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ChicagoBarcamp Day 2 Recap

After a handful of hours sleep, we made it back to BarcampChicago on Sunday.

The crowd had definitely thinned out compared to Sunday, but there were still quite a number of folks there.

Ken’s first talk on installing a MythTV appliance was great. There is so much buzz and interest in the community around virtualization and appliances, and Ken’s talk and the live demo of installing the appliance went over well.

After a brief juggling of the schedule, and a little swearing at the projectors, Ken kicked off the Foresight presentation. We had put the presentation together on Saturday, and I’ll get a copy posted to the website this week. I was mostly watching the crowd’s reaction and listening to questions. I want to take a snapshot of the current presentation, and then work on version 2. There were lots of questions about Conary, and later, rPath, that would be good to address in the next version. The presentation provides an overview of why Foresight was created and it’s purpose, an overview of the innovative applications included, and where Foresight is headed in the future.

A brief while later, we had a small get together on kicking off the first US based GNOME Usergroup in Chicago. Kevin Hariss did a great job in sharing his passion for GNOME, and shared some ideas on what a GNOME Usergroup could hope to accomplish, and next steps for the group. I’ll throw up a post in the next day or too with some additional details and the meeting notes.

Shortly after that, I took off, grabbed a Chicago style hot dog at a local restaurant, and took the train to O’Hare where I promptly took a nap on the flight home.

A big shout out to the Chicago BarCamp organizers, the event was a blast. I’ve finished uploading the photos I took from Saturday and Sunday, here’s the set on Flickr. A big thanks to Kevin for hosting Ken and I, and thanks to Ken and Kevin for all the great Foresight discussion. I was excited about Foresight before, and now I can’t even put it into words.

Quake Wars Update

I’m standing in Chicago last night (just after eating at a Chicago-style hot dog place, one of my favorite things to eat, but I digress) waiting for the train to take me to the airport when I get a call from a good friend informing me that Quake Wars beta keys were available.

Linux Games has an update from Timothee Besset at iD regarding the Linux client and lack of beta:

I don’t want to commit to any schedule for the ETQW Linux client at this point. Most of my time is spent working on the game itself, on the Linux dedicated server and on the network infrastructure.

Once those things wind down (in the upcoming weeks) I will start working specifically on the client. But fear not, ATI and NVidia have expressed interest in getting a Linux client early, so they can review how it performs and get their drivers adjusted. When we release, we’ll release a high quality product, just like we do on Windows.

In any case, don’t expect to find Linux binaries on the retail DVD. It’s hard enough for everyone to get gold masters done, there are enough things to check and worry about, I will not place additional strain on the procedure by trying to squeeze my additional set of files on there.

I have my key, looks like I’ll have play the beta at a buddies house for now. September can’t come fast enough for when I can play at home.

GNOME Journal

The latest GNOME Journal was published today. Articles include:

  • Fun with Gstreamer Audio Effects
  • Exercising Your Application With Accerciser
  • GNOME.conf.au 2007 Wrap-up

And most importantly, my first contribution GNOME Journal,

Creating the GNOME 2.18 Live Media: An interview with Ken VanDine. Hopefully, this will be the first of many articles I hope to write in the future.

I don’t know if I’ve ever told this story, but I first met Ken last February when I was trying to figure out how to build a new GNOME LiveCD. Dave Neary pointed me at Ken at one point, who was already working on this as well. After talking to Ken, he was lightyears ahead of my struggles as he was using the rPath toolset, which enabled him to quickly publish a GNOME 2.18 LiveCD. I helped out with the easy stuff, editing the LGO pages for Live Media, and the PGO page which was later committed.

Ken was so welcoming to the help, I gave Foresight Linux a try as he is the founder and lead developer. I had just installed it when I started the interview, and by the time the interview was done a month later, I was helping out Foresight with docs and website updates and other little stuff.

Three or four months later here we are, and I’m still going strong helping out, and I enjoy the Foresight community as much today as the first time I asked a question in IRC. I hope you enjoy the article as much as I enjoyed working with Ken writing it.

Barcamp Chicago Day 2

We’re back at Barcamp as of just after noon after 4 hours of sleep. We’re surprisingly awake and ready to go. We had a small hicuup trying to download the images needed for today’s Conary talk, but SpecialKevin bailed us out.

Ken is on in 10 minutes – the first talk is on Conary, and he will be demonstrating a MythTV appliance. (I’m so excited – I’m on vacation as of Thursday, and one of my projects over vacation is to get my MythTV box up and running finally. The timing of this talk couldn’t be better!)

Ken then continues on for another hour at 2:00 CST with the Foresight presentation. The day’s a little in flux, so we might push it back as people are still trickling in (we were up late….). And then at 3, the first US based GNOME usergroup meeting, a brainstorming session with SpecialKevin.

More to come soon!

Microsoft's Linux patent deals

As a long time Red Hat stockholder, let me say thank you to Red Hat’s leadership for flatly rejecting Microsoft’s overtures for interoperability and protection from patent suits. From the Yahoo! News article:

Microsoft made its intentions clear on Friday: It wants to work out a cross-licensing deal with the largest Linux vendor on the market that would look much the same as its recent agreements with Xandros and Linspire.

