Life on the fast lane OR Fedora Steampunk OR Who is brave enough to wait?

We have still a few weeks (maybe even a month) ahead until the Fedora 9 release, the graphics are almost ready and checked in the distro, can we just sit back and relax?

Of course not! Andy came with a first idea for a F10 theme (sky), Mo with a couple more (neon and steampunk), Frank with another one (waterfalls), the season is open.

Well, I liked the steampunk idea: it is about technology and Fedora is on the technology forefront (too bad it isn't also some magic involved, otherwise I would be completely sold. Or is it?). Anyway, between two customizations of the F9 countdown it was natural for me to create a similar graphic (it can be derived in a standard banner, alpha/beta banner, counter) in a steampunk style for F10:

Like this is enough! I was just acquired the taste... so using the gear effect in the newly released Inkscape 0.46 I went further: a gear concept (steampunk is all about steam engines, clockwork devices and difference engines). In two variants: one is about ink painted gears on old paper:



And another about more realistic metal gears (like in your grandfather's clock):




And with a bit of impulse from Martin it went in a first official proposal for Fedora 10 themes.

Note: those are conceptual, unpolished graphics.

That is living on the fast lane: F9 is not yet released and we already dream at F10.

Sure, there may be other explanations, like me having a short attention span or me being a sucker for anime (where steampunk is used a lot). Or it may be the side-effect on running Rawhide, where the future is already in the past...

First F9 countdown spotted

Here is the first running Fedora 9 release countdown I spotted (and even better, it is a translation, in Portuguese):

And quickly after that, a Romanian one (working with alexxed to get it also on fedoraproject.ro):

Countdown to Fedora 9

Update: to get the SVG rendered correctly, you need the MgOpen Data font (is a free font, available with a yum install mgopen-fonts in Fedora).

With the schedule still on track to release on 29 April and with the general intention to stick with it, this is the time to start counting down to Fedora 9 "Sulphur":

Waiting for this counter to get on the front page (hopefully with an easily embeddable widget for anyone to use), you may want to run your own. If so, here is a tarball with pre-rendered images for 30 days in advance. It is English only, but the source SVG is included to ease translations.

If you want to script the PNG creation from the base SVG (with Inkscape and command line arguments), replace the text with the 'counter-text' id. If you want to to it from Inkscape, just change the black text outside of the canvas (the effects are made with clones).

If you want help with creating translated graphics, ask me (but don't abuse) but for scripting the inclusion on your pages don't count on me (but share with me the solution you'll find).

Update: to get the SVG rendered correctly, you need the MgOpen Data font (is a free font, available with a yum install mgopen-fonts in Fedora).

Update: Here is a JavaScript provided by Paolo Leoni (just change the paths according with your setup):

<script type="text/javascript">
document.write('<a href="http://fedoraproject.org/"><img src="path_to/fedora9-countdown-'+days+'.png" border="0" /></a>');
if (days < 0) {
document.write('<a href="http://fedoraproject.org/"><img src="path_to/fedora9-countdown-0.png" border="0" /></a>');
}
</script><a href="http://fedoraproject.org/"><img src="path_to/fedora9-countdown-25.png" border="0"></a>

Update: Now the counter is runnung on the Fedora's main site along with an embeddable js.

Follow up: Catavencu

Last week I complained about my article being improperly credited in the Academia Catavencu magazine. This week the next issue comes with an errata (along with my second article, this time about "Battle for Wesnoth"), so I publicly declare I am OK with them (the magazine, not so with Dragos, who didn't do the same, at least yet).

I still have to think if I want to continue such a collaboration, there are positive aspects but also negative ones.

Stepping on a geek's copyright OR what could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship

I stepped up recently to help Dragos Manac with his Linux column in the Catavencu magazine (the print edition). Not for the money (it's a sum so low, I would be ashamed to tell and I can get better payment from other places) but for the greater good, for Linux, for glory and stuff like this.

This seems kind of fun job, I am used to write stuff (even if I usually write in English, a return to Romanian prose is refreshing), I have plenty of ideas in the queue and a lot of things deserve promotion. Being a mainstream magazine, is not hard, you have to touch light topics without entering into details.

