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Tag archive: Fedora

• Έλληνες στο FUDCon Μπρνο

• 110 και πλέον άτομα θα είναι σε 10 ημέρες στο Fedora User and Developer Conference στο Μπρνο της Τσεχίας, εκ των οποίων 2 Έλληνες. Για όσους άλλους ψήνονται, τσιμπήστε την απευθείας πτήση για Βιέννη με Ολυμπιακή στα 200 €, hostel για 1-2 ημέρες και μετά τρένο για Μπρνο για να αρχίσει το code hacking (Transifex hackfest session, yay!) και τα υπόλοιπα καλά.

• at night, Tuesday 26 August 2008
  Fedora | Έλληνες στο FUDCon Μπρνο (Comment!)

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• L10n infrastructure hackers wanted

• Fedora L10n is looking for Python|RPM|server admins eager to help administrate our toolchain. Drop by #fedora-l10n for more info.

• at night, Tuesday 29 July 2008
  Fedora, Mini-Post | L10n infrastructure hackers wanted (Comment!)

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• Lost Fedora heads

• For the folks who lost their heads with the Planet Fedora transition, the old hackergotchis are still available at http://planet.fedoraproject.org/heads/.

• at night, Thursday 19 June 2008
  Fedora, Mini-Post, Weblogs | Lost Fedora heads (Comment!)

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• Fedora 9 release party

• Αποφασίσαμε να ρίξουμε ένα γλέντι για να γιορτάσουμε την κυκλοφορία του Fedora 9. Στην πραγματικότητα θα μαζευτούμε οι συνήθεις ύποπτοι στην πίσω αυλίτσα του Cinema café στον πεζόδρομο της Γεροκωστοπούλου στην Πάτρα να τα πούμε. Σας περιμένουμε με μπυροκαφέδες, μπλουζάκια Fedora, Fedora 9 Live CDs/USBs και όρεξη για flames.

  Short fact sheet:

  • Σάββατο, 17 Μαΐου, στις 6μμ
  • Cinema café, Πεζόδρομος Γεροκωστοπούλου, στο κέντρο της Πάτρας (χάρτης)
  • 15-20 geeks
  • Fedora talks, swag, …
  • URL: http://fedoraproject.gr/fedora-9/release-party

  Μπορείτε να υπολογίζετε ότι θα είναι παρόντες οι κλασικοί εν Πάτραις Linux-άδες. Μετά το παρτάκι πιθανό να υπάρξει έξοδος για ωραίο φαγητό σε μεζεδοπωλείο κάπου στην Πάτρα (οδό Τριών Ναυάρχων, κλπ). Οι φίλτατοι επισκέπτες από Αθήνα και λοιπά περίχωρα, έχουν την επιλογή να διαμείνουν σε κάποιο fellow Λινουξά ή μπορούν να την κάνουν κατά τις 8 για να επιστρέψουν στα σπιτάκια τους.

  Θυμίζω ότι την αμέσως προηγούμενη ημέρα διοργανώνουμε επίσης το πρώτο OpenCoffee (more info) στην Πάτρα, στο οποίο θα μαζευτούμε να μιλήσουμε για ενδιαφέρουσες νέες τεχνολογίες (Web 2.0 κι άλλα bubbles) αλλά και για επιχειρείν και επενδύσεις. Ελάτε να τα πούμε και στα δύο events.

  

• at night, Friday 9 May 2008
  Foss, Linux, Fedora | Fedora 9 release party (Comment!)

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• FLSCo elections slipped

• We’re slipping the FLSCo elections to give more time for Infra on setting up the voting system. The voting week now starts on 22/4, which means we have 8 more days for new nominations.

• at night, Monday 14 April 2008
  Fedora | FLSCo elections slipped (Comment!)

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• Heads up: Unavailability

• I’ll be mostly unavailable for the next couple of weeks. Because of high load at my $dayjob, I will have very little time, if any, to dedicate to Fedora.

  In case you need me for something, please be patient during this period, since a reply might take some time.

  If something on our L10n toolchain seems to behave in a strange way to you, please take a look at the L10n FAQ. If the issue is affecting your productivity, the folks over at #fedora-admin might be able to help, but please be gentle as their plate is always full.

  
  Juggler
  Zagreb, December 2007

• at night, Saturday 15 March 2008
  Fedora | Heads up: Unavailability (Comment!)

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• Crossroads

• 
  Photo by evilnick (cc)

• at night, Wednesday 12 March 2008
  Fedora, Personal | Crossroads (Comment!)

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• FOSDEM’08 slide deck

• FWIW, the slide deck for the Transifex presentation at FOSDEM’08 is now available for download from fedorapeople.

