Fri, 06 Aug 2010
Starting a miniconf fad at LCA 2011
I've submitted a miniconf for LCA to be run as a FAD in the vein of a mini FUDCon type event
Wiki Page for signing up and being invollved
As I list in the wiki the goals are
- Explain Features coming in Fedora 15.
- Explain how Fedora and The community works, Show how someone can be involved and help guide Fedora's future.
- Provide an opportunity for users and developers to interact.
To pull this off first the LCA organisers need to accept the miniconf and I would need funding for travel, as well as media, pens , maybe some other swag.
posted at: 16:16 | link | | 1 comments
Sun, 25 Jul 2010
The middle of FISL
Day 1 of the exhibition floor of FISL had us very busy at first giving out lots of media. we quickly changed tactics to make sure we had enough to get us through the 3 days, plan 1 was to not just give them out but to engage folks, and give them out then, We also had pens and stickers. Part of our engaging people was to give some quick 30 minutes of so presentations on Fedora Topics.
Toshio gave a talk on the process of joining fedora as a packager. he gave it in English and had a person translating it. to me it felt a little choppy. As a result I decided i had to give mine in Portugese. I sat down with new Fedora packager Rafael Aquini and we translated my slides from english to Portugese. the result can be found Here It was certainly not easy to give a talk in a language i do not speak, but it seemed to go over well. Toshios talk was on Thursday mine on Friday. they were just in the booth. I need to send a massive Shout out to Marillia from Red Hat Brasil who did an amazing job on the booth design. We Spent alot of our time trying to talk with folks and doing whatever we could to help.
Overall FISL went well, We Had fun, Made some freinds, and it was reinforced how big a deal Langauge is I dont know about Africa. but at least in south and Central America there is very little English, and it seems to be the same in Asia. A big take away for me is finding ways to lower the language Barrier. how can we communicate and engage folks who do not know English or even people who only understand a small amount of it.
I'll have a wrap up soon of my trip to South America.
posted at: 22:52 | link | | 2 comments
Sat, 24 Jul 2010
FISL 2010 the start
Following on from FUDCon in Chile, Toshio and I flew to Porto Alegre for FISL 11, this is my 3rd time in Brasil for FISL. the conference is a big thing here. and it continually reinforces to me the need to have documents and support in languages other than English. So many people in South and Central America do not speak a language other than Spanish or Portugese.
Toshio and I arrived in Brasil Monday afternoon. Leo, Marcello and Douglas were kind enough to pick us up from the airport and take us to the hotel. We checked in and parted way with the guys, Toshio and I went and found some Brasilian cheeseburgers, and washed them down with 2 litres of guarana (yummy softdrink), Tuesday We met up with Leo for lunch at the buffet, and walked around the down town area of Porto Alegre. there is a nice mixture of old buildings and newer ones, We explored a local market lots of fresh fruit and veggies, as well as meat and fish. We headed back to the hotel to meet up with Wolnei and Lenno who were flying in. they were delayed a few hours so i tired to catch up on email.
When the boys got in we went and got some pizza for dinner, along with more guarana. followed by a early night
Wednesday We meet up in the hotel, and made our way to the university. We found an amazing half completed booth.
We spent the rest of the day planning how we were going to run the booth and getting it setup in its final configuration
posted at: 13:14 | link | | 0 comments
Mon, 19 Jul 2010
FUDCon santaigo Day 2
Day 2 of fudcon Santiago, I gave a second talk on Joining Fedora infrastructure. I went over the things that fedora infrastucture does and the services it offers to the community. I tried to stree the importance of paitence, being a self starter and picking one thing to start with. My slides can be found Here Please feel free to let me know if there are places for improvement or things you think I got wrong.
Chile is a very intersting place its a mixture of very old and very new. I like old building architecture and its nice to see that some of it has been preserved here. while some of it has been pulled down for new buildings to go up. Thanks to gotencool for taking lots of photos and posting them. He has the same camera as I do.