All good until today, then the first piece was published. Attributed to someone else. And with someone else's website URL next to it. Sorry guys, but this is too much. I have to react.

I can accept it was an editor's mistake, without rushing to the "p" word. I may accept Dragos sent the correct text with the correct signature to the editor. But, frankly, I don't care. I don't care if it was a honest mistake, laziness, malevolence or something else. I want moral reparation.

Now here is the full text of the article, I have not signed anything with anybody, have received no payment (but have not asked for), have not waived my copyright, so sue me if you dare:

Of course, before going out in the blog with it I escalated to the proper channels: first to Dragos (an answer like "it's too late, nothing can be done now, the next number will have an article with the right credit" is not good enough), then to the magazine (no reply so far).

So disappointing when you put god faith in a thing and people don't give a rat's ass. If I publish content as GPL, CC-BY-SA and even PD that does not means I don't care about it. By the opposite.

Update: one week later, the next edition of the magazine published an errata. I am OK with them now (but only with them).

My struggles with F9 Beta

This time I really want to jump to the Fedora 9 Beta on my primary desktop (as unwise as such a move is), I want to practice how some theming things go along. My first try was to do what all the cool kids do: do a yum update to Rawhide, I did a small test and got that:

Transaction Summary
============================
Install 128 Package(s)
Update 1339 Package(s)
Remove 2 Package(s)

Total download size: 2.4 G

I am to big of a wimp for that, uninstall some large packages (games which I don't play anymore) and it gets a little better:

Transaction Summary
============================
Install 124 Package(s)
Update 1275 Package(s)
Remove 1 Package(s)

Total download size: 1.8 G

Better, but not good enough: if I have to download that much, then I can download a bit more (double) and do a clean install (you'll see next why this proved a good decision by a totally unexpected reason).

So I don't like the Live CD as a base install, I need in the day to day activity a lot more packages so I had to install from the classic DVD image. But wanting an install from USB media I found what I label as a clever way: use livedc-iso-to-disk to write the netinsatll image to an USB pen drive, then copy the install DVD on the same drive, boot from it and whan asked from where to install select that USB drive (sdb1 in my case) and a hard drive (I wasn't able to find a simper way, but this is simple enough).

But I hit a bug, I can reproduce it both when installing from the classic DVD with Anaconda and when booting from the Desktop Live CD (in this case I can see it all the way: RHGB, GDM, desktop): I don't have any text on screen, no icons, no buttons or other widgets, nothing. Here is how my desktop looks like:

And this is for Intel on-board graphics, something that is expected to work the best out-of-the box (do not look funny at me, I didn't buy that box, I always buy AMD).

I guess I can do a text install and hope for the best, but as I said before, this is my primary box and I don't want to risk being forced to boot into Windows or revert back to F8 to do my day to day work.

Update: as everyone adviced, run the installer with xdriver=vesa and it went OK (if you can say running the desktop after install in VESA is OK). Then, to be on the safe side, updated everything, deleted xorg.conf, reboot and now it if just fine (resolution, acceleration, everything).

Inkscape 0.46 - the stealth release

Now that we are out of the embargo and can talk freely about the release, here is the news item: after over one year of waiting (and a couple of weeks of stealth status), Inkscape 0.46 was released with a load of features.

Why stealth? Between a crappy platform, Windows, which exhibited a bad printing bug (a release blocker) and a tight ass distro, Ubuntu, with its policy of not trusting its package maintainers for package updated, Inkscape developers found themselves in a hard place: to release with a major bug on Windows (where the majority of users are) or delay the release, lose Ubuntu's feature freeze and have no reason to release at all for the following 6 months (about the same happened 6 months ago).
So the "solution" was to release but at the same time not to release: a release a couple of weeks ago, just in time for Ubuntu, but with all the PR embargoed until either the Windows bug is patched or is evident it will not be patched.
At least the release happened officially now.

As a Fedora user, I am content: we have the latest prerelease, pre3, in Rawhide, a build is also available for F8 in Koji for testing purposes, the new version will get in Rawhide and F9 but also (and here our policy and our package maintainers shines compared with other distros) in the current stable, F8.

