So if you think you can handle a few more thought-provoking rants from your favourite mad German in your life, go ahead and subscribe: we have a regular MP3 feed as well as an Ogg Vorbis feed for all the freedom lovers out there. I hope you enjoy the new show, a second (more regular) episode will be out very soon!

]]> http://srcview.org/2010/rant-ofab-launched/feed/ 13 http://srcview.org/2010/test-driving-gnome-shell/ http://srcview.org/2010/test-driving-gnome-shell/#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:28:03 +0000 Fab http://srcview.org/?p=2154 After all the sessions at GUADEC¹ about Gnome Shell, I got once again really excited about it as well as the whole future of Gnome itself. I had run Gnome Shell previously, you can just install it from the Fedora repos, but the version that is currently in most distros (including Fedora 13) is months old and the project is obviously making great strides constantly. After a pretty abysmal attempt at installing it from the project’s experimental repo which shot most of my GTK-related packages point blank in the head, leaving me only with the option to delete integral GTK packages from my running machine and reinstalling them via yum downgrade, I decided to build a stand-alone version of Shell from their git repository. Luckily, this turned out to be amazingly easy. So if you have about half an hour (depending on how fast your system is with compiling stuff) and you want to have a look at what’s coming in Gnome 3, you might find the following instructions helpful²:

This will pull the current dev version of Gnome Shell from the git repository and compile a stand-alone version of it in your home directory that you can run at you leasure. To do this, the first thing you want to do is download the install script from the Gnome site to your home directory and run it.

cd ~
curl -O http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/plain/tools/build/gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
/bin/bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh

You can then start the actual build process. This will take some time as the script has to check out a ton of packages from git and compile them one after the other. You best start this in its own little terminal window and get on with whatever you were doing before or fix yourself a nice cup a coffee and watch the awesome matrix simulator build into gcc (best viewed fullscreen in an old school terminal font and green-on-black text).

jhbuild build

If this completes without errors, you got yourself a standalone version of Gnome Shell that you can now manually run. Change into the specified directory and start up Shell.

cd ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/src
./gnome-shell --replace

The --replace command will tell it do replace your current window manager so that you get the full experience, if you want to quit out of Shell just issue a Control-C in the terminal you started Shell from. If something major goes wrong, you can always change to a different tty (Control-Alt-F2 for example), log in, and kill X by issuing the command killall Xorg as root. Just be aware that this kills all of your currently running programs. Bear in mind that I have tested this on Fedora 13 and depending on your distribution, some of these details might be slightly different. The actual steps to run and build Shell from git, however, should be pretty universal.

I hope you enjoy tinkering with it as much as I do at the moment. Feel free to file bugs and help the devs out with valid feedback, I think they are quite short on people testing this at the moment. If you want to rebuild a newer version of the packages, you can follow these instructions. You can also follow the development on identi.ca of course.

So if you have some feedback or want to post some mockups yourself, feel free to do that in the comments — I will relay that information back to the team. You can also post comments on identi.ca, and if you do so, please tag them with #fpodesign so that we can track them. The Fedora Design Team now also has a group on identi.ca, by the way, so you can join that if you want to stay up to date on what we are up to and any further developments on the website redesign as they happen. I can’t wait to see how this turns out!

Just to clarify: The picture on the right is just one possible design that Jef did. Please hit the links above to have a look at the designs Mo posted as well.

• Sudo Modprobe (Prairie Version) — Ogg Vorbis, 987 KB
• Sudo Modprobe (Harmonica, Fast) — Ogg Vorbis, 258 KB
• Sudo Modprobe (Harmonica, Slow) — Ogg Vorbis, 331 KB
• Sudo Modprobe (Harmonica Bumper, High) — Ogg Vorbis, 102 KB
• Sudo Modprobe (Harmonica Bumper, Low) — Ogg Vorbis, 113 KB

And as if that wasn’t enough, Jon also recorded a rocking Latin version of our theme with stuff he had lying around in his office:

• Sudo Modprobe (Latin Version) — Ogg Vorbis, 394 KB

This man is just amazing! Thanks again, Jon, you rock! I am so glad to have people like you being part of the Linux Outlaws community. And while we are on the topic of music, we also got send a second² 8-bit rendition of the theme tune a while ago, which is a lot of fun as well. This one was send in by Chris Tevyaw (aka. Slasher in our IRC channel), so thanks to you as well, Chris! Check it out:

• Sudo Modprobe (8-bit Version by Slasher) — Ogg Vorbis, 762 KB

As always I’m just absolutely thrilled with how cool our listeners are. Both Dan and myself would’ve never thought about getting send all this cool stuff when we started the show almost three years ago now. I am floored again and again by the generosity and creativity of the people listening to the show. Amazing. Thanks to all of our loyal fans and listeners out there!

