Marginalia and minutiae

Whew. First of all, I’m sorry I can’t make Utah Open Source Conference this weekend in Orem, but I wish I could. Here’s the thing: When you put two shows on back-to-back weekends, one of them gets the attention and the other . . . not so much. So while I’m still decompressing a bit from Linux Fest Northwest (and while my wallet smolders with burned-through credit cards), I have to pass on what is normally one of the highlights of the year for me. Sorry, guys and gals, you know I love UTOSC but I can’t make it this year.

Just to touch base on a couple of issues today while I still play catch-up after a great weekend in Bellingham:

Single-window GIMP: My prayers to the graphics program gods are answered, finally. Call me slow — I’ve been called worse — but finally GIMP 2.8 is out and, thankfully, it has the single-window that I’ve been waiting for, well, ever since I started using GIMP and would sometimes . . . OK, always . . . get hopefully lost among the multiple panels. Thank you, thank you, thank you, GIMP!

CrunchBang Waldorf right around the corner? The first CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf” development builds are now out — get them here — and it looks like Philip Newborough has produced another winner as soon as it officially leaves the starting blocks sometime soon. Currently I have it running on a ThinkPad T30 and it’s going great guns. If you’re feeling adventurous and want to give the development build a shot, download it and take a few laps.

Mark, Mark, Mark . . . tsk, tsk, tsk: I certainly hope Mark Shuttleworth has tasty shoes, because putting one foot in one’s mouth would require it; to say nothing of how unbecoming whining is, especially from someone trying to be the next Steve Jobs. In this Muktware blog item, The Mark whines about how Red Hat hampered Canonical’s participation with GNOME, which is probably just one observation on the issue, and arguably not exactly an objective one. I didn’t write it, but I wish I had — the first comment on the blog from TheWholeTruth speaks volumes to the real issue.

From Beefy Miracle to Spherical Cow: The Fedora 18 release name was voted on and the results are in: Spherical Cow. That may get the big “huh?” from a lot of folks, but to theoretical physicists and other scientists, Spherical Cow makes perfect sense. Also, it may be a quick sketch, but Juan Rodriguez has drawn an excellent adaptation of the Fedora logo to go along with it, unofficially of course.

One more thing: Happy Birthday to the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. Uhn! Yeah! Get on up-pah, and have a great birthday!

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Adios, Ubuntu

I’m not going to make a big deal about this, despite the fact it transcends mere annoyance and enters the anger zone. Also, I apologize to those who got comfortable with their popcorn and were ready for a verbal thrashing and grammatical throwdown of epic proportions here, as we’ve done in the past when this issue arose.

The reason I’m not going to make a big deal about it is because there’s nothing new in this issue — just the standard issue Canonical/Ubuntu behavior where it’s “Ubuntu uber alles” and the FOSS community be damned. But at the same time, the reason I bring it up is because it’s something which folks should keep on their proverbial radar, and keep track of it because just as it has happened continually in the past, chances are it will keep happening in the future.

Joe Brockmeier wrote something on his personal blog today that he discovered yesterday about “the Ubuntu kernel” in the upcoming Precise Pangolin release. I can’t add anything to this, and Joe writes something I completely agree with and something I wish I had written. This new “kernel” comes from a company that has systematically kept the word “Linux” at arm’s length, or further, for years now, and now they don’t even have the courtesy of acknowledging their roots.

What’s worse is that there is a revisionist tack to the story of who-begat-who, since Mark Shuttleworth, a person for whom the word “hubris” seems to have been coined, seems to think — and isn’t shy about opining — that Debian is part of the Ubuntu “ecosphere,” rather than the other way around.

To say nothing of the lack of upstream contribution by Canonical/Ubuntu — this has been outlined in the past here, here, and even here where The Mark and I square off, and pretty much all over the place.

As long as I’ve been using Linux — that would be 2006 and one of my first distros was Ubuntu (though my first was Debian, to which I’ve returned both using that distro and CrunchBang) — Ubuntu has done much to bring visibility to Linux, until it stopped calling itself that. So while it deserves a degree of gratitude for this, Canonical/Ubuntu has always been the salesman in the new-car showroom, taking credit for selling you this great product when the truth is that the salesman really did not have much to contribute to the construction of the car.

I’m more than welcome to let Canonical/Ubuntu and the legions of Ubunteros — many of them good people, some of them blind hero-worshiping sheep (this will become evident in the comments, no doubt) — go their own way and I’ll go mine.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions — which no longer includes Canonical/Ubuntu products — in the small business and home office environment.)

Hello, I must be going

It’s a very busy week among with redwoods in Felton, not the least of which had a Monday visit from the UPS delivery guy with two — count ‘em, two — ZaReason laptops to test. Sadly, that’s not the biggest reason that I’m busy — a new refrigerator comes today and we’ve had to carve a path from the door to the kitchen to get it in the house (though, interestingly, the refrigerator is by a window we can take out . . . hmmm), adjusting furniture to make a clear path. Oh, and I’m starting the media machine going for Linux Fest Northwest — you’ll be hearing a lot more about that as time goes on.

Therefore, in the words sung by the immortal Groucho Marx, “Hello, I must be going . . . .”

But before I do — you didn’t think you’d get away that easy, did you? — a couple of things:

Open palm, insert face: I haven’t had a chance to weigh in on Canonical’s new HUD, the (ahem) Head-Up Display — head-up what, exactly, is something you’ll have to determine for yourself. Without going into detail, I don’t see it as progress or innovation if I have to type something in a field where previously I had to just click on an icon. Maybe Steve, er, Mark Shuttleworth does, but it wouldn’t be the first time he and I have disagreed (incidentally, I’d like someday to agree with something Mark does. Maybe someday). What’s next, the progress or innovation of using a green monochrome screen? I’ll try it — HUD, not the monochrome screen — but from the looks of it, it doesn’t deserve the “oohs” and “aahs” it’s been getting — maybe a disengaged “hmmm” at the most. But we’ll see.

All work and no play: As mentioned earlier, ZaReason sent me a pair of laptops — the Alto 3880 and the Strata 6880 — to put through their paces and give them a review. I was going to swear off reviews after the last one I did, but I reconsidered. They’re currently running Linux Mint with the MATE desktop — very interesting — and there’s a better than excellent chance we’ll have Fedora, CrunchBang and other distros on the HDs before the week is out. Plus, as a bonus, my daughter Mimi is also going to give a review of the laptops as well, since she’s using the one I’m not using, and when she’s done with it we’ll swap laptops. These reviews come sometime next week, probably around Wednesdayish.

Ruh roh: Time to bring a refrigerator up a flight of stairs.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and has just started developing software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)