I get suckered into these threads on osnews (I no longer comment, but still read) and I wanted to make people aware of an important thing: Commenting on the state of any feature does not fix that feature. I suggest you find better ways to use your time.

MOTU needs people
First and foremost, please check out Ubuntu Open Week and visit some sessions.

Much to do
One issue that is facing MOTU is the problem of things needed to be done vs. people who can do it. So if you are on the edge, or think that there is sufficient people to do it, now is your chance to get involved. MOTU wants, and needs you!

Idea time
I have an idea on how to get the ball rolling. I propose a once a week, hour long session for MOTU. This session would need to have 1-2 very knowledgable MOTU’s. Here is where my idea branches off from others slightly. In these sessions, it would be bitesize task driven. Very informal, friendly atmostphere. Basically, the session would have an agenda, which would feature 5-10 packages with easy to remedy issues. At this point, the MOTU novices would then try to fix these issues, but have an expert there to answer any questions along the way.

Experience pays
The benefits:

• Each session 5-10 packages (or more depending on attendance) get fixed
• Rapidly accelerate the learning and potential base of MOTU members
• Kill the massive learning curve associated with it

Coordinate with forums
I think we have a huge base of potential people in the forums, who would like to help, but have no clue how. If we can pull a sufficient amount of people who are willing to learn, everyone benefits.

Potential sponsor
If we can get some people willing to get this going, for the MOTU experts who will guide the sessions, I will provide paypal funds for sufficient beer (ie $20-40) to cover your trouble. My sponsorship offer will extend for up to 2 MOTU’s per week for the first month to get the ball rolling.

Advertising
A key to this will be to reach as many people as possible. So if it happens, we will need help to spread the word at some point. Not yet, because it doesn’t exist right now. But I am open to any ideas.

Looking for a little help

The problem
I need to forward one serial port’s traffic over tcp/ip to a device. The device itself has the actual serial port device hooked up to it, and provides network access to it. I have been unable to find documentation on how to forward my traffic to it. The device itself is a “Systech RCS-3184″ or RCS-3000 series. In windows, this functionality is provided by a program called NativeCom. Searching google only yields spam aggregators.

Got a solution?
Please just leave any possible solutions in comments.

Back story
Well today I was upgrading one of my systems from edgy to feisty, and someone rebooted my computer, causing my primary partition to somehow disappear. Being that there was nothing critical on it, I figured I would just do a fresh install anyway. But I have had this Vista disk for some time just sitting here, so I figured I would check it out.

Install process
Install process is very easy. Only like 4-5 clicks. I would say that the Feisty installer is about on even footing with the Vista installer. Initially I tried to put it on a 10 gig partition, but it wasn’t having that. Instead of saying that I didn’t give it enough space, it just kept telling me I didn’t have an appropriate volume. Gave it 30 then it went.

Once installed
Vista doesn’t support my sound card out of the box. Feisty does. Score one for the little guys. I immediately went to download firefox, and when I went to install it the screen when blank for about 8 seconds with a flashing cursor, then came back. Quite odd. Played a little bit with the 3d desktop but it didn’t seem anywhere near as useful as compiz at this point. I finally found out how “user access controls” work also. Everything I tried to do, I was asked again if I was trying to do it. Click add user -> Box comes up asking me if I want to add a user. I supposed I wouldn’t have clicked the icon for it if I didn’t want to add one?

Art
The default art in Vista outclasses Feisty in my opinion (then again so does Fedora). Although I suppose that is trivial as there are a ton of themes at art.gnome.org, but first impressions mean a lot to some people. Getting gdesklets by default, and a bit more polished would compete with their default widgets easily.

Fonts
The best thing about vista is the fonts. Their fonts by default look pretty darn good. I think that might have to do with the default feisty font issue that I blogged about earlier this week.

Conclusion
This may sound bias, but it really isn’t, as my copy of Vista was free, so I have no vested interest in bashing Vista if I am just going to use it in the secrecy of my computer room. I just don’t see a compelling reason to run it. 99% of my computer usage revolves around web browsing, instant messenger, emailing, web design and coding. In those scenarios, Ubuntu provides a better platform that doesn’t get in my way.

Dear AMD, in light of you losing $600M for Q4, I am still left wondering how you can ignore quality Linux drivers. Feisty was probably the biggest release yet for consumer linux, and I have seen figures on previous releases of downloads greater than 20 million. You can’t afford to exclude this market. If you can make decent ATI drivers for Linux, we will be on board with you.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=343670

Follow that thread, and get subpixel rendering again.

Apparently there was no category in the pony awards for me. I was hoping to win the award for most annoying spec spammer. Which reminds me, check out: Enhanced Bash spec.

Been doing some php work lately, and I found some nice tools.

Symfony Web Framework
Great system for creating stuff, fast and easy. Symfony

Komodo Edit
Activestate recently released a free as in beer version of their editor. Komodo Edit

AMD64 Komodo Edit
If you want to run Komodo on amd64 run: sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32asound2 lib32ncurses5 ia32-libs-sdl ia32-libs-gtk gsfonts gsfonts-x11 linux32 python

Putting it together
So combining Komodo, Symfony, and Apache 2 / PHP 5 / Postgresql 8.2 makes life super easy.

Michael Dell uses Ubuntu – I have got to say, after viewing that page, it makes me want to buy new hardware. I still haven’t jumped on the dual core bandwagon yet, but when people start showing off their hardware something in my brain triggers the “impulse buy” section.

On slashdot I saw a link saying that in China only 244 copies of Vista were sold. It infers that many people get it through other, less scrupulous methods. I was musing to myself about it, and I figured it begs to ask the question: Isn’t that a good thing for america?

How is stealing our software good?
It seems to me that, as an American, this is excellent! It boils down to competitive advantage really. If people in China all run windows, then I can be relatively sure that I can out-produce them and provide a better product to the global economy. I base this assertion on the fact that I see Linux as such a huge technological advantage, both in cost of developing applications, and cost of maintenance.

Please, continue to pirate Windows.
It makes me much more valuable in the global economy when you do. Don’t think I don’t appreciate that.