A whole lot of things to write about…

  • Generally I am the last one in the office to move to a new release of Fedora on the main box. I tend to move through stable -> rawhide / development -> newer release on the test box using a variety of combinations of desktop environments and applications. Since the test box is MIA and I was getting tired of the “raah-raah Sulphur” that seems to be echoing from corners of the office, I decided to take the plunge and take the main box to rawhide / development with the intention of moving to Sulphur (stable). Used a LiveUSB to “install-to-hard-disk” activated the livna repo and pulled in a massive upgrade followed by the install of my preferred applications. First impressions – [i] the graphics look way too smooth and beautiful [ii] NetworkManager had some initial hiccups but then began working nicely (UPDATE: Thanks to the poking around the system by mether it turns out that some till_now_undocumented gconf cruft in /home was playing hard to get with NM other than which the disable-enable trick for the connection seems to work nicely) [iii] Pidgin hasn’t crashed yet, so I am off Kopete for a while [iv] took some time getting used to the packagekitd + yum thing with yum getting locked now and then. I generally turn of yumupdatesd and then do yum install / remove etc and guess getting used to PackageKit will take time [v] scim and Bengali (India) support work nicely [vi] fonts on the browser render well, I could do with some of my browser add-ons though, but I guess they will come in due course [vii] the firstboot doesn’t include the SELinux bits so you can trip up getting the system installed and booted into SELinux “Enforcing” mode. Fun, fun, fun 🙂
  • The experience with the local mirrors viz the GLUG-NITH and the WBUT ones hasn’t been a happy one. The former times out rejects the connection (as per conversation with Debarshi) with an unerring frequency while the latter doesn’t mirror development yet. The usage statistics for the GLUG-NITH mirror are here, and it does prove that more mirrors and torrent seeds are required. If you know someone who can help in getting this done, do get in touch with the Fedora folks in India via the fedora-india mailing list or the #fedora-india channel on FreeNode. In fact, if you want to help out with the FreeMedia project in India, these would be the means to get in touch. At the last count there are more OPEN media requests than we can handle and we would really love to see more contributions for this effort. Getting the OS bits to consumers and contributors go a long way in ensuring that the latest and the shiny greatest release is available for testing and contribution.
  • The list of projects this time looks amazing. Here’s to a wonderful time hacking and building communities. A slight note on the insanity that prevailed for a short while with various LUGs pushing out lists like “here are the number of folks from ‘our’ LUG who are participating as candidates or mentors”. Without being too sarcastic, that reminds me of the time a number of coaching centers take out advertisements which proclaim to the world and its uncle that “xy number of students appeared in the top ranks for such and such common entrance examinations”. It isn’t really about the breast beating – it is about ensuring that the mentors and the candidates work in harmony and help ensure that a community of usage is built around the project. If they have a collective of people who think, work and learn together it is then that the massive push like the GSoC would be really effective. Till then it would be like the annual festival which is slowly losing some of the sheen.
  • Thanks to all the fine folks at Nokia I finally have my n810 at hand (thanks to ramkrsna from getting it down during his 17 flight backpack across the US trip). First impressions – [i] xrandr breaks a whole lot of things (should not have tried that really) [ii] scim stuff is not suited to a tap style of input [iii] I miss the fact that the button is not outside and I have to expose the keyboard to use it [iv] the keyboard seems a bit flaky [v] a lot of my prejudices around the on-screen tap based usage would require a re-visit [vi] the application wish list is an interesting document.
  • Clare has a lovely welcome note for GSoC candidates that can apply to all the other projects too.

And in some other news

  • Yesterday evening we had a lovely meal at Barbeque Nation which is doing a soft launch at Pune. The concept of a “live barbeque” at the table is fairly unique for me at least and the food was lovely. For a change the music wasn’t really too loud, the seating comfortable and we had a whole lot of stories to share over the fixed price 5 vegetarian, 5 non-vegetarian “eat all you can” barbeque feast. The food could have done with a touch of less salt and I really wished I had dragged my camera along.
  • Runa is back from her vacation and she re-arranged the bookshelf and I have space for more books. She also brought some goodies (read palm-candy) for me. Yay !!
  • During an unguarded moment of enthusiasm I had opined to Lucas that the RoadMap needs to be “un-geeked”. So, I plan to sit down during the coming weeks and ask the lamest of questions on the now-released-roadmap and be a general pain in the posterior for all the fine folks who responded to the roadmap call.
  • ps. we are looking out for a software engineer.

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