The people here are very welcoming and freindly. I wish i had learnt more Spanish before coming here, I am doing much better with the language than I did when first going to FISL 3 years ago. Ill see how i go with Portuegese next week. Toshio and Jared get to wrap up FUDCon at the end of day 3.
posted at: 21:45 | link | | 0 comments
Thu, 15 Jul 2010
FUDCon Chile day 1 world meet the new FPL
What do you do when you get a new FPL?
For those under a rock, we have a new FPL, his name is Jared Smith, Toshio and I flew down to FUDCon Santiago Jared who became a Red Hat employee on monday came down also. Due to the lovely airlines We all ended up with cancelled flights. Jared happened to get an extra delay and got in a little late today. FUDCon waited for him. He came in and rocked the opening speach in Spanish.
Following on from Jared i gave a talk on intro to rpm packaging. based very heavily on spots excellent talk on the same subject. It was well recieved, and was followed up with some excellent questions. Day 1 while off to a slow start finished well. now to make sure we get to dinner before 11pm tonight.
Toshio, Jared and I are all going FISL in Porto Alegre, Brasil after FUDCon, we should have lots of things to report on. and lots to learn as we go. Now that Jared is a Red Hat employee i have to find someone else at digium to bug about getting the kernel modules for their hardware upstream.
posted at: 21:57 | link | | 0 comments
Sat, 22 May 2010
What is it?
So while walking through the Iowa state Campus today we kept seeing these little animals, clint kept saying look a squirell.
What we actually saw was chipmunks.
Another totally awesome thing we did see was the Virtual Reality Applications Center that they have here. They are doing some awesome amazing 3d and haptics work that is all powered by open source software
posted at: 03:19 | link | | 1 comments
Fri, 21 May 2010
FAD NA 2010 Day 1
after a 5 hour drive yesterday from home to Ames, IA. I met up with John and Larry, Max flew in shortly after. We ate some local BBQ for tea. then went played some pool and had lots of fedora conversation. After John thoughly beat us all, Max and I chatted while i preppared the pork butts that im going to smoke for our saturday night social dinner event. We have 40lbs of uncooked meat we will end up with 25lbs or so of coooked meat.
Right now we are discussing fedora events and how to have them promote them etc. how can we piggyback on other events, how do we promote fedora at different events and get either new users contributors, fedora awareness etc.
posted at: 16:15 | link | | 0 comments
Mon, 10 May 2010
Fedora 12 SPARC beta
I have pushed a fedora 12 beta sparc tree the master mirror, you can find one close to you Here under /releases/test/12-Beta/sparc/ the tree is pretty much complete. there are a few broken deps that need resolving. Partitioning is fragile. it mostly works however sometimes you will be best off to do manual partitioning in rescue mode or breaking out into a shell.
Here is a quick list of some of the issues you might hit and workarounds.
- serial console install - to have a console on the serial port post install pass "console=ttyS0,9600" to the installer
- serial console install - to do any customisation at all you need to use vnc
- sunblade systems with qlogic hba's for primary storage - Make sure that you do a graphical install (vnc or local X) or kickstart and include "hardware support" this is so that you have the firmware for your primary storage
- install blowing up at partitioning - parted doesnt seem to like old parted disk labels. in rescue mode "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=2" where X == the valuse of each disk
- partitioning is fragile - simple partitioning works fine more complicated setups might require you to manual use parted to setup the partitioning you want and then choosing custom partitiing and allocate as you need to
- less than 512mb ram - using vnc you may get OOM during package install. you will need to either do a default install or select a smaller package set
- repo issues when installing - There is not repos exactly as anaconda wants when doing a netinstall. you can pass repo="path to mirror" or fix up in the gui
Oh and partitioning is fragile, it looks like F-13 will be better
And things ive likely forgotten or missed, please drop into #fedora-sparc on freenode for assistance, questions or feedback.
posted at: 16:58 | link | | 0 comments
Mon, 03 May 2010
Getting EPEL ready for EL-6
So its that time of the RHEL release cycle that we are starting to work on getting EPEL in shape for it, The first step is to prepare for mass branching, that will happen this Friday, 7th of May. if you have a packge that you do no want branched for EL-6 that has a EL-5 branch you need to add a nobranch file to the EL-5 branch with a reason why. the reason why is just for documenting. if you have a package that has moved to RHEL you dont have to add a nobranch but it would be nice if you did.
