UTOSC – Day 2

[A moment of silence, please, for my dearly departed laptop power brick. Anyone who has a brick for a Fujitsu Lifebook that they can spare, please contact me.]

[Thank you]

Friday’s edition of the Utah Open Source Conference must have been good. Reason: The day flew by.

Traffic in the exhibit area flowing pretty steadily for the better part of the day and the swag was getting into folks’ hands. Some of the questions we were getting ranged from the basic (“So what is Linux, anyway?”) to more complex (“Why does yum suck?” — No, it doesn’t, but that’s been handled in a past blog). The usual suspects are here: Open VZ, GNOME, KDE, for starters, as well as the Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu — the interesting part about this is these three represent the three roots in the Linux tree: Fedora roots go back to Red Hat, OpenSUSE’s to Slackware and Ubuntu to Debian.

Both Ian Weller and Paul Frields presented yesterday — Ian’s presentation was filmed by Scott Dowdle and should appear on the Montana Linux User Group site sometime soon.

Stormy Peters of the GNOME Foundation gave the keynote yesterday, and it was quite informative. I wish I could have stayed for the entire address, but someone has to watch the booth.

Again, with the amount of traffic and the number of people who have visited the booth, the day went quickly. I went to get lunch and realized it was 4 p.m. Not much later was the geek dinner at Mama Spaghetti’s (I think that’s its name).

Day 3 — the Saturday edition — to follow.

[This item also appears on the Larry the Free Software Guy blog.]

(Larry Cafiero is the Regional Ambassador for the U.S. West Coast for the Fedora Project and he also runs Redwood Digital Research in Felton, California. He also blogs from time to time as Larry the Free Software Guy.)

The Three Faces of Fedora 11: KDE

The following may come as a shock to you all: I had originally written another blog, filled with kute kommentary kompletely katagorizing the klear advantages kurrently available in the new KDE 4.2, and how well it runs on the lightning-kwick Fedora 11.

But after being up all night with this version of Fedora 11, I deleted most of it. I’m not going to go there — not with the “k” thing which, since 1996, has probably been the mainstay of jokes around the desktop environment; jokes which those close to KDE find way beyond tiresome by this time, I’m sure.

“Up all night” sounds bad, too, as if I were nursing a sick child with a fever. That’s not the case here. On the contrary: The reason I was up all night with KDE is that, as predominantly a GNOME user, I was enthralled by the desktop environment and its accompanying programs. Enthralled probably isn’t the best word here, and neither is enamored because neither word does justice to how impressed I am overall with KDE 4.2’s offerings and performance on Fedora 11.

A caveat: There are programs that I still prefer over the ones K provides on KDE. For example, while KOffice is an adequate program, you can have my OpenOffice when you pry my cold, dead fingers from it, and I installed it and tested with it. While I am an unequivocal OOo user, I do think that KThesarus is an excellent addition to KOffice. Konqueror, though adequate, tends to falter when it comes to some sites — Facebook and Gmail come immediately to mind. So Firefox was installed as well.

Having said this, though, there are programs on here that I like very much and would use going forward. I put Konversation through its paces during the Fedora Ambassadors IRC meeting on Tuesday evening, and it gained me as a convert. Also, KMail was very easy to set up and use and is a viable alternative — and in many ways a superior one, once you find your way around it — to Evolution.

[Note: I'm still on the fence when it comes to KsCD, but with the hour being what it was last night I wasn't able to crank up the Judas Priest -- played, of course, for testing purposes only. No, really. Just for testing . . . ]

Despite the digital stumble KDE 4 arguably may have been, KDE 4.2 tends to make up for it and goes way above and beyond the call. Further, KDE is clearly worth considering if you’re installing Fedora 11, whether or not F11 is the first time you’re using Fedora.

Coming tomorrow: Divine inspiration in using Fedora 11 with the Xfce desktop.

[This blog item also appears on the Larry the Free Software Guy blog.]

(Larry Cafiero is the Regional Ambassador for the U.S. West Coast for the Fedora Project and he also runs Redwood Digital Research in Felton, California. He also blogs from time to time as Larry the Free Software Guy.)

Weighing in on SCaLE

It figures: Just when I get the LAMP stack running flawlessly on one old machine running Fedora 8 (I said it was an old machine), the dreadful click of death visits the hard drive.

So with a new hard drive and with a Fedora 10 install in progress (DVD version), things need to be packed for the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles (SCaLE) this weekend, Feb. 20-22 at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel.

DVD/CDs: Check.

Buttons: Check.

Stickers: Check.

A note about SCaLE: This is the seventh annual event in Los Angeles, and the event is growing into a standard — maybe even a must-attend weekend — for Linux users on the West Coast. Bear in mind that another Linux jewel in the Pacific Rim’s crown, LinuxFest Northwest, is still two months away, and OSCON comes to San Jose in the summer. So if you want to get a head start on 2009 and you are somewhere west of, oh, the Rockies, you may want to drop by sometime over the weekend.

Also, the first-ever Fedora Activity Day (FAD) — “Fedora Ambassador Day 2.0,” if you will — takes place all day Friday in the Midway room at the hotel. FAD is a symbiotic mix of improving the distro while having a good time with friends — and if you’re not careful, you might learn something useful. The encore to FAD is the Birds of a Feather event in the same room at 7 p.m. Friday.

[And, if nothing else, Clint Savage's presentation on Fedora Remix will surely be worth walking to Los Angeles from wherever you might be (no pressure, herlo . . . )]

There’s something I’m forgetting, but chances are by Wednesday night I’ll remember and pack it in the car. Then on Thursday morning, early, I’ll head three miles down Highway 17 to Santa Cruz and hop in the minivan with Karsten Wade and our daughters — Santa Cruz’s three Linux Chicks in training — and head south.