Ivan Krstić essay on the state of OLPC

A very interesting and insightful post by Ivan Krstić about the recent disappointing changes at One Laptop Per Child, including a bit of prehistory of the project and ideas for the future.

Kiwilinux 8.04 released

First of all hello Planet GNOME readers, since I forgot to say this in the previous two posts, and thanks to Jeff for adding me. While I am still an Xfce user, I tend to contribute more to GNOME lately as the clear roadmap, strict release schedule and the active community make it the more appealing project.

Kiwilinux 8.04, the Ubuntu derivative mostly for Romanian and Hungarian users is released. It is package archive and schedule compatible with Ubuntu and the changes to it are minimal but important for first time Linux users. Switching back and forth between Ubuntu and Kiwi is very easy.

Here's the FAQ for those wondering why the world needs another distro and what's with the name, and here's the downloads page.

The question of which video player and codec stack to choose was settled, it is totem-gstreamer with the restricted codecs on the CD, with a workaround in totem to play the BBC News WMV streams. The package, along with the other changes to Ubuntu are in the Kiwilinux team's PPA in Launchpad. A signed mirror of that along with the Medibuntu repositories are the additions to the default Ubuntu archives.

Status of Sugar in Ubuntu 8.04

In this mail posted today to the Sugar mailing list you can find the current status of Sugar support in the Ubuntu8.04 official repositories. For those not familiar with it, Sugar is the novel graphical shell and collaborative learning environment developed for the One Laptop Per Child projects' XO laptop, but which can be run on any Linux box.

which is the most complete multimedia stack?

For the Kiwilinux derivative of Ubuntu one of the main goals has always been including reasonably complete support for multimedia content on the CD so the user does not need to search and install the bits needed for restricted formats.

By default Ubuntu uses Totem with the Gstreamer backend for both file based and streaming media.
The easy codec installation feature has made support for most restricted formats fairly straightforward although still incomplete in my experience.

So far our choice in Kiwi has been mozilla-mplayer for streaming and totem-xine as the standalone player. Libxine's maturity, better support of DVD subtitles and menus and more compact packaging - one package vs. 5-6 Gstreamer ones - made it a better pick.

For the 8.04 release I have briefly revisited the issue and I still cannot find a way of supporting the most common formats with only a single multimedia stack. The problems I have found so far include:

* VLC - although reportedly supports all conceivable formats the browser plugin is broken in Ubuntu 8.04
Bugs in Launchpad and upstream

* Totem-gstreamer - DVD menu support lacking (not a big issue but still) and apparently no consistent way of getting ASF streams to work (BBC News short videos for instance).

* Totem-xine - conflicts with PulseAudio, reported on the forums and LP and in my experience too; after a short while of playing audio goes mute and the app claims that the audio device is being used by another app.

* MPlayer - it seems to be closest to the goal but it does not have a decent and simple GUI like Totem (gnome-mplayer is promising but buggy)

I'd be happy to be proven wrong and given either the simple workaround for Xine and PulseAudio, a list of gst plugins that correctly play streaming media in the browser or an easy fix for VLC.
Until then like most other people I know I'll have all of these libs and players installed and use the most appropriate for each scenario :)

And Kiwi 8.04 is likely to include both Totem and MPlayer for the same reason just like the previous releases have.

biciclete, sambata

Anuntul pe reactieinlant.ro

Romania maintains OOXML approval

This past Tuesday the Romanian committee debated and voted over the OOXML issue, and the result remained 'Yes' as in September. Back then there were 12 committee members and the Yes/No/Abstain breakdown was 10:1:1 . This week 26 members voted, 13 of them joined the committee in the past two weeks, and even if almost all of the new members prominently feature the MS Partner logo on their websites the result was a much more balanced 15:6:5 . The debate was a relatively moderate argument between MS, a MS partner and three of us opposed to the fast track process. Many of the other members were probably waiting for it all to end, so we could vote and go home :) Can't blame them, it's not like they were interested or knowledgeable about the topic.

The ASRO rules state that only if consensus is reached should a final decision be made, but there's no clear rule to determine what to vote in such cases. An Abstain would have been much more logical, but it's up to them to decide.

For many more details in English check this blog, while Romanian readers can check out this one.


While I agree with the 'let's make free software better' part of Miguel's blog post I think he downplays the role of activism and non-development side of FOSS. It's not OOXML per se that people are pissed off by, but the nontransparent, often corrupt and hurried process by which it is being pushed along and which in turn will affect FOSS - bug count, codebase size, compatibility issues and user confusion to name a few.

As a somewhat stretched analogy: Miguel, how about instead of you criticizing the Bush administration and their cohorts, and praising Kucinich, Gravel, Paul or Obama you just accept whatever the mainstream media produces without a word, and run for Congress yourself? 'start walking' as you say in your post :) (nb: from what I read on Miguel's blog I agree with his political views)

There needs to be awareness among non-technical users of the implications of software and data freedom or else we're simply left with 'open source'.

Document Freedom Day

Today, four days earlier than the rest of the world, we have held a small event attended by about 20 people including a local TV crew to celebrate the first Document Freedom Day. Adi and I gave two short presentations on open standards and their benefits, document formats, ODF , OOXML and the latter's ongoing and embarrassing standardization process. Even if OOXML is labeled 'Open Standard' soon by ISO, we're determined to continue the campaign of raising awareness and trying to educate the Romanian public about the merits of opennes and true interoperability.