»Autumn Colors« by Joisey Showa (joiseyshowaa on Flickr)

Máirín has blogged about the wallpaper we are working on to include as a default, but we are also aiming to include a lot of additional wallpapers (much like upstream Gnome does) that people may use as an alternative. We are looking for photos or abstract graphics that lend themselves to being good wallpaper, ie. something not too distracting or busy — close-ups of grass and flowers, landscape vistas, abstract graphics like swirls and bubbles are all good examples but try to think out of the box as well. We are collecting submissions on this page until Thursday, August 19 (one day before my birthday, incidentally) after which the Design Team will vote on the submissions and decide what will be included. So if you have an idea for something you think would fit the bill, please head over to that page. We will need the following information for each submission:

1. URL of the image (ie. “where it’s at”)
2. Title of the work in question
3. Name of the author (their real name is preferable, but a nickname with a link to the profile on the page the image is from works as well)
4. Contact information for the author, email if possible
5. URL of the source page that the image was originally from
6. The license of the photo (has to be compatible with the Fedora requirements)

You can either go to the wiki page directly and add the photos yourself or you can use this handy script to upload them automatically (usage instructions). If you want, you can also email me submissions directly to fab@sixgun.org as long as you provide the above information and make it clear in the subject line that you are submitting wallpapers for Fedora. If you find a nice image and it isn’t released under an acceptable license, you might want to try to contacting the author to release it under a license that would make it possible for us to ship it. We can also ask the author ourselves if you want, just email me about it if that is the case.

»Oregano Orejón« by María Leandro (tatica on Flickr)

I think this is an awesome opportunity to get your own work or someone else’s that you enjoy into Fedora and at the same time improve things for everyone. Who doesn’t love gorgous wallpapers, after all? As I see it, this is one of the easiest ways ever to contribute to a F/OSS project and could still be very rewarding. I am looking forward to lots of great submissions so go ahead and knock the ball out of the park with your find!

The first is people who complain about “armchair coaching”. I get this a lot because I like to critique stuff while I watch it¹, football being no exception, and this complaint went through the blogs and media a lot recently as well. I mean, what is wrong with these people? Why the hell do you think football is shown on TV anyway? Isn’t it natural to talk about this stuff when you are really engaged and rooting for a team? What the frak am I supposed to say? “Oh, they are playing so lovely. Shame they are beating us 3:0…” This isn’t the Fairy Forest, we live in the Real World² and I have a news flash for you: People aren’t perfect and no, we can’t all live in peace all the time. Of course, we could all just shut up and watch the game but how much fun would that be? And if we were all totally emotionless about this sport, I doubt it would fascinate so many people and be shown on prime time television all over the world.

Speaking of fascination, the World Cup was a wonderful summer party here in Germany. People celebrating the games in the streets, everybody having a smile on their lips during the warm summer days and nights… flags everywhere. A wonderful atmosphere. This is where the second class of idiots come in that have annoyed me. You see, Germany has a troublesome history to put it mildly. I should know, I have studied it extensively. This means that as soon as people will hang a flag out of their window (which only happens during the World Cup or European Championship and only since about 2006 at that), the political left gets a brain aneurysm and thinks we are descending into the Third Reich again³. I know all about Germany’s “special place in history” and I am by no means right wing racist, hell that couldn’t be further from the truth, but I’ve never understood (especially after spending over a year living in Australia) how it is OK for citizens of every country on the planet to hang their flag out of the window but if you do it in Germany you are a Nazi to a lot of people. That makes absolutely no sense. Now, if I was flying a Hakenkreuzfahne, sure, but I completely fail to understand how the colours of the Hambacher Fest, a flag that symbolises freedom and democracy on German soil like nothing else, can be seen as problematic. I do understand that people might see flying a flag as nationalistic, but that is just stupid. Has it never occured to these people that there might be different reasons to hang a flag out of your window? One being to support the national football team and to show pride to be living in your home country as opposed to the overt desire to kick out immigrants and burn the neighbouring countries to rubble? And is it bad to pride yourself on a national team that embodies Germany’s willingness and success to accept and embrace immigrants like no other? This wonderful young team had players with roots in Poland, Turkey, Ghana, Tunisia, Brazil and many other countries — all of them with black, red and gold on their jerseys, playing a damn fair game and giving their best. I think this is wonderful and should be embraced. Anybody who misconstrues this as dumb sheep falling back into the old traps of our past had better think twice and save their anger for real threats against our democracy. Or at least concentrate the contempt on those losers who are booing the national anthems of other countries, those people have earned it.