There is mock configs available in my mock git tree fedora people git tree I need to do a push with ccache of EPEL-6 content for it to work. unless you disable the ccache plugin. koji disables ccache, maybe we need to disable it in mock to make mock more like koji.
Due to how Red Hat is pushing out RHEL we are building i686, x86_64, and ppc64. We could also do s390x builds however i dont know that there is any demand for it. ppc32 and s390 trees are not complete enough for us to use.
posted at: 15:57 | link | | 0 comments
Tue, 25 Aug 2009
fedora-cert
A few fedora-packager releases ago, i added a utility to fedora-packager called fedora-cert. its intended as a utility to check that your cert is good and download a new one when needed. Ive not touted it since the verification of certificates is incomplete. pyOpenSSL doesnt have CRL support so i cant check to see if your certificate is revoked or not (there is about 10 implementations upstream waiting to be decided upon). What does work is "fedora-cert -n" which will get you a new certificate and save it in place. you just then need to run fedora-packager-setup.
since lots of peoples certificates are about to expire i wanted to get work out there that this is an option for you. rather than downloading the cert from the browser and manually putting in place. Down the road I want to make this a library so that fedora-packager-setup will let you do everything in one step. but you can verify your cert manually and fedora-cvs can tell you that your certs has expired, been revoked or is about to expire. So please give it a whirl and report bugs.
posted at: 17:11 | link | | 0 comments
Wed, 24 Jun 2009
Day one of FISL 10
Im once again at FISL in Porto Alegre, Brasil. I feel much more comfortable here this year. I understand some portugese but not alot and speak very little. Communications this year are better. Also in attendance are Fedora ambassadors from other parts of Latin America, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico, and elsewhere im likely forgetting now. there is a mixture of English, Spanish and Brazillian Portugese.
its nice to see that Fedora makes the press in Latin Aerica
I gave my talk on spacewalk this morning. There was a good turn out. I had hoped for more questions. But i guess i either answerd them all, they did not have them at this point in time. or i just confused them all. Im hoping it was the first two options. I did have positive feedback.
posted at: 18:45 | link | | 0 comments
Sat, 20 Jun 2009
The Fedora 11 Elections
I thought is remind everyone that there is approximitly 2 days left to vote in the fedora elections going on right now. I honestly dont care if you vote for me or not, but i would really like for everyone to have there say in who they think will help guide fedora forward during the next year. To vote you need to be in cla_done and one other group in fas, then go Here.
posted at: 15:38 | link | | 0 comments
Thu, 14 May 2009
Humbug talk May 16
This saturday at 6pm AEST im going to give a talk at humbug on "Fedora, SPARC, spacewalk. An open source world" if anyone is in South East Queensland and wants to come along feel free. Apparently QUT and UQ students have been invited. It will be intresting to see what changes QUT has made since I graduated from there.
posted at: 00:43 | link | | 0 comments
Tue, 14 Apr 2009
Fedora 11 SPARC status
today i did a rawhide sparc compose from dist-f11 rather than dist-f9 that we had been using, Im syncing that right now to the primary mirror. it will take a little while since its really big.
