It’s Thanksgiving day in USA, and while I don’t get the day off, I did want to write down a couple of things I’m thankful.

1. The Fedora Project. I run Fedora 16 on my laptop at home and at work, as a Media center at my Dad’s room, and Fedora 14 powers both my brother’s and my dad’s laptops. I really like the Fedora as my base of operations.
2. Android. And Cyanogenmod. And all that’s in between. My phone (Currently a Galaxy SII) and my Tablet (Nook Color) are both powered by CM builds I’ve modded and built on my laptop. I like tinkering with my devices at the source code level.
3. KDE. This one’s a surprise to me, as I’ve never really liked KDE, but given the options of Shell or a hard place, I chose the lesser of two evils, and I’m happy I did and am sorry it took so long for me to switch.
4. Having a job that I like. While my job does not consist on creating Free Software (That would rock!), I do get to use Fedora 16 at work, and happen to run the RHEL/CentOS/Solaris servers that need maintenance. Not using Windows at work is a blessing.
5. Friends and Family. I’ve met a lot of people, online and off, and there’s a lot I can count as my friends. I’m thankful to have met every one of you, but I’m specially thankful I met, Laura, my girlfriend.

It’s been quite a while since my last blogpost, lets hope this brings me up to the habit of blogging more often.

Happy Thanksgiving Day!

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

By Mark Terranova.

All hail it now,
The Beefy Miracle rocks!
Now meat your new God.

Names are being chosen
Vote for Beefy Miracle
You won’t regret it.

I’ve been using KDE 4.7 for the past few months, since Gnome 3 and me really don’t get along.

I decide to take 3.2 for a spin on my Fedora 16 computer, and found it to be more of the same.

Network Manager is as incomplete as ever. Just add an advanced button, dammit! I hate having to type “nm-connection-editor” because the Network panel is half-baked for people who actually need to choose their IPs. KDE has no problems with this. The old (Good?) Gnome didn’t have a problem with this.

The other issue I’m having is with Empathy, and I mean the chat program. I can’t find a way to bring it up after I’ve closed the buddy list, and checking the bottom right notification area corner doesn’t bring up anything either. At least pidgin hides itself there, but thanks to Gnome’s brilliant (And I mean this sarcastically, if it wasn’t obvious) notification area, I never get notifications when someone pings me, I have to constantly check, and that’s tick I’m not willing to adopt.

On more possitive feedback, Gnome handles multiple monitors way better than KDE. On KDE, whenever I unplug the monitor, I have to go to display settings, change my laptop’s screen res, and change it back to normal, otherwise it still thinks I have the external monitor configured. Gnome handles this perfectly.

Bottom line is that Gnome 3.2 still isn’t what I’m looking for. I’m switching back to KDE 4.7.1, and will might try again in 6 months, but as the Magic 8-ball says… “Outlook not so good”.

I recently gave a talk at the UDEM about How Free Software Can Pay for Itself (Thanks for the title, Andre!), and a wild idea I had was to have each slide Tweet automatically a link to the slide and a short message, as well as the event hashtag.

A quick Google search later, I found an old OpenOffice-Twitter extension, however due to Twitter’s “security” policies, it no longer worked.

Because implementing an OAuth client was just out of scope for something as ridiculous as this, I decided to instead use Greg Kroah-Hartman’s bti, and just hook it up with a Shell Macro.

The end result was this little macro:

Sub PostToTwitter()
Tweet=InputBox(“Your message:”, “Post to Twitter”)T
Shell(“bash -c ‘echo “+Tweet+” | bti’”)
MsgBox (“The message has been posted.”, , “All done!”)
End Sub

This works, though you need to set up a .bti file in ~ with a consumer secret and key, and Twitter’s “security” policies state that I probably shouldn’t post the keys I used, but you can keep a secret, right? Here’s the contents of my bti file

consumer_key=INsLmO6n8wdW4JWJhiP3Ug
consumer_secret=xzI5radv0V9YWyZRLkjOIt0ahHvPuo5wJm6KUelqzo

With that done, try tweeting from the command line. Once you’re sure that it works (You do need to authenticate and type in a pin), you can use the Macro I wrote above and it’ll tweet as “LibreOffice”.

With that done, I really wanted to tweet each slide as I went through them, though LibreOffice, as far as I know, has no way to execute a macro on an open slide presentation, on load…. but here’s what I did:

I created a blank png file, and made it cover the entire slide. I then right-clicked the invisible PNG and once selected, I clicked on “Interaction”. This allows you to configure a Macro, and because we don’t want the Macro up above to popup with “what to Tweet” mid-presentation… I pre-wrote the tweets and assigned each macro to a slide…

Sub IntroTwitter()
Shell(“bash -c ‘Comenzando mi conferencia\, en vivo para el \#IUSL2011 desde la UDEM… Como el Software Libre se puede pagar a sí mismo http://sparkle.k3rnel.net/iusl11/1.png | bti’”)
End Sub
Sub OhYes()
Shell(“bash -c ‘Free es libre. Free es gratis. Que palabra tan dificil… \#IUSL2011 http://sparkle.k3rnel.net/iusl11/2.png  | bti ‘”)
End Sub

Here’s a couple of considerations:

• If you have animations (I had some stuff set to appear on click), you won’t be able to “click” the slide to advance through it.
• The keyboard keys left and right do work, and so does space bar and the Macro won’t be triggered this way
• If you’re using the libreoffice-screen-presenter (It’s awesome, you should), make sure you have your mouse over the slide and not on the screen-presenter.
• If you’re using a Wii-Remote as a remote controller, I suggest you set A and B as left-and-right on the keyboard, and in my case I used Dpad-Down as left click, but you could use the Home button and prevent accidental mis-tweets.
• When writing the macro, remember that using echo, certain ASCII letters need to be escaped, such as , and #, for the command to work.
• Instead of Twitter, you could use Identi.ca or any other Status.net server as long as bti supports it.
• You require an Internet connection to tweet. I didn’t have access to the Internet when I started my presentation, and therefore, my experiment was pretty useless.

If you found this useful or have a way to improve on it, please let me know. I had a lot of fun putting all the pieces together and thought this might help someone else.

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