Wed 15 Nov 2006

  • elections (board): I am not running for reelection this year. After being on the board for the past five years, I wanted to step down before people start clamoring for term limits.More seriously, I feel like I have finally accomplished most of what I wanted to get done as a board member (although it took four years longer than I had hoped). I was able to present a clear picture of the financial state of the Foundation at GUADEC this year, and many of the institutional issues we have faced have been resolved. The Foundation is in great shape and it should be fun to be on next year’s board. Interest in GNOME is expanding, and there are lots of opportunities for the project everywhere.Federico did an excellent writeup of what qualifications are important in a successful board member. I only have two minor quibbles with his post. The first is that we can definitely find the money to buy a phone card for board members. I would hate to have concerns about phone bills keep an otherwise excellent candidate off the board.The second quibble is about his “rock star” comment. I think he is implying that being on the Board requires a definite time commitment. If you don’t have the time, you won’t be a good board member. People who already are doing a lot for the project (and thus, have earned the coveted “rock star” label) tend to not have spare time. If you do can’t make the time for the board, don’t run. It’s just as simple as that. We need good people with time, energy, and especially passion to be on the board \u2014 don’t let your label get in the way of running!Besides, being on the board this upcoming year is the fastest way to “rock star” status. (-:
  • eleanor: Jesse has been posting baby pictures all week of his new baby. It’s time to post a gratuitous baby picture of my own:
    Eleanor and Java
    Eleanor hearing about Java moving to the GPL

Tue 14 Nov 2006

  • shipping: A few months back, we asked a partner of ours (who will remain nameless) for some test equipment. We wanted to make sure that Fedora worked well on that set of hardware and machines. They didn’t arrive for quite some time. Finally, last week, they arrived at the office.

    It turns out that the machines had been shipped to the wrong location. Someone had very helpfully packed it up and forwarded them to us. Unfortunately, it seems that they didn’t have any packing material at the office it was shipped from. So instead of shipping the machines with styrofoam, or even packing peanuts, they filled the box with leftover pens and harmonicas. Yes, harmonicas. About fifty of them. Keeping the computers safe. Fortunately, the machines were robust enough to survive the trip, but geez, I hope they don’t go out to customers like that…

Sun 29 Oct 2006

  • Releases: Fedora Core 6 (zod) was released this week. So I baked a cake:
    Zod 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 Console
    RHEL4 in Fedora

Thu 20 Jul 2006

  • 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. (-: