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2007

Foresight KDE Edition

As a GNOME guy, I don’t use KDE.

As it was pointed out to me today (thanks Og!), without any intended ill intent, I left off any news of KDE in the Foresight Newsletter I’m working on.

One of the cool things coming with Foresight 2.0, is a KDE edition and a XFCE edition. The beauty of open source is choice – whether it’s a desktop environment, music player or your choice of web server.

The KDE edition is a little further along than the XFCE edition at this point, and one-ups the GNOME edition in the fact that it’s only 695 MB! One of these days we will get the GNOME edition to fit on a single CD. 🙂

Jtate and Int are leading the way in developing the KDE edition, which is also attracting new Foresight users such as Nixternal, whom you may know from such shows as Planet Ubuntu or Chicago LUG, and old Foresight users such as Og, who’s helping translate KDE to pt-br.

Now is a great time to get involved with Foresight – whether it’s helping polish the GNOME edition, help building the KDE or XFCE editions, or helping on any number of tasks in progress, such as documentation writing; bug triaging; building our next generation website or forums, or helping with marketing and attracting new users.

More information coming in this month’s newsletter!

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Extreme

My favorite late 80’s / early 90’s rock band, Extreme, has announced their re-union, along with a new album and tour in 2008.

Say what you will about More than Words and Hole Hearted, but when Extreme came out in 1989 with their first album, and Pornograffiti in 1990, they had a refreshing twist on the hair metal bands of the day. Their blend of funk, with horns, and Nuno’s guitar playing put them head and shoulders above their contemporaries, such as Winger, Slaughter or Poison.

I saw them a number of times live, including headlining at the Eagle’s Club right after Pornograffitti was released, with Alice in Chains opening, before Alice in Chains broke big. One of the two times I saw Alice in Chains, and it was already clear that Layne Staley was in the throes of the heroin addiction that would later kill him, as Alice in Chains performance was awful, and they were booed off the stage.

Extreme live was a different story – Gary Cherone’s energy is infectious, and Nuno’s guitar playing is absolutely amazing. I’ve seen them in everything from a small club to an arena, and they always rocked the house. I always swore I wouldn’t be one of those old guys who goes to concerts of the bands he followed in high school, but I may have to make an exception for this one.

Growing the Foresight Community

Og’s latest blog post links to David Bolter’s blog with a post on “Transparency in Community Decisions”. David writes:

Transparency should be applied to how decisions can get made in FOSS communities. This can involve different layers; for example, transparency could apply to:

  1. Who gets to participate in decision making.

  2. How these people are selected.

  3. The process of decision making.

In FOSS communities I think transparency should apply to all three where reasonably possible. What do I mean by this? Let’s take a couple of examples:

A) Getting hired by a FOSS organization which is integral to the community.

B) Getting commit access to an svn repository.

C) Getting syndication of one’s blog onto a planet/aggregator.

The timing of this couldn’t be better. The Foresight Marketing Team is about to tackle some of these exact tasks, specifically on what it means to become a user and developer within Foresight. This includes perks, such as IRC hostmasks or foresightlinux.org email addresses, but more importantly how to get commit access.

We don’t have all of the answers yet, especially for 1-3 above (other than Ken gets veto power!). But David’s post highlights the need for transparency, not only in how we build these processes, but how we execute them going forward.

We will be having a Marketing meeting sometime in the next week or so, with details to come soon.

Foresight Linux 2.0 Alpha Bugs wanted!

Yes, the title is right. Are you running the alpha of Foresight Linux 2.0? We want, no, need your bugs!

The alpha has been out for a couple of weeks now, and only ten bugs have been filed against the alpha, with two of them fixed. And I’d argue a couple more aren’t really bugs, but enhancements or tasks.

Please, please file bugs against the alpha. This way we know what needs to be fixed or needs improving. A new alpha release should be out sometime in the next week or two as well.

In other bug news, see me or Kevin if you’re interested in joining the QA team and want to help with bug hunting. We have 110 bugs assigned to Distro that need triaging! (Learn how to triage here.)

