Recently I tried to use my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone to access the web via it’s 3G modem that is available over Bluetooth. I wanted it to work together with NetworkManager nicely so that other programs (such as Pidgin) receive the online status and also to ease the connection/disconnection process. However NM and also gnome-bluetooth are not ready for the job yet (Blueman alledgedly is).
I found a blog entry by Harald Hoyer that offers a Python script to simplify the whole process of adding the phone as a modem. However that script isn’t up to date anymore. Unfortunately NM doesn’t trust HAL to determine the capabilities of the phone anymore (thus allowing this nice Python hack-script) but rather additionally asks udev for it’s opinion. This will result in the following error message in the debug log of NM:

NetworkManager: <info> (rfcomm0): found serial port (udev: hal:GSM)
NetworkManager: <info> (rfcomm0): ignoring due to lack of probed mobile broadband capabilties

I worked around this by setting all rfcomm* ports to be “probed” modems via an udev rule. I know that this probably is not the nicest way to do this but hey, it works. Furthermore I updated the script to the new Python 2.6 popen functions.

Here is what I came up with:

dialup-bluetooth.py
90-rfcomm-nm.rules

The udev rule belongs in /etc/udev/rules.d. The python script can be put anywhere you want but keep in mind that it must be run as root.

Have fun browsing the web on the go!

Ladies and gents. Tomorrow, the great Bluetooth presentation! Come and join in the chuckles. A superb presentation that the New York Times calls «Inexplicably enticing», an anonymous KDE developer say it's «Dumbed down, and not Cross-desktop und so weiter».

Where: Palacio de la Música
When: 12:00 to 12:30
Who: Y.T.
What: ¡la mejor presentación de Bluetooth en el mundo!

Here I am, at Crete, participating in the first ever Greek Coding Camp.

We’re at Paleochora, a small town in South Crete. At the moment we’re 10 people, and today a few more are coming along. We’re sitting at the camping’s cafe/restaurant, under mulberry trees and the loud sound of with birds and insects hacking on open source.

We arrived here in the morning after a good trip with the boat from Piraeus. Good thing we caught the bus which came directly from Patras, entered the boat and dropped us in the city center of Chania. We went to the village home of alup, eaten a rich breakfast from his parents which included the local specialty of Bougatsa. Yummy!

Four guys together with camping equipment managed entered the tiny car of local guru hoo2 and traveled to Paleochora. The day started with the usual laughter overdose with the local group.

The teams formed into projects which can last a few days. For today, we have the following projects:

• Translation of 45+ standard Open Office Templates
• Creation of Greek-specific OOo Templates (eg. υπεύθυνη δήλωση)
• Openoffice Testing Greek Build
• Transifex workflow support for translations. Development taking place on our bitbucket ‘reviews’ branch.
• Bugfix in Xorg for letter ‘ς’

Lunch included a local specialty, τσιγαριαστό αρνί (special lamb in casserole with olive oil and herbs) and, of course, a healthy dose of Tsikoudia. Afternoon session was on quite soon.

Follow our work on Twitter at the #gcc09 hashtag!

(cc) by Charlie Phillips

Sembra che il mio precedente post sui driver ATI non sia stato troppo chiaro nello spiegare la situazione che si è venuta a determinare per quello che riguarda Linux, e Fedora in particolare.
In breve, i driver binari faticano a fornire un adeguato supporto agli utenti Linux, anche se quantomeno la documentazione che ATI continua a rilasciare permette agli sviluppatori di del driver open di migliorare il supporto (anche 3D) ad ogni release.

Ma veniamo al punto. Le schede ATI sono supportate da due distinti drivers:

• Catalyst 9.3 per tutte le schede non "HD"
  
• Catalyst dalla 9.4 in poi per tutte le schede "HD"

Il driver 9.3 funziona con XOrg fino alla versione 1.5 e con i kernel fino alla 2.6.28.
Il driver 9.4 funziona con XOrg fino alla versione 1.6 e con i kernel fino alla 2.6.28.

Fedora 10 al momento ha XOrg 1.5 e kernel 2.6.27, per cui i driver sono regolarmente forniti da RPMFusion (kmod-fglrx per 9.3 e kmod-catalyst per gli altri)

Fedora 11 invece ha XOrg 1.6 e kernel 2.6.29. Il driver 9.3 quindi non funziona (e ATI ha dichiarato che non ha intenzione di aggiornarlo) quindi i possessori delle schede corrispondenti devono usare il driver open che comunque ha il supporto alla accelerazione 3D funzionante per quasi tutte le schede.
Il driver per le schede più nuove invece è compatibile con XOrg 1.6 ma non ancora con il kernel 2.6.29 per cui RPMFusion non è al momento in grado di fornire il corrispondente pacchetto.

