European Wafaa

Mr Asay,

Many thanks for responding to my views on you. What I'm referring to is the recent post that a work colleague of yours made, stating that you had given up Vonage in preference for Skype. I'm not suggesting you create your own PBX, just that you accuse Novell of straying from Open Source both in action and thought and you are doing exactly the same - why convince half your company to switch to Apple Mac and not Linux?. After all Novell's agreement with Microsoft isn't just about Linux it covers their wide range of proprietary software too.

Novell uses a combination of open (Asterisk) and proprietary PBX systems. As we have both said, there are times when proprietary works better for companies. I am not taking shots at you over your phone system that would be a bit too petty (even for me), but at the fact that you seem happy to shoot Novell for doing the same thing that you are doing; choosing what suits you best for the task ahead.

I am not an RMS fanboy or a devout FLOSS user - I use proprietary drivers for my graphics cards, I use proprietary software (VMware Workstation, Gizmo) etc. The crux of my complaint is that you as an industry respected person who is listened to by a lot of people - especially those that do not understand the industry - should have an even hand in dishing out the detention to those that misbehave. The problem is your apparent blinkered view of Novell, they get more than their fair share of punishment from you and are chastised much more by you. I can only hope this is a form of "Tough Love" (although I feel it won;t be).

A while ago Riggwelter showed everyone how to add the BBC radio list to Banshee. In 10.3 the location changed somewhat. The new home for the list is now ~/.config/banshee/plugins/stations/user/. Everything else remains the same, so thanks to Riggwelter we can hear Auntie in all her glory

UPDATE: For those that use Helix-Banshee you can also get a list of Real Audio enabled BBC stations from Riggwelter.

The Midgard Project has released a new version of the Midgard Open Source Content Management System. Midgard 1.8.5 "Refix" release includes minor bugfixes and enchancements.

You can ead more about the changes here. As always you can do the 1-Click dance

10.3 is installed and there are a few issues, nothing disastrous but annoying none the less. The first item is the display. Good ol' YaST could see the NVidia card and reports it correctly, but it kinda makes a meal of the monitor. It has set the resolution to 1600x1200 which is what I chose at initial install option (you know when you can choose your language/display/driver/etc). It has it down as a generic LCD and a 19in with a 4:3 aspect with 16bit colourdepth, this should be 17in with a 16:10 aspect WUXGA and 24bit colourdepth. When searching through the options under SONY for monitors, my laptop isn't mentioned the only VAIO laptop I can see is the VGN-TX1XP, I have no idea how to get round that so I manually set the resolution to 1920x1200 and keep the LCD option, anyone with ideas on that? The other bugger of this is that I can't have any of the 3D desktop goodness as SaX2 doesn't recognise that I have manually installed the NVidia drivers - for some reason the rpm blobs really don't work

On a hardware perspective, so far I've found an additional two items that don't work and I can't seem to get working - the built-in webcam and the built-in Memory Stick reader (the SD reader works a charm). The webcam would be great to get working as it means I can play around witht he likes of cheese, but also use it for social chit chats with family across the globe (well my brother-in-law and his clan in Toronto). The Memory Stick reader would be great to have working as I'm regrettably a bot of a Sony Slut - digicam from Sony as well as phone and PSP all using Memory Stick. This way I wont have to have numerous cables cluttering up the place.

The Webcam is down as a Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC22, and I have the drivers:webcam repository enabled and installed the drivers there but no joy.

On a strange DE note, my intentions are to use KDE as the primary environment on this machine as I really need to acquaint myself with KDE better and also openSUSE contribute so much to KDE it would be foolish not to sample the goodness but there is a slight snag with this. For some reason none of the keyboard shortcuts work nor do any of the hardware buttons GNOME has no problem with them and obeys my finger's requests.

I would just like to say thank you to openSUSE and Novell for being such a generous and caring bunch. This morning a parcel arrived bearing a Deutsche Post frank and a lovely blue SuSE logo. Intrigued I opened it immediately and found a lovely T-Shirt:


Logo on the front


Logo on the back

I had almost forgotten about the e-mail I had received saying that I had won a T-Shirt after partaking in the Packaging Day/Weekend. Luckily this isn't one of the tops that I have asked Santa to get me from the openSUSE Shop. I can now advertise openSUSE brazenly without having to carry a laptop around everywhere

One for your calendar folks.

I will be at FOSDEM next year as will a few other contributers, hackers and users of our uber mail and calendaring system As such I have taken it upon myself to organise a mini BongoConf over in Brussels , most likely to take place in the evening but no time or date set. There has been discussion on irc about having a BongoConf, and FOSDEM is about as good a spring board for it as any.



Additionally I have requested the opportunity to hold a lightning talk about Bongo, your support would be great This is an ideal opportunity to meet some of the crazy folk working on Bongo and to ask your questions and see it in action if you haven't already.

If you have any requests for either the lightning talk (remember it is strictly 15 minutes only) or the get together please let me or the others know.