The GNOME Commentary

The mighty Miguel reports that Moonlight saw it’s first release. First person to package it for Fedora gets a free review!

Yes I am lusting it’s goodness.

You might be sitting there on your Fedora 7 or 8 setup, reading the Fedora 9 release notes drooling all over yourself wishing it was on your machine. Well why not upgrade to it without the ISO download using PreUpgrade?

You can get preupgrade using yum by doing this as root:

yum –enablerepo=updates-testing preupgrade

However the version with Fedora 9 upgrades enabled is not yet in the repositories so if you can’t wait for it to get pushed out you can do the following:

for Fedora 8:

rpm -Uvh http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/preupgrade/0.9.3/3.fc8/noarch/preupgrade-0.9.3-3.fc8.noarch.rpm

For Fedora 7:

rpm -Uvh http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/preupgrade/0.9.3/3.fc7/noarch/preupgrade-0.9.3-3.fc7.noarch.rpm

Then run preupgrade like so:

preupgrade

Follow the instructions and voila you have all the drool worthy Fedora 9 goodness on your very own machine. All without the downloading of an ISO which is filled with rpms you probably will never use, no going through the same installer a second time and keeping your settings.

*edit*

Updated the version of preupgrade as the previous version had a bug that would hang it at the final stage.

openSUSE community manager Zonker points out this wonderful slideshow on sabotaging your community (pdf). In terms of Fedora I feel points 5 and 7 apply. We tend to require signed license agreements to fart and our governance model is confusing to put it mildly. E.g. I’ve been considering running for FESCo or the Board but I have no clear idea what either ones governance scope is and where what I want to do is best approached.. I suspect the board but it is not obvious since I’d like to see some fundamental changes in the way we handle new contributors to make the Fedora community more welcoming and do a better job at providing education and guidance for contributors, the changes would affect FESCo as well I suspect. I would like to encourage people to work together more attacking problem areas, right now it seems when a problem is found we do a lot of unloading on contributors who may very well be unexperienced with certain kinds of things and I know we have people who can help, I’d like the norm to be for these people to be willing to see the bigger picture and jump in with patches and advice when they point out a problem.. in much the same way I previously suggested that the correct way to respond to someone wanting to rip out functionality without a sufficient exit strategy for consumers of this functionality or a replacement should be plain and simple: “no, back to the drawing board”.

I love music, podcasts, audiobooks and all the little wonders of the modern audio age. I also love it to be portable, so currently I have a 5.5 Generation iPod with 80GB of storage. A decent piece of hardware was it not for the frequent lock ups, the lack of support for free formats and naturally also the lack of wifi capabilities which I must be honest after getting used to the Bluetooth between my cellphone and laptop I would rather never again hook my player up via USB, cables are just so messy and I tend to loose them which is a pain with the proprietary plugs the iPod uses.

Now here’s my problem, I’m running out of space, I’d like to upgrade to something with more storage soon but my options are limited by my requirements. If I elect to prioritize Ogg Vorbis support then I can wave goodbye to storage as nobody makes a portable player that holds a reasonable amount of music and plays a decent format. An exception here would be putting Rockbox on an iPod but having attempted again and again to make Rockbox work on my iPod I’ve always found it a subpar experience to the shipped firmware as a user, not to mention I still haven’t make it sync with banshee using Ogg Vorbis. Another issue here is that the goal in picking a player with Ogg Vorbis support would be to show the vendor support for adding this feature not rewarding them for not doing so and then replacing the firmware with something the Free Software community spend time and money developing. That seems counter-productive.

The whole point of having a portable media player for me is that I can take all my music with me, and I mean all of it, I don’t know what mood I might be in during the day. Be it for an audiobook, a podcast or any of the number of genres of music I own. Limiting my storage forces me to sync more often and it assumes I know what kind of day I expect to have. That’s just not how things work, let me access my entire library on the go or perish.

So if I have to live with just having mp3 support, and I want storage then the options seem to be the Archos Generation 5 605/705 models which go to 160GB. My first harddrive based player was a 10 GB Archos Recorder 10, it’s a nice piece of hardware and was it not for the fact that it’s bulky and the isd200 driver seems broken in Fedora for the past many releases (#229190 rh-bz) it would still work to this day. Calling 605/705 models sexy would be mildly put.. a lie. I hate to make looks an issue but it looks dinky and very unprofessional. It’s user interface looks to be very unprofessional and overly complex. Finally it’s big, my iPod fits nicely in a pocket, I’m very happy with that form factor. I think the issue with the Archos is that it is trying to do to much, I don’t want to watch movies on a small screen in the bus, I want to listen to music, audiobooks and podcasts. Trying to add movie playing to a pocket device is about as senseless as adding video calling to my cellphone (which mine actually has, but I’ve never used it).