Cosa si può fare allora? visto che parliamo di driver "closed", direi ben poco... Una cosa però è possibile: la ATI ha un bug tracker e una form di feedback: se avete un minuto libero, assicuratevi di contattarli per fargli sapere quanti problemi vi crea il driver con Fedora 11...

On the bus to Boston and finishing up my notes from NECC09. As noted in an earlier post here, I was sick the first half of Tuesday (I slept in until my fever broke), but managed to get some good conversations in anyhow within the few afternoon hours I had.

Low floor, high ceiling. My hacker friends and I use this phrase to describe a good design - it should be easy to learn but not constrain you from doing powerful things. As a hacker, a high ceiling is a killer feature for me. I want control. I need control. I know I’m going to outgrow the defaults on - if not all, a substantial portion - of things I use; I actively seek to max out the capabilities of my tools. For this freedom, I’m willing to give up a good initial experience - I will climb a steep learning curve to get something set up on my computer and in my fingers and mind because the long-term benefits are worth it.

For teachers, low floors are the killer app. They need it working now. They don’t know whether their kids are going to be abe to take it further, so it’s not really worth looking at whether the thing can go farther. I mean, most of the assignments given to 8-year-olds take what, 1-2 man hours to complete? As a high school student (at an intense math and science magnet, too) spending over 5 hours on an assignment was unusual - and I remember sophomore year when friends of mine moaned about how hard it was to do so much work because they had to learn to make websites for their history assignments on top of… y’know, learning history.

If you have to think and train too much about the usage of a tool, that tool gets in the way of learning things other than how to use it. One teacher taught her elementary school kids how to make stop-motion films. When I saw the title of her presentation, I started thinking about all the neat things you could teach them with video editing and tricky lighting setups and special effects. But the teacher emphasized that all she had taught her kids was how to push the “take a picture” button on the camera. (Which was already mounted on a tripod. Pointing at a table. Which was lit.) The kids didn’t string the pictures into films, didn’t even zoom in or out. But those kids had time to tell a story.

Phrases I heard repeated over and over when teachers were showing me their work: “All you have to do is…” “It comes built right in!” (This one is followed by a chorus of awed “Ahhhs.”)  “You don’t have to set it up!” “If I can do it, anyone can!” These typically were repeated several times in rapid succession in the same presentation.

Other buzzwords: (yes, I made the bingo card - click picture to expand.)

Some of the teachers had brought their students to show off their work. In one of the booths, a 6th grader was being filmed by her teacher, reading a prepared speech off a laptop screen about how “technology changed her life.” I thought once again about how good we get at giving the answers other people want to hear.

I also discovered SETSIG, a group of educators interested in technology for special education students. My laptop is about to run out of battery, so I will need to type that in later.

Simply a great story reaffirming how the failure of technical leadership and fundamental understanding about the need to have a robust underlying technical architecture for something as fundamental stock trading. Compare that fiasco with how the New York Stock Exchange sustains it's leadership so much so, that the CIO himself is willing and able to go on camera to attest to the robustness of Linux and related technologies. Years ago, it used to be said that "no one get's fired for buying IBM" and then some tried to replace IBM with Microsoft. Big FAIL.

I am hoping that the decision makers who awarded the Standard Operating Environment of the Singapore government are reading this blog and following those links. I suspect that they are not for they are so blinded and entrenched in a MS worldview. I continue to hear of major defects in the project, massive cost overruns ("oh, that part is not budgetted for.") and general annoyance at the end user level. Try talking to anyone about the progress of SOE and all you get are snarls and a string of explitives. Wonderful. Almost a billion dollars plunked down for questionable and low quality proprietary software. No empowering of the local economy to help with the system. Wasted tax dollars. #fb

HI all,

This month’s SLLUG Daytime SIG meeting is this coming Wednesday, July 8, from 11:30am-1pm at BetaLoft.  I apologize for being slow getting this out, we’ve been working through a big datacenter move this past week at work.  Now that is over, it’s time for SLLUG Daytime at BetaLoft, (357 W 200 S Suite 201 Salt Lake City, UT, 84101).  Here’s a map if you need directions.

