Free Software Linux

Many places I go I meet people telling how much they liked graphic tutorials and how much they learned about using GIMP and Inkscape following theb, and this makes me feel bad, as I am quite busy lately with a lot of things (video and photography ate a lot of my time) and rarely manage to write something new. But here is a perfect opportunity, Fedora 13 entered Alpha and had a code name (Goddard) and so far a visual theme based on rocketry, so it seems a tutorial titled "Drawing a rocket with Inkscape is not rocket science" would be just fit.

Very few followed my riddle and to my knowledge nobody guessed the answer, but the time has come for the first part of the trilogy, today the day for the Fedora 13 Alpha release.

It was not hard at all, the riddle was "the first one is titled just like a name" and its answer "Goddard", as in the rocket scientist and the F13 codename. The next one, "is about trekish cannon-fodder" is slightly harder, but still trivial for any respectable geek.

Now gotta run, I have a localised announcement to write...

When I was hit by the need of some business cards and considered the Fedora contributor ones are not fit for the tasks and the ones from my day job are even worse, I decided I need to make some. Fired Inkscape up and got playing with it.

This is new and awesome: the new interface for the Open Clip Art Library is at least what we waited for all those 6 years since the project was founded. Not the images can be browsed visually (can you imagine an image gallery lacking such feature? OCAL was it...)

The site is powered now by Aiki Framework, a "a new and flexible PHP+MYSQL platform that allows designers and programmers to easily create and work with content management systems from the web" (quote from the press release).

It looks like everybody is rocking the planet except me, wonderer with pink ponies and disco balls and mchua with happy people, ponies and disco balls again. Is time for me to join the fray, rocking as hard as I can (with a bit of help from my little cartoonish friends):

As Fedora lacks a warm an fuzzy mascot (and every time something like that was tried it was received with a very strong and vocal opposition), I had to use for this photo session the same old Tux penguin. So there is no way I can turn this photo series into some distro-related wallpapers or posters.

It is worth noting the model is a CS student who understand and likes the principles of Free software and Free culture but still uses Windows on her laptop, so the message is almost true :D

I am in a hurry, working on some cool (for myself!) stuff which I will probably write about in a couple of days, so I will reproduce the announcement verbatim:

The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is the annual working conference for free software graphics application users and developers. The fifth edition takes place 27-30 May 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. Teams from GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, Open Font Library and many other graphics projects gather to improve their software and discuss new ideas for interoperability and shared standards.

I, for one, feel an itching seeing Inkscape 0.48 in "chill" - this means just before "freeze" and on the way to "release" and start thinking about a jump to Rawhide as soon as it's version will be upgraded but on the other hand I see people in a different situation: big company with "RHEL4 on thousands of workstations" crying about being stuck with (self built) 0.46 and preparing a migration to RHEL5 now, in the spring of 2010, and crying their old building script won't work with 0.47 (EPEL has 0.44 for RHEL4 and 0.46 for RHEL5).

Just before selecting a candidate for F13 Alpha (we were supposed to do this yesterday), those are the concepts submitted for Fedora 13 artwork, enjoy:

As you can easily see, the inspiration source was the code name Goddard, going the way to rocketry, deep space, exploration. I expect we will go with one of Mo's rocket trails and also like Mola's cartoonish style, which I could see used for additional graphics (banners).

Have you recently seen James Cameron’s Avatar? Have you always wanted to make a 3d movie? Has the costs of proprietary 3d animation suites always hindered your creationism?

Blender provides a free and open source solution to all of these problems. If you have been wanting to jump into the realm of 3d animation without really investing a big load of money, blender is what you are looking for.

As with any great open source project, Blender supports a lot of platforms, which includes Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, Linux x86, MAC OSX, Solaris and Irix. It requires Python to work.

Now that I can see beyond the snow is time to follow the Day -1 with more photos showing what happened during the event.

Travelling with a sponsorship from Mozilla (thank you guys a lot!) and being a rabid Fedora fanboy I shared my time between the Mozilla room and the Fedora booth:


And hanged with people from both communities:

We had yesterday the first edition for this year of the RLUG meet (Întâlnirea RLUG) and I pretty much failed as a photographer: expecting to take only a few shots (they look pretty much the same as one meeting to another) I skipped checking the battery level in my camera, so with the last charge being last year (for the New Year's Eve photoshot)it was obviously depleted, so my only option was to resort to the video camera, which is not suited for the task for a few crappy shots.

I noticed today a cool Free Art project: OpenGameArt.org is a large collection of freely licensed resources (graphics, 3D models and audio) for game development, both original creation and contribution from existing FLOSS games. It looks like fun to me:

I guess I should look if I have some stuff suitable for it...

I had the laugh of the day (of the week?) when bmbogdan showed me this:

I found it very funny and ironic when you take your current avatar/hackergotchi, delete the Fedora logo from his T-shirt, submit the SVG as Public Domain to the Open Clip Art Library for everyone to use it freely and it ends as an illustration to an article about photo managers in Ubuntu. That's sharing! Lets all hold hands and sing "Kumbaya".

Much to my disappointment, among for the naming criteria for Fedora 13, we did NOT have "it must not be a ruler or religious figure" so a lot of obscure kings or emperors were advanced, but a queen is much better than that, more so when we are talking about a queen of the fairies. So my vote for the F13 codename was Gloriana.

Have you voted yet? If not, then go now and obey your queen!