Software Free

Some of us are Fedora and this is a good thing. Some other people are not Fedora, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
The important thing is that the video kicks ass and I am trying for some time to get hold of a camera and a few local contributors to make a local video about that.

In unrelated news, even I am not much into micro-blogging myself, it seems that all the cool kids are doing it, so I have to join the bandwagon.

Much to my shame (one should not talk about elections if he didn't bother to vote), I didn't vote for the Fedora board. Why? I think any of them would do a good job on the board and do not know them enough to say if one or another would do a better or worse job.
Also, I am not close enough to anyone to vote him only on a friendship basis (probably that would be equally worse from a democratic point of view).
However, voters, candidates, winners: congratulations to all!

The regular readers of Planet Fedora probably noticed a new (and very cool) webcomic K3RNEL from Mexico. Some competition for this webcomic.

Of course nodoby is going to war, I know they have a mighty army, so will just claim the two webcomics have completely different styles, formats, stories, graphics and both can live happily together.

Make fun not war!

After a few weeks of pause, Fedora Weekly News is back in full force, giving each week an interesting read.
While I may have lied a bit about the nudity part, the rest is true, and true is that it could use some more contributors, so join the team!

Can I resist playing the running meme on Planet Fedora? Of course not, and of course I temporarily changed my hackergotchi to fit it.

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:

1. One weapon
2. One song blasting on the speakers
3. One famous person to fight along side you.

1. Emerald Sword - see next item for additional info
2. Emerald Sword - while I could go for many other (and maybe better) choices from a Rhapsody of Fire compilation, I will go with Emerald Sword to give the needed background info for the previous item
3. Aerie - the wise choice would be a cleric with the Turn Undead ability, but I have a soft spot for elvish companions, so Aerie is.

As some people are confused about the "technical difficulties" of having their blog added (or re-added) to Planet Fedora, here is a small screencast about how to do it. So can you still honestly say the barrier is to high?

The screencast is made with OGG Theora so it should work out-of-the-box in Fedora (or any Linux distro), but if there is anyone "technically challenged" that much so it is too hard, I uploaded the clip also to YouTube:

Everybody likes to set a clever publicity stunt when doing a release and for FF3 which will be (or for some of us already is) a major the Fedora guys are planning to break a Guinness World Record:

For me this is a kind of moral dilemma: I want to help a bit spreading FF3, but I don't want to lie, all my machines running FF3 will receive it either as an yum update or as an FF3 automatic update (from RC to final), depending on the OS, therefore not counted by their system. What do you do, pledge or not?

Who doesn't enjoy taking sides in a megatheread?

PS: If you think I am not funny enough, just hit me with ideas in comments.

As disappointing as it may be, my countdown has ended and it was related to my webcomic... sorry if you had greater expectations :D

Anything that's put on the web is measurable and the measurements for my Fedora webcomic showed unsatisfactory results, so I had two options either to drop it or make it better. Being excessively stubborn, dropping was not an option so the only way remaining was trying to improve, and as I can't improve the humor (as it defines me as a person) I worked on the graphics. So here is today's edition:

One more webcomic created in April (the last one, cross my heart), but this time I have an excuse: it was made for the release week the release got delayed, so my webcomic too (but next week...)

With my effort to translate it into Romanian I inflicted the translation pain of having to translate untranslatable expressions and play-on-words, which reminded me why I hate translations.

And 8-1=7:

Is not hard to imagine cool stuff we can do with photos of people, see gregdek's idea about hackergotchi stickers, the old call for photos by Mo to promote spins, or a couple of ideas from me (Anaconda slides or fp.o front page banners), you know, things which could "emphasize the human nature of Fedora and the people behind the project" (he, he).

But we have a big blocker: lack of such photos... photos of Fedora contributors and enthusiasts which we allow us to use their photos (the approval part is very important).

So here is an idea: next week Fedora 9 release parties will gather all around the world a lot of right people in the right mood, so get your cameras, get approval from the subjects and let the photos flood. I am sure we can find crafty way to put them to good use.

Powering robots since 2005. 'Nuff said. Now bow to your robotic overlords.

If you noticed the date for this comic, yes, it was made in April and the next issue is also made in April (that one was made for the release week and I had to delay it) but, I promise, after that there is a surprise waiting...

Last week experimented with translations for the webcomic, without success which drives me to one of those two conclusions: either is to complicated to use PO files and translating directly from Inkscape is simple enough, or I have to grow the webcomic and improve its quality to become translation worthy, so back to simple SVG this week.

I didn't forgot about the mysterious countdown, here is the current count:

I was so carried away with the idea of the Fedora 9 release countdown that I couldn't stop myself from creating a counter for a "personal" project (the counter is plain and boring: static images, without any scripting or autoupdate):

Now, obviously, the bets are open for what I am counting down to...

Do you remember the Fedora stickers kit I talked a about a few days ago? Here is an usage suggestion:

And in related news, my webcomic goes international! With baby steps, of course.

The first attempt was made by myself, I translated by hand the SVG (this is the advantage of having access to the source) and created a webcomic section on the Romanian Fedora community website.

On a strange coincidence, about at the same time lkundrak asked me for PO files, for proper translation, which make me to think of a proper solution. Then all I had to do was to remember I read a while ago about a piece by Andy about translating SVG, search for it and:

After the latest issue of my webcomic, where I touched the Ubuntu release subject, I received a healthy amount of feed-back (I said you then, a bit of controversy is good) and the piece I thins stands out the best is this blog reply from Cypress:

Well, Cypress, I give you a 7 (seven) for the effort and for finding a good looking stock photo.

At a second thought, the "rpm hell" joke is so ooooold and the "old tractor" metaphor is wrong (a much better metaphor/joke on Fedora would be as a to new, unproven technology) that it make me think I was too generous with a 7, but I already said "seven" and "seven" is.