I’d like to let you all know that I (Herlo) will be presenting this month, and the topic is: Cobbler, the powerful, installation, dhcp, dns and repo server!

If you have ever wanted to setup a system with pxe, dhcp, customized repositories and more, then cobbler is for you.  Feel free to read up on the cobbler website before the meeting.

I should mention that cobbler supports several distributions of Linux, and will soon support Windows remote installation (using Linux RIS).  Albeit, I’ll focus on setup of cobbler, a simple installation server with just one distro, using kvm and koan (kickstart over a network) with some basic networking and showing the gui tools as well.

Bring your lunch and your brains and learn all about setting up your very own install server in under an hour.

See you all on Wednesday!

Cheers,

Herlo

Related Posts

• Meeting: SLLUG Daytime SIG - May 13, 11:30am-1pm, Basics of Puppet
• Reminder: Cooking with PAM - This Wednesay 11:30am @ SLLUG Daytime SIG
• Reminder: SLLUG Daytime SIG meeting THIS Wednesday @ 11:30am
• Event: SELF: Day 0.5-2.0
• SELF: Day 0-0.5

I still see bugreports that blame HAL for various things including my mouse buttons don't work", "the pointer jumps", and various other things. In none of these cases HAL is at fault. From the X server's point-of-view, HAL is merely a replacement for the xorg.conf.

The simple tasks HAL does for us in the X server is:

1. List all input devices (the equivalent to the InputDevice sections in the xorg.conf).


2. Nominate the appropriate driver for each input device (the equivalent to the Driver "..." line in each InputDevice section).


3. Provide user-configured extra options such as the keyboard layout (the equivalent to the Option "Foo" "bar" lines).
   

Note that 2 and 3 are a result of your local configuration files and not some random guesses.

So whenever it's unclear if a problem is in fact caused by HAL ask yourself: if you had a xorg.conf, could this problem be fixed by editing it? If not, then you need to report the bug against the input driver or the X server. Here's Fedora's rough checklist for reporting input bugs.

That HAL is being replaced by DeviceKit everywhere is a completely different issue as well.

I’ll cut to the chase: it doesn’t work. But have no fear, there’s an OSS solution.

I recently got into using Amazon for buying MP3s. It’s DRM-free and has a great integration with pandora.com, which lets me hear a new song and click directly in pandora’s interface to buy it. It’s technology at its finest, if not its most dangerous (to my credit card).

Amazon is annoying in the sense that you can download single MP3s as an MP3 file, but to buy a full album you have to use their proprietary downloader. This was bearable until a recent change where all MP3s now have to be downloaded using their downloader.

The problem? The most recent build of their client is for Fedora 9 (or Ubuntu 8.10 if you go that route). So their software is, um, I’ll just say “not up to date”. I was able to hack around to get it to run under Fedora 10, but it’s flat out busted in Fedora 11.

As I said at the outset, there is hope. Clamz is a command line app to download MP3s using Amazon’s .amz formatted files. It’s exactly what you think it is. You download the .amz file from Amazon (at the point in Amazon’s workflow where you should be just downloading the MP3 itself) and run the clamz executable passing in the .amz file. Poof, it just works.

I’m disappointed it has to come to this. I know Fedora 11 is still new, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was never a Fedora 10 build (and still is no Ubuntu 9.4 build) of the Amazon downloader. Serious good karma to the Clamz project for stepping up and filling this need (at least until I find a new outlet for buying MP3s; if Amazon doesn’t want to let me buy from them then I’m not gonna go nuts trying to).

“What does it take to be good at something at which failure is so easy,so effortless ? ” : a quote from Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande which is a highly recommended reading for those who have not read it yet (that’s a link to the flipkart.com entry for those who are local).

Last evening over dinner, among other things, Runa and me got talking about translations and, translation quality. That is one of our favorite shop-talk items and, since the morning blog had bits about my performance with spellings, it was a bit more significant. It is a somewhat known issue that most translation teams measure the length of the sprint, that is, how many strings were completed or, the percentage of the coverage for a particular project. Some projects attach badges like “supported” / “unsupported“, “main” / “beta” to the coverage and thus make the rush to the tape more important. At some point in time, it is important for the teams to sit down, understand and make notes about the quality of translations. Left to itself, the phrase “quality of translations” doesn’t mean anything does it ? For example, if the phrase was “Disconnect from VPN…” and, you were required to translate it – how wrong can you go ?

