why do we think one size can create all?

Why is it we think that we can build a server and a desktop and a mobile platform and a computational cluster platform and EVERYTHING out of a single tree of pkgs and a single kernel? Is it not possible that easy, functional and versatile is too many things to ask for and keep everyone getting along?

I’m going to suggest something radical:

fedora server should be a complete tree branch – with its own criteria for admittance of pkgs and updates

fedora should continue as is with the focus being the desktop and targetted the user that the board defined a little while back:

http://lwn.net/Articles/358865/

specifically:

 We found four defining characteristics that we
believe best describe the Fedora distribution's target audience:
Someone who (1) is voluntarily switching to Linux, (2) is familiar
with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer, (3) is
likely to collaborate in some fashion when something's wrong with
Fedora, and (4) wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either
using desktop applications or a Web browser.

Perfect, right? We can focus on the issues of a server and of cutting the edge of what servers need while the desktop-oriented folks make a great desktop (or desktops) and we don’t have to have these pitched battles over systemd and networkmanager and policykit and what not.

sounds like a winner to me.

wow

Just

plain

wow

That is almost as good as this

searching package tags from the pkgdb

In the last round of roll outs the fedora packagedb added tags and ratings to the site. A great bit of work by mbacovsk, maploin and toshio made this happen. I added support for yum to use the db  that the pkgdb can spit out, searching on the tags for pkgs, provided that the info is in the repodata. It’s not quite percolated to the top of anyone’s list to get it into the repodata in bodhi. However with the advent of repos.fp.o I now have a good place to store this and make it accessible to users.

So make sure you have yum updated on your system – at least yum 3.2.26.

1. Grab this file: http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/skvidal/PkgTags/fedora-PkgTags.repo and stuff it in /etc/yum.repos.d/ on your system

2. run: yum search sometag someothertag someothertag

That’s it!

I’ll update the repo ever so often until the round-tuits are compiled for it to be added into the updates repodata automagically.

Fedora App Market Proof of Concept.

Yesterday someone was talking about installing apps in fedora and how it was hard to figure out what to install/try b/c there were too much STUFF in fedora. They suggested an ‘app store’ like functionality. I explained that all the resources to do something like that exist in the infrastructure yum and friends offer now. I decided to prove that concept a bit.

The concept of an ‘app’ is pretty amorphous but I decided to just use what Colin Walters said was his definition of an ‘app’ – which is any pkg containing a .desktop file. So I just whipped up a simple tool to dump out an xml-file of a format yum is already familiar with based on that criteria:

http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/appfinder.py

Running that generates an xml file with only the ‘apps’ defined.

Great. Then I wrote a yum plugin to access and use this data.

and I stuck it in this repo

1. copy this file into /etc/yum.repos.d/

2. run: yum install yum-plugin-appmarket

Now yum will have a few new commands available to it:

app-install    Install an App
app-list       List Apps
app-remove     Remove an App
app-search     Search for an App

Some examples:

yum app-search yum

won’t turn up ‘yum’ but it will turn up ‘yumex’.

Fancy, huh?

Now, the concept of an app can be refined in many ways but this is just to prove that the infrastructure has been available.

Eight years on

Eight years ago I sent this incredibly romantic email to a person who had started to respond to me directly from the dulug mailing list:

Subject: Re: [Dulug] red hat 7.3 install help
From: seth vidal
To: Eunice Chang
Date: 11 Aug 2002 00:17:36 -0400

On Sat, 2002-08-10 at 15:23, Eunice Chang wrote:
> okay, happy news! it works for me!
>
> one thing, though. i use gnome x windows, and i was wondering how one can
> change the display– i had the gnome ximian setup tools, but they don’t work
> in 7.3.
>
> now that i have 7.3 up and running, what else do i need to do?

Change the display to do what? If you mean the resolution then you’ll
want to go to a text-console (ctrl-alt-f1) then login as root and run
Xconfigurator.

-sv

Eight years later I’m not doing as much tech support for her but we do support each other.

fedoras are hot

According to spam miss chang got today: