BR-LinuxOu Leia Em Português!
A new translation on the Fedora Documentation’s mirror tutorial to Brazilian Portuguese was made by Diego Zacarão and revised by me. It is now available under the Fedora Documentation Page at:
Also, I welcome Diego on getting cvs access on Fedora Documentation Project and help us to improve documentation :-)
It’s incredible. It’s addictive. It’s professional. It’s fun!
I’m talking about the game: Battle for Wesnoth. As someone of you already know, I’m doing documentation on various games available in Fedora, and Wart (MichaelThomas) suggested me on doing a Wesnoth review. As I began playing it, I forgot about all things in the world and stayed playing for the whole weekend!
It’s a strategy and tactics game based on a fantasy-theme similar to some RTS games, but turn-based. It’s very complete and IMO professional. It even has a battle.net-like server to host and join games on the Internet! I can’t stop playing. The campaigns are pretty hard too :-)
Wesnoth is currently available in the Fedora Extras repository, and can be installed automatically with this yum command:
yum install wesnoth
Today I’ll post a review under the Fedora Games Wiki Page.
I posted this message to the fedora-docs-list (see archive)
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Hi guys!
As I’m in the Extras group for Games, we are needing some good descriptions and “reviews” about games on Fedora! We are gathering as much information as possible in this Wiki page:
Later, that information will be migrated to a “Fedora Gaming Guide” here at DocsProject. I’m working on the page, game list, descriptions, instructions on gameplay, tips, and so on, but I think a little help could be handy ;-)
On the page above you’ll encounter a list with some games available in Fedora through Extras. I’m maintaining this list and will be expanding to all games available as we package more and more.
I’m asking for help here to writers interested on games (Adam Moreland comes in mind, anyone else?). I made a “template” on what we need to bring up about each one of the games:
If you’re willing to help, please answer this email, telling what game you want to review/describe. If you have any doubts, please let me know about them (about the project, wiki usage, and other things).
Thanks and “Let’s Rock!”
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Since English isn’t my native language, I’ll really need some revision ;-) If you want to help, contact me. If you know someone who can/wants, spread the word! Thanks.
First of all, I would like to bring some attention to this post, mostly for Fedora developers, Fedora Extras packagers and people that are in the KDE SIG on Extras. If you are one of these, please read this post :-)
If you already don’t know, with the Fedora installer (anaconda) being integrated into yum and Fedora Extras, and Red Hat getting all the attention to GNOME, there is a proposal to get KDE into Extras, putting a community effort on it. This is detailed into the Unleash KDE Wiki Page. This proposal explained here is based on these ideas.
The Current Approach
As most of us know, KDE is packaged on a few main “official” packages like: kdebase, kdelibs, kdenetwork, kdeutils, kdegames, and so on. Each one of these packages contains many applications considered “base” on the upstream. With this approach, things get easier when packaging and installing KDE on systems.
For example, on Fedora, installing the kdegames package brings these games for the system: atlantik, kasteroids, katomic, kbackgammon, kblackbox, kbounce, kenolaba, kfouleggs, kgoldrunner, kjumpingcube, klickety, klines, kmahjongg, kmines, knetwalk, kolf, konquest, kpat, kpoker, kreversi, ksame, kshisen, ksirtet, ksmiletris, ksnake, ksokoban, kspaceduel, ktron, ktuberling, kwin4, lskat. Now if I want only kbounce, or konquest? What do I do? I must install all other games.
I talked with many people (20+) and all of them said the same thing: this is really annoying. “There’s got to be a way to install only kopete or kmail, instead of the whole collection of programs”. Everyone says that this will be a lot better to the user. But we know that for us packagers and maintainers, this brings more difficulty into our hands.
The Solution: A Sub-Packaging Approach
This is already used in some distributions, and users appear to like it. The solution would be to use a sub-packaging approach, and that means we have many sub-packages independent one from the others (with a common package containing common files used by all) and a main meta-package that requires and installs all these sub-packages.