• at night, Saturday 1 March 2008
  Fedora, Mini-Post, Transifex | FOSDEM’08 slide deck (Comment!)

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• FOSDEM recap

• Another February, another FOSDEM. And what a great experience it was. I can’t decide where to start from. From the joy of seeing familiar faces again and the networking with cool people full of ideas, or the beautiful Brussels and the delicious crêpes Suzette. What a great trip.

  I’ll try to document most of the interesting stuff that happened. This helps me track down TODOs for the next days and provides a nice report to see how stuff are progressing over time.

  Init, Mozilla BoF and beers

  Last year I was there with a couple of Greek friends. This time, the group was around 20 people. Not sure how that happened, maybe from a few of those encouraging emails to Greek mailing lists. It’s so fun travelling with friends, lots of laughs, especially with Themis from my local city’s LUG.

  

  The day before the event, the Mozilla folks organized a BoF to discuss with various people from the community L10n tools. Some cool projects were presented at the session, all revolving around tools used to translate stuff. A couple of presentations caught my attention, like Alexandru Szasz’s one about Narro and Friedel Wolff’s about Pootle.

  Like software development, translation engineering depends on the structure of the project being localized. Fedora’s challenges revolve around the fact that it’s a distribution of resources: we have many independent projects hosted around, each one with its own type, release schedule and quirks. Fedora is an aggregation of upstream stuff — even if some of them are built by Fedora engineers, and hosted locally. Under this light, we are called to cross quite a challenging river. With each tool we design and each process we adopt, we need to keep in mind characteristics that would make any combination of processes more complex: content diversity, hosting uniqueness, scheduling differences.

  
  Elevator in Atomium

  In this respect, I was more interested how these projects could fit in this distributed and upstream-friendly way of developing software and writing documentation, and the scalability that Transifex can ultimately achieve. Unfortunately, most of the tools don’t do well in this respect, and need some work to handle large numbers of projects (eg. 3+ branches of 80 projects for now, one of which has 6K strings in it). I invited people who are challenged by the existence of multiple systems and versioning systems in their ecosystem to find me at FOSDEM to discuss how their tools can use Transifex to overcome these difficulties, and it seems most of the tool developers were interested in such options (I wonder how difficult it is to have PHP and Python work together).

  Kwak Belgian beer

  At the evening, we hit the beer party. I have to admit, some Belgian beers are strong. Despite this fact, me and Yaakov of smolt fame managed to discuss a bit about server-to-server protocols and how we could achieve federating translation portals like fedora.transifex.org or india.transifex.org in separate servers, while retaining the benefits of a common configuration scheme. Challenging stuff, but with great potential of resource distribution and locality.

  Presentation and Mediawiki

  On Saturday the day started with a good breakfast at the hostel (no internet, no blogging) and the setup of the Fedora booth. I brought with me a 3m-tall Tux poster, which we hanged right behind our booth, along with Máirín’s new slick ones. Had some good discussions with Joerg about Fedora EMEA and spot about our L10n engineering progress.

  My presentation went really nice, despite some mic twists. I was happy to see a lot of people being interested in it enough to attend and listen to me for 40 minutes, but also to see that people from Debian, openSUSE, Ubuntu and Wikipedia were there. Some very interesting questions were asked, like if Transifex can be used to provide a common terminology or lexicon to translators, and whether Transifex can be used with Launchpad, Ubuntu’s main development (and translation) service. Unfortunately, Launchpad is closed-source software, so I can’t know how to make it use Transifex to solve its limitations with dealing with upstream.

  On the other hand, Launchpad hosts projects on a versioning system open to external contributions, so Transifex could be used to submit translations to projects hosted on Launchpad, just like any other upstream repo. Once our hooks are there and we can let any developer register his repo on Transifex, then any project hosted on bazaar.launchpad.net, code.google.com, sourceforge.net et al could use Fedora’s translation community for contributions.

  We also had a good chat with the Mediawiki folks that were there. They want to grow their community (and hence, their language coverage) and reminded me that one of the values Transifex has is bringing translation communities together. I also seem to have forgotten to mention in my talk that compared to the traditional direct access, we can now have pre- and post-commit hooks to validate, for example, PO files being uploaded in terms of syntax, encoding, etc, send commit notifications with high-level checks and messages, etc.

  Since we are thinking of using Mediawiki for Fedora’s wiki, I want to make sure that it has the i18n support we need, both in terms of the UI and the content. I am extremely happy to see upstream is so much helpful in this respect. I’ll investigate more on the extensions MW has to support i18n and try to report back sometime in the next weeks.

