Whirlyball
The BFG event is off and running and we’re having a blast. We played Whirlyball & Lasertron last night.
Here’s a shot of the first winners for Whirlyball.
Blog
Ubuntu 5.10 Released!
Today is the day Ubuntu Breezy Badger is released and becomes Ubuntu 5.10!
Lots of good stuff built in to this release, some big, some small. (Release Notes). Bluetooth support, better partitioning, Edubuntu/OEM/Server versions (all new!), graphical boot and even editable GNOME menus.
If it at first you don't succeed…
Try, try again.
Or at least that’s what the MPAA thinks. The Broadcast Flag is being revived by the MPAA and 20 member of the House have pledged their support to it.
Danny O’Brien of the EFF breaks it down for you.
This is a must-read if you care about digital television. The MPAA’s attempts to ramrod this through backdoor legislation is appalling.
GNOME News
The Linux & GNOME communities are all abuzz with the announcement yesterday of BetterDesktop.org and the Tango Desktop Project.
Better Desktop has published many usability videos of folks trying to do basic projects, and share those videos to make the user experience better. (Better Desktop is sponsored by Novell).
The Tango Project goal is:
While the look and feel of an application is determined by many components the initial work has been done on unifying the look of the individual icon sets.
Sponsored by Novell/Suse, it’s interesting to see them moving forward with this, as one of my constant complaints with SUSE is it’s KDE-centric icons. Yup, I’m a user not a developer, so I like my eye candy. I have high hopes, as the team involved crosses distributions, including Novell (Ximian), Red Hat, and Mozilla developers to just name a few.
Quake IV
I’m excited to see that Quake IV will have Linux support via a client patch within a few weeks (the game went gold last week).
You have to love iD Software for doing the right thing – whether it’s Linux clients or GPL’ing the source of their games when they are done with them.
Though the PC Gamer review score of 70% is a little worrisome.
But it’s Raven and iD, and I love both studios for their quality work.
Wireless Freedom
I upgraded Ubuntu on my laptop from Colony 3 to Preview 1. I’m finally wireless again – it’s something to sit on the couch in front of the TV and surf (and blog). I needed to get everything running for my trip this weekend so I can blog the LAN party and upload the pictures in real time to Flickr.
My wireless settings for Centrino weren’t working on Colony 3, but a quick apt-get upgrade and double checking my ESSID and WEP and everything is up and running again.
What a change from Hoary – getting Centrino support was a bear and then some. From upgrading the firmware and the drivers, this time it was just a matter of activating it.
Now I have to find the instructions somewhere on the net to get the pretty blue light working again when the wireless is on. 🙂
EFF Defends Right to Read Public Web Pages Without Getting Sued
Here’s why I like the EFF.
The EFF has filed a brief in support of DirecTV against a website operator who is suing DirecTV for accessing his website. Basically, if you want to make your website private, set up a password – you don’t have a right to say “don’t enter here if you work for so and so” which this yahoo is trying to do.
What do I like about it? EFF has gone after DirecTV in the past. From the article:
EFF has opposed DirecTV in the past for its legal campaign against “smart cards,” and co-sponsors a website, www.directvdefense.org, designed to help those who have been sued by DirecTV. However, as Bankston said, “When it comes to protecting the rights of Internet users, EFF doesn’t hold a grudge. We may oppose DirecTV in other cases, but here, it’s plainly on the correct side.”
But the EFF is on the side of what’s right – it doesn’t always matter who.
Behind the scenes at 89.3
Minnesota Public Radio’s music station, 89.3 The Current has launched a group blog called the Current Cue for their DJ’s.
One of the more interesting posts so far, their computer which houses all the music crashed. Apparently they rip all their CDs to PC to play on the air. Interesting story on what happened.
It makes me wonder though – if they’re playing music over the air digitally, what format are they using? It has to be a lossless codec, and there are only a few of those that would work. FLAC? SHN? Windows Media Lossless? Or do they just rip it straight to wav? I wonder what kind of RAID redundancy they have set up for something like that.
SUSE 10 OSS mini-review
Seb Payne reviews SUSE 10 OSS so you don’t have to. More of a mini-review, really, but it hits the good points.
YAST support is so-so and GNOME feels unfinished. One of the things that has driven me nuts about SUSE in the past is it’s KDE icons in GNOME – which it still retains.
Seb Payne is a Hula developer, and has been bouncing back from Ubuntu to SUSE and back again. Like Seb, I’m sticking with Ubuntu.