A first attempt at F9 "Sulphur" media labels

There is still early, with plenty of time until the release but with the Beta expected the next week, maybe some may have use for them, so here is my first attempt at Fedora 9 "Sulphur" media (CD/DVD) labels:

The first one is an extremely simplified version of "burning sulfur on waves" we feature on the release artwork, the second is an even more simplified version of it (for LightScribe) and the last is just the wallpaper clipped with a CD shape (not printer friendly at all).

Linux is everywhere: even on phones

Recently someone asked me to help him with the configuration (it was absolutely painless) of a cordless Internet/ DECT phone, VOIP841. Is a nice, even if a bit pricey IMO, phone made by Philips, able to call land lines, Skype network (without the need of a PC), use multiple handsets (and have calls between those handsets too)... but enough with the praises, I am not a Philips sales agent.
What I liked the most is that phone runs Linux (I noticed this seeing "Open Source File" on their download page. Cool stuff, Linux is everywhere!

note: and the guy owning it (he bought it by himself and is happy with it) looks funny at me when I mention using Linux...

How many people in the Fedora Art group?

With FAS2 deployed, it is naturally for everybody to explore its functionality, trying to make the best use of it. Is not that hard from there to get to the list of members in a group, like the Art group, notice a lot of members, 38, realize that some of those names are completely unknown (unknown on the Fedora Art list, other Fedora lists and the larger Fedora universe) and have the initiative for a policy for granting group membership (with all the privileges granted by it).

This is my comment seeing we have 38 people in the group:

If Fedora Art would have 38 active members, then it would be better looking than OS X

Read this as you want either that I believe we are close enough to the OS X quality that we can match and surpass it or that I think it is such a high, unreachable, number that the goal will remain apiece in the sky.

Dithering for GRUB

There is a hard constraint when creating GRUB splash images: they must be 640x480px with effectively 14 colors (16 colors, one must be white and another black) so the result is something which will look inevitably bad consider today's requirements and expectations.
The solutions are either to use custom patches (like gfxboot), wait for GRUB 2 (which seems to never come to an useful state) or try your best with dithering (which works OK for simple images but not so well for anything complex). And I have not touched yet the issue of various aspect ratio displays.

So here is a first iteration made by Mo for a GRUB splash based on the F9 Waves theme:

On top of the inherent visible pixels, I have a big issue with it on my 20" widescreen display: the bubble does badly deformed (that happens when you use 4:3 video modes on wide screens). I expect a sulfur crystal will not look that bad when deformed. And I have the feeling the splash would look better un-centered.

Enough reasons to try my own variation, I edited the Inkscape made SVG and exported as a full color PNG, it looks quite nice:


But as I said above, it needs to be uglified, to match the specifications, so let's make it indexed, 14 colors:


The result is really ugly, we have a lot of unwanted light pixels:


So take the cone tool, clean them and then with a sharp brush solve some more minor details. Still ugly:


I blame it on the blue flame, it is the primary source for this light color. So back to the source, remove the flame, export as PNG, index with dithering:


A lot less bad pixels, GIMP them out:


Much better but not sure it is good enough, I passed it as is. Mo takes the torch again: she lighten the background and dull the water reflections a bit, simplifies the yellow crystal, index the image with dithering and adjust the result removing some of the unwanted noise:


Now about adding the blue flame back... that's really a tough one.

Note: to test those images as GRUB splashes, open the indexed PNGs with GIMP, save them as splash.xpm.gz and put the file in /boot/grub/

All your mails are belong to Y!

I am a heavy email user, but my mail exchanges are usually either in geek circles, the business area or both, so my usual data is not a good sample. But recently I was involved in a project (website) which deals with a completely different demographic group: women watching specific TV shows (soap operas, talk shows) or reading specific press and who happen to have access to a computer, either at work or at home, but don't understand, and don't want to understand the technology. Pretty much the mainstream public.

