Fedora-Core on SWiK

Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:53:23 -0700

LinuxTag2008 report and Fedora EMEA

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:53:22 -0700

Well, it's already being a week since I've returned from Berlin and yet didn't get time to write my Linuxtag2008 report. I guess I'm the last one :P

Left Brussels, Belgium at 23:41 on 30/04 and travelled 9 hours by train to reach Berlin,Germany, I was glad and overjoyed to meet the Blue Men Group. It was also the first time I was about to meet our new Fedora Leader Paul W. Frields.

I've finally met ThibaultNorth, who summarized the big picture that I've missed with respect to the Fedora Electronic Lab during the first 3 days. We had exchanged several phone calls to prepare his speech and I'm admired his commitment. A real Swiss.

ThibaultNorth accomplished another of my dreams of Fedora Electronic Lab:
Introduce an OpenSource Electronic Simulation to the General Public.

Since the very first day Fedora Electronic Lab was approved as a Feature by FESCo, I exchanged a few emails with StuartBrorson, sharing my thoughts to provide an infrastructure which can provide a means to "market" open source electronic tools. This infrastructure consisted of using the well established Fedora Ambassadors facility to talk about Electronic tools during various events, something that many upstream can't organize.

This year, the year

Fedora EMEA was officially (after 2 years of hard work and collaboration) registered as a non-profit association.
Fedora 9 Sulphur was released
More universities are adopting FEL applications.
YOU magazine's January issue bundles Fedora Electronic Lab Live CD.
Fedora community has strengthen and excelling in all areas,

GeroldKassube and JörgSimon (our Super EMEA Ambassadors) organized and reserved a slot for a FEL Demo Presentation during the LinuxTag2008.

I'm very happy that ThibaultNorth stepped in and did a demo of FEL applications and introduced the Fedora Electronic Lab. The presentation can be found here.The team work between Fedora Ambassadors, Fedora Board and Fedora Packagers have made this possible. A big thank you. We are now reaching another FEL objective: Upstream's work has been properly deployed and advertised by Fedora.

It is this type of team work that's promoting various areas in the Fedora community. During this LinuxTag2008, it can be easily noticed that every Fedora contributor, present, wanted to push his particular field of contribution forward, but for that he needs the help of other Fedora contributor. Despite they are speaking a foreign language (English) to communicate, Fedora contributors were actually talking and discussing among themselves on how they could collaborate to do better. I was talking about FEL. Jeroen, Fedora Spins. Paul and Max, LiveUSBs. Glezos, translations. Jörg, OLPC......There is a great bond between Fedora EMEA contributors. This bond is not only about social interaction, but to bring Fedora to a higher level. E.g: I want a FEL LiveDVD spin and Jeroen wants to push the spins SIG.

We had a chance to talk to Shakthi Kannan from Qvantel. We explored some embedded tools that might be interesting for FEL.

FranscescoCrippa shared, he talked to 3 Texas Instruments guys who were eager to learn more about FEL on Thursday. ThibaultNorth and I headed straight to their booth. We discussed about some eventual inclusion of Texas Instruments electronic libraries into FEL, once the licensing issues are cleared. They were mainly interested in the Embedded side. Thomas.L described his beagleboard.org to us and how it's easy to use OSS on it.

At the Fedora booth, booth members were helping new contributors subscribed to the Fedora Account System. We have a bunch of new contributors subscribed but without a mentoring program. Their names _for the moment_ have only increased the number of contributors on FAS. Paul W. Frields and I discussed some eventual possibilities to turn those numbers into real contributors. I had the chance to help a new FEL contributor Thomas.R subscribed to the FAS2. Believe me, the subcription process is now every easy.

I missed my Fedora EMEA bathrobe breakout during the Linuxtag2008 social event. So JörgSimon offered me my chance :)

One rare photo, I'm in.

At the end of the day, we all gathered to dine together. GeroldKassube noticed one particular _feature_ about ME: "I eat very slowly" :) After dinner, I was too exhausted to speak. I followed MaxSpevack,Jeroen and Stephen back to the Hotel at about 3hr in the morning.

Including FEL applications to Debian

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:53:31 -0700

Last month, Aanjhan Ranganathan (Active Debian and Ubuntu contributor) joined the Fedora Electronic Lab crew.

