NEVER! I swore to myself that I would never buy one of these crappy, under performing Atom based computers. This was before I went to my local computer shop. They currently have really cheap and small Atom computers on sale, so I bought a complete Foxconn R10-S3 for around 120€. I already had a hard drive (500GB) and a memory stick (2GB) lying around, so it was a good opportunity to build a cheap computer to test Rawhide builds.
As you can see on the picture above, it’s a really small case in which you can fit an optical drive and 2 3.5″ disks. The whole thing is based on an Atom 330, which is a dual-core CPU running at 1.6GHz. As a desktop chip, it supports the 64-Bit instruction set. So I installed a 64-Bit Fedora 11 on it and I have to say that it works quite well…It’s perfectly usable to browse the web (even with Flash), listen to music and work on an OpenOffce document at the same time. Don’t expect much more as it will begin to feel sluggish…
One thing I don’t like about it is the integrated fan…it’s loud. In fact it’s as loud as my quad-core computer when it’s idle, which frankly sucks on a small computer.
Last Friday I handed in my Bachelor of Science diploma work, so I basically finished my studies! If all goes well (and it should), I’ll receive the title of “Bachelor of Science in media engineering, IT orientation” or something like that. I already got a proposition for a very nice job in the Open Source industry, but nothing is completely sure at the time. I really hope this turns out well 
Maybe you want to know what my diploma work was about? Well, it was about setting up an industrialization process to create custom Fedora-based Linux distributions on the fly. Basically, Fedora appliances targeted at video surveillance.
- The first part of the diploma is targeted at analysing the Fedora package build process, or how to get from source code to an RPM in a repository. It’s a good guide for SPEC files, rpmbuild, Koji, Bodhi etc…the whole build process is detailed. For the job I had to package motion, for which I’m now a contributor and RPM package maintainer. There is also a comparative analysis between the different composition tools available in Fedora.
- The second part of the diploma is targeted at streamlining the whole development process in the company I was working for. As a result they are now using a version control system (SVN) and Trac as a bug tracking system.
- The third part of the diploma is targeted at creating custom Fedora remixes which are auto-installable and auto-configured with heavy kickstart usage. The end result are a couple of scripts which create custom Fedora remixes with Revisor.
- The last part of the diploma is targeted at setting up quality assurance (QA) on the produced Fedora remix.
The final workflow allows the developers to automatically create custom Fedora distributions containing all their code in less than 15 minutes (compared to 1-2 days before). All the configuration files, GUI code, kickstart files etc…are directly extracted from SVN and passed to Revisor.
Now I have time again to catch up with Fedora Marketing stuff, and there is plenty of interesting work going on…
There have been rumours about Linux support in Steam for months, but yesterday a friend pointed me at http://store.steampowered.com/app/900804/
If you look at the bottom of the page, you’ll see this:
So, if it’s not a typo, we could have a pretty good surprise soon
Yesterday, the Fedora 11 Retrospective Meeting was held, I had the chance to be invited there as a member of the Marketing group. This meeting, done by phone, was a cross-group talk to see what went well and not so well during the Fedora 11 release cycle. The goal is to gather feedback so we can learn from our errors to create an even better Fedora 12. People from the Ambassador group, Fedora Board, Design team, Marketing team, Documentation team, FESCo, Infrastructure team, Quality Insurance team, Release Engineering, Translation team and Website team were present, everyone had around 5 minutes to talk.
I found it very useful even if I didn’t talk too much; Jack, the Marketing team leader, did a good job of saying what needed to be said on our side :p
Long story short, it looks like Fedora 12 will be a “stabilization” release compared to Fedora 11. The main demands could be summed up with:
- A longer freeze period before release would be nice.
- More features need to be tested by QA.
- Testing periods should be longer.
- Last minute features should be pushed to rawhide for the next release instead of being squeezed in the current cycle.
- A better communication between groups is needed.
- In every group, more feedback is needed.
