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32 bit Firefox on 64 bit Foresight

We’re still at SCALE, manning the Foresight booth and introducing Foresight to lots of new users. (I’ll need to check download statistics and see if we made an impact).

While here, Ken helped me get 32 bit Firefox running on my laptop, which is running 64 bit Foresight. (I missed having Flash).

There has been some discussion on the mailing list lately, and we are leaning towards including 32 bit Firefox by default, and leaving Epiphany at 64 bit for those users who want a 64 bit browser.

To get 32 bit Firefox installed, run the following commands:

sudo conary erase firefox

sudo conary update firefox['is: x86']

sudo conary erase nspluginwrapper['is: x86_64']

sudo conary update gtk-engines:lib['is: x86']

sudo conary erase nspluginwrapper['is: x86']

Reboot.

And voila, Firefox is now runnning 32 bit, and Flash should just work.

Thanks to Ken for walking me through it this morning.

Yahoo! and me

I’ve read enough of the stories of Microsoft’s takeover bid for Yahoo!, and I hate to contribute more, but Wired has a great story on the Flickr communities’ reaction.

I’m a Yahoo! user by acquisition. I absolutely adore Flickr, with over 4000 photos posted and viewed over 67,000 times. (My Foresight screenshot is #1 for me with 2000 views). I bought a Pro account when Flickr first launched, ages before it was acquired, and was rewarded for overpaying by gaining a year. I have hundreds of bookmarks at del.icio.us (which annoy Planet readers to no end as they auto-post to my blog). I applaud Yahoo!s recent OpenID implementation.

But I’ve seen first hand what Microsoft does with its acquisitions. If I was a Yahoo! shareholder, I’d take the money and run. Their stock has been declining for years. Their search market share is stagnant. Their media strategy, including music, isn’t really working.

But does it have to be Microsoft? Please, no. Anyone know how to migrate photos from Flickr to Picasa?

Google Accounts

I have a few different Google accounts I use, including two for email, one for backup, and a Google for Domains account (pcutler at foresightlinux dot org).

I forward all my email to my primary account (silwenae at gmail dot com), and use that account to log in to all my Google services. Within that account, I have selected pcutler at foresightlinux dot org as my main account to send email from, when logged in as silwenae. Gmail makes this all pretty easy from it’s settings menu within Gmail.

One of the recent challenges I had, is that I’ve created a couple Google Groups for Foresight mailing lists. Since I was logged in to Google as silwenae, and my default email to send from is pcutler at foresight, I kept getting bounce messages when I’d try to email the group as I’d forget that I had to change my send email address in Gmail. So I then created another Google account for pcutler at foresight, subscribed to the group, but now I was subscribed as two different users. It fixed the problem, but wasn’t elegant.

Yesterday, the Google Operating System Blog posted about associating another email address with your Google account. Similar to how Gmail allows you to associate another email account (including receiving and sending emails), it allows you to use all of Google’s services, such as Calendar or Groups, with this account.

I had to delete the new Google account I set up using pcutler @ foresight, and then followed the steps above. Then, in Google Groups, I went to “Edit my Membership”, and it asks: What address do you want to use for this group? I selected pcutler @ foresight and voila, all fixed, with a much more elegant solution.

For those of you with @foresightlinux.org accounts, this trick may come in handy.

GNOME Developer's Kit

As someone who has for a long time wanted to get involved with an open source project, and specifically GNOME, the GNOME Developer Kit is a true blessing. (And more on my wanting to get involved in a different post in a week or so).

The GNOME Developer Kit is fully functional operating system with the latest (unstable) branch of GNOME. Available as an ISO you can install on your hard drive, or a VMWare image you can boot within your current OS, it has everything you need to start contributing back to GNOME. The GNOME Developer Kit is based on Foresight Linux, and uses Conary and PackageKit to stay updated with the latest commits from GNOME Subversion. Both the Dev Kit and Foresight were created by Ken VanDine, Foresight’s lead developer.

Og Maciel, a GNOME contributor, blogged about using the GNOME Developer Kit in assisting the translation teams. One comment in particular caught my attention, asking if translations were too hard of an area for someone new to contributing to start with.

