A somewhat neutral observation

I don’t get it. There’s a huge bunch of people, users and contributors, throwing mud at each other in the name of their favorite Free Software project. Online on blogs, identi.ca, forums, mailing lists and virtually any form of communication known to the broader Free Software community. Most blog posts have no actual content, but are just slurs and hatred wrapped in nice rhetoric. Both sides seem to largely have lost the ability or will to talk to each other. What I’m observing is the GNOME/Canonical debate.

On the GNOME side, people accuse Canonical of not working together with the GNOME project. Most of the controversy seems to evolve around the decision to use the desktop that started as an in-house Canonical project called Unity instead of the new GNOME Shell in the upcoming release of Ubuntu. Supporters of GNOME seem to see that as an open attack on their project, or something like that. Much of the argument is also fueled by past and present Canonical “mistakes” like moving the window buttons, their policy of copyright assignment and most recently the change of the Banshee Amazon affiliate ID.

On the Canonical side, it seems people are sick and tired of receiving a ton of hate mail for every little change they make. I could imagine that having to justify that they’re working on a Free Software project and giving it away for free can be quite frustrating for Canonical employees and Ubuntu community members. After all everything they do (at least on the desktop) is completely Free Software.

Now, when I see both sides putting so much effort into the discussion, I am asking myself:
What do they try to achieve?

The thing is, that’s not that easy to answer. Of course everyone speaking/writing on this subject may try to achieve something else, but the general tone I seem to hear is:
GNOME: Use GNOME Shell in your next release and abandon your non-upstream stuff like Unity, Application Indicators, Messaging Menu etc or at least integrate it into GNOME Shell.
Canonical: We would really like to keep using that stuff, leave us alone already.

Let’s broaden the perspective a bit. Let’s move away from the current discussion and look at what the projects, GNOME and Ubuntu, try to achieve. Because I think they have a common goal, and actually a very similar vision of how that goal should look like. A Free Software desktop, easy to use, elegant, with a unified user experience and a unified developer experience. In short, a Free Software desktop operating system and platform that is able to compete with the proprietary alternatives. This also includes an App Store/Software Center. Let me show you two screenshots.

GNOME 3 in the Fedora 15 Alpha

Unity in Ubuntu 10.10

Does this look like a different vision to you? Does this look so different to you that it’s worth having a heated argument about it? To me it seems that GNOME and Ubuntu still share the same vision, and also have very similar understandings of the concrete manifestation of a Free Software desktop. This is what the Ubuntu community means when they say they are still a GNOME distro. Canonical tweaked the desktop over several releases with the introduction of App Indicators, the MeMenu etc etc and presented Unity as an end result of this, while the GNOME people got their Shell ready and ported most of the core applications to GTK3.

Now the final release of Unity for standard desktops and the final release of GNOME 3 (which will first be included in a major distro in Fedora 15) are soon to happen. It’s not a new phenomena in Free Software communities that when two projects are equally good and it doesn’t look like one is going to cease development anytime soon (it is my point of view that Unity and GNOME Shell are currently equally good desktops, I’m trying to be as objective as possible here), a huge flame war starts. These are almost never based on “technical” arguments, only sometimes based on project politics, and all of the times pure personal preference. The latter also applies in this case. You might argue about Canonical’s decision finding process, or the way they develop software, but they release working software that obviously pleases its users. This is Free Software. Even if you don’t like the company developing it, in the end only the code matters, and whether the users like it. The freedom is not going away.

What I’m trying to say is: Are the points brought up against Canonical really that grave? Grave enough to justify a major split of the Free Software Desktop? Can’t two projects with such similar goals, such similar visions and such a shared history as GNOME and Ubuntu stop the turf war and try to get things done together? And if that’s not possible for reasons I fail to see right now, at least accept and respect the existence of each other? If Google launches Chrome OS soon, I’m sure they’ll put all their force behind it, and I don’t think there will be enough space left for a fourth major player on the desktop market after that. This might be the last chance for the Free Software Desktop. Can we unite, or will we go down fighting each other?

An extraordinary request

Hey everybody, I thought I’d share an E-Mail I wrote recently. I was inspired by Jezra’s letters to Dell and Google, but didn’t actually have the patience to find out Steve Ballmers postal address. So I just sent it to his Microsoft e-mail address. I’m still waiting for an answer and will update this post if he eventually responds…

To: steveb@microsoft.com
Subject: An extraordinary request

Hello Mr. Ballmer,
my name is Julian Aloofi, I'm a 17 years old pupil, currently living in
Germany, and interested in PCs and especially programming. I'm a very
satisfied user of Windows Vista (I'll upgrade to 7 with my next computer
soon, I promise!) and generally tinkering with the .NET framework.

