Jonathan Blandford – Page 3

Sun 29 Oct 2006

Releases: Fedora Core 6 (zod) was released this week. So I baked a cake:

Kneel before the Zod cake

It was a pretty awesome release. You can read the release announcement here.I just thought I’d highlight three of my favorites features. First, compiz on aiglx works really well. Soeren made a valiant attempt at taming compiz by getting it to honor many of the metacity settings, as well as by providing a more traditional pager mode. He and Kristian also got X running with aiglx enabled by default, so starting a compositing manager doesn’t require an X restart.Secondly, X will now start without an Xorg.conf file. Adam has been working hard at making X autodetect hardware, and it can now do so on many setups correctly. There are times still when you will need that file, but it is bringing us closer to the day when you won’t have to set up X at all.Finally, if you want to play with Xen, Daniel did a really nice job on virt-manager. It looks slick.

RHEL4 in Fedora

mail: Two pretty exciting emails caught my eye last week:

Alex Larsson discusses replacing gnome-vfs in glib.

Carl Worth proposes a new tessellator for cairo.

boxes: There is now a North American GNOME Event box! We spent the last couple of weeks putting it together. It was partially used at Siggraph, and now is ready to go out to other events.

First stop: Ohio LinuxFest2006.

milestones: Today I officially join the GNOME Old Farts Club. Now I get to be ornery all the time and complain about the young’uns.
photos: I finally put up my GUADEC photos. Most of them look similar to all the other GUADEC photos out there, but fire at night is always cool.

lazyweb: I’m a little hesitant to ask anything here, given that my last posting on limburger resulted in this gem: the key to limburger is that you need to eat it with mayonnaise and raw (or at least rare) halibut.

Nevertheless, I’m looking for a machine to purchase to put in the North American GNOME Event Box. It has to be small, light, and run Free software well. Something like the Shuttle X100 is close, but I’m not going to be able to get the Radeon card in it to work. Mac mini’s are much better supported and a great size, but I would prefer something less ‘branded’. Having Apple hardware in the booth would confuse our message.

Alternatively, if someone knows how to change the top plate on a Mac Mini to a custom logo, I could totally go that route. (-:

cairo: What an excellent dockudrama! Or maybe it’s just a dockumentary..
cairo (two): That post does point out akamaru, written by Kristian Högsberg. It’s a pretty nifty little physics model written with cairo. I don’t know how practical it is, but it’s pretty fun to play with.
passings: It was sad to see that György Ligetti died today. RIP.

presents: Sometimes the dog decides to bring me a present. Tonight, it was a very dead bird at two in the morning…

whoops: Things you don’t want to hear your plumber say:

“Can you run downstairs really fast and make sure that there’s no water coming out of the ceiling. I’m not kidding!”
SoC: We ended up getting some excellent Summer of Code applicants this year. I’m mentoring the forms in evince project. It looks like it will be a lot of fun to complete. Over all, there were three SOC projects accepted to work on poppler. Two were in the GNOME camp, and one was a KDE project, and all three require modifying the PDF file.