Recently, he included magic, irsim and xcircuit to the Debian world. Now I feel, we are reaching one of the many Fedora Electronic Lab objectives:
A quick and simple deployment of an Electronic simulation platform made possible.

Together with Aanjhan, we have a strong focus on not deviating from upstream.

Last week at LinuxTag2008, ThibaultNorth, Jeroen Van Meeuwen and I were exploring an eventual FEL LiveDVD, since 700MB isn't enough to put all the electronic tools.

During the next few days, a FEL LiveDVD kickstart should be available for testing.

Linuxtag 2008: Fedora Electronic Lab

Thu, 29 May 2008 23:40:56 -0700

I'm proud to announce that today (yet again :) many thanks to Fedora Ambassadors ) 30 May 2008 at 10h00 to 11h00 (Berlin), one of our new Fedora Electronic Lab members ThibaultNorth (from Switzerland) will hold a presentation (english) at the Fedora FUDCon (Saal Europa 2 (OG))

He will introduce Fedora Electronic Lab and how interoperability is met with this electronic/microelectronic platform. Along with our FEL objectives at the Fedora project, he will show some demos as well.

I'm arriving at Berlin tomorrow to join the amazing Fedora LinuxTag crew :)

Oracle Linux Calendar 9.0.4.2/10 and ...

Thu, 29 May 2008 16:47:53 -0700

Fedora Electronic Lab at Binghamton University

Sun, 25 May 2008 03:12:30 -0700

Benjamin Kreuter sent me a short writeup about their engineering design project at Binghamton University, explaining their achievements.

Binghamton University is a SUNY doctoral research university for 13000 students in beautiful upstate New York;

Together with his friend, Robert Greene, Benjamin Kreuter have introduced Fedora Electronic Lab to their university engineering laboratory. They discussed how free software and Fedora 8 was used to go beyond the minimum requirements of the project in their case study.

Please take the time to read it and if you or your friends are using FEL somewhere, please drop us an email like Benjamin did. We will be glad to hear from you and your suggestions. You can digg this post here.

This week: on the news

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:47:45 -0700

March 17, 2008 : ON Semiconductor Corporation Completes Merger of AMIS Holdings, Inc.
March 20, 2008 : Synopsys to pay $227M for Synplicity

Curse Fedora everytime and everywhere, but still you will be using their technologies in the future.

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:46:48 -0700

Whatever, I'm going to write will not please everyone, but still I'll do!

Recently in Februrary 2008, with other Fedora ambassadors and contributors we were at FOSDEM. Yes, yet again, we all wore our blue ambassador t-shirt with pride.

Everyone in the Fedora team talked pretty much what they do at the Fedora Project to the public and how important it is ( from koji, packaging, transifex, OLPC, translation, R, FEL .... ). Ok stop ! I should rephrase my sentence "how important it is for the users".

We had many visitors at the Fedora booth. Many were RHEL users and using Fedora at home. Compared to last year, this time, many RHEL users were gathering at the Fedora Booth and talking with us. It was rather fruitful to me listening to their needs, especially I'll soon join the real professional work life.

Nevertheless, I was fed up, but REALLY FED UP, with random comments such as:
" I quit fedora because of yum "
" I quit fedora because of selinux "
" I quit fedora because X, Y and Z "
" I quit fedora because fedora's KDE had always the bluecurve theme "

Ok, some people have different opinions. So I do, while talking politics. Well I ignored those comments.

Today, while having a glance to my rss feeds, what do I find ?
"Ubuntu Gets SELinux". I quickly flew over a few more words:

"This is the result of the amazing work of the ubuntu-security and ubuntu-hardened teams."

Ha, there is something wrong here !

First, some previous users quit fedora because of SELinux, in favour of Ubuntu which doesn't support it. But now Ubuntu gets SELinux ? Hmm who is not listening to its users ?

Second, this is the result of amazing work of DanWalsh and his colleagues. The credit goes to them, and NOT ubuntu-security and ubuntu-hardened teams.

I don't recall where I have seen this phrase, but it sounds truthfully true and I give credit to that writer.

In FedoraLand, people talk "Linux" and in UbuntuLand people talk "Ubuntu".