Well, why am I writing to you?
I heard rumors on the internet that you threw a chair at one of your
employees. Maybe you heard about this as well yet. I don't even want to
talk about whether this was right or not, it's your chair after all.
However, my chair recently broke, and while I was looking for a new
chair, I thought that the best chair I could think of possibly is this
very chair. If someone owns a good office chair, who but not the CEO of
Microsoft?
Would I ask too much if I'd ask you to send this chair to me? I know it
probably doesn't mean much to you, but just imagine how happy you'd make
a small german boy. If you're interested, write me back so I can tell
you the postal address. My eternal gratefulness is of course guaranteed.

Best regards and a happy and successful New Year,
Julian Aloofi

 

PS: Yes, I'm serious!

I just hope he doesn’t find out about the operating system I actually use…

By the way, I made some new packages for eViacam. They should contain no errors, regarding the application itself and packaging guidelines compliance. You can find 32-bit packages on my fedorapeople space. 64-bit users will have to rebuild the latest SRPM for now. If you try them and something breaks, please let me know!

OpenRheinRuhr 2010

Hi there everybody,

in a couple of weeks, the OpenRheinRuhr 2010 will take place in Oberhausen in Germany. It’s a fairly young and promising Free Software conference and of course Fedora will be present as well! Apart from that, although the presence of Fedora alone makes the whole thing awesome enough, there will be various different projects from all corners of the Free Software world and a broad range of talks. If you happen to own an Android phone, you can install the OpenRheinRuhr Android app from the market and start planning

If that sounds interesting to you, come join us and have some fun embracing Free Software and just generally chitchatting at the Fedora Booth on 13th and 14th November.

By the way, I think the OpenRheinRuhr could still use some helpers, so if you’d like to lend a hand check out the helpers page.

PS: Don’t you forget to vote for the Fedora 15 release name. Together, we can make Asturias happen!

Running Grim Fandango in Wine

This post is a short guide for running Grim Fandango in Wine under Fedora. I’m mostly writing it for myself so I don’t forget what I did, but I’m sure other people will benefit from it as well, because I just wasn’t able to get Grim Fandango running with the popular guides from other places. I tested this under Fedora, but there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work in other distributions as well.

So, let’s jump right into it:

1.) Install Wine, obviously
1.1) If you have it enabled, temporarely disable SELinux with setenforce 0 as root

2.) Start winecfg
2.1) Don’t choose to install Gecko, you don’t need it for the game

3.) Set the Windows version to Windows 98
3.1) Open the “Audio” tab and select your preferred driver. The default one should generally work
3.2) In “Drives”, select “Add”, choose the “Path” to your mounted Grim Fandango Disc 1 (or a folder on your hard drive containing all files from the Disc 1), open advanced settings and select “Type” CD-ROM

4.) Go to ~/.wine/dosdevices/d: (or whatever letter you gave to the CD drive) and run wine SETUP.EXE
4.1) Follow the instructions on the screen to install
4.2) If it asks you to setup your joystick, don’t do that. It crashes the installer over here. I didn’t try using a joystick, so if you want to use one you’ll have to figure that out yourself
4.3) If it asks you, install DirectX 6.0

5.) Go to ~/.wine/dosdevices/d: again, enter the folder PATCH and run wine start /unix GFUPD101.EXE
5.1) If you don’t have that folder, download and apply the patch from ftp://ftp.lucasarts.com/patches/pc/Gfupd101.exe

6.) Download the Grim Fandango Launcher from http://quick.mixnmojo.com/grim-fandango-launcher (or if that’s down, the older version from http://www.grimfandango.net/?page=launcher)
6.1) Unzip the launcher and launch the .exe with wine
6.2) If you want to, you can go to “Options” and select “Run Grim from Hard Drive”. If it asks you to override files, always select no to save time, or select “Yes to all” if you’re lazy. It won’t make a difference.
When it asks you for Disc B, just open winecfg and point the CD drive to the mounted disc B (or a folder on your hard drive containing the files from disc B)
Note that it may look like the program froze or crashed, but it’s just copying files so give it a bit of time
6.3) Select “Run Windowed”. When the game started, press F1. If you can see the menu, you’re done! Go directly to step 8

7.) If you can’t see the menu when pressing F1, press F1 and do: Arrow Down, Enter, Arrow left, Enter
This will exit the game. Don’t just kill the process or hit Ctrl+C
7.1) Go to ~/.wine/drive_c/ and navigate to the install folder, usually Program Files/LucasArts/Grim/
7.2) Run wine GRIMFANDANGO.EXE -h. That should fix it

8.) Never ever change the ingame graphics options

9.) Make a nice shortcut somewhere to launch the “Grim Fandango Launcher.exe”, and always play in windowed mode. Maybe Fullscreen works for you as well, but it definitely doesn’t over here

PS: If you think this was too hard, support the Residual project!