Fedora/RedHat

I’ll be heading in to Austin tomorrow to check in and get my badge before the crazy lines roll in Friday morning. Tomorrow night I’ll be at the Social Media BBQ at Emo’s. Friday I’ll start off in the Blogger’s Lounge because that’s where all the cool kids hang out. Depending on how my retrospective call at work goes (it’s the end of our agile development cycle) I hope to attend a few UX panels. You can find all the panels I’ve selected to attend on my SXSW schedule.

Saturday night the company I work for is cosponsoring a party with Tumblr, FourSquare, SoundCloud, and KickStarter at Emo’s. They are also cosponsoring the Houston@SXSW party Monday night at Hudson on Fifth. You can RSVP for that party here.

Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any Austin Barcamp activities going on. If there is something going on that I don’t know about yet, please inform me! I’d like to start a discussion on the need for good designers in free and open source software development and to brainstorm ways to get designers more interested in participating!

If you can’t find me at the panels I’ve posted, the Blogger’s Lounge, or at these parties - you should be able to spot me at The Planet’s booths (303 & 305) in the tradeshow sometime Sat & Sun 12 - 6 and Monday 12 - 4. I’m told there will be sweeeeeet giveaways so I hope to see you there!

In addition to the last posting here a new one:

[Original by Johnny Vulcan via flicke under cc-licence; edited by Henrik Heigl]

[Original by Velo Steve via flickr, edited by Henrik Heigl]

[Original by Abraxas3d via flickr, edited by Henrik Heigl]

Continuando la "tradizione" dei giovedì di test, domani sarà la volta delle webcam.

Infatti, dopo il lavoro già svolto in Fedora 10 e Fedora 12 per migliorare il supporto a tutti i tipi di webcam, anche per Fedora 13 Hans de Goede ha deciso di lavorare sui driver di quelle ancora parzialmente (o per nulla) funzionanti, con particolare attenzione alle cosidette "dual-mode camera", che possono cioè funzionare sia da webcam che da fotocamera digitale.

Come al solito, partecipare è semplice: se già state usando la versione Alpha, eseguite Cheese o un programma analogo e verificate che la vostra webcam funzioni correttamente.

Se invece non avete installato la Alpha è sempre possibile usare il live CD più recente ed eseguire i test senza installare nulla. Questo metodo è consigliato anche a tutti agli utenti di altre distribuzioni che vogliano contribuire ai progetti conivolti (kernel e libv4l): i problemi riportati e risolti finiranno ovviamente anche nella vostra distribuzione. Potenza dell'open source :)

Tutti i dettagli sulla pagina wiki dedicata.

I’m totally jazzed about the upcoming Marketing FAD which kicks off this weekend.  The Marketeers will be meeting in Raleigh, Friday (late-late Friday, probably starting at zee Waffle House!) and ending Tuesday; I’ll be headed out of town Wednesday.  We have a boatload of deliverables we plan on knocking out, and on top of that, well, FUN STUFF.  We’re going to a hockey game, for one – and, coincidentally, It will be the Carolina Hurricanes vs. Phoenix Coyotes.

So for background: Ryan Rix and I are both traveling to RDU from… you guessed it, Phoenix.  I am not exactly the world’s biggest sports nut, but of course I have to root for my hometown, so I’ve been cracking jokes about how I’m going to be decked out in my full Coyotes gear (which, of course, I don’t actually have).  Here’s a fun clip from the marketing meeting yesterday on IRC, where we were discussing any last-minute items we needed to wrap up before our FAD:

20:06:35 <spevack> so I think we're in pretty decent shape. 20:06:46 <spevack> That's really about it from my end. 20:06:47 <spevack> HOCKEY 20:06:48 <spevack> 20:06:48 <spevack> EOF 20:06:50 <rbergeron> oh 20:07:09 * rbergeron and rrix are bringin yotes gear 20:07:27 * rrix has a jersey 20:07:31 * mchua chuckles 20:07:35 <rbergeron> oh, you do? ergh 20:07:43 * rbergeron has... facepaint?