So please file bugs against the alpha, we want your desktop to be cool (and bug free).

The Beauty of Blu-Ray

If you were paying close attention to my blog a week ago, buried in my del.ico.us links were 2 links to Blu-ray news, including one on the state of Blu-Ray.

This was all research with the intention of buying a Blu-Ray player, which I ended up doing a week ago Sunday. I was lucky enough to find a second generation Samsung player, the BD-P1200. Why a second generation player, and not one of the third generation players that are profile 1.2 and just hitting retail shelves? It’s all about the Silicon Optix HQV video processor included, the only Blu-Ray player to include one. Where the HQV shines is on upscaling normal DVDs and is one of the best video processors ever made. Due to trying to reduce costs, Samsung did not include it on the BD-P1200’s successor, the BD-P1400. (Read more on the HQV video processor at the CNET BD-P1200 review under DVD performance.)

The quality of Blu-Ray discs is amazing. I expected to be good, on par with high-def TV, but it’s amazing. I’m lucky enough to own a 1080p TV, and I can’t get over the video quality of the movies I’ve watched so far. I bought a handful of movies with the player, and so far I’ve had the opportunity to watch both Fantastic Four movies, and Live Free or Die Hard.

I bought my Samsung player a week ago Sunday, at night, and promptly left for L.A. the next morning for work, returning late Thursday night. I then had plans all of last weekend, and was home only a few days before coming home to Milwaukee this weekend for Thanksgiving, so I haven’t had much time to enjoy it yet.

I still have to watch a normal DVD and see how good the HQV video processor is. I made sure the first thing I did was update the firmware – plugging in via ethernet I wasn’t able to grab an IP, but burning the firmware to a CD-R and popping it in was easy enough. I’m not concerned about being limited to a 1.1 BD profile – the only thing 1.2 allows is picture-in-picture for things such as director commentary. Until players come out in a couple of years at BD profile 2.0, this player will do just fine, and by then the cost will have come down and I’ll want to replace my other DVD players in the house.

I’m also not concerned about the pitched battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. A few months ago I was 100% sure Blu-Ray was going to win, but now it’s looking like a stalemate and both formats will be around for at least a few years. HD-DVD only has 2 studios in their camp, and one of those they had to pay $150 million for to be exclusive for the next year. Blu-Ray has all the other studios, and all the hardware manufacturers, except Toshiba, so I’m betting Sony will have it’s first format win in a long time.

If I hadn’t come in to some extra money, I don’t know if I would have bought one, but am I glad I did. The picture quality is beautiful and I can’t believe the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD.

Lawyers, Guns & Money

Unreal Tournament 3 was released Monday. But the Linux client demo never appeared, and the Linux retail server and client haven’t appeared yet either.

The UT3 mailing list has also been quiet recently, but last night Icculus sent a tweet out and the news hit the mailing list soon after: UT3’s Linux bits are hung up in legal. Somewhere along the way Epic licensed some middleware that can’t be included in the Linux version. Hopefully we’ll get some more news soon.

In related news, no Gears of War for Linux, only Mac. Something about the publisher who is based in Redmond squashing that idea. Damn them.

Rock Band

I more than enjoy the Guitar Hero franchise, having got my PS2 out of the closet a year and a half ago after buying all the Guitar Hero games, including this last one on the 360 for the first time.

Tomorrow marks the release of Rock Band, and Ars Technica takes a look at it and approves.

I’m pretty excited to get it, even with the high price point, as a few of us have been known to get together and rock out to Guitar Hero. Now we just need to find a 4th… And I can play with Alex, who I am sure will get a kick out of banging the drums. I’m happy the Guitar Hero guitar works with Rock Band, but very disappointed the Rock Band guitar doesn’t work with Guitar Hero as I don’t want to buy another guitar, but really want to unlock the co-op songs in GHIII. Hopefully they will patch the 360 version so the Rock Band guitar will work with GHIII sometime in the future.

Thankfully, I have the room in my basement for the setup, although if I do pick it up, I won’t be able to play it until next week since we’re going home for the holiday.