The Tokyo Linux UG will have a technical meeting & nomikai on Saturday November 14th. Stop by.
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published by Vivek Gite on 2009-10-30 07:52:11 in the "Debian Linux" category
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published by Vivek Gite on 2009-10-27 18:17:03 in the "Linux" category
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Some shots from the Tokyo Linux User Group 15th Anniversary Event last night in Akihabara.
My Tokyo Linux User Group archive.
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The Tokyo Linux User
Group will be celebrating 15 years of Linux in Tokyo in a couple of
weeks. I`ll be there. If you want to go,
see the info here. I have been participating
in TLUG for over two years now, and I have learned a great deal --
not only about Linux but also about the FOSS community in Tokyo. And,
actually, the Linux community in Tokyo is international, so you are
always meeting people from not only here but from all over the place.
In any given meeting, you could easily have conversations with guys
from a dozen countries. Really interesting group. Friendly. Open. Technical. Diverse.
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Some images from the Tokyo Linux User Group (TLUG). Really good technical meeting on Saturday and nomikai later at night. About 50 people came by to hear Zev Blut on using the shell effectively, Alberto Tomita on the upcoming Japan Linux Symposium, and Matthew (Karamoon) on Hackerspaces.
All
of my TLUG photos here on Flickr.
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One big risk with git is forgetting which branch you're working in. Several people solve that by putting the git branch in their shell prompt. But often they do that by calling `git branch` and parsing its output, which is quite slow, especially in big repositories (we strace'd it, and it really opens and reads a lot of files).
At GCDS, together with Aurélien Gateau et Sébastien Renard, we came up with
this light-weight implementation (http://web.davidfaure.fr/scripts/git_branch_in_zsh_prompt).
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Hearing that kubuntu jaunty was out, I upgraded two machines today.
My wife's machine, so she can finally use KDE 4.2, and my own desktop machine. On her machine, NVidia card, no problem at all.
On my machine, ATI Radeon X1300, after the upgrade, X would always just show some red dots on the top of the screen, and then the machine would hang (no keyboard, no ssh, nothing except reboot).
I tried every possible driver in xorg.conf, no difference. So this isn't a driver problem, but an Xorg problem.
Other people on #kubuntu (e.g. "chx") reported the same issue.
So... I recompiled the xorg packages from intrepid (i.e. X.org 1.5.2) so that they can be used on jaunty. Long and painful, but it solved the problem. Proof that the problem is really X.org 1.6.0.
In case anyone is interested: http://www.davidfaure.fr/2009/xorg_debs.tar.bz2
Quick instructions: download, unpack, then
sudo dpkg -r xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-input-all
sudo dpkg -i *.deb.
If you see apt-get -f install removing a bunch of video drivers, that's fine; I didn't recompile them all, only a few.
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published by vivek on 2008-06-21 06:47:08 in the "Linux desktop" category
Paul Vixie and Corey Shields currently serves as a judges for the Mozilla Foundation's "Download Day", an attempt to set a Guiness World Record for most downloads in a single day for a new piece of software
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Spacewalk is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution. It is the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived.
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So some guy from Nokia named Ari Jaaksi was speaking at some conference and said something along the lines of open source developers needing to be "educated" about consumer restriction technologies like DRM.
While I agree with Ted Tso that these words weren't chosen wisely, I believe that the actual message got "lost in translation".
As reported at some point Ari Jaaksi said "...but we are not yet ready to play by the rules..." (emphasis mine), cleary indicating a wish to move beyond the the messed up situation they are currently in, caught by traps like DRM.
To get out they need help from someone who is not trapped and, as Ari Jaaksi indicates, this basically means the Free and Open Source developers on a technical side and the Free Culture communities overall, since anyone in the industry is caught as well.
To help somebody out of a trap one needs to understand the trap and how those in it got caught (or why they willingly submitted into), so I am going to discuss one of the: DRM, Digital Restriciton Management, e.g. technology and techniques to deny consumers the execution of part of their rights.
DRM is a very nasty trap, not only for those effected by it from outside, but also for those caught in it, because it is a cover-up of a lie.
As everybody knows, if one lies, one needs to make sure the truth is not uncovered, because whatever one used the lie for, getting exposed as a liar has usually worse consequences as one's original wrong-doing.
It started when those who get the work of the gifted to distribute it to the consumers, also known as publishers, failed to do their job properly and their profits declined.
Instead of taking the responsibility for losing sight of the customers' demands and letting product quality decrease, they blamed it on the "pirates".
To make sure their lie would not be noticied, they were willing to spend money on whoever was willing to help hold up the fake truth and when money is to be made, there is always somebody willing to take it.
So DRM was born and everybody directly involved knows that it does not work as advertised to those who pay it.
The developers in the companies creating DRM technology know it, their management knows it, the management of their customers (the publishers) knows it, their developers integrating it into the final product know it, however, those who pay, the consumers and publisher sharewholders do not.
There will be different strategies how we, the untrapped, can help them out, assist them in getting out, disarming the traps, etc. and each strategy will have different implications for both sides.
Therefore it is important to learn about the messed up situation these technology providers are in, to understand which strategies might look good from our point of view, but will force them into countermeasures.
They are looking for a way out that lets them leave broken concepts like DRM behind without "losing their face".
I think we should continue to do what we do best: delivering cool, innovative, useful and, most important none-restricting, techology experiences, so customers learn to understand that they do not have to cast away their rights in order to participate in modern life style.
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Just a short late summary: LinuxTag 2008 was fun and interesting, met some new faces both from openSUSE and KDE communities and many familiar ones. I have uploaded some pictures mostly of the openSUSE and KDE booths. The German "KDE 4.0 auf openSUSE 11.0" talk which me and Will gave on Saturday in the openSUSE track had about 150 listeners, the slides are uploaded like the others on the LinuxTag page in the openSUSE wiki.
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published by alexander neundorf on 2008-06-05 00:19:43 in the "LinuxTag" category
This year I was again at LinuxTag, after I missed the one last year. LinuxTag in Karlsruhe was always very nice, the one two years ago in Wiesbaden somehow didn't feel that good, but this time in Berlin it was really great again.
It was a nice event. I arrived late Thursday, just so I could manage to get to the Social Event before midnight. From there we headed to the hotel and next morning the fun started 
There were a lot of new people I never met before: Patrick Spendrin, aka Saro Engels (according to him a name from Brave New World), one of our KDE-on-Windows hackers, Claudia Rauch, our KDE e.V. secretary/manager/employee/... (what's the correct job position ?), Alexandra Leisse, who did a great job at organizing LinuxTag for KDE, Roland Wolters aka Liquidat, and we noticed that we both had lived the previous 5 years in Jena without knowing that, Eckhard, Luca, Lydia and of course all the usual suspects
We had KDE running on Linux, Windows and Mac there, I was quite impressed to actually see that working
Friday evening we were invited by Trolltech to a dinner in an Italian restaurant, which was nice, and directly located below a S-Bahn (suburban train), so had that train running all few minutes over our heads.
Saturday LinuxTag ended. I took the chance and talked with some Gnome/gtk guys, and in the end we were talking about CMake again. They are also not really happy with autotools, it would be great if they would join us with using CMake. Beside all the (mainly) KDE devs (but also e.g. VLC devs), here and there we were also talking about version control systems. git seems to be quite popular, Patrick would prefer hg, me too. Also the Gnomes are thinking about VCSs, but won't switch in the near future. Their switch to svn is not that long ago yet.
In the evening we met at a Ubuntu party with BBQ at a canal, which was very nice too.
So now I'm back and have finally catched up with email, so I have time to blog again
Looking forward to Akademy to meet you again
Alex
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published by cornelius schumacher on 2008-05-30 11:32:36 in the "LinuxTag" category
LinuxTag is a blast. I'm here for the third day, have met a lot of fantastic people, listened to great talks, and had a lot of fun. On Wednesday there was Aaron's KDE 4 keynote, where he also showed the tremendously exciting Marble with OpenStreetMap integration. Yesterday Till talked about Kontact, which now runs on all platforms including Windows. Liquidat has screenshots, or check it out live at the BSI booth. Another fascinating project I saw is the Open Bicycle Computer, a bike computer built from scratch as open project.
Today at 13:30 there is Nat's keynote The future of Linux is software appliances. Go to room London to see it or check out the live stream. It will be worth it
Today there also is the KDE track and tomorrow will be the openSUSE track with more great talks.
Linuxtag excitement!
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In two and half weeks the likely biggest Linux Event kicks off: LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin. Four days of exhibition and more talks (the organizers say 240, German/English mixed) than ever before. I plan to be around all the time.
On Wednesday everyone's darling, the multi-headed president of KDE e.V. and the galaxy, Aaron Seigo will give a keynote about KDE4. On Friday is a day-long track with KDE talks, on Saturday is openSUSE day and there are separate talks about Amarok and Kontact planned. Additionally there will be of course KDE and openSUSE booths all the time.
Special tip: one can travel for 59 Euro from everywhere in Germany with ICE to LinuxTag/IT Profits and back.
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