Joining in the recent trend of people blogging about their laptop purchases, I need advice on hardware.
I’m looking for a laptop in a €1500 budget, which is light, has wifi and ethernet, works perfectly with free software (including projectors), has at least 1GB of RAM, and is fast enough to do some hacking on. I’m not picky.
Any suggestions (in comments or mail)? The D420 Jeff got looks cool, but is a bit over my budget.
On the occasion of the release of Portland v. 1.0, VNUNet digs up a classic quote:
“The KDE guys desperately wanted to look and feel like Windows, and the other guys desperately wanted to make it as hard to use as possible,” said Dirk Hondel at LinuxWorld in San Francisco in August.
Fernando: Your blog entry just got pointed out to me by Luis. It raises an interesting question about the relationship of GNOME to its main sponsors.
GNOME (through the GNOME Foundation) gets a lot of support from companies – in particular our advisory board members, Sun, Novell, RedHat, HP, IBM, Debian, the FSF, and the more recent additions Nokia, Imendio, OpenedHand, Canonical, PalmSource, Intel and the SFLC.
Part of the problem that we’ve faced in the past is that we go to the well for very concrete things – advisory board dues, GUADEC, the summit, a new server… or a local conference. To the company, it all comes under the heading “GNOME”.
Ideally what would happen is that we would go to the company once, with a detailed list of activities for the year, have one single purchase order for “GNOME”, and then at the end of the year publish an annual report of all the things we’d done with the money (including sponsoring local conferences) to prepare the terrain for the following year.
There are a number of reasons why that might not be a great idea. First, companies might like to support the foundation, but not sponsor one particular conference. Second, we still want to get one-off sponsorship from companies not on the advisory board. Third, all our biggest sponsors will already have their sponsorship bundled up in the foundation, reducing the scope for the organisers.
But the existing situation is untenable – it’s easier for someone to justify a one-off payment of (say) $40,000 than five separate payments for $10,000, $15,000, and 3 x $5,000. So we do need to figure out a better way.
One way to improve things would be to offer sponsorship packages, varying from “Advisory board membership” through to “Deluxe cornerstone strategic partner”. We will need to work out reasonable levels for those packages without making things too complicated, and pitch the idea to advisory board members to work out the details. And of course, it’ll force us to be much more open about what we do – there are a bunch of things that the foundation has helped with this year which either haven’t gotten much attention, or which we haven’t really shouted about. When I get a chance, I’ll make a list…
In short, I’m not surprised that Nokia hasn’t sponsored you, but the foundation’s sponsorship of Fernando’s plane ticket is coming in part from Nokia and their support, so don’t be too hard on them.
Back in June, Sun gave us two Ultra 20s to give to deserving GNOME hackers and announced the donation at GUADEC. Finally, we can reveal the recipients:
+= 
+=
We tried to think of two more deserving recipients, really we did.
There’s nothing like lots of new people tasting freedom for the first time to get your day started. DAM brings us the story of a migration of part of a French group to GNOME-based thin-clients. 550 clients being served by 10 servers.
And thanks to the wonderful work that has been done recently to make free software applications cross-platform, even the people who have to use Windows on their laptops get to join in the fun, using Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org.
Every so often I get so invested in something that I start to go off the rails a little when others don’t see things in the same way. At the moment there are two situations like that – one I won’t go into, and the other is a long-standing issue in the GIMP community about how to handle abuse in the community.
So I’ve been getting overly heated on both these issues, and have been trying to keep things moving in the right direction, but I realised yesterday that in both cases my intervention has been counter-productive.
So I’m going to take a step back for a while. Perhaps I’m not looking clearly at the issues any more, and others have ideas which will work better than mine. For the first situation, it means I’m going to take a few days to cool off, and see if anyone else steps up to the plate to move things along.
In the case of the GIMP, that means I’m finally, and definitively, leaving the project. I haven’t written any code for the GIMP in a long time anyway, and the project has ceased being fun quite a while ago. I have unsubscribed from all GIMP mailing lists, and bolsh@gimp.org no longer exists. I will also be removing myself from the list of people who handle GIMP donations as soon as possible.
