http://blog.linuxgrrl.com

Actually, I tried to do this maybe a year ago and gave up because there was some issue with the feed getting cut off in Planet. I’ve got a new version of WordPress running and after testing the feed with Planet, it seems to work fine so I’m going for it.

If you’re following my blog via RSS, the new feed URL is:

http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/feed

I really appreciate the time folks take to read my ramblings here, and I am very sorry if this move causes you any annoyances.

Inkscape SVGZ source

Lunchtime!

More booth shots….I think this guy must be a Mac fan:

Robin and Ruth.

Robin was the hero of our booth, he helped us out a ton:

Tux made many friends:

There was a lot of interest in our flyers and CDs!

A film crew came by to check out our photo booth system, written by Luke Macken and designed by design team ninja Emily Dirsh:

I also hear Tux visited with IBM’s Watson super computer. I hear Ruth has video

I love you all dearly, but I also love GNOME. I feel that it’s juvenile to beat down on other free software projects’ hard work. It really breaks my heart to see this going on. Don’t you think that there are more constructive and less personal ways to voice your feedback, concerns, and critiques?

If you would like to participate in juvenile critically-important activities for the fun of it, might I suggest a more worthy cause: promoting the glorious and miraculous hot dog that will surely be the ‘weiner’ of the Fedora 16 naming contest?

He really has a chance this time; we have a solid link between Lovelock and Beefy Miracle as submitted by Max:

Convert Lovelock and Beefy Miracle to numbers using A=1, B=2, … Z=26.

Lovelock = 12-15-22-5-12-15-3-11
Beefy Miracle = 2-5-5-6-25-13-9-18-1-3-12-5

Sum those two sets of numbers.

Lovelock = 95
Beefy Miracle = 104

Keep summing until you get to a single number 0-9.

Lovelock: 95 -> 9+5 = 14 -> 1+4 = 5
Beefy Miracle: 104 -> 1+0+4 = 5

So, to follow the rules of Fedora naming:

“Lovelock” is a string, that when a function is applied to it, results in an output of 5, and so is “Beefy Miracle”

What do you think? Can you convert that hate energy directed towards your peer free software contributors and instead make the world a better place with mustard-coated, reconstituted beef?

So many people…. this picture doesn’t even cover it. So many people at this FUDcon!

PULP!

Barcamp talk proposals during the kickoff session.

Diana’s anthropology report on Fedora.

Sebastian and Mel during the Education session.

Chris’ talk on cloud management.

Dennis and Greg smile for the camera!

Justin, Peter, Kyle, and Dave at the hotel lobby

Will during the meet the Anaconda team talk.

Hey, it can be the unpackaged open font of the week, and some weeks just don’t have fonts, right?

Crimson Text is a traditional, Garamond-inspired serif font family meant for use, as upstream terms it, a “workhorse” font that could be used generally, including flourishes, small caps, symbols, etc. The font is a lovely example of an in-progress international open font project, as it’s being creating by a team of folks:

• Sebastian Kosch, a 21-year old German student studying in Toronto;
• Hector Haralambous, who is from Greece;
• Georg Duffner, who is from Vienna

Crimson Text is licensed under the Open Font License.

Note that as the upstream homepage indicates, the font is under heavy development and in particular the kerning is a little dicey. While you may not want to lay out documents using this font in its current state, the typeface is certainly suitable for custom type designs for logos and the like if you’re up for adjusting the kerning manually. This is definitely an interesting project to follow.

Oh! And as far as coverage… it’s already better than some of the other fonts we’ve featured here, although the creators will have you know it’s far from complete. Here’s a screenshot of some of the character map under Latin:

• Fedora Font Wishlist Entry: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Aldus_Leaf_Crimson_Text_fonts
• Upstream Homepage: http://aldusleaf.org/

So, you want to package Crimson Text?

Hot doggin’! You’re groovy! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fonts_SIG

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_packaging

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

• https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts.

Last week’s font

We didn’t have a font last week. It’s been a while! Maybe I should do a blog post summarizing the state of all the previously-blogged fonts and check in on them. What do you think?

Yesterday I attended the Linux Plumbers’ Conference in Cambridge, MA.

