Phoronix recently hosted a near Gnome User Survey, which surprised me, given Gnome Developers’ general “We know what’s best, bug off” attitude.
Then I read Bruce Byfield’s post on how Felipe Contreras suffered with Gnome Devs to help get the survey out the door, so to speak.
Give Bruce’s post a read, it’s worth it, but if you’d like a summarized version:
Lemme start by saying that I’m a bit in the dark when it comes to the whole #OccupyCity situation. I understand there’s an awful lot of people in the streets complaining about the Market, but besides proving they can go a very long time without a shower, I can’t seem to understand what they’re getting at.
Here’s a wild proposal though: Lets Occupy SourceForge. And you read me right, SourceForge. Not Github, not Google Code. SourceForge. The place Free Software goes to die.
Instead of waving signs in the air which leads to a potential arrest and a rather cool story for your kids, lets bang our keyboards together, help revive some Free Software projects or create new ones. Hell, if you’re opposed to Sourceforge, go ahead, use Github, Google Code or roll your own, just… do something productive!
I really wish you guys the best of lucks with your protests, whoever you are and whatever you occupy, but nowadays, I seem to prefer occupying myself in a hobby that can result in something useful than marching around in a rally, unless it’s one that vouches Sanity and/or Fear.
So I just distro-sync’d to Fedora 16 on my favorite laptop, my Dell Studio 15.
This isn’t a review of the distro itself, just some notes of what I immediately noticed.
For starters, I had been running KDE 4.7.2 packages on Fedora 15, by cheating yum and using..
yum update –releasever=16 kde* qt*
So the problem with doing that is that apparently if you use “yum clean all”, it’ll only clean Fedora 15′s yum cache, but not Fedora 16′s yum cache, which means my cache was outdated when doing distro-sync and kept on getting 404′s. I think my solution was running yum clean all –releasever=16, but I tried so many things I’m not sure what fixed it.
Anyway, I followed these instructions, except I felt bold and ran them from konsole on KDE instead of in run level 3. Everything worked flawlessly, I even installed grub2, and here’s where my mini-review starts:
Grub2 is ugly. Don’t get me wrong, It looks very clean, but it’s black on white. I liked the old Grub’s background picture, and am not sure if I did anything wrong or if there’s a way to get a hotdog in there.
The new Plymouth screen is beautiful. I know the only change was blue changed to gray, but it looks clean and professional. Maybe I got bored of the old plymouth screen, maybe I really like this one.
Wifi works, though bluetooth functionality apparently missing in action.
The laptop at work also has issues with bluetooth coming and going at random days, and is using Fedora 16 too, so now I’m baffled and scared. A geek needs his teeth blue and functional. Halp?
Larry wrote this “Time to Fork the FSF” blogpost a few days ago and it reminded me on why I stopped contributing (economically) to the Free Software Foundation.
You see, I feel their efforts are misguided, in particular, their “Defective by Design” campaign which actually drives me nuts.
Yeah, it’s cute that you’re sending Bricks to Nintendo, calling out Windows’ “7 Sins” and my personal favorite, the “Amazon Swindle“.
I see them raising attention to big problems, but I don’t see them providing an actual solution. And as long as a decent solution isn’t available, Free Software won’t prevail.
Sure, you can whine all you want about how Apple locks down iPads, but I don’t see them selling an “FSF-endorsed” Tablet that is about as good (Hint: They could start by grabbing Android as a base, or even Tizen) and offering a product that’s so awesome, it’ll actually generate revenue for the FSF, to further empower their campaigns.
I hear “Photoshop is bad”, but I think you should say “Gimp is awesome” instead. I hear “Windows is evil”, but I’d rather hear “Use Fedora today!”.
I see FSF at the same level as the PETA nuts or the Green Peace crazies, throwing buckets of red paint on leather coats of celebrities, yelling “MEAT IS MURDER”. This is a pretty bad image, one I do not want to be associated with.
What I’m trying to say is that instead of calling Amazon’s or Barnes and Nobles’ stores “evil”, that energy would be better spent creating a store of your own, with your ideals firmly in place, and advertising it. Instead of ranting how evil Nintendo is, create your own game console, one with Free Software, and advertise the hell out of it.
I’d buy that for a dollar.
-Nushio
Names are being chosen
Vote for Beefy Miracle
You won’t regret it.