Red Hat quickly dashed all hopes, standing on its previous statements from last November, issued in the wake of the controversial Novell deal. Red Hat left no room for misinterpretation when it said the company would not compromise on its open-source roots.

“An innovation tax is unthinkable,” the company said in a statement. “Free and open-source software provide the necessary environment for true innovation. Innovation without fear or threat. Activities that isolate communities or limit upstream adoption will inevitably stifle innovation.”

To Red Hat, Ubuntu and all the others in the future who reject this deal: Thank you.

Writing Foresight Docs: Part 5

No, your eyes aren’t fooling you, the Getting Started with Foresight Linux User Guide is complete, and ported to Docbook. (Click through to see a larger picture at flickr.com):

foresight-userguide1

I was traveling for most of the week for my day job, but I did a little writing after last weeks post, then a flurry of activity Friday and Saturday. Last week, I was mostly content complete, with tons of formatting left to complete in almost every document, including:

  • Linking all URLs
  • Fixing all bullet points
  • Adding arrows to directions for clicking in the menu
  • Fixing the indentation errors
  • Resizing all screenshots to 510 pixels wide

The above items were almost all completed Friday, but I still hadn’t started the biggest challenge, which was writing a Table of Contents. Looking through the source code of various other Yelp / Docbook files, I had seen a number of pages calling other Docbook pages, such as the GNOME Documentation Project Handbook, for inclusion using this tag:

[include href="filename.xml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/]

In the end, I ended up using the ENTITY tag, as found in the GNOME Documentation Style Guide, which consists of listing all the files in alphabetical order at the top, and then calling each one in the order you want within the [book] tag:

[!ENTITY APPLICATIONS SYSTEM "applications.xml"]

&APPLICATIONS;

I borrowed heavily from the GNOME Documentation Style Guide’s structure and code, in writing the default page (foresight-user-guide.xml) and create a Preface chapter. This chapter is new as of yesterday, and includes an “About” section, “What’s in this Guide” with links to each Chapter and it’s summary, and a “Who Should Read this Guide” which breaks out by chapter for new or experienced Linux users the chapters they might find the most relevant.

This required me to rewrite the first 75 lines of each of the 9 Docbook files that currently make up the userguide, and change them from using sect1 tags, to using chapter tags. This actually makes it much more simpler for future contributors to add to the book, as they write their chapter and don’t have to worry about filling out all the revision history in each file, it’s updated in the foresight-user-guide.xml file instead of each individual one. I got in the zone and knocked all the files out last night, and submitted them to the Mercurial repo.

There is one bug I have yet to solve:

foresight-userguide-helpbug

In two different sections of the Userguide, the “Help” section is called, both in the Preface chapter, and it references the IRC help sub-topic instead. A bug-hunting we will go.

I am sure that I haven’t done everything in the right order or by the book – for example, I’ve found references that GNOME developers use make to write documentation files, I can guess to why, but I’m not sure, nor can I figure out how they’re set up. I’m also not sure on the translation process, other than editing the files by hand but I’ve never created a program either that has had to use a po file.

I’m also darned if I can find where Yelp, when you start the GNOME Help from System > Help, is calling the files on the right side under “Welcome to the GNOME Help Browser”. That’s where I want to put the userguide, but when you open /usr/share/yelp/toc.xml it only appears to be calling the links under “Desktop” on the left.

This has been a great experience so far, and isn’t even close to over. After I track down the bug and find a place for the userguide to live in the default documentation, it’s time to take Foresight documentation to the next level. The content written so far is not set in stone. In some cases, it only skims the top of what should be included in a given chapter, there are huge holes of information not even presented in the current guide, such as a better installation overview or printing, and more screenshots could be sprinkled throughout. Other sub-chapters could be written on specialized topics, such as installing on a Macbook or running OpenBox.

A process still needs to be developed to cull documentation on the wiki to live offline in the userguide. Documentation should be a living, breathing thing that grows with the operating system, not something that grows stale. (Quick sidenote – the fact that GNOME still ships with the GNOME 2.14 Desktop Accessibility Guide and the GNOME 2.14 Desktop System Administration Guide in the default help page ticks me off to no end. Now that I have some limited experience with Docbook, it’s time to give back). Taking user contribution submissions to the wiki and putting them in the userguide should be a high priority. Hopefully, the work done on the userguide so far can serve as a base for future contributors to continue to add content to, and people will find it useful as they use Foresight Linux.

Virtualization Bandwagon Jumping

I decided to jump on the bandwagon and tried out my first appliances today, using the free VMWare player, and a couple of appliances from rpath.org.

Working on Foresight, a number of the images published are for various virtualization technolgies, such as VMWare, Parallels and Xen. Following the VMWare installation instructions in the Wiki, I installed VMWare on Foresight 1.3, downloaded 2 appliances, and was up and running in about 5 minutes.

