Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 48)

Apologies to my boss

His OpenOffice crashes at least once an hour, with differnet documents. I kept insisting that OpenOffice.org cannot simply crash that much. It must be hardware, because I have never seen it. Well, it just happend to me, repeatedly.

Ok, it was only with one doc, but I have now confirmed that OpenOffice.org is a giant bloated pile crap, not just the Fedora Core version. Not only does it fail to copy MS Office, it also fails the stability test. Lovely.

Hey Abiword, Gnumeric devs, how is that OpenDocument work coming along? If you finish it soon, I can move my office over. And they say that OpenDocument is not important...

On opinions and being dumb

Ubuntu is going to piss some people off. It is also going to make some people love us. That is ok. Ubuntu strives to be the best Linux distribution in existance (Does not every distribution?). We have clear goals and clear objectives. We are opinionated. We make choices, bold choices and sometimes stupid choices, but we make them. This is no different than any other distribution out there. It is just that sometimes ours are a little more bold and a little more out there.

What sort of opinionated and crazy things have we thought up for Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake)?

• A unified Live and Install cd, with an new installer based of the Google summer of code and Guadelinex work
• A new server team and more effort being made to make Ubuntu the best distro on hte server as well as the desktop
• Some work on the menus to make them a bit useful. Sometimes this involves hiding things we may shouldn't have. Oops! Tell us about your thoughts at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenusRevisited/Comments
• A long support period, extending to 5 years on the server and 3 on the desktop
• Much much more.. For a full list see: Dapper specs

I also wanted to quickly answer what Robert said about building packages. Ubuntu does not ship any compilers installed by default but does provide an easy meta-package to install them and they are on the cd. This was a choice we made very early on, something that we carried over from Debian.

Gnome bugs and work

The whole linus thing has got me thinking about Gnome and options. Due to my status as the "Linux desktop expert" at our office, I get a lot of questions about "Why does X do Y?". Of all the things that people come to me to ask about, only one has been about customization. That was to do with the panels (which need work and upstream knows it) on the first day. Every other question has been about an annoying bug, usually to do with integration.

Oh, and most of those bugs come not from Gnome apps but from OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird.

Therefor, I state that, given developer time is finite, I would rather have them fixing integration bugs than adding customization for power users.

Dear bloggers on Planet KDE

I am very sad. My bling quotient has sadly not been satisfied by Planet KDE recently. While I don't run KDE, I wish to learn about the cool (or is that kool?) new things you are working on. The buzz surrounding KDE 4 has even me excited, yet scarcely a screenshot can be had. KDE 3.5 just came out. Yet again, nary a screenshot can found on Planet KDE.

So please, just for me, can the world see the new KDE hotness?

Yours,

Corey Burger

On Abiword and collaboration

Marc, you ask what you should concentrate on for being useful for the OLPC project? My answer to that would be full OpenDocument support and dropping the abiword-only file format. Every day you hold out means that MS gets to beat us with a stick about not many applications supporting it.

As for collaboration, I am pleased to see that Abiword is working on collaboration features. Thus in a short while, we will have three different implementations, Abiword's, Inkboard (now in Inkscape 0.43) and Gobby/libobby. My personal opinion is that the Jabber idea which Inkboard did is the sanest, but I might be wrong. All I really care about is that we don't run into 5 or 10 different directions.

Anyway, done ranting now.

Laptop Testing Team

The time is upon us again to test our laptops. Dapper Flight 1 has just been released. (You can get it here). In light of that, I have moved all laptops which do not appear to have been tested with the final release of Breezy to an new table on LaptopTestingTeam called Unmaintained. If your laptop is on this list, don't dispair. Simply test Breezy and Flight 1, update your wiki page and then move the row entry back to the 2nd table.

What if you held an installfest...

...and only one person came? Happily, 100% of the computers that people brought to have Linux installed on them got Ubuntu. And the guy brought his own Ubuntu amd64 disk, thanks to Shipit.

Sad but true

Ok, I just about pissed myself laughing at this.

Revisiting the menus for Dapper

While at UBZ we had a good discussion about the various applications in the menu and what, if anything, we should do about each and every one of them. This generated the MenusRevisted spec, which is going to be pushed into dapper very soon now. Now this spec makes a few changes that some might disagree with. In light of that, please go read the spec and make comments. We need that feedback to make Dapper rock!

Playing with the big kids

Seems nobody else has blogged about this yet. Ubuntu has been certified on DB2 ready by IBM. As announced to the world by Sivan Green and the wonderful Jane Silber in these two ubuntu-devel posts:

• Playing with the big players
  
• Ubuntu gains DB2 certification
  

I leave it to you to guess who wrote which one... ;)