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Posts Tagged with “linux”

May 17, 2011
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Life with Fedora 15 and Gnome 3

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For the past month, I’ve been piloting Gnome 3 and Fedora 15.

I’m pretty happy with the state of things now. I have to admit that in the beginning, I was cursing loudly asking for my desktop and panel back, but I’m used to the dash area and window picker now. The search feature (which is similar to Spotlight in OSX) is really useful and I end up using that for the majority of my tasks. I also find the notification system very well done along with the ability of dealing with messages without changing windows. In the end, all I can say is I find myself using Fedora more over my pretty MacBook Air for the majority of my tasks. I’m almost as productive as I was with Gentoo and Rat Poision back in the day :)

On a side note, when will “desktop Linux” realize that no one wants to write applications in Gtk, Qt or Python. And by no one, I mean there’s just a small slice of developers capable of writing applications in those languages (I don’t care how many Python snippets you provide). The first one to allow applications be developed in a more popular and saner language, preferably a combination of HTML/JS/CSS will do wonders to their respective communities. I think the direction Gnome is going with Seed but they need to still make things easier for folks.

Anyways, if you want to learn more about the Gnome 3 changes, check out this wiki page. The final release of Fedora 15 should be out in a couple of weeks, but if you can’t wait, grab the pre-release which has been working great for me.

April 4, 2011
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Texas LinuxFest 2011

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Last weekend, I had the opportunity to introduce Git and Gerrit to folks at the Texas LinuxFest 2011.

From a quick poll in the members in the audience, there were about 60% of folks using Git, while only a few have used Gerrit before. From conversations I had with folks after the talk, there seems to be a lot of interesting in migrating to Git from their existing systems (which ranged from Perforce to SVN). Anyways, it was fun and I enjoyed the experience of being able to walk to a conference venue from my home office.

June 7, 2010
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Interesting Trends from the Eclipse Community Survey 2010

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Ian Skerrett recently posted the trends from the Eclipse Community Survey 2010.

What interests me?

“Linux continues to gain market share on the developer desktop”

“In 2007, 20% said Linux was their development operating system. Now, in 2010 almost a third (33%) say Linux.  The biggest loser seems to be Windows 73.8% in 2007 down to 58.3% in 2010.  Interestingly, Mac OS X has only gone from 3.5% to 7.9%.”

I expect this trend to continue with Windows losing a bit more share next year. On top of that, I would be really interested to see the segmented results of what open source developers use as their primary development operating system versus normal developers. I mean, I can’t be the only one who hasn’t noticed that any conference you go to that features a lot of open source developers… you tend to see a lot of shiny Macs. It’s almost scandalous given how closed Apple is with everything.

The other nice trend I like is regarding version control systems.

“Git usage up from 2.4% (2009) to 6.8% (2010). Mercurial usage also increased from 1.1% to 3%. This growth seems to be coming from the decreased use of CVS, 20% (2009) to 12.6% (2010). Subversion continues to be the most popular at 58.3%.”

I expect to see DVCS continue to rise next year when the tooling becomes better and people become more knowledgeable about their VCS options (if you been living in a centralized VCS world for a long time, making the jump to a DVCS takes some time). I think the trend of large open source communities (e.g., Eclipse) using or moving to a DVCS will help the trend toward DVCS dominance. This aligns nicely with one of my goals is to make sure Eclipse.org is running fully on Git soon.

I highly recommend taking a full read through the survey.

April 10, 2010
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Texas Linux Fest 2010

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Today I had the opportunity to speak at Texas Linux Fest 2010 and meet some Red Hat colleagues…

I presented some ideas I had on how to get involved with open source and be successful with it. It seemed the audience received the presentation well even though I was a bit nervous since this was the first time I did this type of presentation (and I wasn’t talking about Eclipse). Some people have asked for the slides so I posted them on SlideShare.

Also, for the first time that this conference was put on, I think everything went smoothly (good job conference organizers). From my point of view, it was interesting to get exposed to the Linux enthusiast community again, it’s been awhile. I do admit I felt a bit dirty doing my presentation off my MacBook Pro using Keynote in front of an audience of Linux enthusiasts, but hey… Open Office is terrible… I’m a pragmatic open source guy :)

March 31, 2010
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Speaking at Texas Linux Fest 2010

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Next weekend, I’ll be speaking at Texas Linux Fest 2010 which happens to take place in my beautiful town of Austin, Texas…

In a theme similar to what I blogged about a couple days ago about getting involved with open source, I plan to give a talk entitled Open Source from the Trenches: How to Get Involved with Open Source and Be Successful. It’s a long drawn out title, but the basic gist of it is that I have 25 minutes to share my experience in open source land with the audience. I’ve learned a lot from everyone I have met a long the way and plan to divulge some of the lessons learned. I’ll admit I’m a bit nervous as I have never given this type of talk before…

For those from the Eclipse community, anything else you want me to say that you may have learned a long the way? I think we have a special place in the open source community as we tend to dance between the line of commercial and open source really well compared to other open source communities. I was going to say “dance with the devil” but that would be very freetard of me, I’m more pragmatic these days ;)

Anyways, if you’re in the Texas area, I highly recommend attending the conference. I’m personally looking forward to these talks:

I hope to see people there. If you’re in the area and want to meet for frosty beverages, let me know. On top of that, we Red Hatters also plan to have a lot of Fedora swag at the event too (I’ll have Eclipse stickers).