Do you RPM?
I have been talking to someone recently who is looking for some help packaging GNOME for an RPM based distribution. The distribution has some special things going for it which make the task a bit more interesting…
If you have some experience making RPMs, and you like trying out new distros, drop me an e-mail, and I’ll put you in touch with the guy.
Mac keyboard update
Many thanks to Frank Murphy for an updated fr keymap to use for Ubuntu. Now I just need to figure out how to get the bootloader back…
For shame…
I finally got around to backing up all my data, music & photos for the past few months this evening, with the intention of installing Ubuntu on my PPC, and kicking the MacOS X habit.
Alas, I’m back in MacOS X again. I wa going to install it in any case, because my wife likes it, but given that I can’t type # or @ in Ubuntu on a standard Macintosh French keyboard, I can’t see myself booting into it regularly for the next while. When I have more time, I’ll maybe try to figure out XKeyMap stuff again.
Also, I was a little annoyed that the (marginally unusual) case of English language and a French keyboard would cause so many issues. During the installation, I was asked for a country, language preference, and keyboard config (which worked fine). Then after the first boot into GDM, my keyboard was in US layout (very useful when you have numbers in your password).
And after logging in, and configuring the keyboard for myself, I still have no idea how to configure the keyboard layout system-wide, even though it’s obvious that I’m not going to have a different keyboard plugged in for each user…
I’m not quite a JWZ’s “last time”, but I have had far too much trouble configuring keyboards, sound cards and fonts in my short life, once every 4 or 5 years is more than enough, thanks.
Still no titles
There is a discussion going on over at foundation-list about membership of the foundation, which has gotten interesting. There was a good comment from Luis Villa:
[You] assume ‘more members’ == ‘good’, and
I’m not sure I follow that, given that much of the current membership
is apathetic and uninvolved [in the foundation] and increasing the numbers doesn’t actually solve that. I’d prefer we figure out why we have membership (besides the obvious legal/voting reasons), what we offer the membership, and what the membership offers ‘us’ (the community, the foundation, etc.), then talk about having a membership drive if it is still appropriate.
I get what Luis is saying, but I think the problem is more one of perception that reality. It seems to me, when I look around, that lots of people are working on communication, advocacy, marketing and all of the other things that the foundation is supposed to do. The foundation is not the board, after all, even if it’s sometimes easy to think that.
What do you think? What should the foundation represent? What does it represent to you? What’s wrong with it? How can we fix it?
KDE in Vienna
Congratulations to our freedom-loving brothers and sisters in KDEland on their success – KDE and Debian has been adopted by the city of Vienna as an official supported operating system (with about 5000 client machines expected to switch). A nice win for free software.
Software patents
The commission can’t come back on this one. The process is a bit twisted, but this is the end of the road. The process is
We were at the second last stage today, and if the law has been rejected, the only option that the commission now has is to modify the law, and go through the whole process again (the infamous restart requested by JURI some months ago).
Given the completely polarised result of the vote, I’m now wondering whether JURI (which was favourable to the parliament’s position some months ago) rejected all of Rocard’s amendments to polarise the parliament and avoid a dodgy law going through on a split decision.
Fair play to the FFII. I hate to bring it up in our hour of glory, but doesn’t this mean we stay at the current ambiguous “software patents are not allowed, but are granted anyway” situation, though? Wasn’t one of the goals of this law to regularise the situation one way or the other?
Live8
For those of you who don’t know yet (haven’t seen anyone blogging about it), the Live8 concerts are on today. Afterwards, there’s the Long March to G8 going from Mondon to Edinburgh, in time for the G8 meeting on Wednesday.
This is a bunch of people trying to change the world by people power (a bit like us). Worth a mention, worth support. If you can go to the concerts, have a laugh. If not, sign the petition, maybe go to Edinburgh…
I have some nice news today (unusual for a Monday afternoon).
A couple of months ago I went around a few French magazines hawking the idea of a regular GNOME column with a mix of original articles and translated GNOME Journal content.
Denis Bodor and Fleur Brosseau at Diamond Editions were interested, and so starting next month, we will have a new column called “GNOME Corner” in the French magazine “Linux Pratique”, a magazine aimed at Linux beginners still discovering the joys of free software.
The first issue includes 2 articles from the GNOME Journal (a little bird tells me that Claus Schwarm is actively hunting for article authors), Audio CD Ripping and Burning in GNOME by Ken VanDine of Foresight Linux and Evolution 2.2 by Jorge Castro (Jorge, if you’re reading, please mail me, I haven’t got an e-mail address for you). Both articles were translated by GNOME-fr member Laurent Richard.
Congrats to all involved. More exposure in print media is necessary if we want to improve GNOME’s image among hackers, Linux beginners and ourselves.
Since GNOME Journal articles won’t always fill the space allotted to us (4 pages per month!) I also hope to poke some people for original articles in French. Anyone interested please contact me.
Update: I just noticed that there is a GUADEC report in this month’s GNU/Linux Magazine France as well.
PS. Help Seth! I can’t add a title!
Advogato.org introduced me to the world of blogging a little over a year ago. Now I can’t figure out how I lived without a blog before then.
Image uploads are what have finally moved me away from it (that and blogs.gnome.org opening up shop), but since I’ve decided to move I’ve had a few problems. First, I no longer exist and haven’t yet managed to get hold of Raph to get stuff fixed. Thankfully, my old blog entries are safe. But the mod_virgule import didn’t work right with my account, so I only managed to import the 10 most recent entries via RSS. Bummer.
Hopefully I can get my planet feed updated to point here soon (go Jeff!).
I don’t know if Simon will thank me for letting the secret out, but I thought this was so cool.
Apparently, the armature was modelled in skencil somehow, and then the frames were generated (with a custom frame rate), exported to PNG with custom size, imported into the GIMP and turned into an animated GIF, all automatically.
