer to a peer group. Any time you represent a larger community, you have a responsibility to govern your actions accordingly, because it reflects on everyone. The more representatives there are, and the more peers you have, the easier it is to be consistent between principle and action, because that’s what peer groups can reinforce between their members.

I think it greatly reduces the creepiness factor when you can be in the same room with the attendees and give them the opportunity to ask questions freely, much as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst did at the last FUDCon in Boston. Personally, I have done video chats over projector to audiences, but they’re always live, so community members (or potential members) have their chance to be part of a conversation, as opposed to just listeners. So much of what makes FOSS work requires conversation, not dictation! The honesty and spontaneity of that conversation makes it a human connection and hopefully much lower on the Creepy-O-Meter.

But fortunately, negative incidents really are in the minority against the many wonderful experiences I’ve had of meeting and talking to FOSS users and contributors.  There are so many people out there eager to get involved with Linux and FOSS that we have a great opportunity to influence in a positive way, teaching them through our deeds (not just words) to honor upstream projects; to avoid old, outmoded hoarding behaviors; and to become leaders and rockstars in their own right through what Spot referred to as a combination of transparency and courage. These lessons are ones that we continually need to keep in mind going forward, and continue honestly reassessing where we’re succeeding or failing at making good on them, and act accordingly.

Software Freedom Day 2009 in Fredericksburg.

What a lovely day we had for our Software Freedom Day 2009 celebration. It was about 68F by the time we set up in the morning, and the weather would stay mostly sunny and 75F all afternoon. We set up our tables in the small courtyard in front of the library around 8:30am, and there were still a lot of joggers at by that point.

We had loads of Fedora CDs and DVDs courtesy of the North American Fedora Ambassadors, some flyers we made up that talk about Linux and free and open source software, copies of the OpenDisc with FOSS for use on Windows, and some Ubuntu CDs.

Ted brought a MythTV box (running Mythdora) and a big LCD monitor so we could show it and the underlying operating system off to passersby. We also had numerous laptops running an assortment of Linux, mainly Fedora but also some openSUSE. We put up balloons around the table but quickly found they got in the way and “removed” them using the nearest sharp objects. Of course, no beautiful day would be complete without music, and we had great tunes from TMBG to Stevie Wonder to Jason Mraz going all day long.

There was an article in the Free Lance-Star, our local paper, on Saturday that helped draw quite a number of people out. Unfortunately some of the facts and figures I gave didn’t make it into the writer’s final cut, and it tended to have more of an “anti-” slant than I prefer, but you know what they say about press. Many of the people who came out to SFD ’09 were vocal enough on their own, with stories not just about bad experience with Vista but also, notably, not wanting anything to do with a Windows 7 upgrade.

As usual, I totally forgot to bring a camera with me — which, given my poor photography skills, is probably for the best. But I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures to show our colorful booth, and all the dozens of happy and smiling people who were milling around all day!

In which we become an InstallFest.

One retired gentleman named Jack said he was looking for a new notebook computer, but wanted to use Linux on it if possible. He said he was going to buy a new laptop that day, and would be back shortly! When he showed back up an hour later with a huge, beautiful new HP Pavilion dv7t, we knew it was time to represent. With most of us being long-time Linux users, we were jaded by our many experiences and biases about new hardware from the past. But it actually turned out to be no challenge at all.

We shrunk the Windows partition, inserted a Fedora 11 64-bit DVD, and everything installed as expected. Although the free radeon driver worked out of the box, it did exhibit two problems — first, it only displayed a 1152×864 resolution on his gorgeous 1920×1200 display; and second, when switching from X back to a tty back to X, all the screen colors went crazy, although the display still worked OK. We bit the bullet and installed the ATI driver, which was a simple step using the RPMfusion repositories.

After a brief tour, Jack was amazed to find how easy Linux had become since he had first heard of it. When we showed him how easy file management was, and how simply he could attach a digital camera and work with pictures, he was sold. And when we showed him The GIMP, he was ecstatic.

In which we entertain questions.

One young fellow, Jordan, actually brought some interesting questions about Fedora’s support for all sorts of creativity applications — in his case, he uses LMMS, an awesome composer program for beatboxing, sequencing, and other assorted noisemaking. He was thrilled to see that Fedora 11 has the latest LMMS, and showed me some of the cool functions and features. It also can support VSTi instruments (through WINE, I think). We also got a chance to talk about Fedora’s freedom stance and I was able to dispel some myths and also explain the superior under-the-hood engineering that Fedora has featured for years, in areas from security to 64-bit support.