It seems you can go wrong, and, most often do.

• One of the reasons that I have observed is that translating strings in application and, translating content like documentation/release_notes/guides require different kind of mind patterns.
• The second reason is the lack of fluency in the source language. So, if you are a translator/reviewer for any language, if you are using English source files (as most of us do), you need to be extremely proficient in the language. The way the sentences, phrases and sub-phrases arrange themselves in English may or may not lend themselves to direct translations
• The third reason is that most translators do not take time out to first use the application in English (or, read the documentation completely in English) and, use it again (or, read it again) after translation. That is a recipe for disaster. English is a funny language and, sometimes, due to the structure of the source files, the context of the content is lost. What does look like a simple word might have a funny implication if the comprehension about how it is placed within the UI or, the user-interaction flow is not made a note of.

Now that most projects have some kind of “localization steering committees” it would be a good small project to observe which locales are coming up with the highest quality of translations and, attempting to understand what they are doing. Asking the language teams about the reasons that inhibit them from maintaining a high quality would also enable deeper understanding of how a project can help itself become a better one (in a somewhat strange loop way). Such discussions would enable coming up with Guidelines for Quality which are important to have. I firmly believe that all developers desire that their applications be consumed by the largest number of audience possible and, at heart, they are willing to sit down and listen to constructive suggestions about how best they can help the localization teams make it happen. That is the sweet spot the “LSCo” folks need to converge on and get going. In fact, for projects like OLPC, where a lot of new paradigms are being created, understanding translation processes and, chipping away at improving translation quality is highly requested.

Translation is still an activity that requires a fanatical attention to detail and, that little bit of ingenuity. There is something not right about committing a translation that smacks of a “letting go of the disciplined focus on detail” and, does not contain anything new. The job is made somewhat more hard when it comes to documentation. One cannot (and, perhaps should not) go beyond what the author has written and yet, it has to be made available in the local language after “stepping into the shoes” (or, “getting into the mind”) of the original author while making it aligned with the natural flow of the target language. This is also the place where the “translator memory”, as opposed to the “Translation Memory” becomes important. The mind should be supple enough to recall how similar idioms were translated earlier or, if an error that was already reported has cropped up again. Translators have a significant bit to contribute towards making the translation source files better, cleaner, well-maintained and, well documented. And, they have to do it right every time.

All this would come together to produce high quality translations and, wider usage of applications and documentation. Collaboration for the win !

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.6

My IRC chat logs from I Know What You Are Going To Do This Summer 2009 for i-want-2-do-project. tell-me-wat-2-do, di-git-ally managing love letters, and Packaging RPM are now available under Verbatim Copying and Distribution License.

Firefox 3.5 was released Tuesday. And you might have noticed this story from Slashdot.

Now, the issue has been explained in true Internet fashion (via my friend Sam):

I'm going to be away from fedora and from my repository for a few days.

A full week, dedicated to GLPI and more precisely to ITIL work

During this time, my internet access is going to be very restricted, so It will be quite difficult to communicate with me. We have a very ambitious plan and the week should be both studious and convivial. See you soon.... Lire Away for a few days

Lets take a moment and look back about 5 years at the state of the GNU/Linux desktop from an emerging web based world. There was really only two web browsers worth mentioning, Mozilla and Netscape (which in hindsight were essentially the same thing). The problem? They were heavy set in terms of the resources they required, so what happened? Mozilla released Phoenix, and it was amazingly fast and nobody could believe how quickly it would fire up and run on their old Pentium II machines that they slapped Linux on in an attempt to breath some life back into them.

At the time only those "in the know" were running the browser but it was quickly gaining steam just in time for a name change to Firebird due to angry people with trademark hooks on the name and for a decent amount of users this caused enough confusion for there to be a riff in its general usage but as time progressed and users were aware of the name change things were back to normal. Forums were booming with the merits of the browser as the popularity gained, it was insane how fast your browser could be. It truly raised the bar for expectations of what users compared all other browsers to. Now that we've gotten some happy users, lets go ahead and change the name again. This time the Firebird database people are upset so Mozilla politely obliged and changed the name again. Thus, Firefox is born and the web browser revolution is under way. Firefox hits the ground running with features no one can compete with, it is wildly extendible, is "secure" (I always use that word with a grain of salt), open source, and its fast. This is truly innovation that will go down in the history of computing.