Not much to my surprise, I saw the statistics with hard numbers about how the Yahoo mail reigns supreme on this group: over 90% (in my sample it was ~92%) of those people use Yahoo as an email provider (those are personal email addresses), any other provider is just statistical noise. Some of those people give an IM address as their contact address (sometime in addition of email, sometime instead of) and those are always Yahoo! Messenger addresses.

I checked my findings with a friend of mine, he also work with mainstream, non-geek audience (he run an online store, but not sell technology products, only contact lenses) and he has similar numbers but from both men and women.

The conclusion from this is that on the home/personal area, Yahoo Mail is almost a monopoly on the Romanian email and IM market.

Talking about this with my friend, the discussion got inevitably to the topic of Microsoft's intention of buying Yahoo. While my friend,a fervent Debian user, is delighted by this perspective, he hates Yahoo with a passion after a lot of problems with email delivery to his Yahoo using customers (he says something like: I want Yahoo to die, even if Microsoft is the one that kills them), I am scared as hell by the idea of being forced in a Microsoft email and IM realm too (I am also not an Yahoo fan, but I use some of their services but no Microsoft service).

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

In my opinion, the Parsix theme is ugly, a bad combination of light blue wallpaper, dark gray windows, light blue window title bars and glowing orange/brown icons. Should I wonder when it is acclaimed on the Art list by our favorite two trolls?

Import Illustrator (.ai) files with Inkscape

One of the features which can be found in the soon-to-be-released Inkscape 0.46 is the ability to import PDF files (based on libpoppler) and as a consequence, .ai (Adobe Illustrator) files (which are based on PDF). Note: this feature was developed as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007. So how good is that import? I found it to be quite good.

But first a bit of history: for those who remember, the Bluecurve icon set was revolutionary for its time: an icon set for a Linux desktop created with vector graphics. But in those early days, without a competent editor available, it had to be created with Adobe Illustrator, which was for a long time a problem for contributors, which were not able to play with those icons without selling their souls.

Fast forward a couple of years ago, when we had the tool, Inkscape, and were thinking about the future of the Fedora icons: stay with Bluecurve, create a next-generation Bluecurve, adopt an existing icon set or create a new one from scratch (we pursued partly option 3 and 4, but this is not the subject of this post).

We still had problems with anything Bluecurve-related: no way to open the .ai files on a Linux desktop and without written guidelines, hard to re-create them from scratch. So the so solution was to export them as SVG with Illustrator and then freely play with those SVGs on Inkscape.

Today the Bluecurve days are behind us (if you still find a Bluecurve icon here and there on a Fedora desktop it is a bug and have to be fixed) but using the Inkscape 0.46 pre-releases (on Rawhide, but also easy to find for F8) we can play at last with the initial .ai files (after 5.5 years... good lesson to learn about file formats).

Below are two screenshots: one is the Illustrator created .ai files opened with Inkscape 0.46 pre2 and the other a SVG exported from Illustrator and opened with the same Inkscape 0.46 pre2. They look the same to me, bug for bug, which I find pretty good.

Update: and here is how they are supposed to look (Illustrator created PNG) - not sure if the small differences are caused by Inkscape bugs or features not supported by SVG:

NIN: Ghosts and its CC license - a not so positive view

With all this fuss about the Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts release under a Creative Commons license i feel compelled to ask a naive question (or it is an annoying question which renders me a a first class nitpicker?).

Quote from their readme, distributed inside the official torrent:

We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc.  It's licensed for all non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

So my question is: if I use AdSense or something similar on my website, is legal or not to share there? But if I have a button for PayPal donations to a FOSS project?

Of course I already know the answer and it is no, as those can be interpreted as commercial activities (even if the AdSense usage is intended to barely cover the hosting price and a FOSS project is a non-profit).

But this is not why I find this release useless, I find it useless because I can't use this music as soundtrack for my screencasts, which are released under CreativeCommons Attribution Share Alike, so incompatible with the Non Commercial clause.

So are you confused by the too many Creative Commons licensing options?

Turn Based Strategy: 8 Kingdoms

Battle for Wesnoth is the Free TBS game, arguably the Free strategy game: the best known, the most played and probably the best looking. But beside it, there are other smaller, less known gems, like 8 Kingdoms, a game which got packaged for Fedora after the F8 release, so I believe it is not part of any spin or media release, but is only a yum install away...