As a good Swiss guy, I like watches (clichés, clichés), but after a while you get a bit tired of always wearing the same one. So you begin to look around for a second watch, and a third, and so on…It’s really hard to tell WHY you always want new watches just to see the time. Isn’t a 10$ plastic watch enough some may think? Well, no 
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Hey all, long time no see
On the Fedora front I was busy doing marketing stuff for the Fedora 11 release. Overall, it went pretty well, it was a great release day and we had quite a lot of good press. Part of this job is also to follow user comments on all the websites we publish news to, on my side this means all the major French speaking IT websites. Doing this, I could see a few tendencies:
- People don’t have a clue which Fedora spin to download (KDE, Gnome, x86, x86-64 …), the actual download page REALLY confuses a lot of people. Too much choice seems to kill the choice.
- In the same vein, I’ve seen a lot of comments regarding the Live CD’s…comments like “Why does Fedora start to propose LiveCD’s as the primary installation source instead of the normal installation DVD?”.
Rant: I don’t have much to say on this front, but I don’t think it helps Fedora to multiply the installation medias in an exponential way (Note: specialized spins are something else). Personally I don’t like LiveCD’s because they are slow and have very few “cool” software on them due to space requirements, this defeats the “showcase for new users” argument. Anyway. the download page is broken IMO. Why do we provide a “Desktop Edition” and a “KDE Desktop Edition”? Shouldn’t we have a single “Desktop Edition” link pointing to a choice between Gnome and KDE? Or clearly put “Gnome Desktop Edition” and “KDE Desktop Edition” on the front page? Is KDE a second class citizen? How do you expect a new user to do the right choice?
Couldn’t we have some kind of “choice list” instead? A bit like Ubuntu/OpenSuse do:
We could help people chose the right installation media this way, by providing defaults and clearly explain the options. Wouldn’t it be clearer than having KDE and PowerPC links on the right side of http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora ?
If you have anything to say about the way we marketed Fedora 11, please give feedback to the marketing group! You can leave a comment here, I’ll forward it. This really helps us.
In case you didn’t catch it from some other sources, there is a cool page with Fedora podcasts on the wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_release_podcasts These podcasts are aimed at the Fedora 11 release, talking about the distribution and what the novelties are. One new podcast should be published there every 2-3 days, so keep looking
Fedora 11: yummy!
If you have friends who want to see what Fedora 11 looks like, there is also a page with multiple screenshots from the installation process, the different desktop environments (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Sugar) and applications here.
Hello,
Allez, un post en français pour une fois 
J’ai quelques livres à donner contre le paiement des fais de port, si ça vous intéresse il suffit de répondre dans les commentaires, ou par mail à steven.moix à axianet.ch. Les bouquins que je donnes:
- Pratique des réseaux d’entreprise aux éditions Eyrolles (technique)
- Le langage C++ aux éditions CampusPress (livre de poche)
- Assembleur, aux éditions Micro Application (gros pavé)
- Conception Objet en Java avec BlueJ 2ème édition aux éditions Pearson (débutant)
Yes, here they are. Yes, this was my artistic moment.
This Thursday was the last school day for me, it’s a bit sad to know that you’ll probably never going to work again with the people you were with during the last 3 years…
For the last 2 weeks, we (mostly) worked on Fedora in class and Thursday we gave an awesome Fedora 11 presentation to some teachers. By awesome, I really mean awesome. Imagine a group of people who worked together during 3 years, made a ton of other presentations together and you can get a feeling on how great the last of the many was. If it sounds pretentious, I don’t care. We ruled, and I’m already nostalgic.
We are awesome
So from the left to the right, we have:
- Simon Billot
- Christopher Wait
- Frédéric Andreae
- Julien Thabard
- Steven Moix (me)
Thanks to you all, really. Now it’s time to shift gears and begin to work on my bachelor of science in IT diploma work…more news on that tomorrow.
