openSUSE 10.3 Steaming Up the Mirrors
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The openSUSE team finally announced a quite highly anticipated release: openSUSE 10.3 :-). Aside from the distribution itself being technically great, the release itself also went really well and appears to have hit nearly all the major Linux News-related websites, as you would expect.
The torrents have many thousand seeders, the news story has had over 80 comments of praise in a matter of a few hours already, and the mirrors have been pumping gigabytes out per-second. For the first day, apart from our great Released Version Mirrors, we have also adopted the services of akamai, which is for mission-critical delivery of web content. Christoph informed us earlier that It has been averaging at piping out a massive 12Gbit/s, with peaks at around 14Gbit/s! With all the other gigabit-backbone mirrors working, it’s hard to imagine what kind of speeds we’re hitting overall.
Despite the huge load and though the wiki was crawling for a short period, the site has remained up and strong throughout. We’ve pushed out most of the load to the mirrors for now, with our trusty redirector doing the work.
The community contribution in this release is both huge and encouraging; I’m proud to be able to be a part of it :-). A huge thanks to everyone involved for making it such a great release!
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The holiness of technology
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I went to the FISCAR conference last week to talk about how rules and norms emerge in Free Software projects. After the talk, a colleague came up and said she had in particular liked a phrase I used in passing: the holiness of technology as a totem around which you can gather as a community. I had never meant to use such a term, but after thinking about it a bit, it’s beginning to make sense.
During the talk, I looked at three kinds of rules and how they emerge in a project where no party has the formal power to enforce any particular normative set. I talked about GNOME and their set of rules: contractual, technical, and social. At each level it is fairly easy to see the holiness of technology as the most important driving force for the emergence of rules.
At a basic contractual level, GNOME obvously has inherited the licensing culture of the Free Software tradition and the GNU project in particular. However, the holiness of technology has dictated the compromise of the LGPL into the GNU framework: a slightly more liberal license was written for licensing libraries, in order to advance Free Software in the long run. Consequently, the GNOME libraries tend to be LGPL, not GPL. This kind of licensing turned out to be an important advantage for GNOME. Most of the commercial software giants looking to port their applications to Linux or Unix desktop found the LGPL libraries more friendly to code against than Qt for example, when Qt used to be dual licensed with the GPL and Trolltech’s proprietary license. As a consequence, GNOME is the “business desktop” of the Free Software world.
Technical requirements are suggested in GNOME through Bugzilla wishlist bugs. The bug’s life span is as follows. A user is not happy with an application and suggests a change by filing a bug like “Feature X should be added to application Y, so that users could more easily do Z.” At this point everyone can agree that the feature would be beneficial for users, and it will be implemented in a future version. Everyone will be happy. However, quite often this is not the case. Commercial vendors may think the feature would not benefit their customers. The feature may be patented. The feature may even be politically incorrect in some countries. Usability regressions may occur. All these reasons however, can be reduced to technical arguments. Commercial success, international acceptability, compliance to law and accessablility standards of various countries all contribute to the growth of the user base. According to Linus’ Law, more users means better technical quality.
Last year, a proposal was made to create a code of conduct for the GNOME project, inspired Ubuntu’s similar document. The community rejected a detailed document like the Ubuntu CoC, but agreed to write down a minimal list of principles to point to. No discussion forum is more obsessed with staying on topic than the mailing lists of Free Software projects. Idle chatter, flamewars and personal exchanges of opinion are noise. Noise in turn is bad, because it makes it more difficult for the community to focus on the problem at hand. Social rules emerge as a consequence. Digressions are directed to a more appropriate mailing list. Participants of flamewars and personal exchanges are encouraged to take them to personal mail. There are clear technical reasons for this of course: keeping the signal-to-noise ratio as good as possible contributes to the effectiveness of desicion making and problem solving on the list.
To make a gross simplification, the principles of software freedom are codified in the Copyleft licenses. The discussions on the GNOME Bugzilla and the mailing lists are codified in the Human Interface Guidelines. The basic set of mailing list rules are codified in the Code of Conduct. All these documents together form the basic set of rules that have emerged from the collective experience of a Free Software project as it has matured. It is the minimum amount of normative material extracted from mailing list archives, past desicions, and trial and error - to enable them to better work towards a technical goal.
In this manner, a large mature Free Software project resembles a rational bureaucracy with a firm contractual base, a set of technical standards and procedures, and social norms and taboos. This normative layer rests on an uncontested belief, in this case the advancement of technology.
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Installing Ubuntu Or Fedora From A Windows Or Linux System With UNetbootin
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Installing Ubuntu Or Fedora From A Windows Or Linux System With UNetbootin
UNetbootin
is a tool that allows you to install various Linux distributions
(Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Debian, ArchLinux) from a Windows
or a Linux desktop over the internet (i.e., you don’t need to burn the
Ubuntu, Fedora, … CDs). Unlike the Ubuntu installation with Wubi, real partitions are created during the installation. In the end, you have a dual-boot system (Linux/Windows or Linux/Linux).
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