I am starting to see why these are all the rage right now (at the last TCLUG meeting, a lot of folks put Virtualization on the list for a future speaker to come talk about). From using an image for testing, to installing multiple appliances on a server for specific applications, there are some pretty cool use cases that become possible.

And yes, I know I’m late to the party on this topic, but better late than never. 🙂

Here’s a screenshot of Openfiler, a NAS appliance running in a VMWare player:

vmware-openfiler

And here is a screenshot of Openfiler running, and a WordPress-Multiuser appliance just starting to boot up:

wpmu-openfiler

Click through to see larger versions on Flickr.

Writing Foresight Docs: Part 4

Progress on the Userguide has been swift this week. Ken’s comments about having Foresight Linux 2.0 in testing in a “couple of weeks” spurred me to action. In no particular order are the things I’ve learned and accomplished this week:

  • URLs. Again, it’s just a matter of re-wiring my brain from HTML to Docbook’s format. For example: [ulink url="http://www.openoffice.org/product/math.html" type="http">Math here[/ulink] (replace brackets with < or >) links to the Math page on OpenOffice.org. Similar, but different. And god knows I’m no HTML expert to start with.
  • Bullets have been driving me crazy. It was just one little thing, adding the mark=”bullet” to the tag, i.e. [itemizedlist mark="bullet"]
  • 3 of the 5 last pages created were created with zero syntax errors. Yes, pride cometh before the fall. All it means is I’m starting to get the hang of this. And I haven’t started doing any of the advanced formatting yet.
  • All pages have been committed. There’s some editing to be done (more on this below), but the directory structure is complete, all screenshots are uploaded,and the copy is complete in all XML files.
  • I’ve learned more Mercurial commands, such as hg pull and hg update, as I’ve worked on this on my laptop and desktop now. And I experienced a moment of panic after editing a file and not having done a pull. But I figured it out, thankfully.
  • I added a TODO file in the repository, but it probably needs to be updated more often.

Things left to do:

  • The first few pages need major formatting updates, especially on removing the indentation.
  • All pages need to be reviewed and edited for the correct URL tags.
  • Bullet points need to be fixed in almost all the pages.
  • Screenshots need to be resized to 510 pixels wide (so they print correctly, per the GNOME Documentation Handbook guidelines).
  • I still need to research, learn and build a Table of Contents.
  • I need to add some advanced formatting, specifically the arrow labels when showing how to access menus to run applications. (The tag I believe).
  • I still need to research on how to add this to the default Yelp page in GNOME, and how that will work from a packaging perspective.

Paul Scott-Wilson asked a great question in IRC last night, regarding whether Docbook repository or the Wiki will be the master copy of the userguide moving forward. My recommendation would be that Docbook would be the master copy, put together from the text on the wiki. This way it gives users a chance to contribute to the userguide on the wiki, adding new copy, having it proofed, and then moved to Docbook. The Printing section is a great example of this, it’s 80% complete on the wiki, but it needs to be 100% to be included in Docbook. (Jonathan Brickman, where are you? Please finish the Printing page!) Additionally, the Docbook repository has source control, which would make it easier to manage over the long term. Opinions or thoughts? Leave a comment below on the blog, or email me at pcutler at foresightlinux dot org.

Progress will be small to non-existent as I have to travel for my day job. This probably means no blog updates either. More to come soon.

Last.fm

I’m a big fan of Last.fm and since I started using Banshee, I’ve reported all my my music through it. A couple of tools came to my attention today.

Digg linked to the Mainstream-O-Meter to measure how mainstream your listening habits are. Digg, being the force they are, have made the site go offline temporarily. My music came in at 68% mainstream. 68%! I like to think I’m a little more eclectic, but maybe I’m not. Or maybe tech geeks like me who use Last.fm just have similar tastes. 🙂

Pscott linked the second one, LastGraph, which graphs out your music listening habits over time. You can set the background color / theme, and the date range you want to graph.

Here’s my 2007 graph:

2007-music

And here is since I started using Last.fm in Oct. 2005:

all-music

Click through to Flickr to actually read them. A couple of notes:

  • I hacked my Xbox, and added Last.fm reporting. My wife listening to music through it really skews it. (Dixie Chicks or U2 anyone?)
  • I’m definitely a streaky listener. I get stuck on an album or artist and listen to the crap out of it. (Liz Phair, Chili Peppers, The Shins)
  • You can tell when I installed my home theater in August of last year. From August to December, I wasn’t spending any time in my office on my PC. It was all about the new, big TV. The little music I listened to was on the Sonos through the network. (I so wish Sonos had Last.fm reporting built-in!)
  • I also listen to a lot of 89.3 The Current, both on the radio through the home theater, and streaming online through Banshee. That is not reflected in the graph. That is truly eclectic listening.

I’m a big enough fan, that I’ve actually subscribed for over the last year. I can’t say I’m thrilled by the recent acquisition by CBS, but I love the statistics Last.fm collects and lets me share, both on their website and through the badge on this blog.