In any case: I’m somewhat packed, I’m only bringing 2 pairs of shoes (zomg, I know, right?!) because I have to make room for…

COOKIES!!

I’m up to my ears in promises. ke4qqq may be going home from the FAD with 10 boxes of girl scout cookies because of his limesurvey awesomeness (plz see my ongoing tale of luv for survey-goodness on the fp.o market research wiki page).

But seriously: I had a point to this blog post. And I’m getting to it…. right… now.

Tagged: cookies, FAD, Fedora, marketing

For as long as I can remember I have found the LWN.net Community Calendar very useful. It would perhaps be nice to have a similar web-based calendar for Fedora events across the world. Currently, the events are tracked by this page. That is nice but doesn’t give the visual representation of a month full of events world-wide.

It would be nice to have a calendar that integrates with FAS and, allows someone to post the details of the event. Another group of folks, can take a look-see at the posting and approve it to be listed. The original poster could choose to be the event owner or, add someone who is the actual owner. Since Events etc fall under the ambit of FAmSCo, perhaps they might consider this stuff.

You’ve got a partitioned disk image, how do you pull out of that just the filesystem(s)? It’s easy with libguestfs tools:

$ virt-list-filesystems -al disk.img /dev/sda1 ext4 /dev/vg_f12x32/lv_root ext4 /dev/vg_f12x32/lv_swap swap $ virt-cat disk.img /dev/sda1 > boot.fs $ file boot.fs boot.fs: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data (extents) (huge files) $ virt-cat disk.img /dev/vg_f12x32/lv_root > root.fs

You can also use guestfish to examine the filesystem image:

$ guestfish -a boot.fs -m /dev/sda Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for editing virtual machine filesystems. Type: 'help' for help with commands 'quit' to quit the shell ><fs> ll / total 15941 dr-xr-xr-x. 5 root root 1024 Mar 8 19:37 . dr-xr-xr-x 19 root root 0 Mar 8 13:40 .. -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1486532 Nov 7 21:38 System.map-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.PAE -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 103788 Nov 7 21:38 config-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.PAE drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 1024 Mar 8 19:12 efi drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 1024 Mar 8 19:49 grub -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 11253019 Mar 8 19:39 initramfs-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.PAE.img drwx------. 2 root root 12288 Mar 8 18:45 lost+found -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 3454368 Nov 7 21:38 vmlinuz-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.PAE ><fs> cat /grub/grub.conf # grub.conf generated by anaconda # # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file # NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that # all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg. # root (hd0,0) # kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_f12x32-lv_root # initrd /initrd-[generic-]version.img #boot=/dev/sda default=0 timeout=0 splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz hiddenmenu title Fedora (2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.PAE) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.PAE ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_f12x32-lv_root LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=uk rhgb quiet initrd /initramfs-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.PAE.img ><fs>

I appreciated Kevin Fenzi’s post on Knowing Vs. Doing and it pushed me to clarify the thinking behind my original post.

Kevin has a great point that there can be a lot of enjoyment from “knowing” and acquiring knowledge to which I would add, “even if there is no plan for what you will do with that knowledge.”  There is nothing wrong with that.

I want to be a person of greater forward progress and accomplishment.  These are two things that I value.  I also value knowledge.  I’ve found, however, that when I place all my value on knowledge things get lopsided–more and more time gets invested in “wanting to know” and the resistance to “doing” gets higher.

This makes me wonder if the discussions in the Fedora Project are too focused on “being right” before “doing.” Mitch Joel had a recent article along similar lines called Complaining vs. Doing.  I’m hoping for more “doing” and less talking, arguing, and complaining.

No one is required to share my values of forward progress, accomplishment, and knowledge.  I do think it is important to consider the affect our values might be having on the Fedora Project.  If someone places a high value on arguing and debate, does that create an environment for a pleasant, sustainable Fedora Project?

Someone could equally argue my values of forward progress and accomplishment are detrimental to the Fedora Project, though if I thought that were true, naturally I would not focus on them.