  Fedora L10n Meeting, openSUSE, and Pootle

  Since some of the most active European translators were present, we got together for a L10n meeting. We mainly covered topics around Tools, Community and European locality. I was very glad to hear the guys were feeling much more comfortable with the new tools. It seems despite the ups and downs we are having, the new way of things using a website to submit translations is much easier for newcomers (and for some experienced users as well) is more enjoyable. Always good to hear things are getting better. Got a lot of good suggestions too, and, after popular demand, it seems the possibility of getting Pootle setup on one of our publictest servers could arrive sooner than later.

  The openSUSE folks confirmed my belief that we have many common goals and point of views. They found Transifex a good idea that solves important issues, and worth of investigating and working together on it. In particular, they agreed that an authorization layer is needed for proper bridging between larger projects that have existing translation teams, like openSUSE and GNOME. It’s probably a good time to start working on it, and the separation of the commit mechanism from the web server. This way, a remote project could install the commit service on its own server, eliminating the need for creating SSH keys, etc.

  Finally, I had a good discussion with Friedel Wolff from Pootle about their future plans. They are planning for a bunch of exciting features, which put the project even higher in my scale. Pootle is undoubtly the most complete web-based translation management solution out there, and its developers are such a friendly bunch of good hackers. Which makes me want to download the source right away and start working on how to make it work with our environment and Transifex.

  

• at night, Wednesday 27 February 2008
  Fedora, Foss, Linux | FOSDEM recap (Comment!)

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• Paul on L10n

• Quoting Paul’s interview on c|net:

  There are also a lot of interesting community/project things going on. Transifex is a cool tool for facilitation localization. If you have a pet project that you’re interested in having someone within or outside Fedora localize, you can submit it no matter what source management system it uses on the back-end. Those communities can immediately start working on it. From the project page: “Translators can use Fedora Web-based tools to contribute directly to any upstream project, large or small, through one translator-oriented Web interface. Developers of projects with no existing translation community can easily reach out to Fedora’s established community for translations. In turn, the latter can reach out to numerous projects related to Fedora to easily contribute translations.” Again, the Fedora community revolves around software, but there is more room in the community than simply for developers. Others can and do play important roles.

  Fedora and the art of creating an inclusive community

  Paul, I just realized that the person who put the whole L10n re-engineering madnes^Wstory in my mind was actually you. I might as well start referring to you as “the guy that gave me that irritating itch”. I remember watching you copy around PO files from cvs.fpo to elvis every time you wanted your release notes localized, often doing re-syncs and re-merges for small updates in the doc source. And it happened more than once in each release cycle. And that was almost sad.

  I remember thinking to myself “hell, this guy has better things to do with his time”.

  The Docs Project was the first entity that used the ‘cvsl10n’ FAS group. In Fedora 7, we decided to be bold, and for the first time, give the opportunity to Fedora translators to work directly on the files hosted on the Fedora servers. The truth is, things did look risky back then. We had maybe less than 80 people in the cvsl10n group, compared to elvis, which had 2000 translators. We also had a different translation workflow, a separated time schedule and freezes than the rest of Fedora, and no statistics interface. While one would expect that the Fedora 7 release notes would ship in fewer languages and be of inferior quality, they not only caught up with FC6, but were actually shipped in more languages. And not only that, we did manage to save Paul from the time to juggle PO files all over the place.

  Next goal: Have all tools work flawlessly (Makefile targets, Transifex notifications, Bodhi integration) and perfect Documentation so that developers and documenters worry about translations a tenth of how much they do today, and work on more interesting and creative things.

  
  Boston Commons park, USA

• at night, Wednesday 27 February 2008
  Fedora | Paul on L10n (Comment!)

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• Life as a spammer

• 

  Yesterday I sent spam to 2300 people. To 800 of them, I sent it twice. Yes, I sent 3000 spam mails in a single day.

  The reason behind this (if there’s ever justification behind spamming people!) was to notify our translators we are migrating our last development modules off the legendary and invaluable elvis server, which has served as the i18n host for Red Hat and Fedora for such a long, long time.

  It’s hard being separated from the systems you love, but this old fella’s mojo was wearing off for some time now, substituted by fatigue and a clear need for retirement. It’s time to let the chap take some time off, let him just be, and start playing with the new kid on the block.

  So, back to spam, spam, bacon and spam.

