The Final Zone project

A strange problem occured on the computer when I installed Fedora Core 5. For odd reason, GRUB will appears on text mode without bootscreen. This is the first time that problem occured as I didn't have any problem with previous release dual booting with Windows XP. It turned out the BIOS for Asus A7S8X-MX will refuse to recognize GRUB so I had to boot Fedora using the Ultimate Boot CD. I have the latest version of BIOS update. I learned that motherboard was really cheap so I already order a new motherboard with Athlon 64 +3200. It will be the first time I will enter into a 64 bit hardware world. I will still use x86 Fedora Core and I plan to use x86_64 only for Rawhide testing.

Finally, Fedora Core 5 is available. This distribution is special for me as an active contributor for the documentations, translations and my first ever package for the Fedora community Gdesklets since my first encounter with Fedora developers, contributors and some Red Hat staff during San Francisco LinuxWorld 2006. Pratically, Jeremy Katz' blog summarized the moment for developping Fedora Core 5. I am currently waiting for the torrent to complete and will possibly write a simple review.

All of effort translating Fedora Overview vanished with the crash of Firefox on Fedora Rawhide edition 2006-02-21. >. I am too tired to redo it again so I will rest to fully complete this long task.

Good news : I finally made my first Fedora Rawhide livecd using Kadischi Bad news : the iso is 864.3Mb using the default installation which is way about 700MB from CD-R. Workaround : I will have to strip down the number of unnecesarry packages for a LiveCD In memory of my Grand Mother (1922-2006)

Packages Bytes Time │ │ Total : 717 1677M 2:47:14 │ │ Completed: 636 1381M 2:17:42 │ │ Remaining: 81 296M 0:29:31 | Good to see the desktop space reduced to 1.4GB

As Fedora testers know, system-config-packages is retired and replaced by Pirut. That new frontend package manager share some look to its predecessor. The major different is the use of yum as backend. Currently still in early development, I tested Pirut with the inclusion of Freshrpms, a third party repository. Interestingly, Pirut is able to detect these third parties pacakge when setting in list mode. Unfortunately, Pirut won't let user to select the same packages to install under browser mode. It lloks like some yum command needs to be sorted out.

Just saw Mono packages in rawhide. It seems legal issues are settled but I am unable to get a clear details. I am not alone on these question as some Fedora developers want clarification. According to Paul W.Frields, it seems to have to do with this blog Doesn't it make sense to just announce the settlement about Mono before submitting it on rawhide repository? Nevertheless, I hope Fedora team knows what they are doing. It looks like a short term solution.

All I can say about the incoming Fedora Core 5 Test 2 theme is: wow. The bootspash screen, the login session screen and the wallpaper got a nice treatment courtesy of Diana Fong, a Red Hat graphic design. Only downside are the icons that seems to look out of place. I wonder if there are decent artists that can make icons for the whole desktop environment (Gnome, KDE, XFCE to name a few).

At last, gdesklets version 0.35.2 is available on Fedora Extras for all architectures. Rawhide version did not build due to the new dependancies caused by the modular X11R7. I fixed it by adding libXau and libXdmcp development as Build requirement. Thank you Fedora developers for making gdesklets possible on Fedora and I am glad to have Warren Togami as sponsor.

An user from Fedora Forum created an interesting wallpaper with Fedora new logo . I added on my rawhide desktop to see if it fits to the new clearlook theme.

I decided to display the srpms I have done for Fedora Extras extras. It is my first package I built from scratch. As the result, it took me 21 rebuilts especially related to the symlink. I had to use some hacks until I found a way to do a better symlink. The binary is functional though. Have fun rebuilding it. I am open to improve the spec files. gdesklets-0.35.2-21.src.rpm

Ahem.... 1...2..3... My first contact with the world of blog aka livejournal. I am currently involved in Fedora Project. Current objectives are translating Fedora Project website in French. Fortunately, there is another french translator so the task will be much easier. I am currently waiting for gdesklets packages to be reviewed further now that I got sponsorshed by Warren Togami, Fedora Project founder and Red Hat employee. It tooks me 21 compiles to make sure gdesklets follows Fedora Extras norm. From fedoraforum.org, I learned the existance of adesklets . Hopefully someone will choose to port this package for Fedora Extras.