What do you value most as it relates to the Fedora Project and what are you doing about it?

Filed under: Fedora, Productivity

Ladies and gentlemen, God Street Wine is getting back together for a couple of shows this summer and their fan club presale tickets go on sale in a half hour. I was bummed because I was getting on a flight to Austin for a friend’s wedding, right before ticketing opened. Well, I am on that flight now and apparently all American Airlines domestic flights have WiFi. Technology can be awesome sometimes (usually when it makes it easier to do every day things). Let’s just hope my battery doesn’t die before I can snag a few tickets.

Note: Fedora connected flawlessly. Bar none, we have the easiest networking setup out there. Dan Williams has done a kick ass job with Network Manager!

Update: Just purchased six tickets for Friday and six for the Saturday shows! The money goes to a good cause and I have plenty of friends who will come back to NY for this.

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

The best reference book.

Fedora 11 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Bible

xD !

[sub focus - rock it]

did’nt believe it fits so good… hear it, feeil it, rock it.

Many places I go I meet people telling how much they liked graphic tutorials and how much they learned about using GIMP and Inkscape following theb, and this makes me feel bad, as I am quite busy lately with a lot of things (video and photography ate a lot of my time) and rarely manage to write something new. But here is a perfect opportunity, Fedora 13 entered Alpha and had a code name (Goddard) and so far a visual theme based on rocketry, so it seems a tutorial titled "Drawing a rocket with Inkscape is not rocket science" would be just fit.

The target here is to produce something like this, not extremely realistic but easily recognizable as a rocket and the most important, fun (hopefully) and easy to create by someone who is using Inkscape for the first time.

So start Inkscape and draw a rectangle, which must be more tall than wide (we are drawing a rocket!) and have straight, not rounded corners.

Then select it and convert to path, we will do node editing.

Now go in node editor and select the two top nodes. The following operation can be done (as far as I know) only from keyboard: press Ctrl + Alt + > to enlarge the segment, the result should be a trapezium with the big side up.

With the same two top nodes selected, add a new node in the middle of their segment.

Select the new node (only it) and move it up (keep the Ctrl key pressed to limit the movement to vertical only).

Select back the two nodes that were the top corners of the rectangle and make them symmetric, for a shape starting to look like a bullet/rocket.

To finish the bullet shape of the rocket body we need to make the bottom edge rounded: select the two bottom corners, add a new node in the middle, select it, move a bit up and made it symmetric, now we have a bullet, an aerodynamic shape.

A rocket needs some "wings", so we will create another rectangle, this time much smaller.

Select the rectangle and click on it once, this will put in in rotate/skew mode so we need to skew it a bit my dragging on the arrow on one of its edges.

Move it in position, next to the rocket body.

Again, in rotate/skew mode, rotate it a bit by dragging one of the arrows at the corners, until we like the alignment. Note: no worry if the alignment is not perfect, lower it under the body and when filled with color this won't be noticeable.

Select the wing and duplicate it.

Flip the new (duplicate) wing horizontally and move it to the other side of the rocket body (keep Ctrl pressed to limit the movement to horizontal).

The wing facing us is another thin rectangle, with the same height as the other wings (technically, we should have two rectangles, one for each edge, but for now use one for simplicity). To center the new wing to the rocket body, select it and the body, then use the Align and Distribute dialog to align them horizontally relative to the biggest item (the body).

Now you know what is needed for a funny rocket? A window, so the astronauts inside can look at the space. Start by drawing a circle, which will be the windows frame (I think I am boring repeating this, but keep Ctrl pressed, so what you draw is a round circle not an ellipse).

Select the circle and the rocket body and align vertically to the center of the body.

Another smaller circle will be the real window.

Select the two circles and align them horizontally and vertically.

Now color the items, using either the color palette at the bottom, the Fill and Stroke button in the toolbar or any of the other possible ways (there are quite a few). A rocket is usually silverish, so use shades of gray.