For example: a single kdenetwork.src.rpm would create the packages: kdenetwork (meta), kdenetwork-common, kdenetwork-kdict, kdenetwork-kget, kdenetwork-kopete, kdenetwork-krdc, kdenetwork-ksirc, kdenetwork-kwifimanager, and so on. A single kdegames.src.rpm would create the packages: kdegames (meta), kdegames-common, kdegames-kpat, kdegames-kbounce, kdegames-konquest, kdegames-kasteroids, kdegames-kmines, kdegames-kolf, and so on.
ChitleshGoorah suggested: instead of kdenetwork-kopete, the package should be named only kopete. This is because when someone tells the user to install kopete, the first thing that the user will try to do is: yum install kopete, and not yum install kdenetwork-kopete. This could be resolved adding a Provides: kopete into the specfile for the subpackage: this way user can reach the package both ways (kdenetwork-kopete will exist for organization purposes).
Now if someone (or the installer for example) wants to install the whole package, just yum install kdenetwork. The package requires all sub-packages but the sub-packages does not require this meta main package. So if I want to uninstall something, removing only the packages kdenetwork and kdenetwork-kopete will work, leaving all other packages alone.
Some other people from other distributions have talked to me, telling that separating applications into sub-packages gives a boost at customization. I know a distribution that has packages divided into many ones (compared to Fedora) and people always says that this is perfect for creating customizations and derived distributions. Most of the customized distributions I know are based on this distribution. We have to agree on this: this is a great way to get marketshare. More work, sure, but quality and advantages for everyone ;)
Downside: Maintainership
While having these advantages above, we gain a more complicated specfile, meaning more difficulty to the maintainers. The specfile grows bigger with sub-packages, and the maintainers should do a initial work on describing all the applications, separating all specific files for each sub-package, manage dependencies well, and so on. Now this is my question: Is it worthy to get this new approach and get these extra difficulties? I want to know what Fedora People think :-) Some of them already likes it, some don’t because of the concern about taking responsability.
As I’m determined to do this (and I don’t want to try to step on anyone), I began doing the initial work on the packages. If we agree on this, we could form a KDE maintainers group based on the KDE SIG, pretty much like we have today with Perl, Security, and so on. This will easier the maintainership for those packages. Come on everybody, please comment on this and say what you think about it ;)
An Example is already made: kdegames
Yeah, I know, talk is cheap, show me the code. Thinking on this, I created an example of this approach, working and compiling within Fedora Core 5 or rawhide. It’s based on Rex Dieter’s Package Review on kdegames. The specs and SRPMs are linked on bugzilla too.
The current specfile for kdegames:
http://www.devin.com.br/eitch/fextras/SPECS/kdegames.spec
Please read the comments in Bugzilla too for more explanations. Thanks and sorry for the long posting ;-)
After 3 weeks, I’m back at my other home in Brasilia, Brasil. I was in vacation at my hometown: Aracaju. Since I’m unemployed now beggining this week (I’m moving to São Paulo next month) I have lots of time to do lots of things, beggining now! To be honest, I’m spending most of my time contributing to Fedora (mainly here in Brazil, Fedora Docs and Extras), drinking Tequila and watching Anime (currently Ranma Season 2).
I don’t like this city very much, and next month São Paulo will be a great experience :-)
Things I must do:
While reading Fedora People, I came across Seth Vidal’s post in the Fedora section talking about the Board meeting.
Quoting him: “To think about how fedora can impact people world-wide and not just in our own little corner. Some emphasis on making sure we encourage fedora adoption and help new contributors in china, india and brazil as well as the places where linux adoption is more common: europe and north america.”
This is the issue I’m thinking for months. As I live in Brazil, I see what we have here: users, many of them. But they’re discouraged about communicating and contributing. But this is changing: beginning this year with the Ambassadors program, we have gathered some potential contributors and we’re helping spread Fedora across our nation. My work with this is being to teach others how work with the Upstream — The Fedora Project — instead of doing their own things in their own way. I think this is so much of importance. Our community here is growing much more! And with the new quality Fedora releases, more users comes.
