as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

This weekend I upgraded my machine to Gobuntu, the entirely-free-software (but see below) version of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. Since I’m specifically named as the use case (!) it seemed like the right thing to do. First, the good news: it all seems to be working fine. Since I was doing a clean install (again, see below), and because my laptop has an AMD Turion chip in it, I went for the 64-bit version. (Thanks to Dave Morley for taking the time to tell me whether the 64-bit version was worth it.) Everything works; no problems at all. Good work, the Gobuntu team.

I have a few extra things worth mentioning, though.

First, like Mark Pilgrim, I’m disappointed that the issue with Firefox’s non-free logos wasn’t resolved before release. Apparently the solution will be to replace Firefox with Epiphany, the Gnome browser which is based on Gecko, the Firefox rendering engine. At that point people will hopefully be able to move to the unbranded “Firefox”, which seems to be called “Iceweasel” or something similar; I don’t really like using Epiphany, because I want lots of Firefox extensions that aren’t available for it. This seems like a good solution in general, though, and it’s what I assumed would be the case in Gobuntu; I’m slightly surprised that it wasn’t.

Second, there doesn’t seem to be an upgrade path from Feisty, the last version of Ubuntu, to Gobuntu Gutsy. That’s really annoying. Now, possibly there is such an upgrade path; possibly just upgrading to ordinary gutsy and then installing the gobuntu-desktop package would work. However, I couldn’t find anything, anywhere, to say that that was the case; does that package remove all the dubiously-free stuff that Gobuntu doesn’t contain? I don’t know. Gobuntu’s very new, so it’s entirely understandable that there’s not a lot of documentation yet (I had to hunt around rather a lot to find the official Gobuntu page so that I could link to it!), but it was pretty disappointing that it wasn’t clear how to install it. (I eventually decided to go with a clean install, because then I could be sure that I wasn’t running anything non-free, and because I wanted to take the opportunity to move to 64-bit, and because I liked the idea of being sure that I hadn’t made configuration decisions three years ago that were adversely affecting me now).

Third, and not a complaint, there’s no live CD for Gobuntu yet. I personally think that’s fine; again, Gobuntu’s new, and at least initially it’s probably not destined for “ordinary” users; having people like me use it for this release should shake any obvious bugs out of it ready for the next release. My ideal eventual goal is that people install Gobuntu by default, but we’re a way away from that yet. All the hardware on my laptop that I care about works fine (the wireless card doesn’t work, but then I wasn’t using it anyway, and the video card doesn’t do 3d acceleration, but I can live without that for now). This leads on partially to…

Fourth, also not a complaint, Gobuntu allows you to install non-free software once you have it itself installed. There was something of a furore about this on the Gobuntu mailing list, but I can’t think why. The distribution is, at the moment at least, destined for people who want to ensure that they’re using entirely Free software, and are prepared to deal with limitations (like no wireless) to make that so. I personally am not going to install any non-free software, even if it’s offered. The idea that Gobuntu should not allow non-free installations from the Ubuntu archive implies that the plan is to somehow trick people into running Gobuntu without realising it, so that they must be forced to stay on the straight-and-narrow path of free-software-only. I don’t need forcing; I choose it. Let’s have some faith in people.

All in all, I found it to be pretty successful. My experience hasn’t got any worse since Feisty (and I get the advantage of improvements made in gutsy), but now I have a warm comforting satisfied feeling that I know that my machine is entirely Free. Thanks for that warm feeling, Gobuntu and Ubuntu communities: I like it.

I’ve fixed various things in Cruciforum and released a 1.11 version. In particular, there’s now Akismet integration to prevent spam. You can tell Cruciforum about your Akismet API key and then it’ll check new posts. There’s also a handful of other bugs fixed (see the bug list for details).

Next step is OpenID integration. I’m pretty confused by where the current state of play of OpenID is, though; since cruciforum doesn’t have a database or maintain much state, it’d have to be what was originally called a “dumb” consumer. I don’t know whether you’re still allowed to be a dumb consumer, though, and I also don’t know which PHP OpenID library fits in best with Cruciforum’s (a) fairly minimal requirements and (b) single-file nature (which rules out the JanRain library, which is about forty files). The simple class at PHPClasses looks OK, but is it? Suggestions welcomed.

Cruciforum is a really simple web-based forum, designed to make it easy to add somewhere for discussion to go on to your website or a project. A Cruciforum forum is lightweight, doesn’t require a database, and can be set up on your server in about two clicks of a mouse. It’s the easy way to give people somewhere to chat about your project without installing something heavy and complex like PHPBB; just put the cruciforum install file in an empty folder and go to it in your web browser, and that’s all you need to do. Whenever I see a small project’s website I find myself wishing there was somewhere I could talk to people about it, and that’s what this makes easy. Go get Cruciforum for all your discussion needs, assuming that your discussion needs aren’t all that complicated!

I’ve just released the latest episode of LugRadio, “Lock, Stock, and One Smoking Barrel“, which is the second episode of season five (five! still amazes me, that). We talked to Greg Kroah-Hartman about the Linux Driver Project, we ruminate about online office suites and whether they’re completely pointless, about another free software project which seems to be lost in space, and whether the open source community eats itself alive too much, which it does (as per discussions on Planets Gnome and Ubuntu passim). And, y’know, people write in to tell us we were wrong about things (thanks Gerv!) even though we clearly weren’t. You know the score!

Interestingly, though, I’ve been poking through my logs for lugradio.org and associated mirrors. In the past, people have asked (repeatedly) for an estimate of how many people listen to the show, and I normally quote some figures I worked out a long time ago showing that between eight and twelve thousand people grab it every two weeks. For various reasons it’s quite difficult to get figures across our mirror network and RSS and so on, but I believe I’ve put these together properly. It looks like, since the old days when I worked those numbers out, it’s changed rather a lot. As far as I can tell, an “average” episode (if there is such a thing) of LugRadio has about 20,000 people listen to it, and the most popular episodes get somewhere around 30,000 listeners. Thirty thousand! Blimey. So, I would like to say thanks to those thirty thousand people: we love it, yes we do. Keep on doing what you do, and we’ll keep on doing what we do.

Probably this is all explained by Bacon being the top of the Linux bloggers A-list, although I personally have my doubts about the methodology there (as does Don Marti, who did it). Then again, since I was sixth I can hardly complain too much. Don’t talk too much about the methodology; just let me enjoy the warm feeling, even if it is all built on mathematically dubious sand foundations. We march onward, indeed.

I currently (now that we’re in to season 5 and Matt has abandoned us) do the encoding of LugRadio ready for distribution. I’m not sure I’m doing it as well as it could be done, though. If you know anything about bitrates and that sort of thing, do please drop over to my call for help on the LugRadio forums and tell me how to do it right…