16G /mnt/koji/tree/development/source 22G /mnt/koji/tree/development/sparc 13G /mnt/koji/tree/development/sparc64
If you have been keeping your SPARC boxes updated you should be pointing at the F-9 bits and not rawhide still. Ify your not please dont updat to this tree. at the least you need to grab the F-10 rpm from koji. We have Stronger hases just like the primary arches. No work has been done on anaconda at this point. we have a glibc bug that we are waiting on a patch to be applied then we can catch up. most of the packages are from pre mass rebuild state. but it is the closest that we have ever been to being in the same state as the primary arches. we have a kernel that ws built with gcc-4.4 It has been tested and does work :)
Fedora SPARC Linux is built for ultrasparc and newer hardware only. There is no support for any 32 bit hardware. we are shipping a 32 bit userland and 64 bit kernel. if you have specific needs for greater than 4gb ram per process you can enable the 64 bit repo and install 64 bit userland apps.
posted at: 03:07 | link | | 1 comments
Wed, 01 Apr 2009
Busy Busy Busy
Its been awhile since i've posted anything. I have been really busy. Its hard to believe that Macy is 4 months old already. Im sure everyone has has heard it before but Babies are amzing. It really is different when it is your own baby. Her first Passport will arrive soon, we have a trip planed to Australia in May. Once we get back ill submit whats needed so she can be an Aussie citizen also. travelling with a nearly 6 month old should be interesting, and our direct flight from Brisbane to LA got cnacelled so we get an extra flight though Sydney home all up we fly PIA -> ORD -> LAX -> BNE -> SYD -> LAX -> DFW -> PIA. we are considering flying to Melbourne for a few days so i can show Jenny where i was born and grew up as a kid and take Macy to meet my Nanna.
Something i've been working on alot lately is secondary arches. It feels like we are finally getting over the hump and making good progress with them. s390 is making good progress, as is arm, and even alpha. No one seems to want to do the right thing with ia64, which is kinda sad. SPARC is rolling along nicely and someone stepped up this week to do parisc. If someone wants to do mips drop me an email.
Today we released spacewalk 0.5, it still depends on oracle :( but we are making progress towards being able to work using postgresql. 0.5 runs on fedora :) thats something im proud that we have finally done. We are slowly working out how spacewalk fits in and how to do things. Its a big change in how satellite has been developed. The spacewalk/Satellite devs are finding there feet and doing a great job of working in the open with the community. slowly there is contributions from outside of Red Hat which is great to see Colin Coe is doing a grea job of supporting spacewalk. I was talking with some guys in #humbug last week, they were talking about setting up spacewalk. I cant remeber if id never said what i do for a job or if they just forgot. but it was cool to see spacewalk talk going on in other places. They are very excited about having a full open source stack. I think that Postgresql support will be warmly welcomed by everyone. If someone wanted to get involved in spacewalk development it would be awesome to look at integrating func, bcfg2 ( or some other config management system), looking at extenting monitoring perhaps by integarting another tool such as nagios or zabbix. There really is endless possibilities on what can be done. so if you have an itch that you want to scratch introduce yourself on the spacewalk-devel list and get to work :)
overall i've been extremly busy. I have alot that I want to get done on my house this year. hopefully last weeks freak snow storm is the last till next winter. I have alot fo garden work I want to do as well as finsihing the dining room, library, and my office. dining room i need to finish installing trim. Library i need to strip the hundred year old wall paper and patch up the plaster. then install crown molding to finish off the book selves to the ceiling, and my office i want to paint, install a window seat with storage on one wall, install new flooring and install trim. Id really like to have the carpet pulled up and get the floors polished. one of the benfits of having a house thats over 150 years old is the character. sadly the people who owned the house before us pulled alot of it out. My dad is a builder and i worked with him from the time i was 12 or 13 on school breaks. as well as for awhile after i finished high school. It is a blessing and a curse. I insist on doing everything myself, because I know hwo to do it. However I dont always want to do it, but i'm too stubbourn to get someone in to do it. My Father in law is always telling me that im doing things the old school way. but thats how I learnt to do things so its how I do them. I think to think that i do a good job.
posted at: 04:12 | link | | 0 comments
Thu, 24 Jul 2008
First Day of OLS
Yesterday was the first day of OLS, It was also the day that I gave my presentation. My talk was on Secondary arches, where they stand how it works, the tools and resoucres that you need to do a secondary arch, as well as what you get from Fedora by doing one. hopefully we will add PA-RISC to the list of secondary arches, id really like to see fedora for mips also, though i dont have time to do it myself.