Then we have the iPod, their new 160GB classic model works pretty much the same as what I have.. which frankly is a problem, same exact set of issues and a company that will abuse their monopoly just to make it hard to work with the device for 3rd party software.. such as adding a crypto hash around the entire database for no apparent reason. I’d rather not buy an iPod and stimulate a bit of competition. Additionally the Classic has no wifi option which I admittedly really want. On the plus side the iPod being widely used is well supported under Linux (using Podsleuth and Banshee works very well e.g.) and despite the issues I have with mine it is a fairly well functioning device as a whole. I wouldn’t call the iPod sexy, but it is well designed even if the interface can be cumbersome at times. I just feel limited in what I can do with my device when Apple keep making it hard to use from anything except iTunes.

This leaves the Microsoft Zune as the last option, their second generation is very slick with a big screen, the little Zune pad control system, wifi and lots of nice little features. And boy is it sexy looking, packaging to interface the Zune is hands down my current favorite in terms of look and feel of the players. It does only come in a 80GB version now but as I’m not in the market for a player right now I am hoping this will change soon. Microsoft started selling TV shows and such on their web store so the rumours that they are releasing a new rev with a bigger drive are likely to be true. I do feel odd supporting a product that runs Windows and is produced by Microsoft but considerably less odd than I do supporting the Apple monopoly. The one snag is that one cannot actually get a Zune in Denmark so far as I know also I don’t know if the Zune syncronizes with Banshee which absolutely is a must for me.

In a perfect world we would have a device as sexy as the black 2nd Generation Zune running free firmware and supporting free formats out of the box while retaining big storage. As things stand that is a market niche that is yet to be filled. I wish someone would do a device like that, we have plenty of smaller players that do all this.

*sigh*

Fedora is great, Fedora 9 being the latest and greatest is not exception to this rule. However one might want to spice ones Fedora up with a few extras such as multimedia support which legally cannot be shipped. Seeing as I am in a country without software patents I should be pretty safe in explaining to you how to do all this.

Multimedia support:

** Disclaimer: Before installing this support please check the laws in your region as you may be prohibited from legally installing these packages.

Open a terminal and as root do this:

rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

This will enable the 3rd party livna repository which packages all this nice software for you, then we want to install multimedia support.

yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg -y

This will install the gstreamer plugins and support is now enabled, comfirm by playing your favorite mp3 if you like.

Flash support:

First go to the adobe download center, select YUM for Linux in the dropdown box. Then click agree and install. This will give you the rpm you need to enable adobes repository. Install this by double clicking on the downloaded rpm and authorizing the install with your root password as requested. On an x86_64 machine you will need to open a terminal as root and type:

yum install libflashsupport.i386 nspluginwrapper.i386 -y

Then proceed to installing the flash plugin:

yum install flash-plugin -y

and to make sure everything is in order run:

mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v

And restart your webbrowser.

Nvidia drivers:

Sorry, Nvidia have not yet released drivers that support Fedora 9, this should be out shortly. When that is released it can be found in the livna repo under the package name kmod-nvidia.

This goes out to my friend Gabriel who last night promised to give Fedora 9 a whirl after it’s released.

*edit*

I am aware that there’s a beta driver out for nvidia, please stop sending me emails about it (my blog does comments and openID please feel free to use it for such publicly useful debates). However this beta driver doesn’t do 3D and it requires some workarounds to even get you 2D support. Thus you are no worse off with the nv or nouveau drivers for the time being.. in fact I would argue you are better off as it’s just works(tm) and this solution provides better security and stability.

The Fedora package review process is rather encumbered with a number of bottlenecks, primarily from lack of hands to do the work. However the review process does help to ensure the high standard of our packages. As there are few people willing to review Mono packages I will make a standing offer to review your Mono package. I do this because I think Mono and Mono applications are great and I wish dearly that Fedora becomes the best platform for using and developing Mono applications on. I’m hoping by doing this we will be able to more effectively pass through the review process. I actively use a lot of Mono technology and I am active upstream as a tester for many Mono related projects so I also hope to stay active in your bugreport stream.