Just by the way, I had two flags flying the last few weeks: my native black-red-gold as well as the Australian flag I got given when I left James Nash SHS in 2001. Both flags have their historical problems (which hasn’t) but I am acutely aware of those and flew them both with pride. Instead of slamming people for showing allegiance to their football team by flying a flag, why don’t the critics get off their high horse and spend some time learning about these problems in earnest. And maybe not assuming that everyone who has a flag flying is a mindless sheep per se would help as well. I would never consider myself nationalistic — hell, I am the first one out of here if a war breaks out, make no mistake — or even a patriot, but I will leave you with this song anyway, there is a lot of wisdom in it:

This comes back to one of my pet peeves: the problem with overly prescriptive language use. Many governments, regimes and groups (political, religious and otherwise) throughout history have tried to change the way people use language and in almost all cases their efforts have ultimately been doomed². This is why the actual science of linguistics is largely concerned with descriptive methods and approaches. It turns out that language (if in use) is always changing and adapting. This generally happens slowly but it does happen and most importantly it happens according to sociological pressures at large and not because of conscious change or the desire for such. This is why I never say “GNU/Linux” — not because I am lazy or because I think it is factually wrong³ but because this campaign is ultimately doomed to fail. Whoever came up with this at the FSF hasn’t got the slightest clue about either linguistics or history. Even if it was an accurate and precise term (remember, I am not discussing that here) past experience has clearly shown that it has not been accepted by the general group of language users as, say, to google sth. has been. If you analyse the general rejection of the term by everyone but the core FSF and FSFE people, everything we know from the study of history and linguistics tells us that it never will be either. Now, I’m not saying the FSF should stop doing what they do, they are free to act however they feel fit. All I am saying is that people who follow them shouldn’t be surprised that all these efforts go to waste and I am also laying down my reasoning for why I am not following suit in the whole “GNU/Linux” thing, furthermore, why I am deliberately fighting that foolishness on Linux Outlaws and elsewhere. This has nothing to do with me not being a free software supporter, that would be as far from the truth as you can get, I’m just a free software supporter who also knows a bit about linguistics. However, I also completely understand why Bradley is doing what he does and why he stands by RMS in this (I respect that), I’m not trying to disparage him either — I just have another perspective, that’s all.

This brings us back to the original point of my post: Being precise in your language use is all well and good, but if you fail to understand how language works in the real world, your efforts (whatever your agenda may be) are doomed to fail. This is why I am myself often quite imprecise in my language use on the podcast: I understand that people will misunderstand me no matter how precise I am and I channel my energy and concentration elsewhere. I generally do try to use the terms “free software” and “open source” when I mean exactly the corresponding thing, but of course, everyone makes mistakes. I leave it to our generally very intelligent listeners, to figure out what we mean by the context of the discussion and when that fails I have no problem with going back and clearing up the misunderstandings. Same thing on the microblog conversations. There is nothing more natural than misunderstandings and in my experience not even the most careful and precise language use can avoid them, especially outside of the lab and auditorium. Therefore, I am generally trying to advocate a somewhat lax view on these matters, not only in technology discussions⁴. I do think it is good that we discuss these things and I think they have to be discussed over and over again. The fact that the discussion has been had before doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be had again with new people and new arguments — that’s how science works, after all. We just have to understand that in talking about these things, misunderstandings will happen and that this is nothing bad if we deal with them in a sensible way. Of course, it would also be a bonus if people finally understood that campaigns to change language use are a Sisyphean task, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Today is a pretty awesome day: It is Dan‘s 30th birthday, Towel Day and to top it all off, Fedora 13 “Goddard” will be released. To celebrate this, we just published a special Linux Outlaws episode where we talk about the features in the new Fedora.

Towel Day 2010

Highlights include Shotwell and Pino by default, free 3D drivers for ATI and Nvidia cards, colour management for the whole desktop, printing and scanning improvements, more spins, lots of file system and disk improvements, very cool boot stuff and much more. And did I mention that yours truly designed the release banner you can see above and on the main Fedora page? That banner was designed on F13, of course. I’ve been running it happily for quite a while now…

So what are you waiting for? Check out the episode while you are downloading Fedora 13 and above all: don’t forget your towel today!

