codergeek42

With the recent clamour over Nautilus' default spatial-paradigm navigation mode as the default in Fedora, I decided to take a page from the book of David Nielsen and force myself to use spatial mode for a few solid days (at least). Having been a "Browser" user mostly of habit since I first started with Linux in 2003, I want to know first-hand why this decision is making so many people upset.

I'll report back soon with my findings! :)

Thanks to Colin Walters, Empathy should now automagically take care of the MC profile renaming upon startup.

Well, it will...once Koji is back up. The changes are tagged in CVS and simply need to be built. :)

Posted this to the development mailing list; but the more I post it the more people will see it... :)

Hi, all.

The Mission Control profiles in the telepathy-haze-mission-control package were originally created manually based on the Jabber/XMPP profile to allow Telepathy-using applications to support the basics of libpurple's more common protocols: AIM/ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo! IM.

However, these are getting rather stale and upstream Empathy already has nicely-working profiles for Haze (with more protocol support than the old subpackage). So, in an effort to more closely track upstream's code and profiles (therefore slightly reducing the package maintenance work), I have committed and am now building new telepathy-haze and empathy
packages that use Empathy's profiles instead of manually-created ones.

These should hit tomorrow's rawhide but unfortunately it means that the profiles have been renamed. I have included a script named "upgrade-haze-profiles.sh" (installed as documentation) with Empathy that automagically fixes this on a per-user basis; but this script needs to be run manually.

(Come to think of it, we may need to add this as a minor upgrade-related fix in the Release Notes...)

Thanks, and happy hacking.

My secondary hard drive - which I was using for backups (queue the irony) and general storage - died on me over the past couple of days. Unfortunately, that was also the drive on which I kept my Virt Manager images. So until I get a replacement, I'm afraid I'll be unable to triage any F-9/rawhide bugs (since my machine is running F-8).

I'm also going to be gone for the next week (on the other side of the country) so I won't be able to replace that until about the weekend after I get back.

I apologize for any inconvience this may cause but hardware has a way of disagreeing with me at the most inopportune times. =(

Oh well, C'est la vie...See you all in a week!

So, for fun, I decided to check the size of the development/x86_64 repository for Fedora, and various subsets thereof. Using a spooky bit of awk-fu, I found that the total size of the repository is just slightly more than 30 gigabytes:

$ repoquery --info --all --repoid=development | grep Size \
| awk -F ':' --assign sum=0 '{sum=sum+$2} END {print sum}'
32517444423

(This printed amount is the total size, in bytes.) However, not all of this is x86_64 stuff. There is a large amount of arch-independent packages, too (deemed "noarch"). The 32-bit stuff is also divided into i386 and i686 packages (for libraries such as glibc and OpenSSL that intensively use more advanced processor features). The table below charts the approximate total size, in Mibibytes, of packages in the Fedora Development repository, grouped by architecture (x86_64, noarch, i386, and i686).

Architecture	Approx. Size (MiB)
x86_64	19844.48
noarch	6616.08
i386	4534.41
i686	16.08

This shows that much of the repo (nearly two-thirds) is purely 64-bit or arch-independent packages; and the remaining few gigabytes or so is duplicates of the 32-bit stuff needed for multilib. Mind you, that's more than half of the size of the 32-bit "Everything" repository. More than half of the packages' contents are duplicated to the 64-bit tree.

I didn't think so much of that would be 32-bit. I can understand things that absolutely need to stay 32-bit for various reasons (such as Wine), but we have so many application packages in Fedora that don't properly split their shared libraries/etc. into a subpackage for dependency minimization that we end up having to keep the entire application package so that its development files can use them properly, thus duplicating other aspects of the packages: data, runtime executables, et al. Plus, our current strategy of "anything with a -devel subpackage gets both arches" is horridly broken. We need a better heuristic for these things. Can we please endeavor to this fixed Fedora 9+? That would be so amazingly awesome!

There are many so-called "email stations" in my school's library, which are nothing more than minimal Windows XP installs locked down via group policies and such so that you can essentially do only two things: reboot/shutdown the computer, and open Internet Explorer. This is intended for students to have quick access to their web-based email accounts (such as Yahoo! or Google Mail).

As a fortunate corollary, students are permitted to download legally-acquired files (such as incomplete homework that one may have emailed to himself for later termination) to only one place (aside from USB drives, etc.): the desktop. Thus, it's fairly simple to "install" Firefox and OpenOffice.org Portable to the desktop in their own respective folders. This tends to work fairly well, minus some registry entries for default applications not being saved.

I had done this today between classes, as I was working on some extra credit for my Biology class, and a young woman came up to the computer next to me needing to type a document for her writing class, not realizing that these computers only had IE available to use. (When I inquired this of her, this was her first semester here, so that's quite acceptable. ^_^) She looked over and saw me typing out my Biology homework in Writer and asked me how I was doing that if these computers did not have Word available to use.

As any good advocate would, I immediately showed her the OpenOffice,org website and downloaded a copy of OpenOffice.org Portable for her, showing her what I was doing each step of the way. I explained to her that although it is very similar to MS Office and has a lot of the same functionality, the way to access that functionality can sometimes be different. She was wondering how to set her page margins to 1 inch around (as was required for her essay), which was a perfect segue into my continuing explanation.

I then showed her how to set the margins via the Format » Page options, and explained to her the basics of its documentation, so that she could find the help she needed after I had gone to class later. I also briefly showed her through the various support methods listed on the website, so that she could go on the mailing lists and such and have answered just about any question she had about OpenOffice.org.

She sidestepped back to the issue I had mentioned to her earlier about being almost compatible with Microsoft Office, so I also explained to her that it defaults to OpenDocument (and very briefly what OpenDocument is), but will happily open files from MS Office or save to the requisite MS Office format. Upon hearing this, she seemed quite happy that she could keep her documents in a format that she could later open with just about any recent Office application, instead of only MS Office.

Lastly, I explained to her that this was all free software: both no-cost and libre. I told her that it was all Open Source, meaning that we're not only allowed to make and share as many copies of it was we want, but we are encouraged to do so.

When all was said and done, including demonstrating the other applications to her (Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, et al.), I don't know if I explained the concept of it being completely Free to her well enough for her to have understood it in its entirety. (The no-cost aspect of it was probably one of the major reasons she likes it.) However, she seemed to be quite satisfied when I mentioned the OpenDocument explanation to her, and was quite thrilled that after a couple of quick inquiries for my help, she was able to find everything she needed to get her homework done quickly and easily.

She did not seem "computer-savvy" (as the phrase goes), but I could tell that she definitely liked OpenOffice.org, and I hope we (the community) made a good impression on her because of it.

On an aside, I really should be carrying around a few copies of OpenDisc with me for cases such as these. C'est la vie, I suppose. :)

So (as most of you probably already know), since November of 2005 I've been a global moderator on the Gentoo Forums.

As can be seen from my recent inactivity, classwork and side projects have left me with little free time to dedicate to the Gentoo forums. Along with this, I no longer have the passion I once had for the distribution and inevitably end up spending the free time that I do have for the forums just browsing Off The Wall.

Thus, I've decided to formally resign my position as a Global Mod; and to take a quote from the pages of Douglas Adams: "So long, and thanks for all the fish."