Lets fast forward to today and walk into a room of GNU/Linux aficionados and ask "What's your opinion of Firefox?" and as we make this inquiry let us remember that this was the same demographic that half a decade ago was singing the praises of the now main stream browser. The responses you will receive are probably going to be something along the lines of "I don't use FirefoxOS", " pwns Firefox in the face", or "Bloatware is annoying". What happened? Geeks are fickle creatures, that's what happened. We love the latest and greatest tech that nobody else is using because its new and shiny, its fast, it shows promise, and because nobody else is using it we are somehow elite for doing so. What about when that new shiny tech reaches maturity and succeeds in a big way? Firefox happens.

Here's the reality of the situation, yes webkit is cool as hell from a geek standpoint because its new and its shiny but Firefox is tried and true, it supports all the latest and greatest web tech, is popular as hell, its well supported, stable, "secure" (remember that grain of salt), cross platform, fast, extendible as ever, open source, and it just flat out works. I'm not saying you should turn your nose up at webkit in any way, shape, or form because it truly is the new shiny tech that shows a lot of promise. But I'm tired of people bitching and moaning about Firefox's "issues" when all the arguments I have heard thus far are simply cases of a Geek stigma haunting what is now too mainstream to be "cool" or "l33t" enough for those of us who pride ourselves on our technological prowess.

Lets try to be Geeks and be happy for that which emerges from our depths as a great mainstream success in the user share market.

This link seems to be being passed around the blogs, but I first saw it at pjp news.

http://www.commandlinefu.com

It’s a collection of user uploaded and ranked useful commands. The idea is similar to the two entries I wrote on shell tricks but on a much bigger and cooler level. Just quickly poking around the first page of the site has already shown a number of things that are going to come in really handy. They also support all the usual useful channels like RSS and twitter, both of which you can use with a filtered threshold for user votes to limit the incoming commands to the truly awesome. There is some serious black magic to be learned on this site.

Comparto a ustedes el discurso que dio el Presidente Luiz Inazio Lula da Silva de Brasil durante la clausura del Festival Internacional de Software Libre.

Publicado originalmente aqui y traducido al castellano por su servidor

---

Bien, de hecho, Dilma ha hablado por parte del Gobierno Brasileño. No había necesidad de que yo dijera absolutamente nada aqui el día de hoy, porque creo que el haber cruzado ese “Pasillo Lustrado”, el cuál atravesé para llegar aqui, vale por lo menos cuatro discursos. Pero quería felicitar a mis camaradas del Ministerio quienes están aqui con nosotros.

Quisiera felicitar a los diputados federales, a nuestros senadores, al Gobernador Olivio Dutra, al alcalde Fogaça. Quisiera saludar a un invitado especial quien llegó tarde aqui, nuestra camarada Lourdes Munhoz, de España, una congresista de Barcelona quien aconseja al Presidente Zapatero sobre Software Libre. No le veo el rostro porque ella no se ha presentado aún. Párese por favor.

Leer discurso completo …

Articulos Similares:

• FLISOL Monterrey 2009 – Un Exito!
• FISL Dia 0
• Planeta Linux México
• Algo de promoción…
• FISL Day 1 / FUDCon Day 0

Discurso del Presidente Lula durante el FISL 10

Comparte el enlace:

The monthly TeachingOpenSource conference call is coming up on Monday. The focus of this call will be the textbook project that Greg DeKoenigsberg is starting up, and we'll also have an update on the Teaching Open Source Summit '09 (TOSS09) and other TOS projects.

The calls are open to everyone, so if you're in any way involved with or interested in the teaching of community-based open source, please feel free to join the call -- and if you're not already part of the TeachingOpenSource.org community, please jump right in!

Continue reading "TeachingOpenSource Conference Call - Monday July 6"

Sorry this comes late. I took a couple of days off after the Goodwill Tour o’ Doom to unwind with family and my blogging suffered as a result. FUDCon Day 2 was our BarCamp, which we organized the evening of Day 1. Day 3 was a continuation of some hackfests from Day 1, along with a couple additional sessions.

