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SCALE Part 1

I spent last week working at my office in Los Angeles so I could also attend the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) this past weekend. Along with Ken VanDine and Kevin Harriss, we hosted the Foresight booth on the show floor.

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(L to R, myself, Kevin Harriss and Ken VanDine)_

We also hung out with Stu, who flew in with Ken and was manning the Bongo Project booth. Not only was Stu showing off the Bongo Project, which by itself is a cool mail and calendar server and web client, he was showing a demo of it as an rPath appliance.

Stu hosting the Bongo Project booth

(Picture taken by Kevin Harris under a CC Attribution-Share Alike license)

I attended Jono Bacon’s keynote, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Coming of the Linux Desktop which was a fantastic talk. Jono is right: it’s all about the community.

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I later had the chance to catch up and chat with Jono, as well, as Ken, and we talked about the community, how we can work together, and Ken’s thoughts on helping the Patch Squad and making it easy for users to do more testing and bug triaging.

I met some folks at dinner Friday night, including Eric, Christian and Jeff, a couple of which were also at the GNOME booth next door to Foresight at the show. Chatted with Christian briefly on a new RSS reader he just started working on for GNOME, which looks awesome.

Saturday night Ken participated in the Weakest Geek competition (based on the TV show Weakest Link), and I’m proud to say he wasn’t one of the first two voted off. It was pretty darn funny, and other contestants included Ted Haeger (formerly of Novell), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Jeremy (Linuxquestions.org) and two others. The questions were hilarious, and some of the answers were even funnier.

Unfortunately, I missed Karen Sandler’s talk Sunday. Karen is an officer of the Software Freedom Conservancy and gave a talk on Legal Organizational Issues for Free Software Projects. I’m really kicking myself for spacing this one and missing it.

I put up a handful of pictures in a Flickr set, and Kevin has even more.

A Look Back at 2007

One of my New Year’s Resolutions this year was to get more involved with GNOME and / or Ubuntu when the year started. Having used Ubuntu since it was first released, and Linux and GNOME specifically since 1999, I really wanted to give something back. After being utterly confused on where to even start with Ubuntu due to the number of volunteers and convoluted processes, I decided to start with GNOME.

I started the year strong, volunteering to help GNOME with the website revamp, including writing a few pages of content for the revamp, and editing a few more. (The new site still isn’t out so not sure if they’ll be using it or not).

I also volunteered to create a GNOME Live CD in January, and after a week or two of researching, was introduced to Ken VanDine who had also offered to help. Turns out Ken is the lead developer of Foresight Linux, and using the Conary and rPath tools, it was easy for him to create not just a Live CD, but other images including VMWare and QEMU as well.

In talking to Ken, and looking for more information on Foresight, I started hanging out in Foresight’s IRC channel on Freenode, and was impressed with the community, their communication and willingness to help others. See the June Foresight Newsletter for more.

And that began my journey in to Foresight. I installed Foresight shortly after, and just started helping out, first by answering questions in IRC (even when they were the wrong answer), and then really diving in, writing the monthly newsletter and then working on documentation. First developing the userguide on the wiki, and then teaching myself docbook and writing and publishing the userguide in Docbook to be included in Foresight.

Additionally with Foresight, I’m trying to help as a project manager, including keeping tabs on the different workstreams and communication within the group. I’ve been testing the first alpha of Foresight released in early November, and last but not least, continue to work on being a bugmaster and triage issues and tasks in JIRA.

I’m also happy with getting the Twin Cities Linux Usergroup meetings back off the ground after a two year hiatus, even though I haven’t had time to help out in the last few months in planning or organizing meetings.

The resolution I didn’t get to was creating my first podcast. I’ve had the songs picked out, but Jokosher didn’t work exactly as I hoped (as Audacity isn’t in our repos). I also wasn’t happy with my microphone quality. I’ll have to work on this one for next year.

Overall, a great year, and I’m very happy in being able to give back and help out, and looking to do more in 2008!

GNOME Developer's Kit

As someone who has for a long time wanted to get involved with an open source project, and specifically GNOME, the GNOME Developer Kit is a true blessing. (And more on my wanting to get involved in a different post in a week or so).

The GNOME Developer Kit is fully functional operating system with the latest (unstable) branch of GNOME. Available as an ISO you can install on your hard drive, or a VMWare image you can boot within your current OS, it has everything you need to start contributing back to GNOME. The GNOME Developer Kit is based on Foresight Linux, and uses Conary and PackageKit to stay updated with the latest commits from GNOME Subversion. Both the Dev Kit and Foresight were created by Ken VanDine, Foresight’s lead developer.

Og Maciel, a GNOME contributor, blogged about using the GNOME Developer Kit in assisting the translation teams. One comment in particular caught my attention, asking if translations were too hard of an area for someone new to contributing to start with.

With this in mind, what kind of documentation should be included with the GNOME Developer Kit, and where should it live? Getting started in open source can be daunting, and GNOME can sometimes come off as a bit of a clique, making it even harder for someone to start. Translations, bug triaging, and documentation are typically easy areas for someone new to start, but I’ve seen some challenges first hand trying to get involved. I don’t have any answers, but some of the questions that come to mind for me are:

  • Should documentation live on the image or on the wiki?
  • If on the wiki, should it link to other sections of the GNOME wiki (live.gnome.org or LGO for short)? (For example, the “Testing Patches” is linked on the GNOME Dev Kit’s LGO page to the Testing Patches LGO page.)
  • If on the image, should it be a docbook file similar to the Foresight User Guide, or just an HTML page?
  • What common tasks for developers should be documented? Think back to when you were just getting started with contributing, what questions came to mind?
  • What else?

Getting started with contributing back to an open source project takes determination and even a bit of courage. Tools like the GNOME Developer Kit help make that start even easier.

Software I'm excited about

A brief post as I’m still traveling for work. Here are a couple big and small packages in development that I’m excited about:

  • Flyback: A GUI wrapper for rsync and rsnapshot to make backup easier, that is often compared to Apple’s Time Machine. It’s a python script that creates a GUI for the user and makes it simple to create and schedule backups of a user’s directories and files. Choose which directory, files, hidden files, and it sends the back up to a directory of your choosing. It’s still very early in development, and I didn’t see a way to send a backup to a network share that’s mounted in GNOME. But I believe most users don’t backup enough, and for a distribution like that Foresight, that “just works”, backup should be added to the list of things that just work for a user.
  • GNOME-DO: A Quicksilver-like application that is difficult to explain, but can increase your productivity ten fold by making it easy to quickly open applications, jump between open windows and more. See more at Download Squad including a video of GNOME-Do in action.
  • Publishr, a small one, but looks useful, Publishr adds a “publish” plug-in to GIMP to make it easy to send your images to Picasa or Flickr. Sure, F-Spot has had this feature forever, but there are a lot of times when I’m editing a screenshot that I want to send to Flickr that I won’t put in my F-Spot library, and this plugin will help skip a step by having to use Flickr’s web upload feature.

I’m definitely going to keep an eye on these applications, and may add to my Foresight repository when I get some time.

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!

Foresight 1.4 / GNOME 2.20.1 Appearance Issues

If you did a recent updateall in Foresight in the last day or two, there was a bug in libgnome that has been fixed.

On some default installations or a conary updateall, users would not see icons in the GNOME menu, no desktop background, and when you tried to change your theme (System -> Preferences -> Appearance) it would crash. It looks like it was a Gconf setting error upstream in GNOME. It would have looked something like this:

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It was set as /etc/gconf/schemas/desktop_gnome_interface.schemas.in and should have been /etc/gconf/schemas/desktop_gnome_interface.schemas

A big shout out to Ken VanDine who tracked this down and fixed it, and is filing the bug and patch upstream as well.

The groups will be updated in Foresight tonight, but until then, do a sudo conary update libgnome and it should be fixed. For some odd reason restarting X didn’t fix it, but it was fixed on reboot.

This means 1.4.1 with PackageKit will be released in the next day or two.

A month with Quod Libet

For the last month I’ve been runnign Quod Libet instead of Banshee. I had run in to two critical problems with Banshee about a month ago:

  • Banshee was taking 80 minutes to start. (Since fixed, I think it was something with Foresight, as Banshee hasn’t had a release in a while).
  • Banshee’s Last.fm reporting plugin hasn’t reported songs correctly to Last.fm for a long time. This is a known bug in the plugin, without a known fix that I’m aware of.

Banshee’s Last.Fm integration may sound like something trivial, but I really enjoy browsing my profile to see what I’ve listened to. Unfortunately, my profile isn’t close to accurate as all the music I listen to at night via Banshee isn’t being reported. Between that, the old data that is still in my Last.fm profile from my wife listening to music via the Xbox (yes, the James Taylor in my profile isn’t from me listening to it), and the Last.fm radio streams, it’s not really an accurate reflection of my music tastes.

Quod Libet is a GTK+ music player, that also includes Ex Falso, a tag editor. Quod Libet is a favorite of a couple of Foresight users, so I thought I’d give that a try. A simple:

<br /> sudo conary update quodlibet

And it’s installed in Foresight!

My first impressions of Quod Libet, is that it comes across with a basic view, but once you start digging, it’s quite the powerful player. The default view includes a search box, People (artist) Album, and then the song list. Search is fast, feels a touch faster than Banshee.

Other views you can choose from include Playlists, Search, File System, Album, Internet Radio and Media Devices.

I tend to listen to full albums at a time, and not create playlists or listen to random songs, so Quod Libet has worked well for me. I’ve been impressed with it’s simplicity, and as I’ve dug deeper, even more impressed with the number of features and advanced funtionality it has. While it doesn’t have the visual appeal of Banshee, it just works, and that’s all I’ve asked it to do.

The only minor complaint I had, was that due to a DDOS attach, the Quod Libet team lost some it’s website, and the documentation on plugins is non-existent. While there is a nice list of plugins available, I had to get some help to figure out how to setup the sub-directories on where to put the plugins, and only one or two have worked out of the five or six I’ve attempted to install. Granted I haven’t spent that much time trying to configure the plugins, but it was just a small disappointment.

If you’re looking for an alternative to Rhythmbox or Banshee on a GNOME desktop, give Quod Libet a chance, the best thing I can say about it is that it “just works”. And works well.

GNOME 2.20 and Foresight 1.4 Released

GNOME 2.20 is out and that means a formal release of Foresight Linux, 1.4, is out to go with it!

Why do I say “formal release of Foresight Linux”? Because of Conary, Foresight does rolling releases – whenever a package has a major update, you’ll get it right away, so you always have the latest bug fixes of your favorite software.

Here are the GNOME 2.20 Release Notes, Foresight 1.4 release announcement and release notes, and because it is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, the release notes done by our resident pirates.

And of course, the best place to get the latest GNOME is Foresight Linux – download today.

Congrats to the team for another great release, and here’s to 2.0 in the near future!

Innovate! Innovate!

(Said in a Dalek voice:)

Innovate! Innovate! Innovate! Innovate!

GUADEC, the annual GNOME user and developer conference, is in full swing in England right now. One of my favorite times of the year as a GNOME user, all the GNOME developers get together and blog about all the cool stuff they’re working on, or want to be working on.

I continue to be personally excited about Havoc’s vision for enabling an online desktop. This isn’t the first time he’s discussed this, or I’ve blogged about. First, go read the keynote presentation from GUADEC. I strongly agree with this vision of the future, and get excited just thinking about it.

Havoc’s blog links to a new wiki page for the Online Desktop. Right now, it’s one simple page covering the philosophy, and hosting the presentation and screencast mockups. (This is a small thing, but what I like about this wiki page is that it’s GNOME branded. This isn’t a Red Hat thing – this is a thing that all GNOME users and developers should give some thought to, tying back to the GNOME 3.0 / Project Topaz discussions).

Havoc’s expounds on the keynote in his blog. He shares his high level thoughts around the privacy issue, data hosting, and proprietary nature of some of the web services users would want to use. Well worth a read.

I’m enjoying the other GUADEC updates via Planet GNOME, and I thought the Multi-user Desktop presentation was well worth the read.

I need to continue to be more active in GNOME, and one of these years attend GUADEC.

Epiphany and me

A few months ago, I tried out Epiphany for 60 days after a particularily nasty Firefox crash caused me to lose a lot of content I was working on in a wiki page. At the end of the 60 days, I was pretty happy with Epiphany, and impressed with the developers in how they integrated Epiphany in to the GNOME desktop.

However, a few things had me coming back to Firefox:

  1. I have to use WindowsXP at work, and I use Firefox there. I love the Google Sync extension for sharing my history, cookies and bookmarks between my work computer and my two home computers.
  2. Extensions: I love the Gmail Manger and del.icio.us extensions. By far, the most useful two extensions I”ve come across.
  3. Epiphany’s default behavior for opening a new tab drives me crazy, as it opens Google, and the cursor sits in the Google search box instead of the URL field to type a new webpage address in to.
  4. And this is very minor, but Mugshot was opening in Firefox by default.
  5. Epiphany would always open in a new window, not a new tab.

After I switched back to Firefox a few weeks ago, it was just eating up too much memory and CPU cycles. Firefox then began pausing while using it when the CPU / memory use would spike, which drove me crazy, so I went back to Epiphany’s waiting arms one more time.

Since I have switched back, I have also invested some time in customizing Epiphany:

  • Changing the default home page to blank fixes the focus issue I had on the URI line, since Google is no longer the home page, it doesn’t default to the Google search box. This plugin does a similar thing as well.
  • Based on the screenshot below, you can see I’ve added an extra toolbar. Within that toolbar, I’ve added the “Post to del.icio.us” link since the Epilicious plugin is currently broken, which you can get from the del.icio.us home page. I’ve also added 3 search boxes:
  • Google: Add a new bookmark when you’re at Google.com, and then add %s to the end so it looks like this: http://www.google.com/%s Then View Bookmarks, and drag that bookmark to your toolbar.
  • JIRA: Search the Foresight issue / bug tracker from your toolbar: http://issues.foresightlinux.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa/%s (I may have a typo, I have issues with this one).

  • Search rBuilder / Foresight to see if a certain package is maintained on rBuilder: http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/search?type=Packages;search=%s” Great for when folks stop by in IRC looking for a package, and you can tell them to use Conary to install if it’s there.

  • Make sure you go to System > Preferences > Preferred Applications and have Epiphany chosen as your default web browser, and then click on the radio button for “Open link in new tab”. If you have Epiphany, and click on a Mugshot link for example, it will open in Epiphany. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an extension yet to have links in your web browser always open in a tab, ala Tabbrowser Preferences for Firefox.

One ongoing complaint, is the dialog box to remember passwords doesn’t work if I type “R” – I can only use the mouse, even when the dialog box has focus.

The last complaint I have is that the Epilicious and Gmail Notifier plugins are currently broken. I’m a del.icio.us and Gmail junkie, and those are almost enough for me to go back to Firefox, but I’ll manage manually.

If you haven’t tried out Epipany, take the challenge. Give up your other browser for 30 days, and with a few exceptions, Epiphany as just as good any other browser out there, and it integrates with your GNOME experience that much better. I’m dedicated to using Epiphany, and here is my obligatory screenshot (click through to Flickr to see larger sizes):

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