Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 174)

KDE in Ubuntu is not dead

Daniweb has a hilarious article about "GNOME killing KDE" all because of Kubuntu 8.04 not being an LTS. The distinction that Daniweb fails to note is that Canonical considers KDE 4.0 to not be stable enough, not KDE as a whole. If they did, they wouldn't have shipped Kubuntu 6.06 LTS.

As for KDE 4.x, I think it will it be a pretty crazy and cool release. I worry slightly about some of the new tech not being stable enough and that hurting the image of KDE, but 4.1 and beyond should truly rock. And all this new tech should keep GNOME on its toes. Now how about a stable release schedule?

More on Knitting

Martin, the correct answer is actually either. Having been blessed with dating two knitters in a row, I have seen books with one or the other.

Knitting

Martin, it is perl, not pearl.

Zimbra: Not so nice after all

Ivoks, Zimbra has major problems. The first issue is that they have an evil license. And then you get to what they bundle with Zimbra, in hacked versions of Postfix, MySQL, apache, Cyrus and more. You can see it all in the ThirdParty section of their svn. A beautiful security nightmare, if you ask me.

Then there is their Evolution conector:

Zimbra is hardcoded against Evolution 2.6/2.8, and not 2.12

see this mail posted to the evolution-hackers list.

All of this points to an "all mine, none for you" development ethos. When I asked a Zimbra rep at either Ubuntu Live or OSCON 2007 about their massive patches, the only response was "they didn't do what we wanted and the patches are not suitable to go upstream".

And yes, Ubuntu is far more than Canonical. I was specifically referring to where Canonical should spend it's money in the next year. It should also be noted that in most cases Canonical use cases align very nicely with community ones.

As for Evolution, I widely suspect the only bit we will still be talking about in 5 years will be Evolution-Data-Server (or a succesor).

Canonical's focus in 2008

It seems that there is some discussion of where Canonical should focus their effort in 2008. The Enterprise Linux Log started this all off with The Big Three of Linux: Looking ahead to 2008. They get it bang on with this statement:

The ultimate achievement would be when Canonical finally creates an Active Directory-like system to integrate its server OS and desktop OS into a single, manageable environment.

However, Linuxloop.com disagrees with this, saying in a blog post Canonical’s Future: Enterprise or Consumer?:

Instead, I believe that Ubuntu should continue to pursue the consumer desktop and, for now, leave the enterprise customers to big companies like Red Hat and Novell.

. Now, aside from this issues that this not an either/or situation (office works need usable desktops as much as home users and look at the amazing things Dave does at the City of Largo with Compiz on thin clients) it is also ignoring why Microsoft won large numbers of customers from Novell and others with Windows 2000. Simply put: Active Directory destroys the competition. The tight integration of client and desktop is a major win for admins. Tie this in with integrated messaging via Exchange and you easily see why we have not made major inroads.

However, all is not lost. Apt-get, our repository system and the integration it offers is unsurpassed. A few server bits and an LDAP schema and we could have the beginnings of a highly integrated software control system. OpenChange with OpenLDAP are going to allow us to catchup and maybe one of these days Evolution will support mass config.

We (Ubuntu) also have a major advantage: you. There is no free (or Free) integrated solution for this out there. MS and Novell both charge and RH isn't there yet. Enterprise Linux Log correctly points this out, saying:

Canonical is in the unique position of having herds of passionate users behind them.

Imagine what a one toe installation of a directory-managed Ubuntu will look like...

GNOME Do, Deskbar and reinvention of the wheel

GNOME Do and the Deskbar are both wonderful projects and although I find the UI fo GNOME Do (and Quicksilver) most useless, they are both spending a lot of time doing exactly the same things...

Help kill the upcoming Canadian copyright law

As avid readers of BoingBoing will know, Canada is likely to be passing a new copyright law in the next month. The current Conservative gov't is withholding specific information about this new law to stiffle public debate. Jim Prentice, the Industry Minister, whose ministry is responsible for copyright law in Canada, has refused to come on Search Engine, a CBC program talking about culture and the net. It is critical that they don't get away with this. Online Rights Canada is running a great Contact your MP campaign and Michael Geist has other people you should contact. Don't let them get away with this!

Rosetta (and Launchpad) fail again

When are we going to realize that the hard problem is not building a better mousetrap but rather that making the mousetraps talk to each other?

re: OLPC sets up a Pootle install

Got an Ubuntu event? Add it to the Fridge calendar

The Fridge has a very handy little feature for those who are very forgetful about upcoming events: our calendar. However, as you can see, it is a little empty right now. If you have any events you are running as part of your LoCo team or a larger project-wide team, email us to get it added. And for those who have already emailed us and don't see it, I will be trawling the archives tonight. for anything we might have missed.

Back from UDS Boston

I have arrived back from FOSSCamp and UDS Boston. Had a little issue with weather which caused a delay in my flight out of Boston until 10pm which meant I got to spend 6 hours in a hotel (at Alaska Air's expense) to wait for the next flight out. Then of course, I had a nice delay in Seattle due to weather again. All these delays meant I arrived home after about 16 hours of travel, twice what I was planning. I did get a nice reminder of why I live in Victoria. As the flight crossed the border, the weather cleared. What was raining and completely socked in ground fog became gloriously clear skies.

Minor flight details aside, UDS and FOSSCamp rocked! Thanks to Canonical for sponsoring me again and for running such great events. I especially want to thank James Troup (elmo) and Chris Jones (Ng) for keeping all of the infrastructure up and running. Scott Ritchie, my roommate, commented that phones actually worked this time! Having run my an Asterisk box at my last work place, I can feel their pain.

As an aside, I highly recommend Alaska Air/Horizon Air. Every single of their employees was professional and courteous. Besides the hotel voucher, I also got two "free money" vouchers for food, valid at any SeaTac store for anything.