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Technology

Off the Grid

I’ve been off the grid most of the weekend, as I took the family home to Wisconsin to visit the in-laws.

My father-in-law has a wireless broadband connection (supposed to be about 1 meg down, but feels much slower). It’s connect to a Linksys 802.11b router. I’ve been unable to to get my Toshiba laptop to connect to the net, though my work laptop running XP didn’t have a problem nor did my wife. My Toshiba gets an IP address and saw the nameservers on the wireless (eth1), but has horrendous packet loss. Pinging google.com resulted in 66% packet loss, and web pages wouldn’t pull up at all. I don’t know if it was a Linux thing, Foresight, or the ISP itself.

It has reminded me how much I loathe not being connected. So much for tackling learning docbook this weekend for the Foresight user guide or the blog theme on WordPress MU.

Having some time on my hands, I did do some shopping yesterday, stopping at a local bookstore, who hosted John Scalzi just over a week ago. I missed him in Minneapolis last week, and was able to pick up an autographed copy of his latest book, The Last Colony, which oddly isn’t featured on his Books page yet. The Last Colony is the third book in his Old Man’s War trilogy.

On a recommendation, I picked up You Suck by Christopher Moore, which was good and as funny as promised. I finished it yesterday, and I love books that make me laugh out loud, which this did a few times. An odd note about the book: One of the characters is from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, about an hour north of where I am visiting right now in Milwaukee. I was born in Fond du Lac, and most of my extended relatives live there. It’s fairly small with about 40,000 residents, and I was surprised to see it in a book. (But not as surprised when Oconomowoc, where I am right now, was featured in Cryptonomicon).

I also picked up a nice hardcover edition of four Philip K. Dick stories – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik and The Man in the High Castle. I own a number of his short stories, and since it was featured on Boing Boing, the Total Dick-Head blog has been a favorite of mine to read, so it was good to pick up a couple of Dick’s classics.

I enjoy supporting local bookstores, it’s always worth the premium I pay in my mind. I enjoyed visiting Harry Schwartz Bookstores. They had a fairly good collection of books in all genres, and had recommendations for books by their employees all over the store, which I loved.

Now it’s off to lunch and a 6 – 7 hour drive home today.

Digg Melts Down (and DRM continues to break)

In what surely will be the most talked about story of the week (just above Dell shipping Ubuntu on PCs), Digg melted down last night. I watched it in real time last night as more and more users added stories displaying the banned HD-DVD encryption key.

It’s amazing how one 16 digital hexadecimal string of numbers (and a little bit of censorship) can wake up a community.

The blog at Franticindustries has the best recap of the story I’ve seen yet.

But never until today has the entire Internet risen as one to protect their right of free speech, with one string of hexadecimal numbers being their defeaning shout.

As the article goes on to say, Digg was only the catalyst – almost every other major tech site of note has the key displayed in a story or a user submitted comment. The early adopters and tech enthusiasts are rising up against DRM – it’s now becoming more than a movement. In the year when major record labels are going DRM free in music, users patience with digital rights management for next gen technologies is wearing thin. Users want to use their content how they want to – they don’t want to be told when and how they can use their content. If I want to listen to music I legally purchased online on the device of my choice, I should have that ability. If I want to buy a movie on DVD, and encode it to watch on a portable player, I should be able to do that. If I want to watch a DVD movie on my computer, that doesn’t run Windows, I should be able to do that.

This is how we got DVD playback on Linux – one software company left a hole open displaying the encryption key, and it happened again with HD-DVD. When both parts of the key are available to the user – one half on the hardware or in software playback, and the other half in the media itself, users are going to figure it out. Just like the Digg users rising up as one, the community dedicated to breaking the encryption is united as well.

For some reason, this key has become more than just a way to circumvent copy protection: it is now a statement.

It says: information must be free.

In as little as 24 hours, countless iterations of the key have sprung out. There’s a registered domain containing the key; there’s a string of colors equivalent to the key value; hell, if license plates were allowed to have 32 digits I bet there would be a great demand for a particular number.

09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0

Remember this number.

And get involved. Learn more at Defective by Design and join the EFF.

Gaming on (Foresight) Linux

Linux seems to always get a knock when it comes to gaming. I know personally I believed the FUD, before making the switch to Linux full time 2 years ago and learning otherwise. What Linux doesn’t have in quantity as a gaming platform, it does make up in quality.

A lot of the open source and freeware get the publicity, but id software and Epic, among other developers, makers of Quake and Unreal Tournament respectively, continue to put out native Linux binaries of their software.

With the upcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars release, I installed Quake IV, Doom 3 and the original Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on my desktop today. Since I did a clean install of Foresight a couple months ago, I wanted to make sure I work out any kinks before ET:QW’s release.

Everything worked like a champ – I downloaded the Linux installation files from id software’s bittorrent server, installed those in /home/silwenae/games (I’m lazy, didn’t feel like chmod’ing /usr/games), copied the pak files over, and ran Doom 3 and Quake IV. Mapped my keys, cranked the video settings, and I was online in minutes fragging away.

