Dear Hardware people

Today I spent a lovely time working on < redacted > hardware today. It takes 1 minute for the initial EFI to get to the point that the < redacted > BIOS screen comes up. It takes another minute for the system to get to the point where I can get a F1,F2,F12 entry. After that the UEFI takes another minute to time out because its looking for DHCP when I told it to boot statically. Then it takes 1 minute to initialize the Broadcom network and LSI controller.

AND THEN THE BLOODY LSI ONLY ACCEPTS CONTROL-C FOR 4 SECONDS before it goes to boot from the disk or PXE.

Please could you make the various hardware faster and make the prompt for making changes to the LSI a bit longer. kthnxbye.

[This rant brought to you by a person who missed the prompt for making changes to the LSI raid containers maybe 9 times because of various things happening while waiting long periods of time. I timed the amount of time it takes for the hardware and its pretty much down to the second 1 minute per step. This is also why server people really don't find boot-time races from upstart/systemd/etc all that relevant.]

Dear American Airlines

If you are going to treat me and my fellow passengers as cattle, please learn to do it from the best: South West. The lines move faster, the seats were more comfortable, and the flight while only having coffee and peanuts was nicer.

1. Please don't charge for luggage because it takes more time to load because everyone then tries to bring it on. And it takes longer to get out because people can't get their overstuffed luggage from the overhead compartments.
2. If you are going to charge for renting a pillow and blanket please have them aboard.
3. Please don't have your attendants shilling deals while we are trying to get into our uncomforable seats. The attendants don't like it when they are told what passengers think about it. (This was not me but I could hear it multiple times ahead of me.)
4. Please make sure the seats are working. Having my seat fall out when I was getting up did not help our confidence.
5. When designing your cattle drives, please use a humane design from Temple Grandin or such.

My vision of Fedora 20

I would like that Fedora 20 is the RPM based start-up friendly Debian.

I am going with "RPM based" because that is what we package with.. and have for a long time. I don't see that changing by Fedora 20.. well unless dpkg2 is even cooler than it sounds. [I had dreams of Fedora 10 using conary but those have faded so I am picking my battles a bit better this time :).]

By Debian, I am looking at its large number of packages, its open-books policies and 'organization', and its developer centred culture. I think Fedora has many of these and they are so primary in their being that trying to change them would be more futile than Sisyphus's task. However I believe we can improve on opening the books and having a charter that people understand and know.

Finally the hardest, "start-up friendly". By this I mean in the way that Adam Miller blogged about, the ability for a team of people to focus on developing the parts they really want to in a way that can be separate but also able to feed back those changes to 'upstream'. Thus if a team of people want to create, brand, enhance, (possibly) sell, support Kepi Linux they can. And if another group wants to focus on Nephelae Linux they can... and the Fedora Project is built around helping them start-up, improve, and feedback to Fedora. I guess what I want Fedora to be is an Incubator (as they called them in the 1990's.. they probably have some cloud name these days).

If we can do this I would love to focus on Nephelae. It would focus on web development and web developers. Its desktop would be lightweight and clean with contemporary artwork and fonts. Its work mode would be streamlined for spinning up test servers with the frameworks web developers care about and need. And it would make sure they were easily manageable from the web developers desktop whether local or a 1000 miles away in a co-location. [Thanks to the person who started this idea for me.]

So Fedora would continue to grow and probably stay as "chaotic" as it has been, but it would also allow for people to build a focused product that meets their needs.

Need help from other distros and old RH distros

So what started as a minor exercise in updating names of Red Hat Linux, turned into a large table of packages for not just Red Hat Linux, Fedora and Debian. I would like to add in Ubuntu, Mandriva and SuSE also at some point.. but this is what I got from downloads this weekend:

Red Hat Linux	Release Name	Date of Release	# of .src.rpms	kernel	glibc	gcc	XFree86
0.8	Preview	1994-??-??
0.9	Halloween	1994-10-31
1.0	Mother's Day	1995-??-??
1.1	Mother's Day2	1995-??-??
2.0	NoName	1995-??-??
2.1	No Name 2	1995-??-??
3.0.3	Picasso	1996-03-15
4.0	Colgate	1996-10-03
4.1	Vanderbilt	1997-02-03
4.2	Biltmore	1997-04-24	373	2.0.30 (2.0.36)	libc 5.3.12	2.7.2.1	3.2 (3.3.5)
5.0	Hurricane	1997-10-10	385	2.0.32 (2.0.36)	2.0.5c (2.0.7)	2.7.2.3	3.3.1 (3.3.3.1)
5.1	Manhatten	1998-05-07	405	2.0.34 (2.0.36)	2.0.7	2.7.2.3	3.3.2 (3.3.3.1)
5.2	Apollo	1998-10-12	434	2.0.36	2.0.7	2.7.2.3	3.3.2.3 (3.3.5)
6.0	Hegwig	1999-04-19	476	2.2.5 (2.2.17)	2.1.1 (2.1.3)	egcs-1.1.2	3.3.3.1 (3.3.5)
6.1	Cartmann	1999-09-26	500	2.2.12 (2.2.17)	2.1.2 (2.1.3)	egcs-1.1.2	3.3.5 (3.3.5)
6.2	Zoot	2000-03-08	511	2.2.14 (2.2.24)	2.1.3	egcs-1.1.2	3.3.6
7.0	Guinness	2000-08-28	568	2.2.16 (2.2.24)	2.1.92 (2.2.4)	2.96	4.0.1
7.1	Seawolf	2001-04-04	634	2.4.2 (2.4.20)	2.2.2 (2.2.4)	2.96	4.0.3 (4.1.0)
7.2	Enigma	2001-10-22	759	2.4.7 (2.4.20)	2.2.4	2.96	4.1.0
7.3	Valhalla	2002-05-06	815	2.4.18 (2.4.20)	2.2.5	2.96	4.2.0 (4.2.1)
8.0	Psyche	2002-09-30	838	2.4.18 (2.4.20)	2.2.93 (2.3.2)	3.2	4.2.0 (4.2.1)
9.0	Shrike	2003-03-31	839	2.4.20-NPTL	2.3.2	3.2.2	4.3.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux	Release Name	Date of Release	# of .src.rpms	kernel	glibc	gcc	XFree86
1 (6.2EE)	Zoot	2000-03-27	511	2.2.14 (2.2.24)	2.1.3	egcs-1.1.2	3.3.6
2.1	Pensacola / Panama	2002-03-26	728	2.4.9	2.2.4	2.96	XFree86-3.3.6
3	Taroon	2003-10-22	712	2.4.21	2.3.2	3.2.3	XFree86-4.3.0
4	Nahant	2005-02-15	881	2.6.9	2.3.4	3.4.6	6.8.2
5	Tikango	2007-03-14	1226	2.6.18	2.5	4.1.2	1.1.1
6	Santiago	201?-??-??	2057	2.6.32	2.12	4.4.4	1.7.7
Fedora OS Version	Release Name	Date of Release	# of .src.rpms	kernel	glibc	gcc	X
01	Yarrow	2003-11-05	876	2.4.22-nptl	2.3.2	3.3.2	XFree86 4.3.0
02	Tettnang	2004-05-18	946	2.6.5 (2.6.10)	2.3.3	3.3.3	x.org 6.7.0
03	Heidelberg	2004-11-08	2079	2.6.9 (2.6.12)	2.3.3 (2.3.4)	3.4.2 (3.4.4)	6.8.1 (6.8.2)
04	Stentz	2005-06-13	2753	2.6.11 (2.6.17)	2.3.5 (2.3.6)	4.0.0 (4.0.2)	6.8.2
05	Bordeaux	2006-03-20	3137	2.6.15 (2.6.20)	2.4	4.1.0 (4.1.1)	server 1.0.1
06	Zod	2006-10-24	3681	2.6.18 (2.6.22.14)	2.5	4.1.1 (4.1.2)	1.1.1
07	Moonshine	2007-05-31	5189	2.6.21 (2.6.23.17)	2.6	4.1.2	1.3.0.0
08	Werewolf	2007-11-08	6042	2.6.23.1 (2.6.26.8)	2.7	4.1.2	1.3.0.0
09	Sulphur	2008-05-13	7085	2.6.25 (2.6.27.25)	2.8	4.3.0	1.4.99.901 (1.5.2)
10	Cambridge	2008-11-25	8103	2.6.27.5 (2.6.27.41)	2.9	4.3.2	1.5.3
11	Leonidas	2009-06-09	8935	2.6.29.4 (2.6.30.10)	2.10.1 (2.10.2)	4.4.0 (4.4.1)	1.6.1.901 (1.6.4)
12	Constantine	2009-11-17	9428	2.6.31.5 (2.6.32.21)	2.11 (2.11.2)	4.4.2 (4.4.4)	1.7.1 (1.7.6)
13	Goddard	2010-05-25	9555	2.6.33.3 (2.6.34.6)	2.12	4.4.4	1.8.0 (1.8.2)
14	Laughlin	(2010-09-14)	9644	2.6.35.4	2.12.90	4.5.1	1.8.99.905 ()
Rawhide	Rawhide	(2010-09-14)	9701	2.6.36	2.12.90	4.5.1	7.6
Debian GNU/Linux	Release Name	Date of Release	# of src dpkgs	kernel	glibc	gcc	XFree86
1.1	Buzz	1996-06-17
1.2	Rexz	1996-12-12
1.3	Bo	1997-06-05
2.0	Hamm	1998-06-17	1115
2.1	Slink	1999-03-09	1580
2.2	Potato	2000-08-15	2647
3.0	Woody	2002-07-19	5218
3.1	Sarge	2005-06-06	8727
4.0	Etch	2007-04-08	10215
5.0	Lenny	2009-02-14	12108
6.0	Squeeze(2010-09-15)	2010-??-??	14835
7.0	Wheezy	2010-??-??
Unstable	Sid (2010-09-15)		15888