I need to take and post pictures :) So far i quite like Ottawa, there is food that is much more like that in Australia (Must be a British thing). ive gotten to meet some fedora guys that ive not met before, even though ive "worked" with them for years.
On other news i'm leaving OLPC at the end of the month. Michael Stone let the cat out of the bag that ill be joing Red Hat. I'm leaving because of changes in my personal life, witha baby on the way, I feel that it is the right move for me. I will still be helping OLPC, they are shipping over 50,000 laptops a month with Fedora pre-installed. it just wont be my primary focus. Greg is doinga awesome job of getting OLPC and fedora working better together. We must continue to embrace and work with each other, it will benefit both sides.
posted at: 19:06 | link | | 1 comments
Wed, 16 Jul 2008
Interview by Barton George
While at fudcon in Boston, I was interviewed by Barton George who is a linux community guy for Sun Microsystems He posted it today. So i thought id share it with the rest of the fedora world. His blog entry for it can be found here, its really weird to hear myself in the podcast, and to be interviewed for it. I feel like i'm just one of the guys who keeps the wheels turning and helping those doing the really cool stuff to make sure they have what they need. I'm generally a very quiet person. The only time i've not been quiet is when I played football, I was a middle linebacker for the Gold Coast Stingrays for many years, I was always a leader on the field and the loudest guy there, other than that ive always been a very quiet person. Ive generally shied away from any type of publicity. I really am glad that we have managed to get OpenJDK built for SPARC, and the achievements that Fedora has made over the last few years make me very proud to be part of the community.
posted at: 16:33 | link | | 0 comments
Tue, 01 Jul 2008
Dont upset the fearless leader
What should you never do at fudcon?
Upset the fearless leader
posted at: 14:09 | link | | 3 comments
Thu, 26 Jun 2008
Where is OLPC today
Where is OLPC today?
Building and Shipping 50,000 laptops a month. Each and every one of them running Fedora. so far there has been over 390,000 laptops shipped. Which im guessing is the largest single Fedora Install base. Thats kinda mind boggling to realise. Going forward over half a million will be shipped in the next couple of months
What can Fedora do here?
Make the suagr experience in Fedora better. We have Packaging guidelines. we have a ton of Activities. Lets get them into Fedora. Lets look at what packages OLPC forks, work out why, and work out how we can eliminate that need. switching from Fedora 7 to Fedora 9 we pulled in an extra 100 packages. That needs to be cut down. There are needs on the school server. If you can give a little time to help out and want to know what else you can do contact me. I really want OLPC and Fedora to work better together.
posted at: 17:54 | link | | 6 comments
Tue, 03 Jun 2008
Building Sulpher for SPARC
Trying to get everything build for Fedora 9 for SPARC, I threw some jobs at the build system this weekend. We have two builders, they are as follows:
A T1000 named daedalus, it has 16gb ram and a 8 x 1ghz core, multithreaded niagara cpu. it is a 32 way system. It has been doing well with the load. Id like to get the load average up higher. koji cant get jobs to it quick enough. here is todays load average graphs for it.
A T2000 named korolev, it has 8gb ram and a 8 x 1ghz core, multithreaded niagara cpu. it is a 32 way system. It has also been doing well.
This is part of the Secondary Architecure proposal. We are getting there slowly. If you want to help feel free to put up your hand. we can find tasks for people to do. People will also see mail for packages they own. we are going to try cut as much of it out as we can. but you will get noticies for failures. some of the ones we have seen so far are due to changes in qt packaging for instance. it is alot of challenging rewarding work to get things up. Building on all these different architectures helps ensure code is portable. Please mention in your dealings with upstream that we are building on lots of architectures. some that are rarely done. for instance due to how koji works we are building all sparc packages sparc32 and sparc64 even though historically little has been built sparc64 as there is no gains from doing so.