With this in mind, what kind of documentation should be included with the GNOME Developer Kit, and where should it live? Getting started in open source can be daunting, and GNOME can sometimes come off as a bit of a clique, making it even harder for someone to start. Translations, bug triaging, and documentation are typically easy areas for someone new to start, but I’ve seen some challenges first hand trying to get involved. I don’t have any answers, but some of the questions that come to mind for me are:

  • Should documentation live on the image or on the wiki?
  • If on the wiki, should it link to other sections of the GNOME wiki (live.gnome.org or LGO for short)? (For example, the “Testing Patches” is linked on the GNOME Dev Kit’s LGO page to the Testing Patches LGO page.)
  • If on the image, should it be a docbook file similar to the Foresight User Guide, or just an HTML page?
  • What common tasks for developers should be documented? Think back to when you were just getting started with contributing, what questions came to mind?
  • What else?

Getting started with contributing back to an open source project takes determination and even a bit of courage. Tools like the GNOME Developer Kit help make that start even easier.

Stop the Spying

A big thank you to the EFF and Sen. Chris Dodd for helping to kill the Telecom Immunity bill yesterday in the Senate. The EFF has been at the forefront of this issue from day one, and Sen. Dodd’s leadership and bravery in taking a stand yesterday threatening to filibuster this bill until it died caused Sen. Reid to pull it at this point in time.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow sums it up well:

Here’s the thing: EFF and others are suing the telecoms for participating in the wiretapping program. These lawsuits are the best chance we have of getting the details of the program into the public, so we can finally find out what the NSA have been doing to us all these years. The reason the government wants to grant the telecoms immunity is to keep the dirty laundry in the closet — to keep us from finding out how they’ve been breaking the law.

Read more:

Software I'm excited about

A brief post as I’m still traveling for work. Here are a couple big and small packages in development that I’m excited about:

  • Flyback: A GUI wrapper for rsync and rsnapshot to make backup easier, that is often compared to Apple’s Time Machine. It’s a python script that creates a GUI for the user and makes it simple to create and schedule backups of a user’s directories and files. Choose which directory, files, hidden files, and it sends the back up to a directory of your choosing. It’s still very early in development, and I didn’t see a way to send a backup to a network share that’s mounted in GNOME. But I believe most users don’t backup enough, and for a distribution like that Foresight, that “just works”, backup should be added to the list of things that just work for a user.
  • GNOME-DO: A Quicksilver-like application that is difficult to explain, but can increase your productivity ten fold by making it easy to quickly open applications, jump between open windows and more. See more at Download Squad including a video of GNOME-Do in action.
  • Publishr, a small one, but looks useful, Publishr adds a “publish” plug-in to GIMP to make it easy to send your images to Picasa or Flickr. Sure, F-Spot has had this feature forever, but there are a lot of times when I’m editing a screenshot that I want to send to Flickr that I won’t put in my F-Spot library, and this plugin will help skip a step by having to use Flickr’s web upload feature.

I’m definitely going to keep an eye on these applications, and may add to my Foresight repository when I get some time.

The Beauty of Blu-Ray

If you were paying close attention to my blog a week ago, buried in my del.ico.us links were 2 links to Blu-ray news, including one on the state of Blu-Ray.

This was all research with the intention of buying a Blu-Ray player, which I ended up doing a week ago Sunday. I was lucky enough to find a second generation Samsung player, the BD-P1200. Why a second generation player, and not one of the third generation players that are profile 1.2 and just hitting retail shelves? It’s all about the Silicon Optix HQV video processor included, the only Blu-Ray player to include one. Where the HQV shines is on upscaling normal DVDs and is one of the best video processors ever made. Due to trying to reduce costs, Samsung did not include it on the BD-P1200’s successor, the BD-P1400. (Read more on the HQV video processor at the CNET BD-P1200 review under DVD performance.)

The quality of Blu-Ray discs is amazing. I expected to be good, on par with high-def TV, but it’s amazing. I’m lucky enough to own a 1080p TV, and I can’t get over the video quality of the movies I’ve watched so far. I bought a handful of movies with the player, and so far I’ve had the opportunity to watch both Fantastic Four movies, and Live Free or Die Hard.

I bought my Samsung player a week ago Sunday, at night, and promptly left for L.A. the next morning for work, returning late Thursday night. I then had plans all of last weekend, and was home only a few days before coming home to Milwaukee this weekend for Thanksgiving, so I haven’t had much time to enjoy it yet.