Pointers on where I can get the information missing I would really appreciate. Thanks

Board Phone Meeting (2010-09-08)

Many many thanks to Máirín Duffy for being the secretary to this meeting when I was supposed to be secretary. I make a very bad one as I keep writing down my thoughts on what people say ... not what they actually say. [And thanks to Caillon for reminding me that I should make sure Máirín gets credit for her work.]

Her general notes are here. Her more detailed ones will be later. She was very nice to avoid my general grumpiness in the meeting which I apologize to the other board members for.

Too much Top Gear

Well I think watching 3 seasons of Top Gear on the telly in the last couple of weeks has reached its end. [Well especially since Netflix doesn't have any of the older series yet on instant view.] The last couple of nights I have had dreams of Thomas the Tank Engine narrated by Jeremy Clarkson. And yes the race between Bertie and Thomas ended in "and across the line."

Now to see if I can get a Region 1 DVD player so I can watch James May's latest series: Toy Stories. I really want to see Big Ideas too, but that does not look available. I will just have to order the books. Of the three and a half (the Stig) presenters, I have found I like James the best... as sadly I have his sense of direction and love of little details.

[Oh and I had such a great challenge idea after watching the Gumpert race.. build a car that can drive upside down. I figure a large wind tunnel could simulate the velocity to push a vehicle 'down' (or in this case up)... and you could crash several of them to see if any of the ideas work.]

Ubuntu Bashing: Please Stop

Recently someone posted a set of pictures of burning an Ubuntu cd case and breaking up a dvd or cdrom. Hurray a great victory for the rights of Freedom everywhere, correct? No. It is just a ritualistic act to try and rally one group of apes who think they are about to be wiped out by some other clan of apes. It reeks of fear, hatred, and intolerance and I want the Fedora community to be above that.

Having had to deal with Red Hat Linux boxed sets returned to us stuffed with dog faeces, or ashes of disks.. I don't like seeing other people's work crapped on. Having grown up in area where book burnings still happened because of some group thinking it would save their children from the sinful world.. I will not stand quiet on this.

You want to promote freedom, make Fedora or the world a better place. Burning disks and posting hatred will not do that.