The show will be released whenever I feel like it with no set schedule, it is a side-project after all and I don’t want it to detract from my work on Linux Outlaws. As far as what topics to expect: everything basically. This show will not be confined to Linux or even techy topics alone, I will rant on whatever comes to mind. No holds barred, no exceptions — and yes, that does include politics. I am doing this in part because I want to “outsource” some of my more lengthy rants from Linux Outlaws to free up that show a bit and part because it’s fun to do. A lot of people keep telling me they like my rants a lot, so why not have a dedicated solo show for it? Another reason is that I am envious of Dan’s side gig, of course. I’ll keep you updated on the release of the first episode, I need to set up some behind-the-scenes infrastructure first, but it won’t be long, I promise.

Thanks to Shot of Jaq for their substantial inspiration, by the way. Go listen to their show, they are good guys with great ideas!

Photo by Graham Binns — grahambinns.com

I think it is safe to say that OggCamp 10 was a success. Looking back at the last week, I feel incredibly happy and grateful but also relieved that everything went mostly as planned. We increased the attendance of the conference, sold pretty much all the T-shirts and most of the mugs¹ and financially broke even, which was the goal. We did have one or the other minor technical fail, but nothing too earth-shattering. The guys from the Linux Emporium even managed to keep the wifi up for most of the event, against all odds and under fire from foreign DHCP servers. There’s also a feeling of emptiness now that the weekend we planned and worked towards for so long is over but at the same time there’s a hurricane of new memories and experiences. Since everything is already blurring together, I thought I’d sit down and write a summary post on all the things I can remember from the event and around it. So strap yourselves in, I will try to keep this as chronological as possible…

I flew over to Liverpool on the Tuesday before the event with my girlfriend Katy as well as Ilka & Thilo (two friends from Bonn) and we spend a few days at Dan’s place where we met up with Ana as usual. I was quite stressed at first due to the fact that Germanwings — I’m never flying that airline again — had cancelled the tickets I had bought months earlier without telling me and I had to frantically reschedule on Sunday night. In the end we took the trusty easyJet A319 over from Schiphol and safely on the ground in Merseyside we spent some time relaxing with many a beer and some Vindaloo.

Photo by Rosemary Martin-Harris — therosemoirs.co.uk

On Friday we headed into town and moved into the apartments we had booked. At night, things kicked off with Dan’s Rathole Radio gig which was an amazing experience. It was very cool to see many of the Linux Outlaws regulars there, including NYbill & Windigo (who once again flew over from the US for this), YaMatt, Peter Cannon and many others. I spend some time sorting out the live stream connection with Jon The Nice Guy and we got it up in the end, despite some pretty hefty technical problems². I made it to the stage in time to see Attila The Stockbroker and the amazing David Rovics perform, though. Especially Attila’s stuff might have been a bit too radical for some people in the audience, but I enjoyed it a lot. By the time David played Operation Iraqi Liberation, one of my favourite songs of his, I was completely ecstatic. After David and Attila, Dan and his as yet unnamed band³ took the stage and played a fantastic set of mostly very unique covers ranging from Pearl Jam over Billy Bragg to an excellent rock version of Bob Marley’s legendary masterpiece Redemption Song. In addition, Dan also played some of his own music in the shape of his excellent track Elephant in the Room. If you want to check this out for yourself, Dan has released a recording of his set and two of David’s songs in the latest episode of Rathole Radio. After the actual gig, I had a really nice chat with David and also discovered that Attila spend quite some time in the DDR and speaks German fluently. All in all, the evening was amazing and everybody seemed to have a lot of fun. It sure was a pretty long night for most of us except the Ubuntu UK guys (and gal) who seemed to go to bed at ten. The hard core partied on until they kicked us out of the club⁴.

Photo by Franticuk on Flickr

Photo by m0dlx on Flickr

Getting up the next morning was pretty hard accordingly. To their credit, UUPC and most of the crew was already on the ground and working their butts off at the OggCamp venue when we got there. Special thanks to Windigo who brought me a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey over from the States, I was proudly wearing it for the rest of the event. I spend a lot of the morning getting the wifi for the event into shape with the guys from the Linux Emporium, including up to two minutes before being called on stage for the introduction — that’s probably why people told me afterwards that I hadn’t said much, I was still pretty distracted. Because I was running around so much, I never even got to see one full talk on the Saturday. I did see the end of Simon Phipps‘s keynote, however, which was very good. Even if I don’t agree with the man on many things, he’s a great public speaker. Later in the afternoon we had a panel discussion moderated by Dan and including Simon, Chris Procter and Ade Bradshaw (both ex-LugRadio) plus others.

