Can't stop fiddling... » Linux & Open Source

New jokosher goodness

Christopher — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:24:53 +0000

Life has been busy of late but I found the time recently to update the subversion checkout of Jokosher that is sitting in the Fedora repositories. The previous one was from April and there has been a slow trickle of improvements announced on the mailing list that made it worthwhile. Plus I wanted to see how much I remembered of how to push an update. It went really well so after letting it sit in updates-testing for a while I requested the push through bodhi to -stable. I just wonder if anyone actually _uses_ it!

Linux webcam development

Christopher — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:29:58 +0000

So I bought a cheap webcam from my local supermarket for 10 quid. Plugged it into Cadeaux, my desktop PC and .. nothing.

Noting that Hans De Goede was working on better webcam support for Fedora and Linux users in general, I thought it was worth a shot. So I emailed him.

A few emails back and forth and about 48 hours later the camera was working! A couple of weeks ago the commit went into the kernel and any distro based on 2.6.28 will get support out of the box.

Thanks Hans!

The Girl just keeps on … running

Christopher — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:05:14 +0000

The Girl running past the 1km mark of the Great Yorkshire Run, 2008

Hello. In a week’s time, my very lovely girlfriend will be dodging geordies in a monumental run around Tyneside. It’s all for a very good cause and one that is close to both our hearts.

Traidcraft has been working for a very long time to enable the poorest of the world’s population to work themselves out of poverty. They also buy in awesome coffee and other stuff as part of CafeDirect which many people buy in supermarkets around the U.K.

So yes, you’ve guessed it - this is a sponsorship request. Please visit http://www.justgiving.com/lauraglasel2008 for all the details. Enough said and thanks.

Live search badness update

Christopher — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:10:49 +0000

So it seems that U.S.-based Fedorites don’t get the same thing. Perhaps the devil is in the details. U.K. users should try adding live search into their search engine list in Firefox (top right) and then searching for Firefox. Here’s what I get. (Sorry it’s grey, don’t get hosting with 1and1 - you get what you pay for).

Windows Live Search badness

Christopher — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:40:45 +0000

Its all about perception. Sometimes you get the idea Microsoft might be playing a little bit nicer.

Then you try doing a search for Firefox using Live Search. The first non-sponsored link is for firefox dot org dot uk (no, I’m not even linking to it) which bizarrely has no download link for Firefox and has the tiny disclaimer that it has nothing to do with Mozilla or Google. Instead it offers the Google Pack for download.

The second link is ie7.com which at least has a large firefox icon which then links directly to the proper firefox download site.

In fact, nowhere on the list of results do you get what would be considered a “good” result. Is this just the usual Live Search naffness or is it just another case for the European Competition Commission?

NHS connecting for health but not for IT

Christopher — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:22:30 +0000

Hello Firefox users,

Notice something about this page:

Slow hand claps all round. I’m probably taking it a bit far but if I was a tabloid journalist I would type:

“NHS treats Internet Explorer users only”

Time to get my clue-stick.

Update: I have to come clean. It turns out the online booking service is “not yet in service”. I don’t agree with web design based towards browsers rather than standards however.

Lastly, I don’t see any black helicopters but the NHS must have got a BIG discount for all those Windows licenses.

Vanilla and Blueberry…

Christopher — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:54:47 +0000

Now I’m no kernel buff but I get the idea of reducing the patch count and trying to follow upstream a little more closely. So it was with some interest I saw the following post from Mr. J. Boyer on fedora-kernel a couple of days ago

http://jwboyer.fedorapeople.org/pub/
Let the kernel installs begin.
Hopefully I didn’t fsck something up horridly. If I did, then I’ll fix
it for -rc2.
josh.

That’s right folks. Courtesy of Josh and the Fedora kernel team, you can now run the Linux kernel “sans patches”. This has benefits a-plenty but basically means that when kernel developers ask you to “run linus’s tree” or “test with mainline” - you can soon do just that with:

# yum install kernel-vanilla

Well, you’ll soon be able to hopefully. It’s not in the repo’s quite yet.
For the moment you’ll have to grab it from Josh’s fedorapeople space.

It also means you’re following upstream more closely and we all know why that is a good thing.

Sometimes I forget that this blog is syndicated…

Christopher — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:54:22 +0000

My last posting about my linux-hater love sparked some good comments and mails. Though of course its a bit of hot potato so I’m not _that_ surprised. I was surprised by the amount of negativity that was generated - basically poor user experiences. In the vein of current feather-ruffling, perhaps the whole marketing aspect needs a re-think. Perhaps I should just subscribe to the fedora-marketing list.

Max Spevack declared about a year ago that he wanted to make sure that Fedora was never again accused of being a beta for Red Hat. Unfortunately I’m not sure that it will ever entirely shake off this moniker. I’ve read various blog posts regarding poor Fedora 9 install experience (mine has been nothing but exemplary) however these tend towards the “My $PROPRIETARY_APP/DRIVER failed” which I really couldn’t care less about. Fedora quite rightly sticks to its guns on not kow-towing to these vendors.

I think Fedora still has an identity crisis - one that started when Fedora Legacy closed its doors. It does what I want but what does it want to be?

Upgrades are for people with a surfeit of time…

Christopher — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:44:41 +0000

About a month ago I started reading Linux Hater. I have to admit I love it. It takes a few posts for the realisation to sink in that its actually written by someone who deeply cares about Linux, has a great deal of knowledge about the inner workings of a Linux distribution and actually wants it to succeed. He/She/They try to hide it beneath a barrage of bad language and breath-taking insults but its great to see someone voicing the anger which I’m sure some of us involved to any degree in Free Software all feel at times. A friend of mine who had a particularly awful experience with Linux recently (not Fedora thankfully, blame Lexmark) will no doubt enjoy it as much as I do. I think people who dismiss it immediately as insulting are missing the point. Linux Format magazine used to run a section (can’t remember the name) where an anonymous contributor voiced the fears and concerns that someone with a real name and face could not.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve read a lot of upgrade woes, relating to current distributions and their ability to complete and upgrade from a previous version. For anyone not understanding the process of upgrading an operating system I’ll say it once and only once.

It’s not simple, may well break and if you don’t feel confident doing it then don’t.

One reviewer even bemoaned the fact that a system once running FC5 didn’t handle the upgrade from F8 to F9 well. So here’s a clue to those who just want to use a computer and not struggle with post-upgrade installation issues.

Backup /home, /etc, & /var and do a fresh install. The time reconfiguring your O.S. will be greatly less than fixing broken dependencies, repositories, packages and other issues. You will then never need to post about how you don’t understand why a new distribution with new toolchain, kernel, package management system and desktop environment doesnt work out of the box.

I.T. and a healthy, balanced diet…

Christopher — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:47:57 +0000

The Girl tells me I should be “Eating breakfast like a King, lunch like a Prince and dinner like a Pauper.”

Lets see how Wednesday measured up.

Breakfast - cold toast, much of which scattered across keyboard whilst RDP’d into a client’s server
Lunch - Frapperlattimochachino thing, sipped whilst typing into a supplier’s “Live Chat”, trying to get remote backups to sync correctly
Dinner - Latte with side order of M&M’s, drunk and eaten at 80mph in the fast lane of the M1, heading north at 11pm.

Yeah, my body is a temple.