In my experience, I saw that one of the main reasons people use Software Livre is when how they fit in contributions. When people are doing, helping and building something for a distribution, it’s more likely to the user to be a pleased contributor and user. Here, Debian leads mainly because everyone uses it to customize and create their own derived distributions. Ubuntu is growing larger because people can help there. I personally met some guys that abandoned Fedora because they couldn’t work with it (contributing) and they joined Ubuntu, as they found more easy to join and contribute. This is the main community issue, and Fedora is getting some great advances in this field. Congratulations for us.
As I always speak in my lectures, both developers and users have to listen and communicate. This is a must for advances in the Open Source world.
Well, sometimes our Time isn’t enough to do this well, but better later than never ;-)
Finally, I want to inform that I’ll do everything that I can to help spread Fedora here in Brazil. So if anyone needs anything on this from me, I’ll be glad to help.
After ENSOL, I can get to work again in many things. Speaking about the Fedora Project, I had updated the Brazilian Portuguese translation for FedoraFAQ.org, added some mirrors for Fedora download and yum usage. Just routine :) This, plus all the activity on the fedora-users-br mailing list, takes many of my current time (and I like it!).
Yesterday I found myself surprised: I was playing Playstation2 (this vacation rules), then I noted someone saying my nick in IRC. It was a Fedora Documentation Project meeting and they were nominating me for a FDSCo seat. I was very surprised with this, and I accepted. Now I will have to work more! Muahaha! I’ll be responsible mainly for translation issues and coordination (as I am now experienced with this in DocsProject). I will make good work, you will see :) Thanks to the FDSCo for trusting me and giving work to do :P
Speaking about Extras, the yakuake package was finally orphaned, and as this bugzilla entry (and this one too) shows, I gave up trying to maintain it to give place for other user. Now I’m only maintaining netpanzer and netpanzer-data packages. More to come ;-)
In May 12th, 13th and 14th, the ENSOL happened in João Pessoa, PB, Brazil. It was a northeast meeting all about software livre, and the Fedora community was there to spread the word! The event was a success: it was the first and it had more than 1300 participants and many lectures and presentations. I was there helping with Fedora marketing and doing the same lecture I did in FISL: Creating Documentation and Sharing Knowledge.
RodrigoPadula made a presentation about Fedora Project and asked many people to join and help the project as a community. The room was full!
Our Fedora Booth stayed full all the time. We distributed about more than 200 DVDs and 800 flyers, 10 T-Shirts for the Fedora collaborators, and much information to all. I’m pretty happy with these events here in Brazil because this year Fedora began to participate and now all the people knows more about the Fedora Project, and they don’t have that old-and-bad-image about it anymore. The community is getting stronger here!
Here are a couple of photos relevant to the Project:
More information about Fedora’s participation in this event can be found in this wiki page.
Well, that’s it… Until the next event, in August ;)
Since yesterday I began using everything Qt/KDE. Why? I always liked KDE better than GNOME, and while talking in IRC I realized that using only Qt/KDE would improve my system performance. So I quit X-Chat for IRC and began to use Konversation (I liked it! It’s better! But I have to try KvIRC too). Began using Kopete for IM (multi-protocol, pretty and full featured!), amaroK (no comments, this is the better music application). My system performance was improved and I’m more happy with it… Now I’m using Konqueror as Web browser too, and Thunderbird as mail client. These two are the only fallbacks now: Firefox for me is better, and same thing for Thunderbird.
Well, I’m using gtk-qt-engine (yum install gtk-qt-engine) and now my GTK apps like Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice are nice as the KDE apps :-)
Here are some screenshots:
I’m looking forward for KDE 4 and Fedora putting some more community effort on it (as the distro is mainly GNOME-centric).
I always liked to package things in RPM, and I sometimes did lectures about doing this (this presentation in Portuguese shows that) in some Brazilian events, where the RPM in community isn’t so popular. I didn’t have time to do this well (When I do something, I like to do it well) but now I think I have the proper time :-)
This week I shoot three packages in Fedora Extras for Review, and it appears that the guys there liked. I’m glad I could do this. Here are my three package entries in Fedora Extras:
Hope I get more packages inline ;)
And finally, I have to thanks these guys for helping me with these packages: Andreas Thienemann, Hans de Goede, Dawid Gajownik and jima (from IRC, I don’t know his name heh :) See you next package!