You might be thinking that I'm bashing, Ubuntu well no. I just don't find the Logic in it. After all there is no sense of community in the UbuntuLand.

Another thing I've noted at FOSDEM this year that, those who met me last year did stop by to say "hi, how are you doing ?" I did the same whenever I went to get myself a break or a drink. Now who are the ones who stopped by ? Those were CentOS guys, Opensuse, a kopete developer, AMSN developers(thanks for the t-shirt), some are unaffiliated.

Ok, let's slow down a moment, I think CentOS guys (Dag, Karanbir, Dries, and the guy with the white hair I met at Chemnitz2007 and FOSDEM) are a rock solid team.

The RPM family is really a family. If this isn't social, I don't know how to call it.

On Fedora IRC channels, Ubuntu guys need X, Y and Z on IRC, fedora guys simplify their life. Debian guys need something or patches from Fedora KDE contributors, Rex, Kevin and others give them.

Well after all, why can't there be ground for real collaboration and really community ? Ok, someone last time said "because you have Red Hat". What's the problem? I'm not a software engineer, but microelectronics, sometimes I need help to code other than VHDL and Tcl. Red Hat engineers (Rahul, Jesse, Jeremy, Max, to name a few) are there to give me that help I need. Please don't take that away from me. Yes, sometimes, some scolded me because of my stupid hacks to get something working, but I deserved those. At least I learnt pretty nice things from the Fedora community.

Have a look at this title Bet you didn't know Linux could do this!". In UbuntuLand, it would be called "Bet you didn't know Ubuntu could do this!".

If you are thinking that Fedora should be popping more "Fedora" words in their title, I think you are wrong ! While Fedora contributors think "community" and shaking hands with CentOS and OpenSuse, others are just having a glimpse at the windows and waiting the perfect time to steal.

[ANNOUNCEMENT] Heads UP: FEL packages updates Release Notes

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:42:40 -0800

Heads up Fedora Electronic Lab users, after 4 months since the first Fedora Electronic Lab LiveCD was released, there have been many enhancements, fixes and features on the FEL packages on both F-7 and F-8. Some of you in Asia have even bought a issue of YOU magazine along with a FEL spin.

For a long time, I wanted to write a page which describes the main features that any FEL user is taking full advantage, thanks to Fedora's quick development and release cycles. We understand your need to develop better products with better EDA tools.

Today, I can now show you that page and at the same time give credits to those involved in the development. This page entails various enhancements brought forward to FEL by Fedora SciTech SIG and all Uptreams.

We recommend users to update their FEL deployments in order to take advantage of those improvements, features and fixes.

A Quick Start Guide for using Xen with Fedora

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:56:49 -0800

Fedora and Xen

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:56:28 -0800

Setting up Samba

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:40:29 -0800

Instructions for Fedora-Core using the Samba Web Administration Tool.

Instructions for Ubuntu.

Instructions for SUSE

Updating Fedora

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:19:58 -0800

Instructions for upgrading Fedora using Yum.

Fabless Semiconductor Business Model Presentation

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:37:23 -0800

Below you will find a presentation I made on how the free semiconductor business model can be attractive to academic institutions and research work.

31 Dec - Pictionary - Gnome Translate

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:06:33 -0800

Below is a "bougie finlandaise" fired by David und Hans für die New Year Eve.

I'm at Mirjam's parents' place in Switzerland (Swiss German part). Tonight, we played pictionary in german, but I neither speak nor understand German.

However Gnome-translate proved to be a very good asset and in the end my group (Mirjam, David and I) won the game.

tweak required to install Fedora on VMWare Server

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:13:52 -0800

edit the .vmx file by hand, and add a line to the file to indicate that you want to emulate a specific type of SCSI controller. absurd that users have to jump through these hoops, but there you go

Rawhide and KDE4's preparation

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:51:43 -0800

Since last week, the following packages were marked as "dead.package" for rawhide:

kdmtheme
marble
d3lphin
kalgebra

This means that they will be shipped with F-9 along with the KDE4 family and not as a separate package.

Kevin and Rex have already obsoleted these packages in the KDE4 packages in order to make yum update from F-8 to F-9 less painful. Well I recently upgraded from F-7 to F-8 WITHOUT any troubles.

