Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 103)

Even on Novell's developer pages: How to configure Ubuntu for AD. Thanks Ryan for the link.

You can't fault the Novell guys for trying and SLED 10 isn't a bad product. It is just that you just can't buy a community like Ubuntu's, nor can just expect one to grow absent any structure. This is something which has become more and more apparent in recent weeks. You need things for it to grow on and gardeners to channel the growth into some sort of order. But mostly you need the right frame of mind. As Jane Silber said at Ubucon, "We started by getting the community right and then the company, rather than other way around". It says a lot that the COO of a company would come to a small community gathering and not be there to tell us about how great the company was (well, maybe we already knew that...). In fact, the only time the Canonical people took the floor was when asked to and then only for a few minutes.

After spending I don't know how much time convincing people that Fedora is not alpha for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they apparently let their CTO out in public and bad things happened. I quote "FC5 and FC6 constituted the role of an alpha", which means, Fedora is an alpha. Lovely. Given I work for a company that bases our product off Fedora and thus what happens to Fedora affects how well I eat this month, I am so very pleased.

A meme, because I can

missing are Ottawa and CalTrain.

Got at b3co.com via Planet Debian

For many a GNOME release now, the gnome-games package has not had a major update. All that is about to change, with Jason Clinton and Andreas Røsda having taken over maintainership. The plan is to remove one game and add one game in the 2.18 cycle (which would be for Edgy+1). However, they need your help in telling them which games you play. Go vote now!

Donnie, I am sorry to hear about Gentoo's community issues. I have to say is that the Gentoo developers in the booth next to ours at LWE were unfailing polite and professional. I believe, and I suspect Jorge would agree, that they were among the most professional and well organized in the .org pavilion. My opinion of Gentoo has risen much higher as a result of it.

PS. I am not sorry we stole Brandon Hale (tseng) away from you. ;)

Ubucon was a great deal of fun. It was great to meet Jordan Mantha for the first time. He led two great talks, one on getting involved and another on what the new user wants and needs. I hope both will bear fruit in the short and long term.

There were many talks, but Jorge gave a great talk on large deployments, his 500+ SunRay thin client on Ubuntu at Oakland Uni in Michigan. As his assistant for the talk, I had great fun with the Snakes on a Plane slide, as well as making some pithy comments. We got to showcase the coolness that is Sabayon and Pessulus.

I wanted to thank a few people as well. Thanks to John Mark for organizing it. Despite the last minute-ness of it, it went fairly well. Thanks to the Google people, including Leslie and Zaheda, for helping us out with hosting and food. Thanks to Jorge's friend Ryan, who now works at Google, for the rides. Thanks to Canonical for staying those extra few days and showing up. Matt Z and Jane, it was good to see you again. Chris, great to meet you. And finally, thanks to the community, for coming out. Overall, a great time and I hope to see everybody next year.

gcjwebplugin

Given I dislike compiling things, I really like Ubuntu for having all the latest upstream crack available. One thing I have not tried until now is gcjwebplugin. While I dislike Java generally, the gnu classpath people are really coming along. So I figured I would try out the plugin. You can install it on edgy with the gcjwebplugin-4.2 (ignore the gcjwebplugin and gcjwebplugin4.1, as they are old packages). After you install it and go to an applet page, you get a giant security warning:

I don't think have yet implemented the sandboxing, hence the scary message, but I am not certain. The interweb is failing me on this one. I know Fedora is going to ship the plugin for FC6 and I don't imagine they would do that without the appropriate security in place.

But if you accept you get this:

I used an applet for this list of applets, all of which are known to work and did not test out in the wild, due to security concerns, so take this with a grain of salt.

I am probably going to remove it, butI want to thank Matthew Klose (doko) for packaging all this Java stuff. It is fun to play with, even it might not be ready. That is what Edgy is for, right?

Well, Linux World Expo in San Francisco. I want to thank the following people for helping me out:

Userful, for shipping my down there Jorge Castro, for letting me crash on his floor Debra Williams, my editor, for a great Sushi dinner Jim McQuillan's friend, for a great Brazilian all-meat dinner Canonical, for all around awesome-ness

On the capture of penguins

So Jane Silber roped me into a team competing for the Golden Penguin award at LWE. Seems that our team came out ahead, against the Novell Open Audio Team (great guys, btw). They were shocked that Jorge and myself were volunteers, however.

On the absence of Red Hat

They should have been at LWE. End of story.

On running the GNOME booth

Jorge and I rocked! While we had no banners and swag, we did get to meet some great people. I had a great conversation with a Japanese consultant, through a translator (always fun), about the Japanese Linux market and about Open Source in general.

Oh, and about 95% of the people who we talked to who ran GNOME were running Ubuntu. There was a stunning amount of Ubuntu at the show.

On the running of the network at LWE

DHCP is a good thing. No, it really is. Oh, and Network Manager needs to deal with static IPs.

On Ubucon

Currently now at Ubucon. Much goodness, more later.

The sun shines on Debian

While I personally have had an awful last two weeks, I saw something today that made me smile: HP announces support for Debian. As Bdale says, some-days the rock moves.

Just a reminder, I will be helping run the GNOME booth (Booth #9 in the .org section) at LWE and then enjoying the hospitality of Google at Ubucon. Come on by and visit us.

from Wondermark via BoingBoing

Glad the government is keeping me safe

Yes, I am being sarcastic. In wake of the arrest of several individuals in the UK for apparently plotting to blow up a few aircraft and all the subsequent restrictions on what you can and cannot carry on to the plane, I have to wonder: Is air travel truly made safer by this? As my job with Userful has and continues to involve travelling extensively, it has never been clearer to me that airport security is a giant joke, very much a cargo cult. It is a heavily ritualized affair, with all the players going through the motions without the understanding behind them. A stark example of this was during a recent trip to Ottawa: When I passed through the security at Vancouver, any security person not dealing with a person was turned around, back to the entrance, watching the World Cup on a small television screen. At points this included the entire group of them.

So ask yourself this: If all the security screening vanished tomorrow, would air travel be any less safe? I am finding it hard to answer yes to that question.

Well it appears that I am headed to San Francisco, thanks to my employer. I will be at the GNOME booth at Linux World Expo from the 15th to the 17th demonstrating our Desktop Multiplier stuff (packaged by Jordan Mantha as desktop-multiplier in multiverse). After that I will be at Ubucon for the 18th and 19th. Having my trip partially funded by employer means I will be unable to help out with the Ubuntu booth, but judging from the wiki page, there are already some great people running that.

As the 18th is my 24th birthday, I look forward to the drinking BoF held in the afterhours of the first day.