There is currently 3 hubs up and runnings ia64, s390, and SPARC. with arm and alpha to follow. perhaps even mips or hppa or some other architecture you like. Just some of the cool things Fedora is doing to let people scratch their own itch.
posted at: 21:27 | link | | 0 comments
Thu, 22 May 2008
Greg Labeled
And the winner is.....
Big thanks to Mo for making the art work for me. The winner is Alex with "Fake Bench. Real Linux". Thanks to everyone who put in an entry.
posted at: 04:26 | link | | 1 comments
Fri, 25 Apr 2008
Label Greg
This needs a label
The person that comes up with the best label for this picture of Greg will get themselves a shiny Fedora T-Shirt.
posted at: 02:24 | link | | 26 comments
Sun, 20 Apr 2008
Chicken Heart Cheeseburger
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We went to a little trendy restraunt here in Porto Alegre tonight and Greg ordered the Chicken Heart Cheeseburger. The above pictures tell the tale. spot and I ordered the Chicken Cheeseburger. They were delicious. Just not quite what is a typical cheesburger for the parts of the world that i've been to. Today was the last day of FISL. I really enjoyed my time here. The Fedora Ambasadors as well as the OLPC Activity developers have all been wonderful, they accepted us warmly and showed us a good time. I have really learnt alot this week.I definetly want to come back to FISL next year, 7000 people registered, the place was packed and people were doing really neat things with little resources. I will be more prepared and learn some portugese so that communications is a much smaller issue than it has been this time. We worked things out and ive started picking up and recognising some words. One thing that I found different here to when I was in Italy was that the people in Brazil were much more polite, even appologising that they did not speak very good english when it should have been me speaking to them in their native tounge. I was the visitor here and was welcomed like a long lost relative. Thank you to all who helped make it great. I have learnt a lot and hope that I can help to make it better. |
posted at: 03:04 | link | | 4 comments
Sat, 19 Apr 2008
FISL Day 2
yesterday was the middle day of FISL, I went to a talk given by one of the Fedora Ambassadors Rodrigo Padula de Oliveira, it was entitled XO / OLPC - Ele é verde, bonitinho e roda Fedora (XO/OLPC - It is green, beautiful and runs Fedora) while in Portuguese, I was able to follow parts of it. I had helped Rodrigo earlier in the day setting up his laptop to show sugar during his talk. he was trying to use sugar-jhbuild which really needs to be rm -rf'd from everywhere. Things would not build because they needed patching for gcc-4.3 (he is running rawhide :) ) and the build process wipes away your patches (Thanks spot for trying) so we yum installed suagr and telepath-salut telepathy-gable (Still some packaging issues to be fixed) I grabbed some .xo bundles and put them in /usr/share/activities and he was able to log into sugar from gdm, out of the box. you can also run sugar inside your regular desktop by running sugar-emulator. I need to finish getting some changes into the activity packaging guidelines so that we can package up sugar activities as rpms they you will be able to run "yum groupinstall sugar-desktop" and get a working sugar environment, perfect for your kids to use, or for developing activities.
There is alot of Activity development here in Brazil. Some of them we see. I met the team that developed paint last night at the Mozilla 10th Birthday party. A lot of the activities we dont see. a problem we have is having a way for activity developers to know where and how to post information on the activity. I think a great project for someone would be to write a TurboGears app like Fedora's Package Database that we could use for tracking activities. something that would let people find out about the different activities that are out there.
Fedora is a great place for people to get involved in OLPC, the OS on the XO is based on fedora. Fedora is a great development tool. with sugar shipping in fedora, its a great tool to develop activities for sugar. If you have kids and want to give them the sugar experience then fedora is also great for that. OLPC and Fedora have a lot that they can gain from each other. We really need to work better together. PLease contact me if you want to help in any way shape or form. It really does not matter what part of the world you are in.
posted at: 15:09 | link | | 0 comments
Fri, 18 Apr 2008
We Got Stickers
We went to the firefox sessions and got some neat treats. Including these really cool stickers
And Mo you can't have one
posted at: 21:35 | link | | 3 comments
FISL Day 1
Yesterday was day 1 of FISL, spot and I waited in line for an hour and a half to get our passes and bags full of phamplets and a magazine. There is over 6000 people registered
this was part of 2 of the 5 lines. they were sorted by First name which really wasnt clear and seemed odd. But we got though ok.
I went to Scotts talk on OLPC. there was a good turnout though Language was a barrier that kept others away im sure. There is alot of interest in OLPC and Fedora here. The line up of people for fedora cds was quite large. People were happy to wait
I really want to see us work out how to overcome langauge issues. I think thats its something that is a must
we finished up going to a dinner at a Brazilian Steak house. It was a river of meat. Guys with skewers that looked like swords walked around serving up all sorts of deliciousnes. there was a entertaining show put on that involved lots of danging and swinging around some kine of ball on a chain. im pretty sure that it would violate all sorts of rules in both the US and Australia
Greg suggested after talking about when I played football that I needed to put up a new hackergotchi picture on my Planet Fedora feed. so now there is a picture from when i represtented Australia in the firstever world cup of American Football in Palermo, Scicily, way back in 1999. Yes I used to play american football. I played 10 years of Middle Line backer for the Gold Coast Stingrays. It was playing football that initially brought me to the USA, its is also because of it that I met my wife and that im where I am today. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the things and see the places around the world that I have. I really am thankful for what I have.
posted at: 21:34 | link | | 2 comments
Thu, 17 Apr 2008
Sight seeing in Brazil
So day 2 in Porto Alegre, We met up with David Barzilay, He is a Red hat guy who does alot ofr fedora ambasators here in Brazil. We went over some of the things that we would like to see from FISL. One Big thing I want to see is Fedora and OLPC helping each other more. The ambasators here do an amazing job. They published a magazine can be found here. One thing that I naively expected was that younger people would know both Portugesse and English, just as most of europe does. I have also learnt that fedora suffers from one of the same thing afflicting OLPC, a need to translate software into all languages. a takeaway that I have from this it that we need to come up with a way to translate from one language to another, not just from english to language foo. People who know Spanish and Portugesse need to have a way to be enabled to translate. I also se the importance of doing different language spins. I think though that a team of native speakers should do the spins and that they should be primarilary hosted in the country that they are intended for. Say for instance a Brazillian Portugesse spin should have hosting in Brazil. Many countries have good internal infrastructure but it is expensive and slow to use international links. We need to remove this road block and get local people making live cds that suit the local needs.
We did a little sight seeing we went to some local museums they were all free entry. One was a art museum, it was largely local art which was good to see. The history museum was a little hard to follow as it was largely words. while i dont undertsand portugesse i was able to make out some words. finally we went to a cultural museum, there was alot of interactive flash based activities, that made me kid of sad. I ama big beliver in using free and open source software wherever possible the short film entitled "Last Hippie Standing" was in English and somewhat entertaining.
posted at: 22:22 | link | | 1 comments
Wed, 16 Apr 2008
I'm in Brazil
I arraived in Bazil yesterday afternoon, I'm here for FISL where im going to represent OLPC and Fedora. I've been looking forward to this for awhile now. I was really honoured when I was asked to attend. So far I've not seen alot, Spot and I are going sightseeing this arvo. I need to break out the phrase book and really try harder to learn some portugese. I fluently speak Aussie and American English, I speak some British English, and nothing else. For awhile now ive been wanting to learn spanish. I really need to just make it happen.
