After I tried OpenSolaris 2008.11, I also tried Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10, each for almost one day. Creation of bootable USB stick: For both distributions, I created a bootable USB stick because it is faster to install from USB than from CD/DVD. The creation was easy in both cases. Fedora ships a shell script and Ubuntu a graphical program for this task. Both very equally easy to use. **Booting from USB: **Both distributions booted perfectly from USB. ... Read more 》

The installation was fast and easy, comparable to the installation of Ubuntu. OpenSolaris seems to have big problems in terms of wireless LAN. I am using a WPA/WPA2 encrypted wireless LAN, and it asked to me to enter my passphrase. I entered it, and nothing happened. I was able to get wireless working via commandline, but this lead me to the problem that domain names were not resolved. I could solve this, too. ... Read more 》

If you use wordpress.com, and added a Gravatar, always use the Atom feeds for Planet installation. There seem to be some problems with parsing the code, i.e. planet seems to understand media:title from your gravatar in the rss feed as the title of the post (therefore, the title of this post would be juliank). The URL of the feed is http://juliank.wordpress.com/feed/atom/, replace juliank with the name of your blog.

I worked a bit with some Gentoo systems the last days and it was no fun. The whole compiling thing is no fun. In fact, it is a danger for the environment. If every computer in the world run Gentoo, power consumption would increase dramatically. There would also be no netbooks, as they are almost unusable for running Gentoo on it, compiling software. The path chosen by binary distributions like Debian is much better. ... Read more 》

The most important birthdays in the FLOSS world this year (where age mod 5 = 0): * **10 years: **Google (September), Open Source Initiative (February) * **15 years:** Debian, FreeBSD, NetBSD * **25 years:** GNU * **35 years:** Ian Murdock (April), Mark Shuttleworth (September) * **55 years:** Richard Stallman (March)

I’m now an SPI contributing member.

On Monday, I joined Software in the Public Interest (SPI). I’m currently a non-contributing member and have already applied for contributing membership. MJ Ray asked why people do and dont join SPI, and received answers. Not knowing SPI is no good reason, at least if you are participating in Debian’s development, and you should really know SPI if you are a Debian Developer. For me, personally, not joining the SPI would not make any sense. ... Read more 》

After playing a bit with gst-launch, I found out that it can convert music files and keeps the tags. Therefore, I think it would be great to rewrite dir2ogg using gstreamer (the python bindings). This version of dir2ogg will be much much smaller, and is really easy to extend. It will also support multiple output formats and does not need to know about the input files (use -i ‘SHELL PATTERN’ to include other files). ... Read more 》

Every time I receive an email at my ubuntu.com address, and respond to it, Evolution uses my jak@jak-linux.org e-mail address. It should be noted that the e-mails are fetched with a single account, as they are on an imap server, and because ubuntu.com is a forward address. Is there any way to make Evolution respond with the e-mail address at which I received an email? BTW, work on debimg 0.0.4ubuntu1 (previously 0. ... Read more 》

This is a summary of most of my activities since end of march. BTW, I’m still at the T&S step in NM since January (I completed P&P in about 3 days). Also, thank you Tolimar for being the second DD signing my key! GNOME 2.22 (Python) / Updated Packages At the end of march, I updated some GNOME packages. These packages were gnome-python and gnome-python-desktop. The upload of gnome-python-desktop was really important, because the old version depended on libtotem-plparser7, which was not available anymore, and FTBFS because the metacity API changed. ... Read more 》