If before F-9's release,:
* KDE3 icon sets
* KDE3 kwin decorators
haven't yet been ported to KDE4, I fear it would be time to obsolete them as well. So please, if you like a particular kwin decorator or kde3 icon set, please encourage upstream to port it. A mere simple mail to the developers might make you happy.

Fedora 8 & Skype: audio and webcam

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:51:43 -0800

With Skype 2.0 beta, one can now have webcam support.

chitlesh(~)$ rpm -q skype
skype-2.0.0.27-fc5

Mirjam got a Logitech Quickcam Chat as a Christmas present.

chitlesh(~)$ /sbin/lsusb
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 046d:092e Logitech, Inc.

Use livna repository to install gspca for Webcam Kernel Module.

# yum install gspca

gspca-1.00.20-1.lvn8
kmod-gspca-2.6.23.9-85.fc8-1.00.20-1.lvn8
kmod-gspca-1.00.20-1.lvn8

For the first, as root type:
# modprobe gspca

Then launch the skype 2.0 beta.

I had an annoying problem with the headset I had. I could only hear my friend through only one ear. Googling a bit, showed that I should use plughw listed for sound in/out.

Now I have webcam and audio support for skype :)

Fedora Electronic Lab for 100$ ???

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:49:04 -0800

Well today, google alerts pointed to me a somehow great article on ReyesSoft Ports Open Source EDA Software to UNIX, even my name was listed on it.

Yes somehow, I'm a bit divided in 2 halves.

No, I'm not jealous of any other Fedora Electronic Lab like project. However I would welcome more people to work with me and upstream.

Reyesoft is shipping some of the packages of Fedora Electronic Lab for at least 100$ for different platform (windows, solaris, linux, macos), under the name 'OpenEDA Toolkit 1.0'.

Fedora ships the packages of Fedora Electronic Lab for FREE together with a complete FREE Operating System as well as free applications for daily usage. FEL supports i386, x86_64 and PPC

Strangely, googling 'Reyesoft points to an extensive press coverage. However, in all the mailing list I'm subscribed I didn't come across something about the development of any of those packages.

All I hope that Reyesoft is not dreaming to get big bucks like Red Hat without contributing to real open source communities. VLSI open source packages are way behind proprietary software so that a particular engineer could adopt it for real work. Can Reyesoft be part of the team who can drive us to this dream ?

DSpace on Fedora Core 4

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:57:01 -0800

FEL: gerbv 1.0.3

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:25:27 -0800

This is to announce the fourth release in the stable branch of gerbv, 1.0.3 was just built for Fedora and will be available shortly among the updates.

This release represents a point release incorporating a few patches made against the 1.0.X source over the last 1 1/2 years. Specific updates include:

Incorporate changes from Joost Witteveen to support extended %SR% commands.
Fix endless loop bug when gerbv encountered an unknown % code. Patch from Joost Witteveen.
Fixed initial scale setting for %MOMM% Gerber files. Patch from Joost Witteveen.
Fixed format for small drillfiles. Patch from Trevor Blackwell.
Fix setting of the initial window size when the screen is larger than the display. Patch from David Carr.

Gerber Viewer (gerbv) is a viewer for Gerber files. Gerber files are generated from PCB CAD system and sent to PCB manufacturers as basis for the manufacturing process. The standard supported by gerbv is RS-274X.

firefox: no sound on flash videos

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:20:40 -0800

It happens that when I installed the adobe flash-plugin for Firefox, libflashsupport was not among adobe flash plugin's dependencies.

Unfortunately without libflashsupport, there isn't any sound on flash videos.

If you are encountering the same issue, yum install libflashsupport from adobe flash repository.

Then test it with this video (Le Train pour Pau):

Video recommended by Guillaume Assens.

Exploiting Fedora Core

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:29:30 -0800

BadName (named color or font does not exist)

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:49:35 -0800

X Error of failed request: BadName (named color or font does not exist) Major opcode of failed request: 45 (X_OpenFont)

If you came across this while using remote applications,

use "add/remove programs" on your fedora
search for x11-fonts
install the missing fonts

Users are not stupid ! They want Fedora 8 Werewolf.

