Category: freesoftware (Page 3 of 8)
I’ve been watching the Ubuntu “power users” group set up with enormous interest. Although Ubuntu has aimed squarely at being easy to use, I’ve never seen it as being particularly unfriendly toward power users, and the idea of needing a specific area in which people can talk about power user issues seems somewhat odd. However – judging from the activity, it seems to have hit a real nerve. Whether or not it is a good idea in the long term remains to be seen: I’m firmly of the opinion that splitting communities into factions is a bad idea, so how they will overcome that in time will be a challenge, but clearly it’s meeting a real need.
(this is part 2; you may want to read part 1 before reading this)
I said last time I would go into the file maangement side of GNOME 3 a bit more, and I think I would be right in saying that there are a number of people who think this is probably one of the weakest aspects of the release.
The first thing to say is, I vaguely surprised myself by the lack of problem in this area.
This is part one of what will be a multipart blog series: how tremendously exciting, eh?! In all seriousness, with GNOME 3 imminent, I thought rather than do a review of the desktop it would be much more interesting to talk about it from the perspective of a relatively hardened Linux enthusiast actually using it within a business environment.
First up, disclosures: I’m an extremely happy GNOME 2 user. I have a copy of Fedora 12 on my Eeepc 901 netbook, with what is now a relatively ancient version of gnome-shell on it, but to be honest the shell is little more than an interface for launching Firefox on that machine.
It has been an incredibly interesting week in free desktop-land, in that kind of “interesting like a soap opera” kind of way. I guess it’s not news that different participants have different recollections of the same series of events, but it is a bit sad to see it writ so large on a public stage.
Timing-wise, it’s quite co-incidental, but it’s enlightening (I think) to read Mark Shuttleworth’s latest “Internal competition is healthy, but depends on strong and mature leadership” alongside Mark Wilcox’s “What happened to Nokia?
As predicted, Microsoft and Nokia are tying a knot of sorts, and all sorts of people are extremely disappointed by this news. I’m an Android user right now, but I’m particularly disappointed because Android just isn’t the free platform it claims to be.
A lot of people are blaming Microsoft and dreaming up “entryism” conspiracy theories. These people are entirely wrong; the decision to go MS was signalled a long while ago by Nokia’s board.
Today was Open Source Expo day. While I had been asked by one of the organisers whether or not I could propose a .Org to exhibit there, I decided against it for a couple of reasons: mainly, because I hadn’t heard very much about the exhibition, was a bit worried about the timing, and questioned whether or not it would be a good use of time for me or anyone else involved in an open source project to attend.
One thing that has always bothered me is that there has always been little way of getting data in and out of Bongo stores easily. Well, no longer (sort of): I’ve upgraded the storetool a bit to make this easier. Some examples are better than words:
It’s not totally complete yet: we need some commands to remove, move documents, fiddle with types, flags and properties too – but it’s a start!
Now, this isn’t something you’d probably want to do every day, but sometimes you have a 32-bit Fedora install which you’d like to be able to run 64-bit software on: my use case is that I have this desktop which I want to start running virtual machines on. Now, if you have a 32-bit install, you can’t run 64-bit machines – a bit weird given the hardware is supposed to be virtualised, but that’s how it works.
It looks like someone has been attacking Savane-derived hosting platforms. Recently Savannah has been down, and the page that has now gone up confirms that they had a security breach. Unfortunately, Gna! has a similar code-base, and their site now confirms that they are investigating an issue too.
This has a knock-on issue for Bongo, since we use Gna! hosting. Our download area appears to still be alive, and thankfully we have always signed the releases.
I don’t particularly like talking law on this blog; it’s boring and – for the most part – disinteresting. However, recent developments in SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Limited (as written up here – thanks to Cristian for bringing this up at FFII) deserve to be aired.
The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. For those who don’t know, SAS is a statistical package which is both popular and influential, and to a large extent can be thought of as a programming development environment.