• One of the hallmarks of FUDCon is the BarCamp segment and this FUDCon definitely didn’t disappoint. We had a great variety of talks on Day 2, from Ambassador development and equipment, to a UI design clinic, to getting started hacking on wireless, to an array of system administration topics. It was a great variety and there was practically no way you could show up and not find something to appeal to you for most or all of the day.
• I didn’t see many talks myself, between working on organization, having one-on-one conversations with some of the attendees, and just helping Max make sure everything was ship-shape for the other folks there.
• I did get to hold a session based on my little PulseCaster app. Unfortunately there weren’t many attendees, but the upshot was that I got a private design clinic with Mairin Duffy. She helped me find some excellent ways to improve the interface for the next version, which I’ll probably work on later this weekend if I have time. I did get some interest from a couple of the podcasting folks who were around, including the Linux Outlaws, who now have a show available in which they interviewed me and Max.
• Max has already written some of the post mortem stuff we talked about at the event, so it’s worth checking out that post if you haven’t done so already.
• Sometimes you simply can’t please all the people all the time. We seem to get conflicting feedback at every event about how the next event should go, and those changes inevitably lead to many people asking for the event to be planned the way it went originally. While that can be frustrating from the organizers’ standpoint, it’s very important to us to keep those channels open and always try to be improving these events, while realizing that it’s impossible to have one perfect event for everyone.
• When traveling, always make sure you leave a venue with every personal item you carried in. ‘Nuff said.
• The photos from the event are incredible, especially the one that led to the FUDCon Berlin 2009 poster. Thank you to Nicu Buculei and many others who did such a wonderful job showing how much fun and friendship we have in the Fedora community. (Hmm, maybe the fifth foundation is actually “Fun”!)
• Day 3 was a little light, but one of the highlights was Chitlesh Goorah’s talk on the Fedora Electronics Lab, where a number of attendees gathered in the main hall to hear about the revolutionary inroads he’s been making with the EDA and manufacturing business community, showing off the wide expanse of open source tools available in Fedora.
• I think the best part of FUDCon for me was seeing and catching up in person with Max, with whom I talk fairly regularly but don’t get a chance to see often since he moved to Europe. Great job on FUDCon, my friend!

I flew home Monday (with another slightly-too-long layover in the hell of Heathrow) exhausted but very, very happy with the state of the European community and the excellent work being done by so many Fedorans there. Many thanks to Gerold Kassube, Joerg Simon, Fabian Affolter, Jens Kuehnel, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Christoph Wickert, Thomas Woerner, and so many others for making this a fantastic event. Also special thanks to the Red Hat security team, including Mark Cox, Josh Bressers, Murray McAllister, and many more, for making a roosting place at FUDCon, and also for making themselves available for our community to ask questions and discuss issues.

There was a lot of talk about where to hold the next FUDCon EMEA — I think most people agree that we should do somewhere other than Berlin, to spread the FUDCon joy around the continent, just as we are going to try to do with the North American FUDCon later this year by having it somewhere other than Boston. Wherever we hold it, I am certain we’ll be graced with some of the brightest, most energetic, and friendliest FOSS lovers from around the globe. Thanks to all of you, for making our community such an amazing place to work and play every day.

I shall be off work for the next week (plus weekends), so you’ll probably see things slow down in this blog too. But before I go away, I thought I’d post an update on some of the exciting stuff that’s been happening in QA and BugZappers lately.

The long-running project to use the severity and priority fields in Bugzilla is finally at an end. I’ve sent an announcement to -devel-announce which has not yet been approved, but the meat is that the severity field will be set by triagers during triage, according to the policy in the bug workflow page, to indicate how significant the bug is. The priority field will be reserved for maintainers to use, if they so choose, to organize their workload as they choose.

We have been working, lately, to improve and create pages dedicated to explaining how to debug issues in particular components, and how to provide appropriate information when filing bugs on those components. This grew out of a proposal made by Jóhann Guðmundsson to improve bug reporting. These pages are centrally linked to from the main page on proper bug reporting procedure and can also be found in the ‘Debugging’ category. One example of a page that’s been substantially revised is the page on X.org.

Finally, Matej Cepl and the rest of the Desktop team have been working on a project called Fit and Finish to work on the small details that make a polished desktop experience. This will be based around a series of Test Days focussing on the user experience rather than specific developer-driven ‘features’. I’ve been helping to set up the test days and it’s also acting as a good test of the SOP I wrote for running test days, which we intended to help with projects like this where a different group takes ownership of its own track of Test Days. Their first event on display configuration is happening this coming Tuesday (in #fedora-fitandfinish on IRC), so please come out to support these events!