  For those who missed it, here’s what the mail was:

  Dear translators, You are receiving this email as one of the 2300+ people who have contributed translations to Fedora, and previously, Red Hat Linux. Thanks to your work, Fedora can reach out to millions more people around the world! Please continue reading, as we are changing some core bits that will affect your translation work. Today all translatable Fedora projects will be moved away from the traditional ‘i18n.redhat.com’ server, and over to Fedora servers. This move is part of our effort to grow our community and open up our processes. It will help us increase the number of Fedora languages and their quality, and also lower the barrier of entry for new translators. What does this mean for you? To continue contributing translations you’ll need to follow some steps to join the Fedora Localization Project. We’re a cool bunch of people, working in language teams, and translating everything that has to do with Fedora. All information you need to know to continue working on Fedora translations can be found at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N/FedoraModulesMove If you have any questions about any step of the migration process, don’t hesitate to drop by IRC on #fedora-l10n on the Freenode network, or send an email to fedora-trans-list@redhat.com, and someone will jump right in to help you out. We’re sorry that we can’t move everyone automatically to the new system, but we are dedicated to helping each and every translator who has any difficulty with the process. As of tomorrow, support for translations via the older system will be dropped, and you’ll no longer need to send translations there. Our efforts will focus on improving the new architecture, constantly adding more projects for translation, creating new translation teams, and making it easier for you to contribute translations. So, thanks for your work, for bearing with us on this long email, and for continuing contributing to Fedora. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N/FedoraModulesMove Dimitris Glezos Fedora Localization engineer

  Being a spammer is no easy job, I tell you. It involves a variety of skills, including experience around technology, and an aptitude for psychology and sociology. Good spammers are gurus, hackers, like those who put a police car on top of a University building without no one noticing or them getting caught. The manage to avoid all the cops and make it to the user’s attention (in our case, their inbox).

  I’m happy this whole story is now over. From now on, we’ve got a proper mailing list to discuss things, each language team has its own, and we can use the account system to send emails to people belonging in a group. Also, from now on, all moved modules are accepting translations through Transifex, no matter what the target VCS of their move was.

  Ahh, the joy of good, well-integrated tools.

• at night, Wednesday 20 February 2008
  Fedora, Humor | Life as a spammer (Comment!)

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• Good times

• Things achieved the past 2 days:

  • Got a bug of our statistics interface fixed, causing non-master git branches not showing up on the website. Pretty important for RHEL branches.
  • Submitted an abstract for the Red Hat Summit 2008 at Boston, to present Transifex and our work in establishing a solid translation infrastructure and community.
  • Submitted an abstract to the Greek FOSS Communities conference to present the work of the Greek Fedora team.
  • Wrote a one-liner to receive all translations files for a particular language.
  • Helped Rajesh create the Maithili team and become its maintainer.
  • Was happy to see that GNOME is discussing the possibility to use Transifex for translation submissions. Only some weeks after we were reminded that closed-sourced software doesn’t work well with communities and about the importance of properly working with upstream.
  • Pulled a mass move of 35 modules from one development environment inside Red Hat to the Fedora ecosystem, being the liaison between developers, translators, and admins. Tough job, my bones still hurt.
  • Sent a spam-like email to 2300+ Fedora translators with accounts on elvis about the move and created a wiki page to guide translators migrate.

  And finally,

  • Together with 12 others, thrown a surprise party for a good friend’s birthday and went out for some proper fun at a traditional greek tavern with lots of food and traditional dancing.

  Good times.

  
  (cc) TIO

• at night, Tuesday 19 February 2008
  Fedora | Good times (Comment!)

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• L10n BoF at FOSDEM

• 

  The Mozilla folks are organizing a BoF on L10n tools at FOSDEM (thanks Sankarshan for the tip!). I’ll definitely try to make it there, since it’ll be interesting to see how Mozilla tries to solve their challenges and discuss our way of dealing with them.

  It seems that L10n is a pretty hot topic these days. Maybe it’s the realization of its importance — more than 5-6 out of 10 Fedora users probably have a desktop in their language, I’d guess this percentage is similar in other projects, or even higher. Or maybe it’s the emergence of the distributed development model, and the need to always work with upstream. One thing is definite though: the contributions from the community are simply invaluable — both for open source projects, but also for proprietary and enterprise ones. For software and also for documentation, websites, videos, everything.

  Every major project I’ve talked with seems to face challenges in this aspect — often similar, but each project’s goals have their own peculiarities. What I’m really happy about is that we’re well past the “problem” stage, and well into the “working solution” stage.

• at night, Friday 15 February 2008
  Fedora, Foss, Linux | L10n BoF at FOSDEM (Comment!)

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• Busy and fun weekend with L10n stuff? You bet.

• I just got into my new apartment. Important services were installed first: power, internet, heating. Important stuff were moved then: Desk, espresso machine and grinder. Now I can work from the new place and sleep or cook a pizza at my friend’s house for a few more days, until the new furniture and appliances arrive.

