J5’s Blog

It seems that Moblin will be switching from Ubuntu to Fedora Linux as their base operating system.  I’m interested in finding out the underlying reasoning for such a move.  The stated reason is because they wanted to use RPM instead of DEB.  I can’t quite buy that but perhaps that is because having come from both camps I think that packaging is an implementation detail that too many people put way too much stock in.  This has the effect of causing unnecessary emotional splits within the community resulting in animosity which often overshadows real threats.

The second reason given, which has to do with building a community is pretty broad but more believable.  Fedora has made huge strides while also sticking to its guns in the freedom department and being valuable upstream contributors. It may be that we sacrificed short term gains which can be gotten via a bit more differentiation, or out of the box “just works” on closed hardware but as companies are being convinced to open up their specs and open drivers are being written, a large portion of which is being done by Fedora developers working upstream, little of the short term gains matter much.

I suspect the real reason is somewhere in the community vein, staring with the Kernel and X team developers who work tirelessly making sure their work is fit for upstream consumption and can be supported in the long term. Following their lead the rest falls naturally out of that single notion of moving Linux forward as a whole. Kudo’s to all my Fedora friends - keep moving forward.

Paul Frields probably has one of the best posts I have seen about ediquet on planets.  It is quite telling what people post to their blogs or any public identity.  I remeber many a news article about the phenomenon of college grads posting pictures and things that they would otherwise not have shown in public only to find out that a potential employer had googled them resulting in them not getting the job.  So while a blog may be considered the private domain of the owner where they can post whatever they want, it is a reflection on that person and may come back to haunt them.

Piling on to Colin’s post:

If you knew what I needed to do already why didn’t you just do it?  Just popping up the dialog that I now have to go searching for would have been somewhat passable.  Besides Jython is not even usable right now so just assume I want my system python.  That is just plain laziness and the reason why I keep trying eclipse and then thinking better of it a couple of minutes later.

To be fair I hear it is a great app but I can’t get past the UI.  It gets in my way.  The run dialog alone has forever traumatized me.  Let’s see if the bugzilla plugin will allow me to file this bug or I will be back with another ranty update. I’m going to try to give eclipse a longer benefit of the doubt but if I run into much more of this it’s going to take a lot of people telling me it has since gotten better, before I try again.

Fudcon is great but when I like to unwind I go to the American Craft Beer Fest. Right now I’m getting ready for the beer and food pairing seminar. Like wine, beer is very versatile as an ingredient (if you have ever had a beer can roasted chicken you would understand). In any case we are about to start
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In other related news Gravity of Debian X fame was here. Great minds think alike and Linux hacker’s minds often think of beer.

Update

I tried to sneak off with the cutting board the food for the tasting was served on but to my dismay they let us just take them. Way to take the thrill out of the equation. I was however happy enough to get a high quality cutting board with the phrase “Here’s to BEER” branded on the top, and here is the proof:

For those of you in Fedora land who don’t know Matthew Garrett has just accepted an offer from Red Hat . If that name doesn’t ring a bell, it should. Matthew is one of the reasons Linux works on laptops. Being one of the few people who truly understands Linux from the hardware all the way up to the desktop, he will be spending his time working on power management in both Kernel land and Userspace.

It is great to see my company recognize the need for such improvements and hire top notch people to get it done. Welcome aboard Matthew.

Fedora is community and no where is it more evident than at FUDCon, a gathering of Fedora developers from around the world. Catch the Linux.com video feature taken on day one of FUDCon;. I have a small section at the end talking about the community with Karsten Wade.

Just a quick observation, gobby + git + turbogears make for a hugely successful hackfest.

I’ll be in various places other than the Boston area for most of November.  Starting this coming Friday I will be driving down to NY where I am catching a flight to Florence, Italy for a friend’s wedding.  I’ll be there for a week and then am going to work from Atlanta, Georgia while visiting my best friend who is getting married next spring.  To round things off I will be working from NY through Thanksgiving.

The Italy trip is pretty booked but I should be visiting the ATL and NY Red Hat offices to say hi since I will be there anyway.  If any Fedora or GNOME folks want to grab a beer or just meet up let me know.

It is good to see other distributions are picking up the eggcups printer autoconfiguration interfaces which I had started and Tim Waugh had perfected. It was more than three years ago that GNOME had a dream of making USB hardware ‘Just Work’ when plugging them in. Today one can’t imagine a desktop distribution which doesn’t have this. A key agenda at the next GUADEC should be getting a lot of this work accepted upstream and figuring out how last mile items like PolicyKit will add polish to great stack we have built up.

Slashdot posts a story about how moving from the Red Hat build systems to the Fedora build systems means that through some sort of magic, OLPC is now subject to export restrictions. Here is a hint, OLPC is a US based non-profit and as far as I know, though I am not a lawyer, OLPC is subject to US law in any case. What that says about export restrictions I don’t know - ask a laywer not Slashdot. Add the fact that it is no secret that Red Hat is the creator of the Sugar interface and that the OS is a derivative of Fedora and all you’ve got is FUD. <sarcasm>Oh no Slashdot users don’t spread FUD they only combat it</sarcasm>. The “article” gets it wrong on so many accounts and I am easily reachable via IRC or e-mail (they link to a mailing list post with my e-mail in it) that you think someone might have fact checked. So to set the record straight here is a mini FAQ:

Why did OLPC move to Fedora?

OLPC didn’t move to Fedora. Sugar, the software layer, was already being built on top of the Fedora OS within Red Hat’s build systems. With the merge of Fedora Core and Fedora Extras we felt it prudent to move the Sugar packages to the Fedora infrastructure. This lessens the burden of maintainership as we were branching a lot of packages just so we could build against them. It also gave us access to a legion of Fedora packagers, developers and translators, which has so far payed off very well in terms of quality of the packages.

What does this mean to people in the community?

It means people in the community have more ways to participate. The Red Hat build servers are accessible only to Red Hat engineers, Fedora’s are open. Go here if you want to contribute to the base OS.

What else is gained?

By not reinventing the wheel we free ourselves from having to think about infrastructure such as signing packages or hosting builds which leaves us to think about the forward moving innovative bits.

For more information you can read my post announcing the move.

As of Fedora 7 Red Hat had relinquished control of Fedora to the community by merging extras and core into one distribution and giving the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) oversight over the whole project. FESCo is somewhat analogous to the GNOME Board. Today it was unanimously approved by FESCo for the OLPC operating system Sugar to become part of the fold.

This means we will be moving from the Red Hat build and CVS servers to the Fedora servers which are open to the community. It also means we will be working within Fedora towards making it more and more flexible for targeted projects such as OLPC.

In the coming weeks I will be rebasing Sugar on Fedora 7 and moving all of our packages over. More information about the OLPC/Fedora partnership is on the Fedora wiki.