Before the obligatory screenshot I feel I need to put a warning: the user interface sucks and the graphics are quite ugly, but I like its gameplay better than Wesnoth's and find it really addictive.

Surely, there are some other things I would like to see in such a game, like more depth, a single player campaign, a backstory and maybe some role playing elements and features which might come handy (like a movable camera angle, which one would expect from a 3D game). And less crashes.

But considering it started by some students as an university project and it has about a couple of active developers, it is really awesome. A must play. Maybe also a must contribute, too bad I know jack about 3D modeling.

On a scale of evil from 6660 to 6666

I know the real "evil" number is 666, but the 666-th upload to the Open Clip Art Library was long ago, so the best I can do is to try a surrogate, a replacement something looking close to it. So I uploaded another milestone:

I am not sure what is "more evil", 6660 or 6666 or if they are evil enough to count, so I uploaded both the image number 6660 and image 6666 (both were imports from the old website), hope this make me sort of evil:

As Johnny Automatic noted on the mailing list, about February 2008: "this month has seen more submissions than any month since we began tracking them", we were up to something this month and still have one more day to go:

What's next? I still have a lot of files from the old site to dump into ccHost, so I will continue my share of increasing the monthly uploads for a while. And I'll continue to be evil (or at least try to).

I <3 fedora

While I am not an Ambassador (and have no intention to become one) I got this idea from the Ambassadors Wall. One of the ways I see that wall is a big poster made from post-it notes (with various colors, shapes, orientation, written in different languages with different hand fonts) containing personal messages (they may be "real" - scanned, photographed or "fake" made with a graphic application, like mine).

As a natural continuation, it was logical for me to simplify it (and make it look even more childish) and reduce to the size used by our Promo Banners:

And if I am silly, why not go all the silliness way and do a custom t-shirt design (probably best suited for enthusiastic users)?

(everything has SVG sources available)

Tons of clipart: openclipart.org daily snapshot

Quite late, a couple of years late, the 0.18 release of the Open Clip Art Library got packaged for Fedora and is expected to hit a Rawhide near you (thanks lkundrak for that).

But that release is ancient, in the meantime we changed the site infrastructure (and lost the ability to do formal releases), gathered thousands of new images from hundreds of new users. What to do, lots of people want the images, we have them but no easy way to bulk download?

I present you the daily SVG snapshot: a large tarball containing all the SVG and SVGZ files from our ccHost installation. Today's (the first) snapshot is 156 MB (tar.bz2, it extracts in about 600 MB) and contain over 8.000 images (all of them released as Public Domain).

As a downside, it does lack meaningful structure, the files are grouped in folders by authors, not by topics/keywords/tags and we don't have keywords metadata inside SVG, so searching is a daunting task. But this is the best I can do, provide at least the content.

Note that this does not replace the old 0.18 release, is complementary and contain mostly images submitted after that release (even if this is changing at a glacial speed as some of us re-upload by hand images from the old site to the new one).

I forgot something? Yes, the link to the tarball, of course, the most important thing :D Go to the Open Clip Art Library downloads page and get daily_SVG_snapshot.tar.bz2 (no direct link from my blog as I'm not sure if it's a good idea do for a 156 MB download).

So use the clipart, enjoy it and maybe contribute back!

More interoperability

My first reaction seeing the page in the screenshot below was to get scared. But I am unsure what the second reaction should be: to pity the fools from a certain FOSS project hurrying to give a lot of personal data to the beast in exchange to a small gift (which is "subject to availability" anyway) or to applaud them for emptying the beast's pockets?
In any case, I appreciate the irony of the gift being a bracelet.

GIMP Polaroid effect

There are some things in life which go in cycles and such a cycle, a short one, is the cycle I started a couple of weeks ago with an Inkscape tutorial, continued with another and it ends now back on track with some GIMPing, after which I will take a break from tutorials. What I'll do next? Upload some old clipart on OCAL? Do some Fedora graphics? Something else? Nothing? We'll see.