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:49:41 -0800

You heard it here, there, from your friends, from various articles/reviews and now even from ME.

I won't make the list of the features and innovations brought forward by Fedora with Fedora 8, because you will continue to see people, friends or other distributions talking about our features after 8th November 2007.

If you are curious, click here.

Yet again, Fedora satisfies its users ranging from beginners, gamers, artists, translators, electronic engineers to experts with its Fedora 8. Fedora maintains/introduces everything for everyone.

From our sponsor Red Hat, a Fedora user no doubt inherits Enterprise technologies for free as a average Linux user. Again the fedora user is a winner.

Our configuration tools has made our average users stood up on their feet on their own. Because we think, our users aren't stupid.

Our users now know that using Linux is nothing but just pure logic. We believe that a "pipelined" development process is among the best solutions for our users. Developers develop or package the products and users use the products. We don't have only newcomers as linux users, but users from different cultural and technical background. We have successfully satisfied all their needs in the past and will continue to do so.

Our technologies are now everywhere, and in many distributions (ranging from Ubuntu to OLPC). Fedora's progress in OLPC was among the best contribution that Fedora could bring to all linux users, e.g Improved support for using Fedora on Laptops,...

From our metrics taken with smolt, shows us Fedora's success.

Thanks Max and Fedora(+Red Hat) contributors

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 06:49:37 -0800

It is a big honor to see a blog post from MaxSpevack dedicated to me, though I don't agree that what I study is "Very Complicated Electronics" :)

During Fedora 8 (Werewolf) development cycle, I've seen more active fedora contributors taking responsibilities than in the past. Thank you, all of you (JesseKeating, JeremyKatz, MairinDuffy,...) who helped me with Fedora Electronic Lab and on other Fedora activities.

JonathanRoberts changed the Fedora Marketing gears to a high level with his set of interviews. He even interviewed me.

FabianAffolter is working hard to bring Fedora Ambassadors meetings to life.

TrondDanielsen and the Fedora Embedded SIG provided tools for AVR µcontrollers. He also provided me with some photos that I used for FEL.

KevinKofler and I got the Fedora KDE splash image at the last minute.

As last year, GeroldKassube is organising another Fedora Ambassadors Day in Rheinfelden, Germany. I'll be meeting those present that weekend.

Fedora Electronic Lab 8 - Stable release

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:49:30 -0800

Last Thursday, 8th November 2007, the very first Fedora Electronic Lab LiveCD was released officially. This LiveCD is based on Fedora 8 KDE along with almost all electronic design tools.

Fedora's Electronic Laboratory provides a complete electronic laboratory setup with reliable open source design tools in order to meet one's requirements to keep one in pace with current technological race. Project management tools such as spreadsheet, gantt diagram, mindmapping tools.... are also included. This Electronic Laboratory can either be deployed by:

yum or
a Fedora Electronic Lab LiveCD

Download Fedora Electronic Lab LiveCD NOW via torrent

Read the abstract, the flyer or its website for more details.

For Fedora 8's release, "Fedora Electronic Lab" targets mainly the Micro-Nano Electronic Engineering field. It introduces:

tools for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) Design Flow process to the Fedora Collection.
extra open source standard cell libraries supporting a feature size of 0.13µm. (more than 300 MB)
extracted spice decks which can be simulated with gnucap/ngspice or any spice simulators.
interoperability between various packages in order to achieve different design flows.

Fedora Electronic Lab 8 RC3

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 01:19:45 -0700

Fedora Electronic Lab 8 Release Candidate 3 has been released on the torrent site (http://torrent.fedoraproject.org).

Happy testing.

The abstract and the flyer for Fedora Electronic Lab are ready. Fill free to pass it over to your friends.

KDE: F8 Werewolf's Ksplash mockups

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:40:13 -0700

Following the discussion with Rex and Kevin on #fedora-kde(on F8 ksplash), here are the constraints:

have a proper color gradient from the splash_top to splash active/inactive bar

the actual inactive/active bar is with echo icons but fedora's kde uses crystal icons by default

not enough time before F8

My two mockups of F8 Werewolf's kplash mockups:
Which one do you prefer ?

OnlineDesktop/GetRunning - GNOME Live!

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:52:00 -0700