  The weekend was a very productive one, got the chance to fix a bunch of Fedora Localization TODOs, and ~15 bugs, some of them pretty important for people’s work. Let’s see:

  1. Kannada, Indonesian, and Italian teams were created, people have stepped up as maintainers for them. We’ve put their details on translate.fpo, so that people can easily see how to submit corrections and bug reports, and how to join the teams.

  With these, we have more than 34 active teams and a total of ~75 languages. 2. We now have all the shipped Fedora Docs, system-config-network and yumex accepting translations from Transifex. Especially with the case of the last two, translation submissions no longer need to be sent with emails/bug reports, nor the developer needs to have account associations for every translator wanting to send something. Get these babies to 100%! 3. translate.fedoraproject.org is now also available in Italian and Greek. Thanks to Francesco Tombolini for the Italian version. 4. Having questions pop up on fedora-trans-list all the time, I went on and created a single FAQ page. While I prefer a proper documentation than FAQs, this stuff work great as a reference point. Next step: move finalized text from there over to the Fedora Translation Quick Start guide, since it’s in DocBook and already translated in many languages. 5. Together with Bart, we moved all content from wiki/L10N/Teams over to the XML files producing translate.fpo/teams/. From now on, we’ll add each new team’s information on the dynamic website instead of the wiki: it’s more easy to maintain, and localizable. 6. Finally, and probably most exciting, a remote command line interface to Transifex has made its first connection over HTTP.

  $ ./tx --list-modules -v
  Creating request http://transifex.shuttle:8084/module/?tg_format=json
  Module name                              Description
  testmodule-cvs                           A CVS testing module
  testmodule-git-revisor                   A Git testing module
  testmodule-hg-smolt                      A Mercurial testing module
  testmodule-svn                           A Subversion testing module
  

  More to come!

  
  Home-made pizza

  Update, 2 hours later: Oh, and another fix I was just reminded (thanks ricky): We found the bug that caused Subversion modules behaving strangely and now they are working again.

• at night, Monday 28 January 2008
  Fedora | Busy and fun weekend with L10n stuff? You bet. (Comment!)

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• Zagreb reporting — final chapter

• Too busy with the conferences, not too much time to write a lot. And every evening I catch myself saying “too tired, will definitely post something tomorrow”, which of course never happens. :/ So tonight I’ll try to get something up, even with a pair of half-open eyes.

  

  Let’s see, where were we…? Ah yes, the cultural beverage party at OTT07. What to say about the party? Well, first of all, there were lots of drinks. Lots. 20-25 bottles (excluding beer etc.) might not sound too many, but the same number in shots down your throat probably does. At least it did say something to most of the people, who, in turn, happened to also talk and sing a lot more than they did before.

  I’m glad many people liked ouzo. I tried some awesome drinks as well, really unique stuff. I asked to get their names documented as well. If they do, I’ll get back with recommendations for some of them.

  Oh, did I mention I speed-geeked about Transifex? Had exactly 4 minutes to talk about it to a group of 3-4, and after that time, a bell rung and those people moved to the next speed-geeker and a fresh group would arrive. Had 10 such sessions in 40 minutes. The purpose was to concentrate on the important stuff and have a small audience that won’t be afraid to interrupt you and ask questions. Very tiring experience, fun though!

  So, OTT’07 was after all a good event. Lots of good discussions. I tried listening a lot rather than trying to talk about tools and stuff. The image I got is that people agree that Transifex does clearly cover a missing piece in the localization puzzle. At least in the open source world. ‘Cause not all content providers have their files in PO files and on a VCS with SSH access. Shame on them, yes, but that’s how things are.

  What I tried to pass was the use of standard formats, in order to be able to compliment existing workflows with other processing paths as well. Do build a cool AJAX web interface for translations, but please, store them in a standard format (eg. PO files) if you want to approach existing translation communities.

  The event guys (Aspiration) have done a very good job in creating good documentation for the event. If you are interested on the brainstorms, the tools mentioned and the use cases discussed, take a look at the OTT’07 wiki.

  

• at night, Saturday 8 December 2007
  Foss, Linux, Fedora | Zagreb reporting — final chapter (Comment!)

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• Zagreb reporting — chapter 2

• 
  Juggling circus in Zagreb

  Open Translation Tools is rolling on nicely. We’re having some interesting discussions covering almost every aspect of localization. I’m glad to notice that there aren’t only technical discussions, and the atmosphere is to study what the needs are and how could they be covered.

  Two interesting topics that receive attention are community management and translation workflows. Open source projects like GNOME, Fedora and other ones are lucky to have an awesome community very motivated to contribute. Not all projects are that lucky though, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the translators don’t want to contribute to that project. It might just mean that they haven’t heard about it or that it’s too difficult to do it in a systematic way.

