New interview up, this time with Thorsten Leemhuis and Hans de Goede about the RPM Fusion project. They’ve both been long time Fedora contributors and the work they’re doing with RPM Fusion is awesome – so thanks to both these guys for their time in doing this interview! You can find the interview here, and if you enjoy it please consider giving it a digg and help to spread the word 
Now, back to trying to figure out where I’m going to live next year…
Another little project that I’d worked on last year. You all know the Creative Commons spin of Fedora right? Well that’s basically what Free Me was, but it didn’t just include Creative Commons media but pieces that fell under other licenses too: this ranged from books to pictures to movies to music to software – both for GNU/Linux and for Windows/Mac OSX. The really cool thing about it was that it played the movies in your standalone DVD player, so even the technophobic people out there could benefit; worked as a Live CD in a computer and also took advantage of autorun in Windows to make all of the media available without rebooting into the Live CD.
The project got amazing artwork thanks to Benjamin and Christoph, two guys from Lafkon who’d produced that awesome video about trusted computing, and pretty good text content from me (even if I do say so myself!). The website’s look and feel, besides the header, were also down to me and a hacked K2 themed WordPress install – I’d still recommend people take a look around as I feel it’s not a bad introduction to free culture.
It actually picked up quite a bit of momentum for a whlie, getting Boing Boinged, interest from the Open Rights Group and I even got to give a talk at the first London Creative Commons Salon which was super fun! Sadly due to a combination of factors I had to stop work on it: my main reason for it was that I didn’t have the technical ability to put the polish on it that was needed for it to suceed at its ultimate goals (to find funding to get the discs sent to MPs and jounralists as an introduction to the free culture movement), but also Creative Commons came along with theirs about 6 months after I started and they were clearly going to be able to pick up more momentum than I. Saying that, I think Free Me actually had many benefits and wider reaching goals when compared to the Creative Commons effort – kind of wish they’d been more receptive to co-operating 
It’s exam week here at university and I probably should be revising right now, but instead I’ve decided to tidy up my website! While doing this I’ve moved my podcast bits to a new page and thought that I’d post about them quickly as people who read Planet Fedora might be interested in a couple of them at least.
I put them together last year (it was my gap year) and they include interviews with Richard Stallman, Jeremy Allison, Jeff Waugh and Mark Shuttleworth. There are more people who I interviewed but they’re perhaps of less interest to planet readers. The podcasts can now be found here.
I’ve also taken this as an opportunity to change the theme on my blog. Before I was using one I’d designed and made myself, but realised it was probably never going to get finished and there were huge amounts broken and inconsistent in it; instead I’ve downloaded a generic one called Hemingway which is quite pretty but I’m going to tweak it and maybe play with the colours a bit.
One down, three to go.
Ah thank you for posting the text of Obama’s speech, Mr.Callaway I’m British but thought it was super cool – well, all except the very last paragraph.
Woah, it’s the 18th of January 2008 – Fedora 9 Alpha is not even out yet but the first developer interview of the new year is! Thanks to Robin Norwood and Richard Hughes for giving me some of their time to talk about PackageKit, the super-cool cross-distribution package management solution that is already making things “suck-less” :p
You can find the interview at:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/PackageKit
And as always, if you enjoy it you can digg it at:
http://digg.com/linux_unix/PackageKit_re_invents_package_management
Happy new year to all, and my best wishes
I know everyone is busy hacking away, and today is the last day, but if anyone happens to have a spare moment to reply to a few generic questions about what they’ve gotten upto that would be hugely appreciated Want to try and do something useful with this info to help promote Fedora and everyone’s aweseome work…Will even try and send out some more specific questions later – have fun! Oh, p.s. reply to these on the marketing list, to my e-mail or on this blog if you get a chance
1) What is the project that you’re working on?
2) What does it do!?
3) Why is this so cool?! i.e. why should end-users/sys-admins/developers
care about the work that you’re doing…
4) Are you hoping that you’re work will benefit upstream as well?
5) What’s the atmosphere been like at FUDCon? Has it been
good/productive to work with people face to face who you’d normally only
see on lists and IRC?
My parent’s laptop has got a Belkin PCMCIA (is that the right abbreviation!?) wireless card which uses the Ralink RT2500 chipset. Before I left to university, and for the last few distro release rounds, we’d set it up using Ubuntu as this worked with this chipset out of the box (I’m pretty sure Ubuntu used a proprietary driver for this?), while Fedora would have required building kernel bits and bobs.
While I’ve been away at uni my Dad updated the system to Ubuntu 7.10 and when he rebooted found that wireless no longer worked; he tried a fresh install and still wireless no longer worked. After a quick google I discovered that everybody was having this problem and support for this chipset had been broken in 7.10; the only solution I found was to build the kernel bits and bobs manually from serialmonkey just like the previous situation in Fedora!
Not wanting to do this, and remembering all the super cool improvements to Fedora wireless support in 7 & 8 I thought we could give it a shot. And you know what? It works out of the box Even better, being Fedora I’m sure that this is working thanks to an open source driver!! Thanks to everyone responsible … Hopefully looking forward to more NetworkManager integration in F9, just to save me those 2 mins when I turned the service on :p (DVD install…)
Best wishes all!
P.S. More interviews are now on the way – questions will be getting sent out once I’m settled back at uni for the new term. Thanks in advance to everyone who’s agreed to take part so far!
Rahul posted a message to the marketing list pointing to this article about installing Fedora in Window’s Hyper-V virtualisation system.
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/12/31/installing-fedora-core-8-on-hyper-v.aspx
Thought it was interesting and people around here might find it so, plus it’s now on Digg so if you think it’s any good and you’d like to digg it:
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Installing_Fedora_8_in_Hyper_V_Windows_Virtualization
