Showing headlines posted by slacker_mike

Platforms are everything these days. They drive users in specific, and well structures ways and can make or break different ways of production. Take for instance the World Wide Web, it’s a platform that allows anarchy and it fundamentally breaks the traditional media’s economic model of charging for content per user. The World Wide Web does this by delivering content not just more cheaply, but more quickly and more succinctly than ever before.

Charles Profitt, in his recent post Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot, talks about a meeting that the Community Council had with Mark on Tuesday. This followed a weekend of me doing everything in my power to step back from the recent announcements and discussions from Canonical that made my Thursday and Friday very difficult. As a leader in the community I have been bombarded by comments from fellow community members these past few days. On Monday several members of the Community Council jumped on a hangout to talk about how we were handling all the news coming out, where we felt the community was going and what our role in this was. Immediately following this discussion we reached out to Mark to have a chat ASAP and I wrote an email to the internal Community Council list saying, among other things:

Here it is, KDE Software Compilation 4.10.1. A few weeks ago, KDE 4.10.0 was added to Slackware-current, along with all its updated dependencies. Essentially that was the same set of packages which I had made available on my ‘ktown‘ repository earlier, Pat Volkerding simply recompiled them using the provided KDE.SlackBuild framework.

GNOME 3 is making major progress with each and every release. Six months ago, when 3.6 was close to release, I wrote about how excited I was about the improvements that were on their way. That release was a big step up from the previous version in terms of user experience. Now we’re on the cusp of GNOME 3.8, and I find myself in exactly the same position. Testing GNOME 3.8, it is a huge improvement on 3.6. It’s more effective, satisfying and polished. Basic operations like selecting a window or launching an application have seen major improvements and the overall experience feels like yet another upgrade.

gThumb is one of Gnome’s great choices when it comes to image viewers and browsers, but I admit that we have overlooked it for far too long. With version 3.1.4 getting released a few hours ago, I had the chance to test the application new features and general abilities for a typical daily use.

Launchpad asked me if I wanted to continue to be an Ubuntu member. I thought about it, and have decided that I don’t. The one thing I’ll miss is being able to post to Planet Ubuntu. But I have to be honest, there isn’t an Ubuntu community any more. There’s a Canonical community, an ubuntu-users gaggle and maybe an enthusiasts posse. But no community that makes decisions, builds a consensus, advocates or educates. It’s dead now, it’s been that way for a while.

This week Jono Bacon announced that Ubuntu Developer Summits will become a series of online events. Having thought about it a few days, I’m now ready to input my own opinion to the discussion. In the announcement Jono lists openness, transparency and accessibility as the major goals of the Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS). The decision to move to an online event is supposed to improve these. In this article I will explain why I don’t think it will, and why the new format looks just another Canonical team sprint. I’ll also cover some of my concerns over the accessibility and equality of the new format and important things I think the online events will lack, but shouldn’t. I will also discuss some of my opinions on how this changes the nature of UDS and the meaningfulness to flavors as well as how this change affects the Canonical-community relations.

I’ve been asked by a few people now to outline my plans for improving software installation in GNOME. I’ve started to prototype a new app called ‘GNOME Software’. It exists in gnome git and currently uses PackageKit to manage packages. It’s alpha quality, but basically matches the mockups done by the awesome guys in #gnome-design. It’s designed to be an application management application. GNOME PackageKit lives on for people that know what a package is and want a pointy-clicky GUI, so I’m not interested in showing low level details for power users.

I must confess, I was neither surprised nor disturbed by last month’s announcement that the Opera web browser was switching to the WebKit rendering engine. But perhaps I’m in the minority among geeks on this topic. The anxiety about the possibility of a “WebKit monoculture” is based on past events that many of us remember all too well. Someday, starry-eyed young web developers may ask us, “You fought in the Web Standards Wars?” (Yes, I was once a Zeldi Knight, the same as your father.) In the end, we won. As someone whose memory of perceived past technological betrayals and injustices is so keen that I still find myself unwilling to have a Microsoft game console in the house, my lack of anxiety about this move may seem incongruous, even hypocritical. I am open to the possibility that I’ll be proven wrong in time, but here’s how I see it today.

Over the last couple of months there have been a number of discussions on the Arch boards about the forum policy of only providing support for Arch Linux, culminating in this long thread about Archbang users (login required) being denied support and having their threads summarily closed. As it emerged in the discussion, there seem to be two separate issues at play here; the question of Arch-derivatives using the Arch brand (logo, colours and even the forum style sheets), and how the wider community of GNU/Linux distributions are treated on our boards.