Photo by m0dlx on Flickr

I was watching on the sidelines and was getting ready to storm the stage at one point but didn’t have to in the end as Dan kept it all together pretty well and got my clue about mentioning the AGPL during a crucial point in the discussion. The whole panel idea turned out pretty well and judging from the comments I heard was well received. We closed the day with the now famous OggCamp raffle which included an unbelievably cute fluffy cushion version of the Ogg mascot which was given to us by Becky Newborough — thanks again for that, Becky! With the first day of the conference concluded, we all went to the Studio 2 club for the official OggCamp 10 party. This was one of the coolest party locations I’ve ever been at and while they ran out of food very fast (I single-handedly eat most of the meat, I was that hungry) we again stayed until they closed the place down at 2:30 drinking lots of beer. I can’t remember much but at one point I was discussing software licenses/communism with Chris Procter in the sound-proof drum room I think…⁵ Thanks to Laura Czajkowski and Dan for sorting out this amazing venue and extra thanks to Laura for introducing me to the head-splitting awesomeness that is the Baby Guinness.

Photo by m0dlx on Flickr

I woke up the next morning and felt like Adam Sweet at the last two LugRadio Live events: totally wiped out. I was so tired, I even briefly feel asleep when we got back to the venue. Much to the chagrin of many observers. But there was much more work to be done and I ran around some more trying to fix broken display screens and assorted bits of gear as well as keeping an eye on the wifi again. I was so busy that I never got to deliver any of my proposed talks and also didn’t get around to doing the Pony Express BoF I had announced before (that doesn’t mean I have given up on the project, however, I will write a follow-up blog post soon to explain what is happening with this — it most likely just means that we have to kick things off without meeting in person). There was some major fail when my laptop refused to play video files in an orderly manner during Campbell Barton‘s excellent talk about the latest Blender movie project and I have to apologise to Campbell for that. I hadn’t planned to present anything with my machine and a Fedora alpha/beta isn’t ideal for anything that crucial without prior testing. His talk was very good nonetheless and we might get him back on Linux Outlaws in the future to tell us more. I think I saw two full talks that day, which was at least something. From what I have been told and have read on the web, the general selection of talks was pretty good. This is of course the one flaky point about unconferences but from what I’ve heard people were pretty satisfied.

Photo by m0dlx on Flickr

We closed day two with the customary joint UUPC/LO live show which was again a lot of fun to do and turned out pretty well, we thought⁶ — people seemed to enjoy it a lot at any rate. Highlights included me agreeing with Steve Jobs, Flash getting hammered by popular demand and the expected digs at Ubuntu‘s button placements from the Red Hat crowd. The resulting recording will be released on Wednesday on both podcasts, LO once again releasing the uncut version including swear words (even those perpetrated by the Ubuntu UK crew). After the live show we packed up all the gear and said good bye to the wonderful Black-E which provided us with an ideal venue for the weekend⁷. Most attendees went to another impromptu party in the evening, I think, but we went home to Dan’s place for some well deserved rest and a long night’s sleep⁸.

Photo by Kevan Vautier — 1award.co.uk

We had another great day on Monday, including a lot of fun playing Wii Tennis, and then flew back home on Tuesday. Everything considered, I think we lived up to our slogan of a bigger, better OggCamp. It was a lot of work putting this show on but from all the feedback we’ve gotten so far, people had a great time and it was well worth it. The whole week was a lot of fun and it was great to meet many of the people you normally only talk to in email, IRC or on websites. I really hope that all the people who attended had as much fun at OggCamp 10 as we had putting it on. Thanks again to the fantastic crew who did a lot of the work and was also a lot of fun to hang around with in between. Dan’s mum and Katy did stellar work selling the merchandise and everyone else kept the place organised and running smoothly. If there is one thing I remember most from the weekend it’s the general atmosphere of friendliness around the place, it really felt like a gathering of 200 good friends, there was nothing edgy about it at all. We will now rest for a few months without talk about conferences and organising I think, but feel free to send us feedback on the event and if you have any ideas on what can be improved, send that too please. Who knows, maybe there will be another OggCamp next year? This one was certainly a blast!