Leaving FESCo

Just FYI, I'm not in FESCo any longer. Now with the Core and Extras merge it became to conflicting with my day job (we all need to earn money somehow for living), so I left (after being in FESCo for about 1 2/3 years) before the problems became to pressing. Yes, stepping down as chair some weeks ago was a preparation for this step; but no, I probably would have stepped down as chair then, too, even if I wouldn't have to leave FESCo now.

And be warned: I'll stay active in Fedora land. I'll in the long term hopefully do what I'd really like to see more in Fedora land: "Simply work on stuff, solve problems, write proposals, write policies or help with getting shit ^w stuff done that is needed or improves Fedora, even if you are not in FESCo or a similar committee". IMHO way to many people yell about (organizational) problems in Fedora land, without actually really helping to make those problems go away.

I wish FESCo all the best with its work and I'm sure it'll do a good job -- but guys, please make sure the community at least gets as much involved as in the past and make sure you try to get them even more involved. I think that's hardly needed, especially now with the merge when Extras-maintainers from the Fedora Community get in touch with Red Hat employees more often -- that's afaics sometimes like people from two different worlds meeting for the first time without actually understanding how the other world works and is organized. That can result in a lot of trouble...

My plans for the short term: finish some stuff like co-maintainership (I prepared a updated proposal, just need to look over it again) and the mailing list reorganization (that's still blocked; I'm waiting for decisions how we want to realize it technically -- e.g. a new server, a alias hostname that points to the current server, or just continue with the current setup...). I plan to get a lot more involved in EPEL (again) -- I had to put that down on my agenda a bit for the past months, as other FESCo jobs were more important.

For Fedora 8 I hope to revisit and rework the kernel module packaging standard -- we sat down and talked about it with some people on FUDCon. I hope we actually can have a enhanced standard for kernel modules in the future that is a mix of the current one and a dkms like solution in addition for those that want it (that might use dkms -- still unsure how to actually do that, but well, we'll see). That should fit most people: "normal" users then can get pre-compiled packages via yum while other that really want to (for whatever reasons) can use a dkms(-like) automatic build solution. Ohh, and I have two other Fedora-related, not-yet-publicly-announced pet projects that I plan to work on, too.

Ohh, and yes, besides that I hope to actually find time again to read a book or two :-)

Parallel installable Firefox 2.0 RPMS for Fedora Core 6

As some of you know I really disliked that Fedora Core 6 shipped (and sticks) to Firefox 1.5. But I understand the reasons why Fedora does that, and why the firefox2 package didn't make it into Extras. But the SRPM from Gawain Lynch was quite nice and he put a lot of effort into it. So I thought: why not get into the repo business for a while and set up a small repo with it? And that's what I did. Use

rpm -ivh http://www.leemhuis.info/files/repo/fc6-thl-ff2/6/i386/thl-ff2-for-fc6-release-1-1.fc6.thl.ff2.noarch.rpm

or something similar to install the repo file and the key which was used to sign the packages. Then run

yum install firefox2

to get Firefox 2.0 installed. The package installs in parallel to the Firefox 1.5 package from Fedora Core, so all those apps from Core and Extras that were build against 1.5 should still work. Note that some of your plugins might not work with Firefox 2.0 and that it will use the same profile directory as Firefox 1.5 (that's different from Gawain's packages -- he started Firefox 2.0 with the profile manager b default, *if* you start it from the menu).

To start Firefox 2.0 simply use the launcher from the menu or start it with "firefox2" from the command line. The package sets a alias "firefox -> firefox2" via a profile.d file, so after the next log in you should be able to just start if by using "firefox".

Special feature: I put a special package into the repo that should obsolete and thus delete the firefox2 package when you update to the development tree or to Fedora 7 later when it comes out -- just make sure the repo stays enabled.

There is one bug ^w feature I don't know how to workaround -- Firefox 1.5 starts up if you click on a URL in a Gnome app in case Firefox 2.0 is not yet running and Firefox 1.5 is still configured as your default browser. That happen to me multiple times, but it did not do any harm to my profile that I got aware of -- but it could, so you have been warned!

Home from FUDCon Boston 2007

Made it home from FUDCon fine. This time the flight worked well so I was at home on Monday morning local time. Haven't had that much luck earlier on my way to Boston -- we had a four hours delay in Paris CDG because they had to fix one of the engines :-( . We were in the plane all the time, so including the flight I got stuck in it for about 12 hours...

FUDCon was great, so it was worth the flight over the ocean -- especially meeting all those people from IRC real life was great, but even three days were not enough time to talk to each and everyone I wold have like to talk to. For the next conference I'll try to prepare a shirt or a cap that has my nick printed on it in big letters -- that should hopefully help that people find me on the first day :-) .

The Barcamp format was nice and worked quite well. The time was to short to visit all the session I was interested in -- I for example could not attend to the key signing party or the Live-CDs stuff. Got quite a bit of work done and stuff discussed during FUDCon and the Hackfest on Saturday/Sunday. Between discussion EPEL, mailing lists, kernel modules, a FESCo meeting and other stuff (side note: we forget to talk where we want to put the Extras wiki-pages after the merge) I reviewed some packages. I chose to work on xorg-x11 stuff -- don't know if that was a wise. I stopped reviewing xorg-x11-drv-* packages soon, as I found some issues in the first two packages that will likely be in others as well -- so it's probably wise to sort them out first before continuing.