Free Software Linux

Following a request on #fedora-art I did this blog button (no worry, I am still going), so use it if you feel like:

The First Meet-up of the Art Team As both Martin and me will be present, we probably will pompously claim the first meet-up of the Fedora Art Team (Mo suggested the title): probably the first time when two active members of the Art Team will be in the same room, so join us if you are interested, this will take place most likely Saturday and we plan to keep a session about Fedora Art (F-10 themes, Echo, Nodoka, Art Team in general). Me and the hackfest

As planned, I attended the Romanian FLOSSCamp, a nice offline summer escape in the mountains. The weather was not our best ally, it was rainy and somewhat cold for this time of the year: But we got a good friend in the fire (Open Source):

Advice: when shoving down the throat of your Linux using co-worker/sysadmin your virus-laden Windows home computer expect him not to care and nuke from the orbit anything looking remotely suspect in the result of a virus scan, no matter if/how legit is it: keygens, password recoverers. keyloggers, Y!M spying tools...

Here is my brand new Eee PC 1000h running a [pretty much] standard Fedora 10 Alpha install (only the graphics are changed: Echo icons and a Gears wallpaper): After a quick testing of F9 and F10 Alpha I settled on F10, it ia a bit friendly with the hardware (no need to modprobe uvcvideo and at least the wired network card works).

Yesterday evening I was at home and with nothing else better to do watching a Stargate SG1 on TV (one of the very few Sci-Fi shows available on cable around here).Nothing spectacular, they were on a planet, drilling in rock to detonate some naquadah, when I saw this translation gem (translated back by me from Romanian to English) "decrease the package manager". WTF? It made no sense, what has to do a package manager with a drill? Then I put my distributive attention to work, the shows here are subtitled with the original soundtrack and remebered hearing something like "reduce the rpm" (or it was "reduce the rpms"?). Figures!

At the initiative of the Grupul pentru software liber (the Group for Free Software) there is an event organized in Romania for the first time this year: FLOSS Camp, on 29-30-31 August at Păltiniş, with the ideea to "take out of their houses all the people wanting to discuss or to exchange ideas and opinions about Free software".

Living in the Eastern Europe I wasn't brainwashed into Political Correctness but still have a scale of moral values (which may be different from those in, say USA or Australia) so I have a mental blockage of saying to someone directly "you suck" or "your work suck", even if there are times when I really fell a need to do so.

I won't comment about "the incident" at this time, there are lots of labels, flames and reactions about it. But I can draw some inspiration from it.

I started to crave for a recently released ultraportable notebook (a certain model), thinking seriously about buying one. What's the problem? The local sale strategy.I won't complain about the global strategy (even if there is enough room to complain: only a Windows version is available, to be followed only after a couple of months by the Linux counterpart, which will be underpowered - less RAM an poorer battery). My complaint is about local sales: all the stores offer only the pink version (rumours say black and white are supposed to be available in a couple of weeks). Like they want to get rid of the unwanted stock. Stupid move, who want to be seen in public using a pink laptop? They should have manufactured less units in this color.

When is a good time to use the "Impact" font? How about... never! Last week a friend of mine put on sale some stuff on an auction website (kind of local ebay, this is his the main activity of his small business) and when creating the page he had to choose a few style elements, the font being one of them.He selected the Impact font, thinking that such a name probably stands for a font that will catch attention from the readers. But being a Linux user, without the Microsoft Core Fonts installed (Impact is part of MS Core Fonts), he didn't saw how the font really looks, all he saw was a harmless san-serif fall-back option. And made it red, no less.

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.

Saturday, in our trip to Cluj, after the presentation and the party ended we still had a few hours to spend, so we went to the Botanical Garden.Close-up to a cactus As the entrance, we had to pay a small tax, 4 RON (a little over 1 EUR) but to be allowed to take photos, an additional tax of 20 RON (or five times the entrance ticket) was needed. Figuring there is no way the tax is worth the amount of pictures we can take, we went tu put our cameras (4 of us had cameras) in the backpack.

As announced, a group of Romanian Fedora contributors went Saturday at an event organized in Cluj-Napoca by Grupul pentru Software Liber. Now it is the time for a [heavy] illustrated report of the event (even more photos [*] can be found in our photo gallery): So, we leaved Bucharest Friday, with the night train:

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