Hey,
The IcedTea interview is now up and it's super cool talking about some really interesting stuff. Check it out at:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/ThomasFitzsimmons
and digg it at:
http://digg.com/linux_unix/IcedTea_free_Java_in_Fedora_8
Thanks Thomas!
Finally, I’ve managed to put up another interview! I’m sorry it’s taken me so long, I’ve had the answers to the questions sitting in my inbox for a *long time* now.
It’s with Daniel Walsh, lead developer of SELinux – so you can guess what this one is about 
Find it here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/SELinux
And as always, digg it here:
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Easier_security_in_Fedora_8
Thanks Daniel, and sorry it’s taken me so long to get around to! One more to go from the first drive I had at this and then on to try some new things for Fedora marketing (and maybe some real-life work too!).
The Open Rights Group have now been running for two years. Happy Birthday!
The student newspaper at my university has a “Features” section, where articles of about 500 words covering a wide range of topics are printed. I’m hoping to get some free culture goodness going on campus and figured an article there would be a good place to start. The editors were kind enough to accommodate me, even letting me license it with CC-BY-SA, and it’s being printed tomorrow. The article is below, and I hope it’s both factually accurate and faithful to the sentiments of the movement – it’s really tough to explain such a large topic in such a small space!!
Before the 20th Century, culture was largely participatory; as a result of the emergence of the recording industries, and mediums such as radio and television, culture increasingly became a one-way affair, too expensive for the ordinary person to produce. The arrival of digital technologies, particularly the computer and the internet, have made it possible to shift the modes of production and distribution back to the hands of ordinary people, giving participatory culture another chance to flourish.
This is a largely digital revolution, but a revolution none the less. Take the way we look up information: no longer do we turn to a traditional encyclopaedia such as Britannica, but to Wikipedia, which says this about itself:
Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free content encyclopaedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers; its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Web site.
While you’d still be wise to cross-reference any information from Wikipedia, as you would with any source, one of the amazing things about this community created work is that studies have found it to be approximately as accurate as Britannica. One thing you might not be aware of while using Wikipedia, however, is the license that it releases all of its content under.
The GNU Free Documentation License is a clever piece of work: rather than using copyright law to prohibit you from using works released under it, it uses copyright law to guarantee that you will always be free to use, modify, redistribute and study works released under it. These are the freedoms at the heart of the free culture movement; these are the freedoms that safe-guard our ability to cooperate in the digital age.
This movement for a free culture, where people collaborate to create great works such as Wikipedia, is much wider than Wikipedia alone. You can see it embodied in the One Laptop Per Child initiative; in the Public Library of Science; in great archives of music such as Jamendo, and innovative record labels like Magnatune; and in projects such as the Internet Archive.
While this is an awfully superficial overview of the movement, it hopefully goes some way to express the flavour of everything that falls under the banner of free culture, and perhaps of why you might want to participate.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
The US has defended its practice of subsidising cotton farmers, while still insisting other countries scrap protections of their own domestic industries.
Interviews
I still have a couple of interviews to put up from the Fedora 8 release cycle, and I will get them up eventually! Included in this selection of interviews is one about SELinux and another about IcedTea, both of which rock…
Things have gotten a little bit hectic here lately, now that I actually have dead-lines to get work done by. Still, can’t complain because I’m enjoying myself hugely: the course is great; the people are great; my back is getting better!
Compiz-Fusion
Secondly this evening, Compiz-Fusion rocks Just for pure bling the expo plugin is super cool, and then there’s the grouping of application windows together, which I think might even be useful for when I’m writing an essay with notes on one side and essay on the other!
There is a small, known, bug in Fedora 8 which made it a little tricky to figure out how to get compiz-config-settings-manager to work properly. Just in case you’re wanting to play with Compiz-Fusion and haven’t figured this out yet, here’s what you need to do:
And finally, a gratuitous screenshot of the expo plugin running on my Fedora 8 system – no more spinning cubes :p
Since I did a fresh install for Fedora 8, I thought I’d give the Tracker search tool a go this time around (usually I use Beagle, but it is a bit of a resource hog!).
So far so good too: at this moment Tracker is using 4MiB according to system monitor; it’s indexed my files; search results come up really quickly; and new files seem to get added almost instantly too. The only problem is that it’s own UI is a bit clunky feeling, though definitely functional; you could always use Deskbar which does provide a pretty neat interface but slows up my Gnome login painfully…
Want to try it?
su -c “yum -y install tracker tracker-search-tool”
Should get you up and running.
According to one of my lecturers:
Sin is when “I am what I am at the expense of you being you.”. The idea of the trinity in Christianity represents a relationship where “I am because you are.” This paints a picture of a religion where one of the key ideas is that relationships are at the center of all reality.
Not an exact quote, but it’s close enough. Whatever you think about religion, I figure this isn’t a bad starting point for thinking about many other things. And just for good measure, here’s an icon of the trinity painted by Andrei Rublev.
Before doing anything really stupid to my computer, can anybody tell me if an openbios is a reasonable thing to try!?