If you want the rocket less realistic but screaming "Fedora", make those grays a bit bluish or go the extra mile and straightly use the Fedora colors (light and dark blue).

Back to our rocket, let's make it fly. Take the Bezier tool (pen) and draw freely a few spikes, they will be the flame.

Color the flame red or a redish orange and lower it under the rocket body.

The core of the flame is supposed to be warmer, so let's draw a new set of smaller spikes in yellow.

Optionally, if we want the rocket cruising, not just taking-off, select everything and rotate a bit.

A bit of beautification never hurt, so let's make the rocket a bit more realistic (if you can call that "realistic") and less cartoon. Remove the strokes (for example using the Fill and Stroke dialog) and use silver gradients for all metallic surfaces, do this by using the Gradient tool, dragging and editing colors.

Fill everything with gradients, including the flames and the window.

Select the inner (yellow) flame and using the Fill and Stroke dialog Blur it a bit for a more realistic (and prettier) look.

Blur also the outer (red/orange) flame. And that's about all.

Now our rocket can take-of and fly proudly. Go to the stars and beyond them!

Pois é, hoje, quem diria, o homem mais poderoso do mundo está completando 70 anos! (lembre-se de que um ano de Chuck Norris equivale a 7 anos em idade de gente) Como diz o artigo do Yahoo "ele acaba...

Um blog sobre tecnologia, informática, ironia e desventuras na vida de um geek

Fedora 13 “Goddard de la” Alpha está disponible! ¿Qué sigue para el sistema operativo libre que muestra la mejor tecnología del mañana? Podés ver el futuro en:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

¿Qué es una versión Alpha? La versión alfa contiene todas las características de Fedora 13 en una forma que cualquier persona puede ayudar a probar. Esta prueba, guiados por el equipo de control de calidad de Fedora, nos ayuda a identificar los errores. Al arreglar estos errores, hacemos una versión beta disponible. Una versión beta es de código completo, y tiene un parecido muy fuerte para la tercera entrega y final. La versión final de Fedora 13 está prevista para abril.

Necesitamos tu ayuda para hacer de Fedora 13, el mejor lanzamiento hasta ahora, así que por favor tomáte un poco de tu tiempo para descargar y probar el Alfa y asegurarte de que las cosas que son importantes para vos están funcionando. Si encontrás un error, por favor reportale, cada error que se descubre es una oportunidad para mejorar la experiencia de millones de usuarios de Fedora en todo el mundo. Juntos, podemos hacer una distribución de Fedora sólida como una roca.

Características de Feddora 13 Alpha

Notas de Lanzamiento

From what I have seen in this blog post looks like Ubuntu has gained option to have transparent GNOME windows.

I hope this feature goes upstream as fast as possible so that Fedora gets this great feature as soon as possible, maybe for Fedora 14? Anybody has some insight regarding Fedora and transparency?

Technical thoughts:

I installed goddard on my eeepc 900 and have some issues. Right after the first boot gnote crashed and activated the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT). So I lol’d and started getting my WPA key put in so that I could report it. Only one problem. The ABRT window is bigger than my screen size, it cuts off just above where you can attach files. So I have no way of easily reporting the gnote bug.

If that wasn’t enough I can’t update it because of a discrepancy in Open Office core versions, and for some reason yum upgrade –skip-broken isnt working, nor is trying to let the GUI update tool handle it.

Non-Technical Thoughts:

I was almost pissed yesterday when I saw the “official” shortened urls for linking to the Alpha yesterday. The “official” shortened urls were setup so that we (the project) could have some data on how popular this release was. My issue was the services that were used are non-free; is.gd, bit.ly, and tinyurl. I was prepared to loose my mind and then I decided that before loosing my cool I should mention this in the mailing list. So I went through my trash folder (I’m so glad I don’t ever clear that out, it is now a personal procedure to keep all “trashed” email [and I don't worry because my hard drive is encrypted]) and replied that I was bad form for us to use non-free url shortners and let everyone know about ur1.ca and 2tu.us. No one knew these existed and it even prompted Paul Frields to edit his blog post to add them to the list.

Sometimes a little checking before you fly off the handle and run your mouth on the interwebs is good. Damn this whole turning 25 and deciding I should act like an adult thing

So please tryout Goddard; see how it works for you, and please post your thoughts about it in the comments or drop a link to your thoughts if you post them else where.

There is a lot of discussion ongoing about how to change Fedora updates and several proposals for an update policy float around. But after I read parts of the FESCo log for the meeting last night, where an updates policy was discussed, I came to another conclusion. Fedora needs more systematic testing. There is a proposal to require at least three positive testing comments in Bodhi (aka 3 karma points) to allow testing updates to become stable. But afaics nobody prepared some statistics about what this would have meant for the previous updates, i.e. how many updates would have been pushed in the past from testint to stable with this policy enabled.

And this leads to a big problem, there is no real knowledge available how well Fedora updates are covered by testing. Looking at the Bodhi metrics, it seems that there is not that much testing going on for testing updates in F11, because the top testers seemed not to improve recently, but the top testers in F12 have already provided more feedback. But even with these comments, there is no way to properly detect how well the testing of a package is covered, e.g. there was an update that was clearly broken that still got positive karma by people who thought using it in a dependent package, but this was not true. I do not want to blame them, because the non-existent dependency was not obvious, but this shows why systematic testing is important. This does not meant that everything has to be tested perfectly, but it should be at least known how well updates are tested to know how to improve it.

My opinion on requiring karma for updates is, that before this is done, it should be made sure that there are enough people willing to test the updates or a automated package behaviour testing should be implemented. E.g. for every package for that a certain karma amount is required, at least one dedicated tester and several occasional testers should sign up. And the required number of the testers should reflect the number of karma points required for an update. If people want better updates in stable, they should imho contribute to testing them, even if they only spend one hour every month on it.

Nothing magic today. Just a simple small perl script. From the header:

# # check_clustat # A Nagios plugin that polls clustat # # Reports 0 (OK) if all services are started # Reports 1 (WARNING) if any services are starting, stopping, pending, # or disabled # Reports 2 (CRITICAL) if any services are stopped or failed # Reports 3 (UNKNOWN) if no services are found, or it is unable # to parse or get clustat ouput #

Download at http://users.linpro.no/ingvar/check_clustat.txt.

DEV300_m74 +5 overall unused, though sal becomes unused method free.

In preparation for a Fedora Netbook Respin every package that isn’t essential has to be removed. This Respin should work on Asus eee (4GB version) with 7″ screen, maybe even on 2GB version if possible (this is especially hard to do).
 
Initial inspection found some packages that take a lot of space and aren’t suited for Netbook Respin:
mythes-en
ibus-anthy
anthy
kasumi
cjkuni-uming-fonts
ekiga
opal
ibus-pinyin
orca
gnome-speech
festival*
gok
 
If you think that some of those packages should stay on Fedora Netbook Remix please explain why.
 
Most likely this Respin wound’t be based on GNOME because it takes too much disk space for Asus eee Netbooks Is there a was to slim GNOME down? Looks like most of the components are “glued” together, and removing one component takes whole GNOME desktop down (like libgweather or evolution).
 
Any suggestions are welcome.
 

Installation was strange as Anaconda backtraced right at the option of checking media. Fortunately, quickly switch to "skip" button seems to not have impact on installation. A welcome change is the home partition inside Logical Volume Management. 4.8 GB is not enough because of my intensive use as designer so I increased it to the maximum after setting root partition to 16 GB. To be continued...

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L'installation a été étrange puisque Anaconda a laisse des traces de bogues sur l'option de vérification du média. Changer et presser rapidement le bouton "skip" semble ne pas avoir d'impact sur l'installation. Un changement agréable est la présence de la partition "home" dans la Gestion des Volumes Logiques (LVM). 4.8 Go ne suffit pas en raison de mon usage en tant que graphiste, elle a été ajustée au maximum tout en mettant la partition "root" a 16 Go. A suivre...