It’s good to see all these exciting projects going on, and I hope they’ll reflect in the quality and innovation in future Fedora releases, starting with Fedora 12. See you all in a week or so.

As of a week ago or so, HAL is no longer required by either NetworkManager or ModemManager.  This helps streamline the hardware detection process and cleans up that code a lot.  It was a fun ride and a lot of other great stuff came along with the udev port, because rewriting everything to use udev pretty much required cleaning up a bunch of other stuff.  The udev parts were a lot easier than I thought they would be; what was complex was rewriting a ton of ModemManager to be more flexible and work better with multi-port modems on the one hand, and really stupid quirky hardware on the other.

For everyone in the US, have wonderful 4th of July.  To everyone who’s not, have fun at the Desktop Summit.  Had prior plans meaning I couldn’t attend, but I’m sure the Red Hat team will honor my absence by spreading the love and drinking all the liquor.  Rock on, GNOME.

I currently have a Dell Studio 17 running Fedora 11, but there are times when i do need windows, so for this i’ve Installed my OEM windows that came with the machine into a virtualbox virtual machine. Works pretty good to be honest, but one thing i couldn’t get working was the webcam, the system just didn’t detect it. Virtualbox noticed that there were webcams available but wouldn’t allow me to select it, here’s what i did to get it working [obviously change username to your actual username ]

1, create an entry in /etc/groups
usb:x:503:username

2, make sure username is in the vboxusers group
3, add this to the /etc/fstab
none /sys/bus/usb/drivers usbfs devgid=503,devmode=664 0 0

mount -a or reboot [i'm not sure this part is necassary]

This should now allow you to select the usb devices that virtualbox has detected then allow you to install drivers for them within windows. Worked for me…..

The post is bought to you by lekhonee v0.4

Related posts:

1. Installing VirtualBox 1.6 in openSUSE 10.3
2. Windows 7 RC + Virtual Box
3. Hardy Heron

Now that India's Draft Policy on Open Standards is close to finalization, the usual last-minute dramas are on. In a new twist, I am told that NASSCOM and MAIT have submitted their recommendations, purportedly on behalf of the industry. If this is indeed the case, my organization, Red Hat was not consulted. I also checked with IBM and they too were not consulted. Since Red Hat and IBM have been key players in this area, this is definitely intriguing. I shot off a letter to both MAIT and NASSCOM and a copy of the letter to NASSCOM is reproduced below. It is self explanatory. The letter to MAIT had minor editorial changes but is essentially the same letter.

To,

Mr. Som Mittal,

President,

NASSCOM,

International Youth Centre,
Teen Murti Marg,
Chanakyapuri,
New Delhi 110 021
Phone: 91-11- 2301 0199

Dear Sir,

We have been informed that NASSCOM has submitted its opinion on the Draft Open Standards Policy for e-governance to the Department of Information Technology, Government of India. We have been informed that NASSCOM's submission supports the inclusion of standards under Reasonable and Non Discriminatory (RAND) terms and also the usage of multiple standards in the same domain.

Red Hat has been actively involved in the standards issue and we would like to place on record that we have not been consulted by NASSCOM before this submission was made. We DO NOT support the above recommendations of NASSCOM for the following reasons.

1) Standards should belong to humanity and not be controlled or owned by anyone. In the physical world, we do not pay for using standards like weights and measures. These are norms of civil society that have evolved over centuries and the digital world should be no exception to these norms.

2) In order to protect India's digital sovereignty, we must ensure that national data is stored in formats that are open and free of all encumbrances like royalties, patent claims etc. The Government is the custodian of data that belongs to the citizens of India. It must therefore ensure that this data is not stored in formats that are owned and controlled by anyone.

3) e-Government data like land records etc remain relevant for hundreds of years. If this data is stored in proprietary formats, it will prove expensive for the country in the long-term. It is also seen that proprietary formats are controlled by monopolistic outfits that (a) drive the adoption of a technology (b) file a thicket of patents around that technology and (c) litigate or threaten litigation if royalties are not paid. India must avoid getting into this trap at all costs.

4) For each application area, there must be only a single standard. The use of multiple standards will lead to tremendous complications in the practice of e-governance. Since data is at the heart of e-governance, the confusion created by using multiple e-government standards in the same domain may bring e-governance to a stand still. For example, if different government departments use different standards for document storage, it could greatly slow down or even thwart the process of exchanging files among government departments.

5) Vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation. The most popular standards like HTML and Unicode are standards that are supported by a vast number of industry players. Multiple standards in the same domain leads to fragmentation. It also helps vendors who can leverage their marketing muscle to drive users towards their own proprietary standards instead of open standards that are created through collaboration and consensus.

6) The Draft Open Standards Policy for e-governance has been in the works for the last two years and several public consultations have been held on this subject. NASSCOM's presence was not visible at any of these consultations and therefore a comment being made at this late stage, when the policy is close to being finalized is surprising. The two recommendations (RAND terms and multiple standards), if accepted, will lead to nullifying the work of the committee that has toiled for the last two years to create this policy because it will land us back to the current status quo dominated by multiple, proprietary standards.

7) We welcome the acknowledgment of open source in the policy. Both open source and open standards are inclusive movements and are therefore closely related to each other. In India, open source is now an integral part of many mission-mode e-government projects and it mention in this policy recognizes its long-term strategic importance in the e-Government sector.

8) We have reviewed version 1.15 of the Draft Policy and would like to place on record our appreciation of the excellent work done by this committee. The Draft Policy does an great job of protecting India's digital sovereignty and avoiding the clutches of proprietary standards. We therefore request NASSCOM's help and support in ensuring that the policy is approved "as is" without any further dilution.

With warm regards,

Venkatesh Hariharan
Corporate Affairs Director
Red Hat

Hi,

Rahul mentioned about this site which lists most useful Bash commands as voted by people

See: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

Some of them are just fantastic; It was cool to tweet from the shell.

I like how these simple things act so powerful. :)

This morning I committed a rather largish (23 files changed, 28 insertions, 1551 deletions) patch:

commit f884a1ae954d14928a6a7055d4d4b182fbb2a3bc
Author: Richard Hughes <richard_at_hughsie.com>
Date:   Fri Jul 3 13:49:05 2009 +0100
    HAL is no longer a dependency of gnome-power-manager

This means that gnome power manager in git master no longer needs HAL to compile or run. This is a quite a significant moment, as now it relies just on the thriving DeviceKit* stack, rather than the old lumbering HAL.

Just a word of warning: You’ll need DeviceKit-power 009 (released in a few days time) if you want to use g-p-m in git master without loosing your ability to change your backlight, or to set the lid action preferences. It’ll still compile with 008, but 009 is very much recommended.

The following is an English translation of the speech President Luis Ignatio Lula de Silva gave at the 10th FISL conference. I was there and heard a live, simultaneous translation of this speech courtesy of former OSI board member Bruno Souza.

Well, actually, Dilma spoke for the Brazillian government. There was no need for me to say absolutly nothing in here today, because I think that passing through that 'Polish corridor', which I passed to get here, it was worth at least four speeches. But I wanted to congratulate my comrades from the Ministry who are here with us.

I would like to congratulate the federal deputies, our senators, our former Governor Olivio Dutra, the mayor Fogaça. I would like to greet a special guest who arrived late here, our comrade Lourdes Munhoz, from Spain, a congresswoman for Barcelona and who advises the President Zapatero in Free Software. I do not see her face because she hasn't presented herself yet. Stand up.

I want to congratulate our dear Dean Joaquim Clutê. I want to congratulate our dear comrade Marcelo Branco, general coordinator of the 10th Free Software International Forum. I greet the comrades of the Brazilian public institutions who are here. I see in front of me the Bank of Brazil and Serpro. I greet the foreign guests. I salute that child who is there, and must be thinking: what are we doing here and why her parents brought her here? One day, she will know.

And I want to congratulate a special person who is here, which is Sergio Amadeu, because now that the dish is prepared ... I also want to greet the comrad Tigre, our chairman of the Industry Federation of Rio Grande do Sul.

Now that the dish is prepared, is very easy for people to eat it. But to prepare this dish was not a joke. I remember the first meeting we had, at Granja do Torto, which I understood absolutely nothing of this language that this people were deciding, and that was a huge tension between those who advocated for the adoption of free software by Brazil and those who thought we should do the sameness of always, buying, paying for others intelligence and, thanks God, prevailed in our country the issue and the decision of free software. We had to choose: or we were going to the kitchen to prepare this dish the way we wanted to eat, with the seasoning that we wanted, to give a Brazilian taste to our food, or we would eat what Microsoft wanted us to eat. Prevailed, simply, the idea of freedom.

read more