Not sure if many people care much, but i tend to be very queit about what im doing, I tend to just do things and get them done.. I'm going to really try harder to be more vocal about it. Mike McGrath is a great inspiration in this regard he has an amazing ability to both get stuff done and to let people know whats going on and how to help. Kudo's to Luke, Toshio, and Ricky you guys Rock, you always deliver and get stuff done.
posted at: 15:22 | link | | 1 comments
Thu, 10 Apr 2008
Ill do the history thing
[dennis@bratac ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
225 ssh
87 ls
84 cd
70 vi
51 make
48 cvs
34 ssh-add
32 cat
25 sudo
22 koji
seems I mostly go places. ssh-add being there so much is from X going blank on me all the time.
posted at: 23:25 | link | | 3 comments
Sun, 16 Mar 2008
knetworkmanger is dead
Due to a complete lack of progress upstream and not enough time to work on it myself. We have had to completely drop knetworkmanager from Fedora. it should remove the confusion some users ahve when they realise that the knetworkmanager package since F8 has just been a shell calling nm-applet
I would like to encourage anyone with c++ skills and a desire to see knetworkmanager be back in feodra to get involed in upstream development
posted at: 03:36 | link | | 1 comments
Wed, 06 Feb 2008
knetworkmanger is hitting rawhide
Thanks to Kevin Kofler and Rex Dieter. They both helped to get a svn snapshot of knetworkmanager built yesterday. In F-8 we had to put in a stub since knetworkmanager was not ported to the new NetworkManager-0.7 api. Its still not ported :(
The new build only supports connecting to wireless and wired networks. None of the vpn plugins have been ported, and none of the dialup networking support in the new NM have been added. So we have about 6 weeks to get everything added or we may have to pull it again. Here is a list of things that i know need doing
- vpnc plugin
- openvpn plugin
- pptp plugin
- GSM Modem support
- EVDO Modem support (Is it in NM yet?)
- Dial up modem support
- All the cool stuff here
Im probably missing something. So if you can code in qt3 then please contact Kevin, Rex, or Me so we can make sure that we get everything done for F-9. we can also release it as an update for F-8 then.
posted at: 06:36 | link | | 2 comments
Tue, 06 Nov 2007
New Job
For those that dont know yet. Im changing jobs. I accepted an offer from OLPC, I will be their build system and release engineer person. I will be working remotely however I will be spending time in Boston, so any fedora people that want to catch up drop me a line. This is an opportunity that came my way entirely because of my work with fedora. So to everyone that works on Fedora thank you. I officially start on Nov 12.
What does this mean for fedora? Well for one, I plan to do everything I can in fedora. I will be spending more time on fedora. I will also be trying to build a community around OLPC. Hopefully much like mmcgrath has done with Fedora Infrastructure. I would like to enable people to build their own custom firmware for the XO. Mainly enabling the countries to be self sufficient. Take the pieces that are of intrest to them and make it work. Right now im just barely getting my toes wet and have yet to work out everything that will be involved. I will be posting as often as I can, making sure that everyone knows whats going on. It really is intresting to see how OLPC has taken the fedora base and added sugar on top of it. It is not your fathers fedora :).
posted at: 20:48 | link | | 6 comments
Mon, 15 Jan 2007
New Laptop
For awhile now ive been looking at new laptops. One thing that is hard about the laptop/notebook market is taht it is really hard to do it yourself. There are some Linux only Vendors out there. R3 and System76 the thing i dont like about them are that they are quick to throw propietory stuff on your system and they dont seem to be working with upstream projects to get there patches integrated. so you end up with an un supportable system. Well to me any way. Of the two i looked harder at R3 as they supply/support Fedora System76 only support Ubuntu.
In the End I went with Dell. The offer there Latitude Series notebooks with FreeDOS. So you are free to put what you choose on it. The only downside is that you need to order it through the Small business section. To find out what they have on offer go to dell.com select small business notebooks. Then in the Menu bar at the top of there site the notebook drop down has Open-Source Notebooks as an option select it and you can get one of 4 different models. So what i ended up getting is a Latitutde D820N with dual core 2.0ghz intel CPU, 2GB ram, 80 Gb hdd, dvd burner, 15.4" screen @ 1680x1050. Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950, Intel 3945 WLAN and Bluetooth. I should get it about a week before FUDCon. Im going to do a rawhide install on it.
posted at: 19:21 | link | | 0 comments