Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 176)

Bits and bobs

My life has been pretty crazy with school recently, 5 classes and all. Thinking never stops, so here are things that passed through my head (sanitized) over the past little while:

• I have an N810. Is cool. Will blog later more about it.
• Congrats to Fedora for all the cool community work they have been doing. Many transitions have been happening, with Max Spevack resigning as Project Leader and Paul Frields taking over. Red Hat has also added Tom Callaghan to the Fedora team and it looks like that a formal "Fedora community" team is in the offing. Fedora have always pushed us technically and I am glad to the see the community prosper as well. A stronger Fedora (or OpenSuse, Mandriva, etc.) makes a stronger Linux.
• Common Desktop Infrastructure - what the hell is this thing? How does it fit into the Portland Project? Is this another useless Linux Foundation buzzword project?
• The next edition of "the book" is coming along. I have been massively busy recently, so if you emailed me, I have your email and will respond this weekend, I promise.
• It appears that Victoria might actually be getting some decent transit. Well, if you call Bus Rapid Transit decent...
• Nick Ali (boredandblogging) has been doing an absolutely amazing job with the Fridge recently.
• The Ubuntu Weekly News is still going strong. John Crawford and the aforementioned Nick, as well as many many others, have been doing a stellar job here.
• A question: Aside from Dell, why are most of the new preinstalled Linuxes "home built"? I can think of gOS, the Asus EEE and of course the N810, none shipping with any of major Linux distributions or DEs, really. Yes, I know that gOS is based on Ubuntu, the EEE is Xandros and ships KDE and the N810 is Debian-based. They all use custom UIs and only bits and pieces of the underlying OS. The closest is probably the EEE, with KDE in the Advanced mode.
• KDE got 4 out the door. Haven't had a chance to try it yet, but it looks very cool.

One final note: If there are any dropped n's or missing spaces in the previous post, I cleaned my keyboard recently and have been having issues since...

Greenpeace finds the Japanese fleet

It is great news that Greenpeace has found the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. It has already been an interesting lead up to the whaling "season" with Japan announcing that it would hunt Humpbacks then deciding against it, Australia getting very publicly getting annoyed at Japan over whaling (a first, thanks to a change of government in Canberra) and the Sea Shepard's boat Robert Hunter being renamed the Steve Irwin. All in all this is probably the most media attention whaling has had for several years.

This time also has great personal interest to me as the doctor aboard the Esperanza is Clive Strauss, a longtime family friend, whom my brother house sits for when he is gone on his often absences.

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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