  Take FLOSS manuals for example. It’s a cool project that helps you compose documentation in a wiki-style way, which can end up in a PDF or even a book from lulu. While they do it in a novel and useful way, they face some challenges in the translation aspect, like how to find translators and make it easy for them to keep up with the projects new docs.

  Another challenage is the workflow they will adopt. Create a new community using a custom web-based tool or do it on top of PO/XLIFF files available for external communities to contribute to? While with the first approach you may save resources (arguable!), with the latter one (small, modular tools over standard file formats) you get interoperability with other tools like Damned Lies, Transifex and Pootle, and can give the opportunity to remote communities to contribute to your project.

  On the technical side, we had some really interesting discussions. With Danilo Šegan of GNOME fame and Dwayne Bailey of Pootle and Translate Toolkit fame, we discussed how to increase interoperability between the tools we write. For example, having a common object model and standard APIs would greatly help in having all three tools (Damned Lies, Transifex, Pootle) work together in an integrated fashion.

  Off to the event’s most anticipated party. Each participant brought an alcoholic beverage from their country. Add to that huge amounts of beer, several bottles of local vodka, etc and you might come close to what’s going to take place. From Greece I brought (what else) Ouzo, the anise-flavor liqueur that usually accompanies fresh seafood in Greece.

  

• at night, Sunday 2 December 2007
  Tech/web, Foss, Linux, Fedora | Zagreb reporting — chapter 2 (Comment!)

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• Fedora websites look-n-feel: Mirror manager

• 

  Lately a lot of work has been done on increasing the usability of the Fedora websites — I’ve blogged about some of our efforts concerning the wiki in the past [1], [2]. We’ve been using web apps more and more to capture information and knowledge, and to provide functionality to developers and users. A bunch of great web-based infrastructure tools were written from various Fedora code monkeys that handle account administrative tasks, package building and updating, knowledge sharing, mirrors management, and translation coordination. Basically, we are on tools building spree!

  So, when designing the template of fedoraproject.org and the content style of translate.fpo, we kept in mind that a common look-n-feel between all our web resources would be desirable for everyone: having a consistent, usable, high-quality web look-n-feel across the project is a good thing™. The idea is that all Fedora websites and web apps “feel” the same, even if they use completely different technologies underneath.

  Take our mirror manager for example. Here’s a small patchset to the templates that landed the other day, wrapping the content in the header-n-footer theme of fedoraproject.org.

  

  It basically inherits from the general fedoraproject.org template, but having smaller text to convey lots of information compared to the marketing-oriented big text of the main page. Using icons to quickly capture information is often used and people like it because they can identify the resource more quickly, navigate more intuitively, and get less often disoriented in a web resource.

  The old design could need some love, and Matt Domsch (the mirror wrangler) gladly accepted tweaks to the way we organize information on the page. Here’s how a table on the public mirror list looked like before:

  

  It’s a filter for the giant mirror list we have. Since it’s not main content, it’s probably better if it didn’t take a big space from the width of a 1024-width page. Also, incremental tables usually span downwards (in rows), mainly because we’re used in vertical scrolling instead of horizontal. Finally, the table borders aren’t really important to spend so many (valuable) black pixels there, and so are the underlines.

  

  On the right is how the new filter looks like. Having the table slim and floating on the right of the page, the user can follow the content first and then catch the filter only if they need to do so. A caption at the top makes sure that even a cropped screenshot like this one makes sense to everyone, and the alternate row colors work better for separating rows, since lines increase contrast in places that are not readable, which reduces the accessibility of the information (in this case, the text itself).

  These small details play an important role in helping users find what the want more easily, and spend more time on our website. Feeling good when browsing is an often neglected, but astonishingly vital part of being productive and efficient, both as an information provider but also as an information consumer.

  At some point, we could separate the basic templating styles from the app-specific ones, so that each app can choose what to override and what common style/element to leave in peace. Common templates in kid, genshi or any other templating language will be packaged in a common RPM, which will be required from our web apps, and yum install foo will simply require, say, fedora-websites-common. This way, each web server can have the set of themes and styles locally with no need to worry that when one web server fails some other website will look weird, and also updating all our websites for a common element (eg. our footer text) could be as easy as pushing an update of the RPM package.

• at night, Friday 7 September 2007
  Fedora | Fedora websites look-n-feel: Mirror manager (Comment!)

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• Fedora 7: Ανασυνθέστε ελεύθερα!

