SVU's blog

stracciatella

Do you speak Italian? I do not. Anyway, stracciatella is “vanilla-flavoured ice-cream with chocolate chips”. Ubuntu introduced that idea of nearly-vanilla GNOME quite a while ago (http://www.piware.de/2009/02/the-stracciatella-gnome-session/) but only today I tried a taste of it, with 10.10. Brrrr. Nonsense. Hardly usable (try to finish the session, for example:). A bit too much of “chocolate chips”. If you look at the Canonical discussions (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Jaunty/StracciatellaSession), there is one essential phrase: “This works on component granularity, not on the level of patches.” Very sensible remark, technically – and honest statement, too. But at the same time, it makes the whole idea more and more useless, as time goes by – because the size of patches applied to standard components grows with every release of Ubuntu. The result is something half-baked that I would not recommend to consume without 0.5 of vodka (I hope the original stracciatella is not that bad).

Whatever tensions are between Ubuntu and GNOME – I do not think it is fair from Canonical to make that kind of bad PR (feels more like FUD) by introducing “NEARLY vanilla” Gnome desktop.

PS I filed a bug in relation to g-s-d, closing it could add a bit more vanilla.

IDC (Russia) overestimated the TCO for FOSS, published incorrect report

IDC (well-known analytical company – or, to be exact, its Russian division) recently published the report analyzing the TCO for different approaches to IT infrastructures for schools. Namely, they look at proprietary solution vs FOSS-based solution. Unfortunately, that report turned to some kind of scandal – everyone, more or less familiar with the economics of  FOSS, raised brows quite high on some figures.

Today, the major Russian Linux vendor reacted: CEO of Alt Linux, Alexey Smirnov published the open letter explaining why the report was wrong – and why it should be withdrawn. I think this is a good practice, to publish more or less official statements when someone tells lies about FOSS. We are all quite vocal at Slashdot, Linux.org.ru etc – but sometimes someone should say something loud and strong. I hope IDC has decency … at least to react somehow – if not to admit, immediately, they did rather poor job.

Testing 10.10

While considering various options, upgraded on G5 from 10.04 to 10.10. The upgrade was smooth – except that new kernel turns CPU fans on (oh, what a sound!) and then after couple of minutes the system halts (the hardware considers itself overheated). Beta quality multiplied by “informally” supported Power architecture… Still, thanks to Canonical for fixing the annoying issue with lvms (I encountered while upgrading to 10.04).