The only small glitch I ran into with Quake IV, and this hasn’t happened in my two or three previous installs, was that it started in Spanish. A quick Google search turned up the fix: Go into your home folder, and in the .quake4 directory (which is hidden, hit ctrl-h in Nautilus to view hidden files and directories), and then the q4base directory, and edit the Quake4Config.cfg file with your favorite text editor, and change the value of sys-lang to english, and you’re all set.

Everything worked great out of the box, I didn’t have the funky Alsa / OSS sound issue I had in the past with Ubuntu, even that worked flawlessly.

Who said you couldn’t game on Linux? Come get some!

Getting Started with Foresight Linux User Guide

I’m pleased to announce the 1.0 release of the Getting Started with

Foresight Linux User Guide:

[http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/docs/Getting+Started+with+Foresight+Linux

]1

The User Guide provides a high level overview of Foresight Linux, including:

  • Download and Installing Foresight Linux
  • Post-Installation Configuration
  • Using Applications
  • Updating Foresight / Adding & Removing Programs
  • Getting Help
  • Getting Involved with Foresight Linux

The User Guide is intended for users new to Linux or new to Foresight,

though advanced users may learn something as well.

The User Guide currently lives on the Foresight Wiki, so if you have

any updates or see any errors, feel free to update it, I would love to

have some more eyes looking at it. I hope to export it to HTML and /

or Docbook in the next month or so.

The TCLUG meetings are back!

The Twin Cities Linux User Groups are back! After almost 2 years, we’re set to have our first meeting (except for last summer’s installfest). Two volunteers and myself have been meeting to brainstorm topics, meeting flow, and trying to find a location.

If you live in Minnesota, and you’re new to Linux and want to learn more, or an old hand at Linux and want to meet some like-minded people, come join us, everyone is welcome! There’s a Google calendar link in there as well, so you can indicate if you want to come.

Here’s the announcement I sent to the mailing list this morning:

Mark your calendars! The Twin Cities Linux User Group is pleased to

announce two upcoming meetings.

Please feel free to forward this announcement. After a brief hiatus, we’re excited to bring back regular meetings of the TCLUG. The TCLUG website will be updated soon with the event information as well.

Date: Wed., May 2nd

Time: 6:30 – 8:00

University of Minnesota Minneapolis campus, EE/CSci Building , Room: 3-210

200 Union St SE, Minneapolis 55455

(Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/2omnv6)

Topics:

  1. Welcome & Introduction

  2. Linux on a USB Flash Drive (Eric Peterson)

  3. Getting involved (TCLUG information, future meetings & meeting

topics, volunteer to speak at a TCLUG meeting)

Food and drink are not allowed in the U of M classrooms. For those who would like to get to know each other a little better, we will be heading out for food and drinks afterward. (Location TBD) We invite everyone to come along!

———————————————————————————————————————————————

June Meeting (Tentative, more information at 5/2 meeting):

Date: Wed., June 7th

Time: 6:30 – 8:00

University of Minnesota Minneapolis campus, EE/CSci Building , Room: 3-210

200 Union St SE, Minneapolis 55455

(Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/2omnv6)

Topics

  1. Feedback from 5/2 meeting

  2. Lightning talks: We would like to provide short time slots (10 – 30 minutes) for any member to demonstrate a project or discuss a topic with the group.. More information will be available at the May 2nd meeting.

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

Upcoming events are also viewable on the TCLUG Google Calendar:

http://tinyurl.com/2c5d8w (Requires a Google Account).

Foresight Linux 1.2 Released

Foresight Linux 1.2 has been released, day and date with GNOME 2.18.1!

Foresight Linux 1.2 builds on the success of last month’s 1.1 release, and features a new default GDM theme, updated hardware support, and a fix for importing photos.

Foresight Linux is an innovative, stable distribution with default applications such as Banshee for music, F-Spot for photo management, Epiphany web browser, and Brasero for burning music and data discs. Foresight also comes with Compiz enabled (depending on your video card), and propietary codecs installed including MP3 and DVDs.

Foresight has a beautiful green theme and features Conary, a next generation packaging tool, to manage your software and software updates.

Visit the download page to download Live Media, including LiveCDs, VMWare images and more to test out Foresight, or download the installation discs on one DVD or two CDs.

View the release notes or the downloads page. Give Foresight a try – in the 2 months I’ve been using it, I can speak very highly enough of the packaging, the distribution and the community.

A big shout out to the developers for another timely, and stable, release.