To take advantage of this offer simply add my email (gnomeuser at gmail dot com) to the cc line of your review request and I will automatically be notified.

(As seen in UFO: Alien Invasion 2.2 from the livna repos when launched on my nvidia powered laptop)

A gutsy move, I am impressed…

*update*

As Hans De Goede correctly points out this is a Fedora customization which will pop up with every OpenGL powered game. Credit where credit is due, Go Team Fedora!

I have used Skype for years, out of the many voip solutions it is the one with the clearest audio quality and it’s much easier to use than say Ekiga (which I despite trying for years never have been able to make even a simple voip call using). Additionally none of the FLOSS alternatives allow me to buy a phone number and have it redirected so people in far away countries can call me cheaply.

Lately though Skype has been bothering me more than usually. Not only have they continually refused to provide a x86_64 build but it’s also impossible to make work with pulseaudio as presented in F9 (or any modern distro really), as such I now use Skype mainly on my Nokia n810 and my cellphone, making it very easy to miss peoples calls since the n810 can’t be on all the time whereas my desktop or laptop could be and the cellphone doesn’t handle SkypeIn calls correctly. Now they’ve added to my pain, I use Skype to call peoples phones outside of Denmark because generally Skype credit is cheaper than paying my cellphone company, however a few days ago they decided to stop taking payments using Paypal instead wanting to verify my credit card with my bank. This does not work because the version of java shipped in F9 is not detected by my netbanking site, so I can’t open an account.. which is required to get the activation thingy that VISA requires me to use (oh joy.. and you just knew somehow Java being the pile of shit it is would ruin my day again..)

More Skype problems, my cellphone comes with Skype installed, this was advertised at fully Skype compliant - I figured that meant it would correctly handle situations where people call my SkypeIn numbers and let me pick them up on my phone… how wrong I was, instead I am required to enable call forwarding which costs an insane amount of money - 0.20€, as a comparison even calling the expensive tier 4 countries on the skype list such as Brazil is 0.17€, it is thus cheaper to call halfway around the world than to call myself.. brilliant. Complaints over said behavior have been filed. The additional joy is that now that I am out of credits and I can refill my account on account of the change in the payment system.. thus call forwarding is completely useless and when I am out of the house now nobody can call my cleverly thought out SkypeIn system.

When people say you don’t get punished for using proprietary software.. they lie.. I plan to market Skype to the CIA as a replacement for waterboarding, now that eBay are thinking about selling it someone should be able to make a quick buck buying it cheap and selling it as a torture device.

It’s been a while since I blogged last so let me treat you to a little story:

There I was, innocent and naked as the day I was born washing my hair when suddenly I blackout, next thing I remember I’m standing against the wall barely able to support myself. Then ensues a couple of rough days for unsigned and loved ones, including the obligatory hospital trip and nifty CT scan. Main thing learned from said scan is that my brain is quite attractive, nothing on the images of medical interest though, so with no idea what went wrong I am thankful medical science has given me good painkillers to take the edge off and that no further episodes of this sort has happened. Recovery seems to be going according to plan, so hopefully nothing further to worry about.

As this didn’t slow me down for long there is lots of Linux fun to be had, I’ve been testing the lastest openSUSE beta release on my laptop but my wifi doesn’t work (it’s even an intel people.. free software powered) - I guess I should count myself lucky, at least this release installed, their previous alpha didn’t even get so far. It’s kinda sad, I always look with envy on openSUSE for it’s artwork and general polish but it’s just to broken during the development phase for pretty much anyone to partake in the testing. Fedora nearly always installs and runs with minimal issues during the development cycle (F9 admittedly was more bumpy than previous cycles but the result is stunning), I feel this is a much underrated quality in development releases generally - encouraging wider testing is vital and I am happy Fedora always keeps a high standard on this front.

I am a big fan of paying for Free Software, I preordered the Apricot game to support Free Software game development, everyone else will get it absolutely for free but I always find it important to support the freedom others before me have worked so hard to get me. Remembering that we are custodians for freedom is important, it only stays with us and for those who follow us if we fight for it. Since I don’t code much, I do so by doing work on Fedora, and by giving money where I can.

In that vein Dave Neary is running a pledge to have community sponsorship for the Libre Graphics Meeting, please do give generously. Your support lets Free Software developers get their travel expenses covered so they can have a voice at this event, let them interact and let the software and freedom we all love and benefit from flourish.