And I got a big surprise when a beloved teacher from my high school years showed up at our event to pick up some discs for his amateur radio club. Turns out he’s been playing with Linux for a while and was really happy to find out that I had a connection with Linux. I’m really hoping to see him at one of our FredLUG meetings soon!

We must have given away half of the discs that the Fedora folks sent us, and a number of people were eager to come back to a FredLUG meeting, which conveniently happens next Saturday at the Library as well. We did a great job promoting software freedom, and with the exception of a short lunchtime lull, we were basically busy from 9 to 5. Finally we packed up all our various gear, and a bunch of us headed over to the Capital Ale House, the official after-party location for FredLUG, for some suds and vittles.

They had a fantastic special that we all ended up ordering — spicy swordfish sliders with remoulade sauce and homemade tortillas with sweet salsa. I wish I’d only had half of it, though, because my recent changes in eating habits (less) and exercise (lots more) mean I need to be more conscious of how I eat when I’m out. Nevertheless the food was scrumptious and we had lots of story swapping and laughs. Our server, Emily, even got in on the fun by talking like a pirate, and in return, of course, we tipped her generously! Always reward good service given in good humor, I say. (Hopefully I can bring the gang next month to CAH when they’re here for Fedora Activity Day: Fedora Talk.)

So all in all, it was a tremendous SFD ’09. I returned home really tired from a day of fresh air and fun, and slept like a log. Or a baby. Maybe it was a baby log? Anyway, another beautiful day awaits today, so I’m going to spend some time in it — but I’ll be back later this evening to talk a bit about the next event that has me incredibly excited — the 2009 Utah Open Source Conference!

Software Freedom Day ’09 on horizon.

Tomorrow I’ll be gearing up for Software Freedom Day here in my hometown, along with a bunch of dedicated friends from FredLUG.

We’re going to have balloons, a free raffle for some swank gear, and stickers, temporary tattoos and CDs and DVDs of Fedora. We’ll also have bunched of copies of the OpenCD, which is chock full of free and open source software for people who aren’t quite ready to make the jump away from proprietary operating systems, even with an alternative as cool and easy to use as Fedora.

Last night I was interviewed for the regional newspaper so I’m really looking forward to seeing how that came out. The writer’s a nice guy who’s done us a solid before, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to get in front of tens of thousands of readers. It would have been nice to be in the paper today but I still think it will haves major positive effect on our visitor numbers at the event.

And the weather is supposed to be beautiful… So I’m ready to do some free software promotion!

Squeezing blood from the turnip.

Well, as everyone probably knows we’ve got coming up in December the North American edition of the always joyous Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in Toronto, Canada.  And with that comes the somewhat less joyous task of figuring out how we can squeeze the maximum number of Fedora contributors into the available budget.

With this FUDCon we are operating under two additional constraints not found at the previous Boston-area FUDCons:

1. We need to ship a bunch of gung-ho community members from Boston to Toronto.
2. We don’t have anyone picking up the tab for FUDPub at this point.

The combination of those two needs colliding makes for a pretty hefty tab. But we’re still looking for suggestions of people who’d be able to benefit from, and add substantially to, the FUDCon experience. If you or someone you know wants to go to FUDCon and you’re looking for a subsidy, you can indicate that on the FUDCon preregistration signup. So how do we contain costs and still have a great event?

For one thing, Tom “Spot” Callaway and I began working last January, right after the Boston FUDCon in fact, to secure extra funding. That pot of money would help cover the costs of transporting Fedora Engineering team members to a not-Boston location. That way, we could bring some long-time Fedora contributors who are Red Hat employees to the event without requiring as much funding from the normal FUDCon funding provided by Community Architecture. But we’re also using some other strategies.

To combat problem #1, we are hiring a bus that will pick up in Boston and Westford, where Red Hat has an office, and then drive on to Toronto on Friday, December 4, and arrive that night; and provide a return home on Tuesday, December 8. We can save a lot in airfare by paying for a single bus — not to mention arguably decreasing our carbon footprint for the event.

We plan to maximize the cost and environmental effectiveness by packing as many people on it as possible. And this bus is NOT limited to Red Hat employees. If you’re in the Boston area and you want to catch a ride to Toronto, you’re welcome — but you do need to sign up on our bus list, in addition to pre-registering.*

The tougher problem that we as a community have the option to solve, though, is problem #2. We have no co-sponsor at this point for the always-popular FUDPub, which eats directly into the budget as well. Do you know a group that might be interested in the opportunity of a FUDCon co-sponsorship? If so, let us know, and soon! The sponsorship page on the wiki has details.

We already have a great partner in Seneca College, which is donating a huge amount of classroom space for our event. One of Seneca’s professors, and the esteemed author of a couple of excellent books you might want to check out, Chris Tyler, also has devoted significant time to helping us with ground-level logistics like the hotel, FUDPub, and other arrangements. I’ll mention this again a few times between now and December, but if you run into him at FUDCon in Toronto, make sure you give him a big hug and a “thank you.” We really could not have done it without him.

Back to the sponsorship issue though — how to let us know? Well, it’s simple, really. We didn’t want FUDCon planning to happen quietly in a back room where people wouldn’t know what was happening, so we have a planning list for FUDCon already set up, and a pretty sizable number of people are contributing there to the logistics of setting up this popular event. If you want to provide some help, by all means join us there!

Snake charming.

The recent mockups of an improved Anaconda storage UI are really interesting. In the back of my mind, it did get me thinking, though. These mockups have a lot of really juicy information for knowledgeable users.

For the most part, the information shown is going to be really helpful for people with setups that go beyond the standard tower or laptop system with one hard disk. People with exotic configurations and special needs will have a much easier time figuring out their target storage and how to deal with it once it’s chosen.

I also like the way that the “Basic devices” radio button is used. People in the simple storage case — new users, or even experienced users in the single-disk case — aren’t required to wade through extra device selection to get through the installation process. Nice!

Unrelated wool gathering.

For whatever reason, this reminds me to report that I spent some time recently with a few systems at home trying various upgrade processes from Fedora 10 to 11. I used the preupgrade process for one of them, which worked as advertised; and a yum upgrade process for the other, following the directions on the wiki to the letter. That worked perfectly as well.

In both cases, I did need to do a little special system configuration fiddling, but only because I, as a non-beginner, had made those changes to start with. A non-beginner user would have simply observed everything working and said, “Great, now I can get on with my life,” just as it should be.

My personal feeling is that the preupgrade method is the one we should pursue, while having some better sanity checks that allow it to fail early and gracefully, with appropriate information back to the user about the reasons. It has a fairly simple and non-confusing interface, and stays out of the way of the user politely.

It still has some rough spots and doesn’t always deal well with odd or exotic configurations, and some of those are definitely worth ironing out. In the cases where we can’t make good choices, though, there is always the yum upgrade method on which to fall back. After all, exotic configurations and highly customized boxes are clearly the province of experts, i.e. people less likely to need hand holding.

In either case, having been around my LUG, and more generally around users of other Linux distros quite often, I know that Fedora is not doing too badly in this area — and in some cases, significantly better that many distros. There are still many problems we need to confront and fix, but we’re making good progress and I hope that will continue post-Fedora 12.

FUDCon Toronto 2009!

Yes, there’s a big news update for FUDCon Toronto 2009, the upcoming Fedora Users and Developers Conference in Toronto from December 5-7 — check out all the details in the announcement.

Pre-registration is already open on the wiki, where you can find loads of other information and maps as well. (We’ve already got 20 people signed up and it’s only been open a few hours!) Pre-registering gets you a couple extras, like lunch each day, a bit of schwag, and a pass to FUDPub.

But FUDCon is absolutely free to attend, whether you pre-register or not, and FUDCon is open to everyone, since time immemorial. (Or at least since we started having them years ago.)

We will have some special “getting-started” user sessions on Saturday, December 5, as well as our always-popular developer tracks and hackfests throughout the length fo the conference. We’re also planning some sort of refereed or pre-sorted content, in addition to BarCamp format talks, so everyone will be able to find Do you have an idea for a session or a hackfest you’d like to run? Then write your idea on the wiki.

There’s never been a better time to come to a FUDCon than the upcoming FUDCon Toronto 2009. It was my first FUDCon back during the release of Fedora Core 5 that really cemented my relationship to the community. I loved meeting all the various people involved everywhere in the Fedora Project, hearing about cool technical advances, sharing anecdotes and experiences, and simply having fun. Every FUDCon has had the same effect, not just for me but for plenty of other attendees.

I’ll never forget the fellow who came up to me at the last North American FUDCon, in Boston last January, to tell me about how he came up from Florida to attend. He wasn’t sure what to expect but loved every minute. The more he talked about it, the more enthusiastic he got, and the more he smiled — and so did I! The enthusiasm was infectious, the best kind of viral communication.

FUDCon is so great for giving people that juice, the positive reinforcement we all need to remind us what a great thing Fedora is, and why we all gather to create and spread free software. And it will come right after the release of Fedora 12, so we’ll have a lot to celebrate at the same time. I’m really looking forward to this next iteration and the renewed challenge of the next release of Fedora, even as we gear up for the Fedora 12 Beta coming later this month.

We’ll have more information coming shortly about some pre-sorted tracks, and other juicy news. Stay tuned to the fedora-announce-list for all the latest updates.