I still have to watch a normal DVD and see how good the HQV video processor is. I made sure the first thing I did was update the firmware – plugging in via ethernet I wasn’t able to grab an IP, but burning the firmware to a CD-R and popping it in was easy enough. I’m not concerned about being limited to a 1.1 BD profile – the only thing 1.2 allows is picture-in-picture for things such as director commentary. Until players come out in a couple of years at BD profile 2.0, this player will do just fine, and by then the cost will have come down and I’ll want to replace my other DVD players in the house.

I’m also not concerned about the pitched battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. A few months ago I was 100% sure Blu-Ray was going to win, but now it’s looking like a stalemate and both formats will be around for at least a few years. HD-DVD only has 2 studios in their camp, and one of those they had to pay $150 million for to be exclusive for the next year. Blu-Ray has all the other studios, and all the hardware manufacturers, except Toshiba, so I’m betting Sony will have it’s first format win in a long time.

If I hadn’t come in to some extra money, I don’t know if I would have bought one, but am I glad I did. The picture quality is beautiful and I can’t believe the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD.

Bad Comcast, Bad

It’s been rumored for a while that Comcast was filtering traffic on it’s network, specifically Bittorrent, and now the AP after significant testing, according to this story on MSNBC.com.

I’m extremely disappointed to have this confirmed. After Time Warner and Comcast swapped markets a year ago, I’m now a Comcast subscriber. Time Warner and it’s Roadrunner service was an excellent internet provider – a number of years ago when I was running a home server, I received an email from Time Warner. It informed me they noticed I was running a mail server, which was against it’s TOS, but they probed and it wasn’t compromised, and they let it be.

Comcast, on the other hand, within 3 months of taking over service, jacked up my rates by 30% (from $45 / month to $60 / month), on the premise I only had their broadband service, and not their TV or phone service, but would leave my rates at $45 if I signed up for one of those. (I still don’t understand how this isn’t illegal tying… I really wish I had gone to law school.)

As a Linux developer, Bittorrent is a legitimate file sharing service. I can share ISOs of the software I contribute to. Bittorrent is not just a copyright infringing service.

Comcast needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

Support net neutrality, and learn more. Call your Senators and Congressional representatives, and don’t let big business ruin the internet.

Rolling releases

Over the next month or two, you may hear a lot of news about upcoming releases of various Linux distributions.

But what if you could do things differently? What if you could have a Linux distribution that wasn’t tied to a specific date twice a year to update your packages and your distribution? What if you wanted access to the latest Banshee for example that will be out later this year and not wait until next spring? Why mess around with backports or unstable respositories just to gain access to the latest release of a package that features a bug fix you need?

Try a Linux distribution that features a rolling release. Try Foresight Linux. Yes, we have a “formal” release when GNOME releases every 6 months, but when a package has an update, it’s probably updated before you even notice, and just one conary updateall away from being included in your desktop. The latest packages will give you access to the latest features, and better yet, the latest bug fixes of any given package. With Foresight Linux 2.0 on the horizon, we will be adding a more formal QA process, so don’t let the “but we need months of testing” stop you from updating. Point releases come out every couple months, but mostly to update the downloadable media including install CDs / DVD and live media such as Live CDs or VMWare images. The magic of conary will keep all of your installed packages up to date.

Additionally, if something doesn’t work, Conary is an innovative package manager that features a rollback feature – from the command line type sudo conary rollback 1 and you’ll be right back to where you were before you installed that last package.

There can be better ways of doing things. And a rolling release is a better way.

GNOME 2.20 and Foresight 1.4 Released

GNOME 2.20 is out and that means a formal release of Foresight Linux, 1.4, is out to go with it!

Why do I say “formal release of Foresight Linux”? Because of Conary, Foresight does rolling releases – whenever a package has a major update, you’ll get it right away, so you always have the latest bug fixes of your favorite software.

Here are the GNOME 2.20 Release Notes, Foresight 1.4 release announcement and release notes, and because it is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, the release notes done by our resident pirates.

And of course, the best place to get the latest GNOME is Foresight Linux – download today.

Congrats to the team for another great release, and here’s to 2.0 in the near future!