Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Was pointed out by a reader that, as I license my blog under a fairly liberal CC license, linuxworld was well within their rights to to what they did. Of course, this is true. My problem is not a legal thing (‘oh my! they stole my ideas!’)- I mean, I put them out there for people to read, and I was rather flattered that slashdot, linuxworld, and others have taken those ideas and run with them. What bothers me is the journalistic slopiness implied by the poor attribution- creating the impression an interview was given seems like very poor journalism to me.

In the ‘just when you thought the media couldn’t slink lower’ category, is this story from linuxworld that looks like an interview with me, smells like an interview with me, and is completely cut and paste from my blog entry. Laaaaame. I suggest adding linuxworld to your list of lame-news-sites-to-never-read-again. Of course, it probably already was on that list, but hey…

<build_sheriff_hat>It is really exciting when people get their first commit to a module and when they are strongly in favor of constant dogfoodability. Now, if only those commits would actually build… ;)</build_sheriff_hat>

Had a brief discussion yesterday with Claudio Saavedra of gnome.cl; they’ve got a bunch of stuff going on- not just this weekend, but another event on November 27th in Temuco. And there is a planeta for spanish-speaking contributors. I hope in the future all GNOME events, globally, get at least a link at live.gnome- it would be very, very cool to have a global calendar teeming with events.

Turns out my alma mater is doing their first installfest in a while this weekend as well- more new GNOME users. Yay. :)

and there is a conference in chile this weekend as well. This is crazy! And awesome. The idea of a trans-atlantic #gnome-hispano hackfest is just way too cool.

Clearly someone from the marketing project needs to write up a small press release, gather some quotes from participants (and ideally a translation into Spanish and Portugese!) and distribute to lwn, linuxtoday, etc….

ccache + the tarball trick nearly halved the amount of time a tinderbox build cycle takes (from around 180-210 minutes to around 115.) Thanks, Jamesh. Now I’m going to have 50% more logs to delete… currently there are 7.5G of build logs in the tinderbox dir. :)

[Later] Hrm, or maybe I failed math. Seems it actually isn’t helping that much; down to something like 170 minutes from 210 or so. Not bad, but given the massive number of hits ccache -s is showing me, not as much as I’d expected.

Elijah: oddly, despite growing up about as far ‘down’ as you can get in this country, I’ve always said I was ‘going down to…’ whereever I was going.

Decent day at the office today; more productive conversations with Thanika, and we got our first several non-novell-filed bug in bugzilla.novell, which is cool. And had a beer with the guys at lunch- first toast with them to the released NLD. Yay :)

Jamesh kicked me into finding ccache rpms for the build box; setting them up was trivial once I did that. James also pointed out that I could speed downloads a bit by setting an alternative tarballdir to download tarballs to. So hopefully builds will start happening faster now- we’ll see.

Very cool to see GNOME stuff just happening all over the world; bolsh talking about gimp in .fr, and mariano giving a GNOME talk in .ar, and the gnome forum in brazil- exciting times. Can’t wait until we can burn big stacks of gnoppix/ubuntu CDs to hand out at these kinds of things…

Flew home from Provo last night. I had a great time. We’d prepared Novell for what they might see, bandwidth-wise, but people were still pretty excited by the volume of interest. Nice to see.

Ate a lot of good food, mostly at the house of my hosts, Guy and Sophie Lunardi. Met Mike Hager of SUSE, finally, after working with him for several months- he was surprised I am so young, and I was surprised he’s 41 :)

I also got to finally meet Elijah Newren of bugzilla fame (he’s doing his graduate work right down the road from Novell, more or less ;) Sort of embarassed to discover that I’d missed that he’d become a father for a second time. Otherwise great to have a few minutes to grab lunch with him and finally place face with name.

Got to see on the Airport Network that Ashcroft has left the DOJ; hopefully the next AG will be, dunno, less of a fascist theocrat, and perhaps more in touch with the ‘Bill of Rights’. Bring back Janet! ;)

Speaking of politics, finally bought America (the book) in the airport. Blew threw it on the plane; was fun. Good to laugh about our country again. I’ve been a little depressed about all that, but hey, we re-elected Nixon too, and the country survived that. We’ll move on, and the Democratic Party will either find a clue or die. Either would probably be good.

Made the tinderbox do a cvs up on the gnome-2.10 moduleset so that next time someone adds a new module I don’t have to do an update by hand. We’ll see how it works next time…

And here we see why I think compulsory voting is a terrible idea.

Oh, and before I forget, an anecdote from my crazy afternoon on Friday as we got the CDs to master. Novell’s CD mastering process requires running a checksum-ish program written in Java but touching some low-level Windows bits, so it only runs on Windows. It actually took us quite some time to find a Windows box in the Novell offices in Provo- there are still tons of them around, of course, but there wasn’t a working one on the entire section my ‘office’ is in (everyone there is on NLD), and the next one we found had a password and no one to unlock it, so we had to scramble quite a bit to find one. Not impossible of course (we found one eventually in the office of an executive VP), but even the marketing guy I spoke extensively with on Thursday and Friday had stopped dual-booting and was running NLD full-time. Pretty cool that Novell has come so far, in so short a time, with a product that wasn’t half-finished when we started to roll it out.

After many months (in some ways, well over a year) of work, I’m happy to announce to my readers (aka, planet.gnome, since no one else reads this ;) that the Novell Linux Desktop is released. I wanted to write a classic release announcement, but hell, I’m tired :)

NLD is based on SUSE 9.1, with the addition of GNOME 2.6 (plus 9.1′s KDE 3.1), red carpet, and some Novell bits like iFolder and the Groupwise Instant Messenger code that is now in GAIM and Kopete. It also has what feels like a zillion bug fixes and some features that my team put together. SUSE also did a ton of work for us, losing even more sleep (thanks to the time difference), working with us on some KDE changes, and all kinds of other bits about teaching us the ins and outs of how a distro works :)

If you’d like to play with our toy, you can- preview downloads are available through this page. You have to do some registration, and then download three isos. It says ‘eval’ all over, but it’s the complete product. Go grab it, show Novell what a real successful launch is ;)

We also have source available. You’re welcome to poke through it; some of the changes have already gone upstream and more will get into 2.9, we hope.

There is a lot of other stuff around novell.com- novell’s ‘cool solutions’ folks, for example, have a page of stuff up. I’m totally psyched about this, but it’s a little weird- when we were Ximian, I knew everything that was going on; now half the links on this entry I’ve actually found out about in the past 45 minutes :)

Some thanks: I’d like to thank my team for putting up with me as long as they did, and losing some nights, and some weekends, and lots of hair. For tons of people from all over Novell (including the nuremberg office) who pulled together to get this thing shipped- I talk about it as if it is a monkey product, but it really has involved a huge number of people from all over the company and could not have happened with just us.

And of course big thanks to everyone in all the free software communities that we take code from, particularly (for me) from GNOME- we couldn’t do this without you, and we can only hope we give back as much as we take. Thanks to all of you.