You must be thinking: “What do you mean by refreshing storage? I didn’t think you could drink storage?” No, sad to say, this blog post isn’t about the type of refreshment you get from a crisp cold glass of Anaconda Cola (yum!) It’s about the action of manually refreshing anaconda’s view on the storage configuration it’s working with. Why would you want to do that?

Let’s step back a second first. The custom partitioning tool in Anaconda (Fedora’s installer) still has a lot of rough edges to the design in Fedora 18 GA. The Anaconda team has been putting a lot of work into improving it in their Fedora 19 branch. We’ve got a ton of bugs, thoughtful (and some not so thoughtful ) comments from forums and blogposts, and some preliminary anaconda usability test data! (You’ll be hearing a lot more about that last bit soon, don’t worry! ) The team has pored over all of this information and has had a number of brainstorming sessions and discussions on how to address the identified issues, both over IRC, the mailing list, in bugs directly, and in person.

A week back, we discussed Fedora 18 Spherical Cow with the MATE desktop environment. Overall, it worked well, but it did lack the wow effect, and certain improvements were needed in the visual polish space, as well as the application set. Mind, this was the first time we saw MATE on top of Fedora, so goblins came and pushed splinters under your fingernails.

This week, we will discuss Cinnamon. The more astute among you will surely recall my amazement at how well Fedora 17 performed when blessed with this desktop. The Beefy Miracle became a miracle and earned itself a spot in the top five charts for 2012. Well, it's time to see if the magic can be achieved once again, with Spherical Cow as the scapegoat. Oh so many animal references, it's almost animal farm.

With GNOME 3.7.90, we’ve entered the feature freeze and focus on polish and on whittling down the blocker list (don’t expect all of these to be fixed, the list currently still contains a mixture of actual blockers and nice-to-have things). But just before that, there was a mighty effort to get things landed. All that happened while I was travelling, so here is a somewhat late tour of new things that have appeared recently.

Five years later, I still think Adam Jackson’s “Linux is not about choice” might be the best thing ever posted to fedora-devel-list. Seriously. Go read it, if you haven’t already. I almost know it by heart. To paraphrase slightly, the heart of the post is this: The chain of logic from “Linux is about choice” to “ship everything and let the user choose how they want their system to work” starts with fallacy and ends with disaster.

As you already know, Steam requires the Flash Player plugin to be installed on your Linux box in order to play videos, which are encoded as Flash. Moreover, Steam requires the 32-bit version of the plugin for you to be able to watch the movies. And if you're running a 64-bit version of Linux, you will encounter a problem. We have discussed and resolved this problem in my first tutorial on this subject, using manual downloads from the Adobe site. Several people emailed me asking for additional methods, possible audio problems and how to work around the fact you must manually manage the plugin, which can be considered a hassle and maybe even a security risk. Not to worry, in this guide, I will provide answers for all these questions.

For me, Fedora 18 Spherical Cow was a big disappointment, mostly because Fedora 17 was a big positive surprise. It's like that woman who keeps smiling at you through the dinner and flirts with you, and then when you take her into your motel room, she suddenly starts crying. I mean what's up with that.

Anyhow, I know upfront that MATE will not change anything in terms of how friendly and simple Fedora 18 is. Anaconda stays Anaconda and whatnot. KDE is also a fairly sweet desktop environment, so the fact it did not quite work for me with Spherical Cows does not mean that MATE will suddenly warm my heart. But, if you can ignore the initial woes, and I surely can, then let's see what happens when you plaster the Gnome 2 reborn desktop on the latest Fedora release. Fedora + MATE, take one.

The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename "squeeze"). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

Just a few days ago, LibreOffice 4 was released. As you know, this is an important milestone, both technically and historically. Since the split from OpenOffice, managed by Oracle, LibreOffice has quickly grown to become the dominant open-source office suite, and has completely pushed away OpenOffice from the spotlight. Moreover, this latest version brings a whole bunch of good things. In my last review, I did opine some skepticism about what LibreOffice is all about, although it did what was expected from it. Let us see how things have changed in the last two years. Finally, we will give some extra focus to the Microsoft Office compatibility, because it is one of the most cardinal issues around. Follow me.

There are a lot of discussions at the moment about a SSHD rootkit hitting mainly RPM based Linux distributions. Thanks to our reader unSpawn, we received a bunch of samples of the rootkit. The rootkit is actually a trojanized library that links with SSHD and does *a lot* of nasty things to the system.

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced general availability of the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4. It has been optimized for performance, stability and flexibility, and designed to help organizations manage their workloads across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux introduces several new components that help enterprises meet these core business objectives.