A tutorial about creating a Polaroid effect from a digital photo is quite un-original, it involves basic operations like layer and canvas management, drop shadows, selection move and rotation, with distort filters being the most "advanced" part. So read it if it sound interesting.

Somewhere inside is buried a screencast, which, as all my screencasts, is rough: unedited and without a sound track (despite the number of requests I received for adding sound). Maybe I should reveal the real reason why I dont' add any sound: it is not about the video editors, you can install Cinelerra from kwizart (it is compatible with livna) and you can get over its interface (one of the the fugliest UI I ever say) or crashiness. I don't add voice because my spoken English is so bad that I can't put it on the web with a straight face and I don't add music because the music I like is powerful, strong, heavy and will distract the viewer from the video, which is the real point of interest. And of course, is not free (sute, I can get to classic music, which may solve both issues, but I am affraid it will make the screencasts "uncool").

Wow! I got really off-topic from the main point, the tutorial. Anyway, it has also a Romanian translation available. Now is the time for a break.

The Fedora Xfce Spin

I am an old GNOME user and I intend to stay this way, it would be very hard for another DE to lure me into using it full time (or even part time) but I always had an inclination to have a look at Xfce, having it installed on my system, even if I don't log in it for months, so after the release announcement of the new Fedora 8 Xfce spin I downloaded it for a quick look.

As expected, it has a tight selection of software to fit on one single live CD, but it is nice and snappy:

While downloading there very few peers available it was very fresh and the news didn't spread enough yet, so digging the announcement and continue seeding may help.

Fedora 9 Artwork: Round 2

After a first round when we gathered theme concepts, the second round, dedicated to further visual refinement has ended and it will be followed by a third, and last, round (with a current deadline for 28 February) where those proposals are expected to approach completion.

From an initial lot of 7 proposals we got to 2 still standing, so I present you (listed in chronological order):

• Sulfuric Waves
  
  It is a combination of the initial Waves concept by Martin Sourada symbolizing "infinity, freedom, voice..." combined with Máirín Duffy's take on the F9 codename (Sulphur);


• Shoowa
  
  Luya Tshimbalanga's geometric take on the diversity of the Fedora community through the use of art from different cultures.

Now is the time for you to voice your opinion about them, please do!

Pac-Man baddies with Inkscape: clipart, tutorial, screencast and challenge

My not so secret Pac-Man project is finished, the clipart images are available on my collection as well as on openclipart.org, the tutorial is on the tutorials page, a screencast too, so now is the time to talk about them.

Ladies and gentelmen, here are some Pac-Man bad buys and bad girls:

The idea started months ago, when I made a silly cartoon about Fedora Games and I quickly realized the potential: is easy and fun (at least I think so), anybody can create such graphics and a tutorial is obvious and quick enough to be covered also by a screencast.
It got stuck in my head for a long time, screaming to get out waiting for me to get in the right mood for that. And in the end I gave up.

I started by doing a screencast (as I said, is based on a concept I was already familiar with), sorry for the Flash abuse, it is made with Istanbul in Ogg Theora and I have the original, but until fedoratv gets usable, its temporary home will be on YouTube.


Then I made in Inkscape the base shape, taking at each step screenshots for a future tutorial.

When done the next step was to create various derivatives, changing either the texture or the shape, there are many of them I like, for example the ninja-pirate duo (who would win in a fight?):

or the textured stripes and camouflage:

The original plan was to create 9 distinct images but the ideas came over and over so I jumped first at 16 and ended with 25 images (and still have a lot of ideas, but enough is enough).

Then I uploaded the images: both in a pacman gallery of my clipart collection and to the Open Clip Art Library (check the arcade tag).

After that, crop the screenshots, combine them, put together in a HTML, add some English text and the Pac-Man baddies Inkscape tutorial is made. Translate everything into Romanian language (yup, I write in English first), put everything online, including the screencast and I am almost done.

The last step is this: blog about them and throw a challenge: look at the gallery and find one baddie representing you. If you can't find one, read the tutorial and draw one yourself. Enjoy it. Show it to the entire world. Maybe upload it to the Open Clip Art Library.

And with that, enough for me with clipart for a while...