See you at FOSDEM

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

About 20 of us will join the fun and attend FOSDEM in Brussels this coming week-end (see our preparation notes).

Among other great and fun discussions, we will hold two talks on Sunday about Mageia:

  • at 10:30 in CrossDistro devroom (H.1302); this one will focus mostly on the technical side of the project;
  • at 16:30 in LibreOffice devroom (H.2214); this one will focus mostly on the organizational and governance bits.

And we will hold our first general assembly at 14:30 on Sunday (meeting place not determined yet).

We hope to see you there, feel free to get in touch with us if you have any type of question about the project and how it is going.

Belgium, here we come!

Update: note this figure: 5. We will speak about that on Sunday.

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Back from application installer meeting

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

One of the most important underlying values of Free Software in general, and specifically of Mageia is collaboration. Collaboration with users to fix problems, collaboration with developers to ship their software, but also collaboration with other distributions, by sharing booths, patches, code and everything.
And fuelled by this spirit of collaboration I went to Nuremberg with Stormi ( mageia app db project founder and packager ) and Nanar ( our mirror manager, the man behind Sophie and numerous others softwares ) after being invited to come by Vincent Untz of OpenSuse and GNOME fame. The goal was to participate in a 3 day long cross distribution meeting sponsored by Novell about application installer, and bring our expertise on the topic as well as give our point of view on the project. Many thanks to them for organising that event and sponsoring some of us.

We were joined by people from Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian, Ubuntu and KDE, as explained on the wiki page of the meeting.
The topic may seem to be quite ambitious, and it was, but we still managed to agree on a common set of standards, as better said in the numerous reports made by others participants like Enrico Zinni, Richard Hugues and others.
To summarize ( and thanks to Richard Hugues to have done this work before me so I can take his blog post ), we had presentations of various software, such as PackageKit, Ubuntu software center, Debtags, and OCS among others. We then worked on deciding what would be needed for sharing various metadata ( screenshots, comments, etc ), producing the start of a specification and various documents, as you can see on the final meeting presentation. The wiki page also holds a good documentation about it.

Now, the important question is what it would mean for us. First of all, while we think it will be an important innovation for free software and Mageia, I didn’t plan to have it adopted without discussing with other members, but I am quite confident that we can benefit from the work that will be done in the coming months. Among the various tasks, we have some python/php/perl programming ( either on Packagekit side, Mageia-app-db side or Ubuntu software center side ), some packaging, and maybe some system administration later. So if you are interested in helping with that or have questions, we will discuss this during the weekly packagers’ meeting on 26/01/11 on the #mageia-dev IRC channel on Freenode.

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Mageia joins Open Invention Network

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

Mageia.org has just joined Open Invention Network as a licensee.

Software patents are a threat to Free Open Source Software development and to free innovation at large.

OIN‘s goal is to minimize/eliminate software patent threats within the Linux ecosystem. It helps by insuring confidence, free innovation and growth within the Linux stack by taking a collaborative and defensive stance against software patents.

OIN provides its members and licensees with the means to:

  • Cross-license to each other, at no cost, their patents relative to Linux;
  • Benefit from OIN-owned pool of patents,
  • Gather forces and defend against software patent threats.

While this doesn’t resolve the question of software patents, it is a great help to defend against those sorts of threats. Mageia.Org strives to understand, design, experiment and release software to empower people in their daily lives; software patents are not going to help in this regard. So we welcome OIN and any other initiative that may help reducing software patents impact and abuses.

OIN members include Sony, IBM, NEC, Red Hat, Philips, Novell. OIN licensees include Canonical, Fluendo, GNOME, Google, KDE, Mozilla, OpenMoko, Oracle, Tom Tom, and many others.

Note that OIN is not alone, only relates to the Linux system and is not the only way to silence software patents, where they are effectively valid; see:

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Happy new Mageia

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

First, let’s get the niceties out of the way… the Mageia team would like to wish you all a very happy New Year, for you and your families :D. We really hope that 2011 will be the Mageia year for users, contributors and partners so that we can propose and promote a rock solid and innovative open source environment.

While we are speaking about the future, the new year comes with the start of the real work!

Packaging

During past Wednesday’s packagers’ meeting, Mageia packaging tasks have been launched. First packages will be imported in the coming days by about 40 packagers. This goes together with starting the mentoring of new packagers so that every proposal of contributions we received since the beginning can turn into a positive effort. You can join the #mageia-mentoring channel on the Freenode IRC network to discuss all aspects of this subject. In the mean time, 2 representatives have been elected for the packaging team leadership.

Our Buildsystem, which is a corner stone of the project, is being updated/wrapped up by the sysadmin team and with the great help of Pascal Terjan (if you meet him, be sure to buy him a beer :)). We will give you more details about the buildsystem deployment later on.

Translations

In the translators/i18n team, basic steps of building up the translation process and workflow have been made. Currently teams are establishing two general translation workflows (one with Transifex and one without it) and we will be ready to start soon. The i18n teams expect that once the whole infrastructure is set (soon) that they’ll gather more contributors to join the teams, former experts and new volunteers alike. In short: i18n is on track!

Web

The Web team is still lagging a bit behind schedule for the new Wiki and Forum instances launch. But this will be done this month, January. The whole infrastructure is making progress slowly (Bugzilla, www, maintainers, account management, calendar, code repositories).

Communication & Marketing

Well… as you may see, we are not very active yet on this, although it is building up slowly as well. Once we have a product ready to be put out the door, marketing will start in earnest.

Alpha 0 release

So we are on track for our first technical release this month. As announced before, of course, do not expect this alpha release to be more than what it is: an alpha release. Things will be way more interesting in the coming months.

FOSDEM

On February 5th and 6th, some of us will meet at FOSDEM in Brussels and will enjoy meetings and discussions with a lot of other happy Free Software hackers!

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First packagers meeting for Mageia

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

The first packagers’ meeting took place the last Wednesday on the #mageia-dev IRC channel on Freenode. About 25 people attended, and many proposed to help both experienced and beginner packagers. Almost 2 hours of constructive discussion, here’re the logs and links to pertinent threads on the mageia-dev mailing list:

Of course if you are interested in contributing in the packaging team, you can still register here. You can attend packagers’ team meetings every Wednesday at 20h UTC in the #mageia-dev IRC channel on Freenode. These meetings should be rather short, around 1/2h. The main goal will be to review ongoing actions based on a pre-defined list of topics (this list will be posted to the mageia-dev mailing list).

Work is now focused on documentation: the Mageia packaging policies and laying out the mentoring process of new packagers.

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