Foresight To-Do List

Stuff I’m currently working on:

  1. Getting Started with Foresight Linux: A user’s guide to start using Foresight Linux. Currently it’s about 50% complete, but I expect to have it 90% complete by the end of the weekend. Includes installing Foresight, configuring, overview of the most used applications, updating Foresight, getting help and contributing. Feel free to contribute. Long term, I want to convert it to html and / or docbook as well.
  2. Foresight Newsletter. The first newsletter was well received, but was done in less than week of it’s release. It should have content being added consistently through out the month, which I need to start doing, and find a way to get more volunteers to add content such as highlighting a package or doing an interview.
  3. Gaming – Since I did a clean install of Foresight, I need to reinstall my games (Second Life, Quake IV, Doom 3, UT2k4). Lots of Quake 3 total conversions have been in the news the last week or two, wouldn’t mind trying those out as well. I probably should add some content to the wiki about gaming on Foresight.
  4. Foresight Calendar – There’s a rumor that a Google Calendar exists for Foresight. I’m thinking I may poke at it, it may be an interesting exercise to add key dates to it, such as GNOME releases, Foresight releases, etc. It may make adding content to the newsletter more structured and give users an idea of key dates.
  5. WordPress-MU theme: There is some interest in adding blogs to foresightlinux.org. There’s still a question around where to publish the newsletter, though the wiki seems to be working for that, but also to offer developers blogs who may not have their own webspace. First, we’re going to need a theme, so I may hack at that – my html-foo is poor, so I’ve been putting that off, and then we need to get it on the webserver. I’m more than happy to admin it for folks who want blogs. I’ll probably throw WordPress-MU up on my webspace this weekend and poke at it to see what the admin interface is like.
  6. Screencasts: Based on a discussion in IRC on Saturday, I thought I’d give creating screencasts a shot. I played with Istanbul a little over the weekend, and it will work, though the audio quality was pretty poor, and I have a very nice Plantronics headset. A big thanks to pscott for re-packaging Jokosher and packaging Pitivi. My current plan is take the Getting Started guide pages on Applications, and create screencasts that match the write-ups I did for the apps. (See the Banshee page for a good example). I’ll record the screencast in Istanbul, then the audio in Jokosher, and use Pitivi to edit them together. It’s a little more long term, as the screencasts will need to be well scripted, both the video capture and the audio narration.

That’s it for now – I don’t want to put too much on my plate and get burned out, so I’m trying to take it in chunks and stay focused. The newsletter and Getting Started guide are definitely the short term focus.

GNOME 3.0?

The concept of GNOME 3.0 (aka Project Topaz) has been thrown around over the last year or two, with no clear definition or direction of the next big step in the development of GNOME.

Last year, Luis Villa blogged a few ideas that could become the future of GNOME, around an internet enabled OS, tied to an infrastructure similar to Apple’s .mac. I’ve had similar thoughts floating through my brain since then, but yesterday Havoc Pennington of Red Hat & Mugshot verbalized almost exactly what I’ve been thinking about in a way I’ve never been to articulate.

Havoc references Dave Neary’s recent interview that GNOME as a platform is becoming different things to different people, with Nokia’s implementation of Maemo on the 770 a prime example. I think Dave’s exactly right, and this strategy and direction for GNOME is a good thing.

What’s interesting to me is the future of the home user, and Havoc’s musings touches on that. GNOME could be an embedded platform or an enterprise solution, but to me it seems as most innovation is being done around the home computing user. Web services such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Gmail, last.fm and other social networking sites started, and still are, geared first and foremost towards the home user. Havoc’s thoughts on the target user are right on. Starting with the early adopter, the technoloy enthusiasts and influencers, and tying those people, and their stuff together, is the future.

The rumor has always been that this is what Google is doing – through Gmail archiving your email, Calendar, Google Docs – they will host your content and tie it paid search to make money. Gtalk’s contacts is a poor start, but Google Doc’s collaboration tools are a good example of tying your content to your communities.

Internet enabled is a key, but I don’t think Google has to win in this space. Giving you access to your community and your content can be done through the operating system, though Luis Villa’s thoughts from last year on a GNOME-centric .Mac type service are where this could get really interesting.

I don’t think there is a question that we are reaching a tipping point in the way operating systems are built and used – even Microsoft has alluded to Vista being the last of their operating systems being built and released in the current manner. Apple is the master of the incremental operating system, and while innovative, is still too closed source to win in this space. It will take a community to build the future, as it is about the people and how and where they use their stuff, and it is this community – the open source community, that has the best chance to innovate and create this future. And I can’t wait for the future.

Distrowatch Weekly (4-2-2007)

Distrowatch Weekly is out, and the April 2nd edition has some kind words for the first Foresight Newsletter:

It is always a pleasure to report that a project has gone out of its way to complement its distribution with additional material. Last week, Foresight Linux, an rPath-based desktop distribution with focus on the latest GNOME technologies, announced the launch of its new monthly newsletter: “The first Foresight Linux Newsletter has been released! The current edition reports about what’s happening with Foresight Linux, including information on the latest release, security updates, tips and tricks, what’s in development, and Foresight in the press.” Glancing through the first issue, this has to be one of the best distribution-specific newsletters available anywhere. Complete with a “Letter from the Editor”, a tip for ATI graphics card users, introduction to the Banshee music manager, the newsletter is well worth a read even if you are not a Foresight Linux user.

Thanks for the kind words, and now the bar has been set for future issues.

In other news, I’ve also updated the RSS feed for the Foresight Newsletter, you can subscribe using a feed I created in Feedburner. Just pop this in to your favorite RSS reader to subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter (Just a bit easier than the other RSS feed, and a bit shorter).