Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 108)

"We are pleased to inform you that you are now part of the GNOME Foundation Membership."

Rock! I was a little worried my membership application had been lost in the shuffle but I guess my concerns were for naught. Now where is the membership committee so I can join and make certain other people don't wait was as long as I did?

8 Nov 2006 (updated 8 Nov 2006 at 00:08 UTC) »
Integrating GNOME into Active Directory

Integrating a Linux desktop into Active Directory is one of the dreams of nearly any Linux admin. The simple fact of the matter is that AD is a very good product and has won in the marketplace. Just hooking up your Linux clients and having them authenticate against AD is not hard, and the ubuntu-directory team is making it easier. However, this is only part of the puzzle. As Jorge Castro said to me, "I would kill to be to control the settings on my Ubuntu clients from AD".

Jorge, start your murdering. Today, Enabled People, makers of Linux-XP, showcased their "Integration Service", which purports to show the controlling of gconf lockdown via AD policy. Interesting, but no code yet, let alone a license the code will be under. We can only dream...

7 Nov 2006 (updated 7 Nov 2006 at 20:06 UTC) »
Are you voting?

If you live the US, you need to vote. My grandfather used to say to me "You can only complain about the government if you voted". And the only way we are ever going to get a sane US government for the sane to go and vote. Don't know how? Your Guide to Voting

If you possibly can, vote via paper ballot. Electronic voting machines have serious issues and don't buy the argument that it will take weeks to count your vote. Canada has managed to vote via paper ballot for quite some time now and still delivers accurate results on the night of the election.

1 Nov 2006 (updated 1 Nov 2006 at 03:36 UTC) »
Being nice while creating teams on Launchpad

Please, when you got and create a team on Launchpad, please append the ubuntu- prefix to your team. Thus if you are working on product foobar in Ubuntu, your team is not foobar but ubuntu-foobar.

Why, you ask? Two reasons, namespace and findability

Namespace: Because Launchpad is used by more than just Ubuntu, you don't want to run into a conflict. What if the original authors of foobar want to use LP?

Findability: If you team name contains ubuntu- in its name, it is going to be abundantly clear that you mean foobar in Ubuntu, not just foobar in general.

Yes, long time, no blog

Life happens. A "What I did this summer^WWWfall" coming soon.

7 Sep 2006 (updated 7 Sep 2006 at 00:38 UTC) »
Chiming 16 past 2

Ubuntu everywhere

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.

Why is this man opening his mouth?

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

gnome-games, revitalized

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!

On Gentoo's issues

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. ;)

22 Aug 2006 (updated 22 Aug 2006 at 05:18 UTC) »
Ubucon

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?

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