I can has Netbook too?

I can has Netbook too?

Today was a relatively quiet day, as the amazing German train system seems to be one of the quietest trains I've been on. I'm sitting in Munich now, thinking about how Ubuntu is releasing yet another respin, this time focused around the so called "Netbook" market. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had the luck to come across this little number here.

For those of you too lazy to click through that link, in summary, Ubuntu is making a new version designed around the small screen, complete with binary blobs and support for all sorts of nasty proprietary things like flash and mp3 out of the box. The worst part is that there will be no upstream for this project. (When will they learn?)

I was curious, (and thanks to the limit of terms of my self inflicted Ubuntu/Debian ban,) so I decided to see how easily these tools can be built for Fedora. We have the respin technology, why not use it?



The whole build process went quickly, although with some difficulties. There are apparently a few odd key dependencies to Maximus, the window manager-ish thing Canonical has hammered together.



We also need to fix up some of the artwork a bit, so it's not so Poobuntu centric.



The next step is to make some RPMs for other people to try out, and possibly a temporary git repo for people to submit patches to.

Here's a list of the things we need to do to use these packages in a "Small Screen" spin.

• Package them


• Review them - most of the dependencies are already in Fedora


• Create artwork maybe a slightly modified theme


• Spin it


• Distribute a slightly customized Gnome desktop on the spin

I can't say that I'll have the time to see through all these steps, but if anyone's interested, I'd be more than happy to start making RPMs.

Hup Holland!

Hup Holland!

So Holland won their first match in the European Championship, which was against Italy. This is apparently amazing because until now Italy was recognized as one of the best European teams in the world. This is interesting not because Italy was defeated, but by the extreme nationalism portrayed by the Dutch.

Speaking of which, I'm going to Germany tomorrow to visit the Munich office and meet the nice folks there. I've been convinced to carry all the Holland crap I can find, which at this point is an orange balloon that says 'Hup Holland', that I can stick in one of the outside side pockets of my backpack. If anyone around her had klompen (clogs) I could wear those too.

To Arnhem and Back

To Arnhem and Back

In order to go to Munich next week, I had to get myself reservations on the super fast and sexy German Intercity Express trains. As it turns out, they can't be issued at the Ede-Wageningen station near where I live. After biking 8km (5m) there, I was told that I had to hop on the next train, but it only takes about ten minutes.

One of the funny things about the Netherlands is how small the towns are. In order to get to the train station, I had to pass through two other villages just to get there. In between it's nothing but pictureque Dutch farmhouses by the sides of the roads. Then it's off to Arnhem for a grand total of 30 minutes, to get the reservations and head back. While I'm sure it would have been nice to wander around Arnhem too, I really wanted to head home and get some other things done.

All in all, I really didn't go any further than travelling from one side of Pittsburgh to the other.

Koji's build system is excellent

Koji's build system is excellent

For all the bitching I did about Koji yesterday, one thing is certain. The build system works really well. After finally getting Koji setup after two days of frustration, I decided to try repeating my work with the development version. Getting the dev version built and setup, worked so well, I had to double check it about 15 times, just to be sure.

Your shipment of fail is here

Your shipment of fail is here

Today, I got the following comment on one of my posts.

"Interesting .. your blog came as the second result when i Googled for "Fedora 9 a failure ? " ..
you forgot to mention about the "PackageIt" that hangs indefinitely , and the removal of the auto-login feature. Shame!, they removed beryl too :(, that was the saving face of F8 in my opinion wrt graphics."

Fortunately, this bug is not reproducible, but it did bring this to mind:



Don't worry Fedora. We still love you.

Marketing Blah Blah Blah

Marketing Blah Blah Blah

As I've previously announced, I'm going to be concentrating my energy on getting people to sign the CLA. In order to do that, I've come up with some specific posters to that goal. I want to get this set up for the Install Fest in Paris, so they also need to be localized. Any comments on the copy are good. I've never realized how hard it is to write for posters until now.







My only concern is that this might dilute the branding of the original posters. In any case, I plan on keeping these small, and specific to whichever table I'm working at. My plan for the install fest is to park myself down, setup the laptop, and then talk to people about how they can contribute back to the community.

EDIT: Not to be forgetting about the source code, it can be found here

The Truth about Truth

The Truth about Truth

I arrived in Holland last night pretty late, and so far i've been keeping a low internet presence just getting myself moved in. Tomorrow I should be back in full force doing Fedora related hacking.

As I promised, I said I would explain what I meant by 'Truth Happens'. The truth is that a community oriented model of development with a strong emphasis on letting the community decide what to do with itself is a far more effective model for not only development but also marketing. Fedora had a very clear and strong presence at LinuxTag, and everyone I spoke to understood this. The fun part is that this entire effort was engineered by the community. From Fedora bathrobes to the unavoidable digs about being the 'Blue Man Group', it's easy to see that we are making a good impression in Europe.

The best part, though, is the response I got from SuSE and Novell. As some of you may already know, openSuSE is going to ship Smolt with the 11.0 release and enable it in the installer in the 11.1 version. On Saturday, I headed up to the SuSE room to have a chat with one of the managers to find out how well it was working for them. One thing I wanted to find out about was if they wanted to send any patches. Before I even got a chance to ask, Klaas Freitag asked me right out if we would accept patches. I was astonished. After Fosdem, Mike and I had a nailbiting couple of months wondering if they would just take our work and run away with it. Here I was being asked by a competing organisation if we could just collaberate instead.

It's starting to seem that openSuSE is understanding the idea behind a community effort. Perhaps they understood it 2 years ago and waited to see if we could succeed, or perhaps they just figured it out. I don't know. What I do know though, is that seeing how we've succeeded, they are willing to do the same.

There were also a number of other things that were discussed between several different people on both sides of the fence. I'm going to let them talk about it more, but it seems Smolt is not the only project we will have in common in the future. It feels good to be proven right.