The failure of the project to control the limits of acceptable behaviour of its participants has been a long-standing problem, and needs resolution. But I’m not the person who will get that resolution.
Our computer is primarily a home machine – there’s myself, my wife, and now my son who use the computer regularly.
We want to keep some information (documents, bookmarks, email, saved passwords) separate, but we want to share a certain number of resources (family photos, music) across all accounts.
Ideally in this use-case, if Anne imports photos from the camera’s memory card, I should have read/write access to the photos afterwards and they should automagically appear in f-spot. Likewise, if I import tracks from a CD into my rhythmbox repository, Anne would like to have those tracks appear automatically when she starts it up.
I know this is possible with some trickiness – I add all users on the machine to the same group, and set up /home/photos, /home/music and so on to have permissions ug+rwx with the gid bit set on the directories, and then set up symlinks to the relevant directories for each user so that things Just Work, but I imagine that this kind of usage (share some stuff, don’t share other stuff, in a small household) is something that comes up quite a lot – most people probably solve the problem by just having everyone use the same account, and storing documents in different directories.
Is there a better way to solve this problem in fspot/gthumb/rhythmbox/…? A preference to let someone point to a shared repository of music/photos?
Sometime today, GNOME 2.16 will be released. Since each GNOME release is newsworthy, and this one is no different, we can expect a flood of press coverage over the next few days.
I have started collecting GNOME 2.16 articles in del.icio.us with the tag gnome216. It would be great if others could do the same to help us collect a database of feedback on the release (local language articles, complementary articles, critical articles, anything) – when we get a CRM system in place, it will also allow us to collect a list of journalists writing about GNOME.
So, go forth and bookmark with impunity, your marketing team needs you. Thank you!
At the foundation general meeting during GUADEC, a person who shall remain anonymous asked the question “why should I get foundation membership? What does it enable me to do that I can’t do already?”
Membership of the foundation is an odd thing. It doesn’t really give you the right to do anything new except participate in foundation-list and vote in foundation elections. Since foundation-list is a list to talk about stuff related to the foundation, if you’re not a member you’re probably not interested anyway.
But foundation membership means something more than that to some people. I happened on this blog entry today, and I was moved. Honestly, tears welling up moved.
The one of the most awaited things in my life.. Its a really dream come true.. On the may 3rd morning, i got a confirmation mail from gnome.org that i have been added to members list. I just pinched myself to check whether it was real. It was.. I was overflowing with happiness.
Being a GNOME Foundation member for someone outside of the community is another way of saying “Come in! Make yourself at home.” For lots of people in this community, they don’t know how much other people appreciate their work.
The first time you feel appreciated is a special moment. It might be when you get a mail saying “I’m spending too much time checking in your great patches, it’s time we got you CVS access”, or it might be having someone you admire in the community saying “Wow! You’re the guy doing jhautobuild! You rock!”.
Or it might be “We are pleased to inform you that you are now part of the GNOME Foundation Membership”.
We have lots of contacts we need to organise – friends of GNOME, journalists, distributions, user groups, governments, deployments, ISDs, ourselves, and people whose paths we cross from time to time – people from other projects, or employees of big GNOME users, or previous keynote invitees.
I’ve worked out the main usecases for a CRM system for GNOME – using it for anything outside this would be excessive.
There may be others I haven’t thought of – that’s what blog comments are for 😉
So far, the feedback I’ve received says “don’t use SugarCRM if you value your sanity, CiviCRM is where it’s at”. As a non-connaisseur, I’m going to probably take that advice, unless there are othr recommendations that people might have that I should consider.
I would love something which had a possibility to integrate with desktop apps (mail, contacts, IM) via a web service API, but that’s not a requirement.
A problem I’ve thought a bit about is what the default level of visibility for a non-privileged user should be. I would like to have 3 levels of security – anonymous users see some stuff (names & events, but not email addresses, for example), authentified users can add contacts and events, and see everything, and administrators can add new users. Anything more than that seems overly complex.
Anyone have experiences with CiviCRM – or anything else – which they’d like to share? Is there anything we’d like to do which isn’t available?
