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

Eep. While I know the blocker bug list has had a lot of things fixed, overall, it has grown from 22 to 26. This is not good… get cracking, folks :) On the plus side, the entire bugzilla (aka, lots of projects not in gnome, but still affiliated) have fixed 5750 bugs since the release of 2.8- pretty nice.

Had a nice day yesterday. Got confirmation of manufacture of the liveCDs from the CD guy, including a special custom request. Got lots of liveCD information into the wiki, which is good. Cooked most of dinner for Krissa, who was blasted after work, so I got points for that :) After dinner we watched Hamlet, as done by German TV and commented on by MST3K. Pretty fun. No Manos, but really, what is. :) Hopefully more of all of that today- mostly cooking (pulled barbecue turkey, yum), some basketball, but also hopefully testing of the first round of CDs from manufacture and doing some thinking about resurrecting the tinderbox.

I’m currently burning the liveCD for LWE; I take it to the manufacturer’s in the morning. It has been a pretty draining few days- I’ve written a bit of content, done quite a bit of polish, learned more about gimp than I ever thought I would (still very little), and fought cases of the mornings to actually get stuff done in the afternoons and late nights.

Most importantly, I got four very serious responses to the art request, and ended up using a great one from Matthew Colyer for the splash, and gimping together some text from Matthew and Ryan Pavlik over the background. Some images:

A CD label, more or less.

Final gnome-session splash screen.

The other image (aka the iso) is uploading now to tieguy.org now. MD5 is here.

Anyway, thanks to everyone, especially the artists and ubuntu folks, who helped me put this together. Hopefully it’ll be a big hit next week.

Oh, and GTHCGTH.

I got one really quite brilliant set of images today in response to my 24 hour artist’s challenge, so the competition is stiff, but there is still time left :)

ISOs for anyone who wants to play and give quick feedback are uploaded. DON’T LEFT-CLICK THAT LINK. Do a right-click save as; apparently mime-types are slightly misconfigured on my server so ephy and firefox try to download and then render the iso, which will hang the browsers interminably.

As we speak, I’m uploading the art-by-luis-gag-us-with-a-spoon lwe-livecd-0.9.9.iso and the corresponding lwe-livecd-0.9.9.iso.md5. If the md5 isn’t there, that means the iso upload hasn’t finished yet- scp is guessing it’ll finish about 7am EST.

Past normal gnoppix, and the artwork, I’ve included lots of media from the marketing pages (though not enough yet), I’ve changed some of the artwork to be less brown (not that I object to brown, but since the best background I could come up with was blue…), I’ve added ephy, abi, gnumeric, and inkscape (each as defaults for their respective classes of docs). All in all, nice toy to play with- hope some folks download it and play. If you have suggestions, direct them to the marketing list. Art goes directly to me :)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled begging for artwork…

So, because I’m jealous of tigert and garrett and jimmac and other sexy art bloggers, I will tonight for the first time post my own sexy GNOME artwork, destined for a special LWE live CD. The catch is that it all is… not very good, and I’d like GNOME community artists to propose better :) Catch #2 is that there is about 24 hours to come up with better :) Please, please take a look at what I’ve done and email me better ones! Think of it as a one-day art sprint, and as inspiration for the more generic 2.10 images I need Very, Very Soon Now.

The images I have hacked up:

A gnome-session splash screen.

A background.

A CD label, more or less.

The sources I used for these were here for the background and here for the skyline SVG (again, thanks to Steven Garrity for the tracing there.)

My artwork request is pretty desperate, but all other news about the project is good.

• Big thanks to Seb and Jeff for pointing out solutions to problems I was having with making epiphany the default browser.
• Before I wake up, if the cable modem doesn’t flake out, I should have uploaded an iso to tieguy.org if people want to play with it.
• This iso is not LWE-specific except for branding. The software is fine for a generic 2.9.90 liveCD, and I totally want images suitable for a generic GNOME liveCD.
• If people have other events they have coming up, I’m pretty happy to accept artwork and pump those onto a CD as well. I have not experimented yet with changing the default language on the CD, but I can, so if you have a non-en_US event coming up, don’t rule that out- talk to me.

BTW, if anyone with gimp/inkscape/general art skills could turn this:

into an svg or simple line drawing for me in the very near future, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks! [Don't need to convert the text, though if someone wants to figure out an appropriate font, that would rock too.]

Update: The rocking Steven Garrity has traced this for me in Inkscape. Thanks!

Someone pointed out to me that it would be a good idea, for testing purposes, to have a liveCD for every beta release. This is such a great idea that it has already been done :) Run, don’t walk, to gnoppix for a 2.9.90 build on a liveCD.

Hacked around on the LiveCD a bit more today. Got a pretty decent layout with a splash screen from jimmac, this background, and some of the media I’ve talked about on it. Not great yet, and I think we’ll have to wait until 2.12 to have a really tight-feeling product, but still will be pretty cool to hand out at LWE, I think. I actually burned isos today, too- the instructions from the ubuntu wiki made it pretty stupidly easy to grab an iso, hack at it, and turn it into something Real. Would have gotten it right on the first attempt if I weren’t an idiot. :) For the couple people who have asked, BTW, the reason I’m going with Ubuntu over Fedora or SUSE is that they appear to be going out of their way to make customizing a liveCD easy- I’ve never seen instructions like that for Fedora or SUSE, so that makes any other technical discussions pretty moot for me right now.

Patriots won again. Wish I weren’t a Fins fan. ;)

Yummy weekend so far. I took no pictures, so I can’t equal Federico’s blog, but… :) Friday afternoon I cracked open my copy of the Foster’s Market Cookbook- Foster’s Market being a yummy little… dunno, southern deli? in Durham. Anyway, the owner has some really, really yummy recipes, so I bought the book years ago, read through it once, and put in on the shelf. For probably 3 or 4 years. I cracked it open Friday, though, and we’ve eaten well this weekend. Friday night we had salmon cakes with a corn salsa thingy… yummy. Very yummy. Last night it was pork loin in a cherry + apple cider + vinegar marinade. Next weekend we’re planning on pulled BBQ turkey and spicy slaw. We’ll see how it goes. :)

Other than that… pretty uneventful weekend. Big chunks of it spent organizing pictures and watching them in GLSlideshow on the TV. It really is just spectacular- if prices for large monitors continue to drop, I think a lot of people who really enjoy taking pictures will start replacing picture frames with large-ish LCDs in the near future (say, 2-3 years.) These guys appear to be headed in the right direction, software and hardware-wise, but they are several hundred dollars too expensive. Hopefully that will come down.

One of the random pictures to come up was this one:

Pretty sweet, and a perfect background for the upcoming Boston LWE. Go us. :)

Blah. Looks like gnome-blog-poster ate my last post. Oh, well. :/ Most important thing is that I’d still love a picture from an african event showing GNOME, if such a thing exists. Thanks to all the people who responded to my original call- I think there are seven great pictures here which capture the breadth, diversity, and hopefully a little bit of the fun of GNOME.