• Στις 31 Μαΐου το έργο Fedora ανακοίνωσε τη νέα κυκλοφορία της διανομής του. Αυτή τη φορά το όνομα δεν περιέχει μέσα τη λέξη «Core», ούτε υπάρχει πια ξεχωριστό αποθετήριο πακέτων Fedora Extras. Οι δύο αυτοί «γαλαξίες» πακέτων έχουν συγχωνευθεί σε ένα κοινό “σύμπαν”. Η νέα έκδοση λέγεται απλώς Fedora 7.

  Αυτό εκ πρώτης όψεως μπορεί να μη σημαίνει πολλά (για αρκετούς, ίσως, από όλες τις όψεις, να μη σημαίνει τίποτε). Παρόλα αυτά, ως συντελεστές του έργου Fedora, πιστεύουμε ότι το Fedora 7 είναι ίσως η σημαντικότερη κυκλοφορία που έχουμε κάνει μέχρι σήμερα τόσο για την κοινότητά μας όσο και για τη γενικότερη κοινότητα ελεύθερου λογισμικού. Ο λόγος είναι ότι η διανομή μας είναι πιο ανοιχτή από ποτέ και δίνει τη δυνατότητα σε πολύ μεγαλύτερο αριθμό ανθρώπων να συμμετάσχουν σε αυτή, να τη βελτιώσουν και να χτίσουν πάνω στις τεχνολογίες της.

  Η φράση «διανομή Linux» αναφέρεται συνήθως σε ένα σύνολο από πακέτα λογισμικού, τα οποία λειτουργούν μαζί ως ένα ενιαίο λειτουργικό σύστημα. Τα ΜΜΕ συνηθίζουν να εστιάζουν στα λειτουργικά χαρακτηριστικά μίας διανομής, όπως την έκδοση του πυρήνα, τις νέες λειτουργίες του περιβάλλοντος επιφάνειας εργασίας, και τα εργαλεία που προσφέρει.

  Η σημασία μίας «διανομής», όμως, περιλαμβάνει πολλές επιπλέον πτυχές. Εχει σημασία, για παράδειγμα, το μοντέλο διακυβέρνησης του όλου έργου της διανομής, ο τρόπος που λαμβάνονται οι αποφάσεις, η οργάνωση της κοινότητας, τα κανάλια επικοινωνίας, η τεκμηρίωση, και η υποστήριξη. Βλέπουμε την αξία της διανομής στο όλο σύστημα σύνθεσης της, και στην αλληλεπίδραση του συστήματος αυτού με άλλα περίπλοκα συστήματα, όπως την κοινότητα και τους χρήστες του. Το τελικό προϊόν έχει μεγάλη αξία, αλλά σημαντική αξία έχει και το μέσο παρασκευής του.

  Ενα έργο ΕΛΛΑΚ, εκτός από το να διανέμει λογισμικό ανοιχτού κώδικα, είναι σημαντικό να χρησιμοποιεί ανοιχτές λειτουργίες σε όλα τα επίπεδα του. Ο λόγος είναι απλός: περισσότερες δυνατότητες και μεγαλύτερη προοπτική. Κάθε ανοιχτό μοντέλο έχει περισσότερες δυνατότητες από το αντίστοιχο κλειστό. Περισσότεροι άνθρωποι μπορούν να συμβάλουν, να το διορθώσουν και να το βελτιώσουν. Η επιτυχία του ελεύθερου λογισμικού το έχει αποδείξει περίτρανα αυτό.

  Μέχρι πρόσφατα, με τη λογική να διατηρείται ψηλά η ποιότητα της διανομής, η σύνθεση του Fedora δεν μπορούσε να γίνει εκτός του δικτύου της Red Hat. Η διανομή που κυκλοφορούσε ήταν μόνο το «Core» κομμάτι, το οποίο διαχειρίζονταν αποκλειστικά άτομα της εταιρείας. Ο διαχωρισμός μεταξύ «εσωτερικού» και «εξωτερικού» κύκλου παραγωγής ήταν ξεκάθαρο ότι περιόριζε τις δυνατότητες της διανομής.

  Από την έκδοση 7, οι διαδικασίες σύνθεσης της διανομής του Fedora ανοίγουν τις πόρτες. Το αποθετήριο λογισμικού μεταφέρεται σε δημόσιο χώρο. Γράφεται ένα νέο, ανοικτό εργαλείο «ύφανσης» διανομής με δυνατότητες εκτέλεσης σε δημόσια συστήματα. Δίνεται η δυνατότητα σε άτομα της κοινότητας να διαχειρίζονται πακέτα που θα συμπεριλαμβάνονται στην τελική διανομή. Αμέσως, δημιουργούνται πολλές εκδοχές της διανομής, όπως μία Live εκδοχή, αλλά και μία εκδοχή με προεπιλεγμένη επιφάνεια εργασίας το KDE.