State of the Kernel

First there was an opening talk by Jonathan Corbet, which was a report on the current state of the kernel. Some take-aways I got from the talk is we have about 1100 kernel developers currently, 300 are very active, and the pace is very fast. There isn’t any concern over attracting additional kernel developers as there is a steady influx. Jonathan went over various new features in the kernel, including a few long-term cleanup efforts that are finally getting finished up.

Boot & Init Mini-Conference

Next I attended the Boot & Initi mini-conference. We had a bit over 2 hours, and many people got up and talked about their systems and/or experience working with those systems. I tried to take some furious notes on the mini-conference’s etherpad, so check them out. Here’s a quick overview of the talks that happened:

• Remote Boot using SAN protocols – iSCSI and FCoE (Supreeth Venkataraman, Intel)
• A generic initramfs infrastructure – dracut (Harald Hoyer, Red Hat)
• Bootchart 2 – what you see under the hood (Michael Meeks, Novell)
• Plymouth – graphical boot splash and logger (Ray Strode, Red Hat)
• Beyond init: systemd (Kay Sievers, openSUSE; Lennart Poettering, Red Hat)
• Gentoo + SystemD – troubles, solutions, and future (k-s Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri / Profusion)
• Debian’s init system – past, present and future (and some numbers) (Michael Biebl, Debian)

For more details on these, see the mini-conference’s etherpad.

Desktop Mini-Conference

After a great vegan lunch (major, major kudos to the conference organizers for providing these), I headed over to the Thomas Paine conference room for the Desktop mini-summit. There were a bit fewer talks, but still the talks took up pretty much all the time we had. Here’s the sessions, with links to their original proposals and my one-line summary:

• EGL and GLES1/2 on Linux (Kristian Høgsberg) – Kristian is working on EGL, a platform-dependent API – almost a graphics rendering API hub – that provides a way to convert to a common object format between different rendering API object types, and also to platform-specific windowing system native types – a windowing system isn’t required to work with it though.
• multi-card/gpu – can we fix it? (David Airlie) – David talked about some work he’s done to combine randr & xinerama, and walked through 4 different multiple-video-card scenarios and the work that needs to be done to make those scenarios much smoother (or in some cases, possible0 for users.
• systemd and the desktop (Lennart Poettering) – Lennart mainly talked about wanting to redefine what a session means and a proposal to involve systemd in managing it. He seemed to be looking for opposition to the idea and nobody posed any.
• GNOME OS (Jon McCann) – Jon proposed we work together on a distro-neutral operating system, that we need to look holistically to build an OS with a great user experience. He gave some examples on how we’ve worked holistically together before from the bottom of the stack to the user-experience (e.g., udev) and pushed us to try for more. He presented a proposed roadmap from GNOME 3.0 (core UX) to GNOME 4.0, with some interesting milestones along the way (developer experience, application store.)

For more information on the talks in this mini conference, check out the miniconference Etherpad session.

I’m really looking forward to day 2.

p.s. Here’s all my photos from day 1.

The Fedora Design Team Bi-weekly Bounty is a bi-weekly (well, at least monthly! ) blog post where we’ll outline a quick-and-easy design project that needs doing for the Fedora Community, outlining all the tools, files, and other resources you’ll need to complete the project. If you’re a designer and are interested in getting involved in the free and open source community, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet!

I am quite happy to report that we have identified our third Fedora Design Bounty Ninja: Christian Brassat!! Christian responded to our third Fedora Design Bi-Weekly Bounty – a t-shirt design for the Fedora Students Contributing program. Christian put together a most excellent T-shirt design for the program, using Inkscape and Nicu’s Open Clip Art T-shirt template, collaborating with the Fedora Design Team throughout the process, then prepping the final design for print using Scribus. He came up with a very nice concept for the T-shirt – it’s summery and fun with its tropical flowers, and relates to free software and mentorship with its sprouting-seed design – and carefully adhered to all of the Fedora branding guidelines. He also provided all of his source work!

The original design team ticket has been closed and we’re looking forward to seeing the final design printed out on a T-shirt soon.

Congratulations, Christian, on a job well-done!

Are you ready for your chance to become an open source design ninja too? Keep an eye out for the next Fedora Design Bounty!