For software
Having used Vim for over 8 years, and it being the only application that I stuck to while changing distributions, window managers, desktop environments, browsers, mail clients and other bits, it was high time I 'bought a license' for it. The money actually goes to a children center in Uganda.
Assignment: come up with a parallel involving emacs and money going into Nigeria.Then look up both countries on the map if you do not already know where they are.
I have never directly payed for software before: when using Windows many years ago, it was (and to a large extent it still is today) normal for home users in Romania to just pirate it along with any other app they needed. I guess I have at least partially payed that back when purchasing a laptop with Windows ME preinstalled and purging it within a day and by having a percentage of my taxes continually being spent by our institutions on buying their software.
For content
Wikipedia is the only site I'd really miss if the Internet went the way of the parrot, so I felt that in this case too a donation could only begin to express my appreciation for the wasted tim^W^W value I got out of it during the years.
I have previously bought PDF or paper books after reading free online versions of them (sometimes earlier editions only), but that is different, you actually buy something new in that case.
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Until now, since 7.04, a new Kiwi Linux was released within days of a major Ubuntu launch, slightly deriving the original image for an even easier experience for newbies, Windows refugees and Romanian and Hungarian speakers.
With 8.10 however I broke this habit for a few reasons. I had much less free time at the end of October, Ubuntu came out very late in the month leaving very few days for testing, releasing and still being able to call it 8.10 without cheating, and not least, the Ibex seemed to have quite a few hardware support regressions on the computers I use.
So the next release will be 8.12, due in the first half of December.
It will include among others 8.10 updates, wubi that actually installs Kiwi and not Ubuntu, and OpenOffice 3.0.
The archives already have OO 3 (copied from scribblers PPA and with updated Romanian translations) and as another novelty the Jaunty archive is enabled long before release, so it does not break Kiwi users' setups who will wish to test the Ubuntu development branch.0Add a comment
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While Pidgin differs from most other projects in its pick of revision control tool (Monotone, and probably a good choice at the time they switched last year IIRC) it's not this choice in itself that makes it the hardest project to start 'following' from what I've seen so far.
Regardless of the tool and project, most initial checkouts look something like this
$VCS $GETCMD [$OPTIONS] $URL
and you get a directory with the source code ready to study and build.
Not for Pidgin.
There's a page that describes the method, including the script you run, and a link to the 210Mb tarball of the repo you download first in order to not tax the servers with getting all the history via Monotone itself.
Fortunately there's a mirror of this on github. Unfortunately it's not regularly updated.
I know the Pidgin developers are busy and probably grown used to Monotone but I still hope they will just switch to git sooner rather than later.
I suspect Open Office is even more annoying to get started on, but OO is a different category of project anyway.9View comments
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Stephen, while Connecticut failed at the specific aspect of democracy you mention, it sure beat California at common sense, decency and tolerance. You have just cheered for an unfortunate manifestation of a weakness of democracy, namely the tyranny of the majority.
By this logic, if 80% of the electorate voted for kicking the other 20% in the nuts we should be happy that democratic values are upheld. So I am inclined to believe that your and others' problem is not that the Connecticut decision was made by 8 judges, but rather the decision itself.
I have read plenty of argumented pro gay-marriage posts in the blogospehere, but nothing similar from the opposing side. Stephen or anyone care to write one up and explain what are the benefits in this case of making other people feel miserable :) ? I am truly interested in plausible arguments convincingly written up in one's own words and not just in links to websites.
thank you18View comments
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Ar fi foarte convenabil să existe câteva şabloane de documente pentru OpenOffice Writer, specifice pentru România. Tipare pentru cereri, chitanţe, facturi, documente standard ce se trimit prin şcoli şi ministere. Un astfel de set de documente puse în domeniul public, afişate pe situl ro.openoffice.org şi împachetate pentru distribuţii Linux ar reprezenta un argument în plus pentru OO, să nu trebuiască scrise de la zero în cazul utilizatorilor noi.
Deci cei care au aşa ceva sunt rugaţi frumos să le pună undeva online şi să lase un comentariu, să vedem cum le putem aduna şi organiza. Nu trebuie să fii programator să ajuţi la îmbunătăţirea şi răspândirea softului liber :)1View comments
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While it could be an innocent oversight, branding 10/100Mbps ethernet switches as GigaX is most likely intentionally misleading. Some of the ASUS GigaX family switches are indeed supporting 1000Mbps Gigabit ethernet, but many aren't.0
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My webcam which used to work in Hardy no longer works with the new kernel in Intrepid and I realized this too late to report it during the devel cycle. The chip is shown by lsusb as
0ac8:303b Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. ZC0303 WebCam
and was probably working in Hardy because of the different drivers used in that kernel. The latest upstream includes the gspca driver family which has not been confirmed to work on all possible models it probably supports.
I reported it in LP and kernel bugzilla.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/292086
and it was recently spotted in Mandriva as well, being the same 2.6.27 kernel with GSPCA in it.
https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=45170
I did not comment on the Mandriva tracker as I do not have an account there. Even if all distros and upstreams will not unite in the near future under a single bugtracker like Launchpad, it would be nice if they supported OpenID at least.
Until the patch is applied those with such a webcam can make it work on a recent x86 Intrepid by adding 'blacklist zc0301' in the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file and by running this as root
#xxd /lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/kernel/drivers/media/video/gspca/gspca_zc3xx.ko |sed '/^000a370:/ s/1b30/3b30/' |xxd -r | sponge /lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/kernel/drivers/media/video/gspca/gspca_zc3xx.ko
It just replaces another chip's USB ID in the driver with ours' and the gspca_zc3xx module should recognize it now. The sponge command is in the moreutils package.
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