  Με αυτή τη δυνατότητα, οι χρήστες, οι διαχειριστές συστημάτων, οι εταιρείες και άλλα έργα (όπως το OLPC), μπορούν να δημιουργήσουν τις δικές τους, προσαρμοσμένες εκδόσεις του Fedora και να τις διανείμουν όπως θέλουν. Σε όποιον δεν αρέσει το Fedora που διανέμουμε εμείς, μπορεί να προσθέσει τα δικά του πακέτα, να αφαιρέσει αυτά που δεν θέλει και εν τέλει να “μαγειρέψει” τη δική του εκδοχή και να τη μοιραστεί με τον υπόλοιπο κόσμο. Και γιατί να μην το ονομάσει Fedora, αν η σύνθεση αποτελείται από πακέτα του σύμπαντος του Fedora.

  Ας ανθίσουν χίλιες νέες διανομές!

  Προχωρώντας ακόμη ένα βήμα, μπορεί να βρει κάποιος το Revisor, μία γραφική εφαρμογή, η οποία κάνει το remixing παιχνιδάκι. Επιλέγει ο καθένας τι μέσο θέλει να δημιουργήσει (Live ή εγκαταστάσιμη ISO εικόνα για CD, DVD ή USB stick), ποια αποθετήρια θέλει να χρησιμοποιήσει, ποια πακέτα να συμπεριλάβει και, προαιρετικά, προχωρημένες ρυθμίσεις χρηστών, γλώσσας και ρυθμίσεων γραφικών. Μετά από μερικά κλικ, η προσωπική, προσαρμοσμένη διανομή σας είναι έτοιμη.

  Αυτό που ευχόμαστε είναι τέτοιου είδους δυνατότητες να προσφερθούν και από άλλες διανομές. Επίσης, ο κώδικας των εργαλείων που χρησιμοποιούνται εσωτερικά στα έργα να είναι ελεύθερος, γιατί με αυτόν τον τρόπο ανοίγονται νέες δυνατότητες και όλη η κοινότητα ΕΛΛΑΚ μπορεί να χτίσει σε αυτά. Και τέλος, όλες οι λειτουργίες που έχουν σχέση με την κοινότητα να είναι ανοιχτές, γιατί με μία ανοιχτή φιλοσοφία ύφανσης ελεύθερου λογισμικού, κάθε έργο είναι ένα βήμα πιο κοντά στην ιδέα της Κοινότητας και του ελεύθερου λογισμικού και συνεπώς σε μία δοκιμασμένη συνταγή επιτυχίας.

  Revisor: Μερικά κλικ και το ‘Fedora Papadopoulou’ σας είναι έτοιμο.

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  (Το κείμενο δημοσιεύτηκε αρχικά στην τακτική στήλη του συγγραφέα στο ελληνικό Linux Format, τεύχος Ιουλίου-Αυγούστου 2007.)

• at night, Friday 13 July 2007
  Fedora, Linux Format | Fedora 7: Ανασυνθέστε ελεύθερα! (Comment!)

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• Ομιλία στη GUADEC

• Γιούπι, εγκρίθηκε η ομιλία μου για το Transifex στη GUADEC! Από μεθαύριο, Birmingham, με το Σίμο και το Δημήτρη Τυπάλδο. (U: διαφάνειες)

• at night, Friday 13 July 2007
  Foss, Linux, Fedora | Ομιλία στη GUADEC (Comment!)

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• Transifex

• I was wondering when I would be contributing back to the community in the form of a real, whole software project. Probably that’s why I’m excited lately.

  Quoting from its webpage:

  Transifex is a web-system that facilitates the process of submitting translations in various source control management systems (SCMs). The name literally means “translation-builder” (from the latin verb facere).

  The goal is to give the Fedora translators the ability to contribute not only to projects hosted at cvs.fedoraproject.org, but to other systems as well. For example, Fedora has a lot of projects hosted on Subversion, Mercurial and Git repositories, on which translators don’t have direct access. This tool will (hopefully) help a translator not to learn a multitude of SCMs, and a maintainer not to have to manage some hundreds (or thousands in the case of Fedora) translator accounts and submissions, while keeping the contribution happening directly upstream. Opens up a bunch of exciting opportunities!

  Here’s some eye-candy. Work-in-progress. Hopefully soon online!

  

  Update 29/6: Chris Blizzard has written a more fluent and elaborate description of the goals of Transifex.

• at night, Friday 29 June 2007
  Fedora, Transifex | Transifex (Comment!)

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