Source Guru

For those of you who don’t know me… You may be surprised to find out that I actually have a real Job.

 I’m a dealer. No - not the drug kind, I work in a casino. Gala Casino in Birmingham in fact.

Anyway - today - I’m sitting there, dealing a game of roulette, when all of a sudden, the “winning number display” crashes. Leaving an xterm on screen.

Considering that most of our electronic gaming equipment is supplied by the same manufacturer, I’d assume that they’re all running Linux… Which means - that, at work - I’m surrounded by Linux.

I’m actually surprised by the quality of how everything is linked in together, including the “table top” display (a big table which shows a 3D rendering of the roulette wheel). These are all linked to Smart Card Cash terminals… it’s pretty amazing how linux is being used. I’m happy to see it being used in a way other than just for servers. Rock on ACE systems!

For this - just the things I’ve been wanting on the supermirror since I started using it (2 weeks ago!)

Recently Scott James Remnant blogged about his leaving of the Debian Project.

Reading this, I was sad to read how he felt that Debian’s conduct to Ubuntu Developers was wrong, and partly, I agree. But I would also like to say that although there are certain individuals within the Debian Community who are VERY anti-ubuntu, a LOT of them are not. I’ve found quite a few Debian Developers who are more than willing to help out, and although I get shot down sometimes in #debian-devel, and yes, I do ask a lot of stupid questions in a lot of stupid places, generally, the Debian community isn’t as elitist as many people think.

I also think that, although it doesnt come across a lot, the Ubuntu Community can come across as pretty elitist to. From my own experiences, I’ve seen a lot of elitism, there are people who will (no names mentioned) shoot down people for not being the “brightest” of the bunch.

The thing I ask is that everyone remembers that there are new people coming to Linux all the time. There are people from ubuntu who want to try something a little different, and want to try debian, there are people (like me) who want to contribute to both Debian and Ubuntu (but, unlike me, give up trying after their first bad experience of the “inter-distro” tension).

The Ubuntu community on the whole does a superb job in welcoming new people to the fold, as shown by Pete Savage’s latest blog. However, in some cases, it falls below par, just as a lot of other places do (as shown by a coment on Pete Savage’s blog).

I’d like to see  more people working towards helping new users get into Linux. There’s a wealth of people out there who just need a little help, and by giving them that little help, they’re more likely to contribute back in the future.

A few of you may know about the “New User Network” in ubuntu -  this is a team of “mentors” set up to help new users come to grips with Ubuntu, and Linux. Recently, it was featured on linux.com. I implore everyone reading this who wants to help increase the friendliness of the Ubuntu Community, whether you be a new user yourself, or an old hack, to join the NUN. It’s a great project, and it’s growing rapidly, and I like to think we’re making a difference.

If you’re interested in joining, feel free to talk to myself or nalioth on IRC, or join #ubuntu-nun, or make a post to the ubuntu-nun mailing list

Anyway, that’s my rambling over… now go read some more geek blogs

I have to agree with Mark’s latest blog post regarding launchpad being able to open bugs in other bugzillas… There’s been a couple of times when I’ve wanted to open a bug in Debian through launchpad - as It would be easier to do it that way.

However, I’ve thought of another solution. I’d love to see bugzilla adopt some sort of “Global” account system - where you can use your bugzilla account from one bugtracker in another. Sort of the way openID and Jabber do things - the whole account@bugzilla. This would then open up the doors to be able to cross post the same bug across many bugzillas.

I believe this is similar to what launchpad intends to do eventually - however - I think it would be better as native bugzilla code.

I mean - one centralised “bugzilla” may be good… but - a distributed bugzilla would be even better

Ok, so not too long back a couple of us managed to thrash out a bug in katapult, and found out it was due to qt-immodule returning errorneous data. So - we fixed it in ubuntu - and sent the patch into debian.

Well now, it seems like katapult is hitting this problem in every single other Linux Distro, because people are starting to adopt qt-immodule.

I’ve just spent half an hour filing bugs in every major linux distro’s bugzillas regarding this issue. What an annoyance.

From what I’ve spoke with Mark about Malone (http://launchpad.net/malone/) - it seems that Malone would be the best thing since sliced bread for bug reporting. But only if everyone were to adopt it. I could file my bug in ubuntu - say “yep - it’s upstream too” and then say “oh, and it’s also in gentoo, Mandriva, RedHat, Suse etc etc … and when the devs from those distros come along and find the bug, they could easily see - “oh - it’s been fixed in ubuntu - lets grab the patch from there - and fix it in our distro”.

However, this isn’t the case at the moment, as the only people who really use malone to it’s full potential are ubuntu. And well - it’s no good just having us.

Please, anyone who is a developer out there - and has a bugtracker, consider using malone - it makes life so much easier for us people who have to work with so many bugzilla’s etc to get a problem in one place fixed everywhere.

So … after finally getting everything ready for ifolder - I’ve finally actually made an apt repository for it

I have limited bandwidth however, so until Novell decide to mirror it - it’ll be restricted.

However, if you wish to grab a copy of iFolder, please feel free to email me and I’ll send you the details of the apt repository.

Please note, that this is currently only for ubuntu dapper. I will however, be adding sid, etch, sarge and breezy repositories soon … well - if they build

oh yeah - mez _AT_ ubuntu _DOT_ com

Is it bad that when watching a program about Triplets last night, and a photographer was taking photos of baby triplets that my first thought  was “how cool an “ubuntu circle” photo would that be?”

Ever since I first got involved in iFolder - I’ve never managed to get Simias to build properly inside a chroot.

A sense of overwhelming achievement came across me today when I finally had this happen

dpkg-genchanges: including full source code in upload
dpkg-buildpackage: full upload (original source is included)
Copying back the cached apt archive contents
-> unmounting dev/pts filesystem
-> unmounting proc filesystem
Current time: Tue Feb 14 00:22:51 GMT 2006
pbuilder-time-stamp: 1139876571
-> cleaning the build env
-> removing directory /scratch/cache/pbuilder/build//21686 and its subdirectories

Ok, so everything may not be cool - I’ve just realised there are some thing in libsimias0 that should be in libsimias-dev - but hey - that’s the smallest issue I’ve ever had.

You have NO idea how … relieved this has made me feel. To finally have an actual fully built simias package. I’m really hoping that this is the final step - that I don’t come across anything else. Because, for those of you who’ve been following my struggle with iFolder over the past x months will know it hasn’t been a pretty one. Much to the fact that the Novell Code/my packaging have always been at a stage where they disagree with each other… but now they finally agree… now - onto iFolder itself… which is currently building nicely… lets just hope it’ll build in a chroot

*crosses fingers and hopes*

So, the last couple of days I’ve hopped back onto the iFolder train - and have been doing a lot of work.

It’s quite a scary program really… It’s got so much stuff in it.

I’ve found that to have a basic iFolder Server install it’s 36Mb … big eh ?

Anyways - things are going good - I’ve got libflaim (new and open sourced) built and well - the other package (log4net) seems to being wubbed in debian - so will appear for dapper+1 in ubuntu - and debian pretty soon (theres no way I can get iFolder into dapper easily - so I’m not going to try!)

But yeah - hopefully we’ll see some nice iFolder packages being made in the near future - and it’s going to add 4 packages to my list of packages I maintain in debian - yay! (and erk!)

Hopefully - I’ll get a sponsor pretty easily for it - the debian mono team are uber people - and have helped me a lot - plus - It seems a DD is already interested in packaging it - so well - should be able to work with him.

Kudos to the iFolder people though - they work hard on bringing you the best they can - and well - they’re alot better at working with the community than some other projects are

Anyhoo - well - I hope Jorge will be happy about all this.

Gah - now I just need to get my website sorted out

Well… it’s been a long time in the coming - but we’ve finally managed to make the first release of katapult - a program we stole from another developer (with his permission of course) and developed specifically for kubuntu.

The Feedback for it has been outstanding so far (see the page on kde-apps.org) and it seems to be going well. It’s amazing how such a simple program can be so useful.

I’m glad to be part of the katapult team. It’s great to be able to help people, and it’s a very cool application - I find it very hard when it’s not around (when I was in windows the other day - I tried to run firefox - I tried alt+space, alt+f2 alt+f1 before I finally realised it was windows and none of those shortcuts worked!) It’s amazing how dependent I’ve become upon it.

Anyway - I can’t wait for the next release - hopefully it’ll be even more uber than this one

Oh yeah - and hopefully we’ll be seeing it as my first debian package soon too