I’ve actually been running the RC since UTOSC on October 9th. On my home machine, work machine, and my HP netbook. I really haven’t had any problems on any of them, though only one of them was an upgrade – the other two were fresh installs.

Actually, I lied. I’ve had one major problem. EVE Online no longer works out of the box in Karmic. After a lot of searching, I’ve found that if you disable your network connection before you start EVE, and reconnect so that you can log in, it’ll launch and work, but it’s still a pain in the ass. Hopefully they get this resolved soon, so I can shoot some spaceships without disconnecting.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be starting the 16 hour drive to Kent, Washington. I’m moving so that I can be closer to my daughter, who moved there with her mother last September. I’ve never lived out of state, I’ll definitely miss Utah, my friends, and most of all, the Sun.

I’ve been researching the OSS community in Washington, and I’m starting to think that Utah is somewhat of an anomaly. The community in Utah is great. There are a bunch of Linux User Groups (Provo Linux User’s Group, Salt Lake Linux Users’ Group, Utah Ubuntu User’s Group) with great membership, language user groups (Utah PHP User’s Group, Utah Python User’s Group), and a great presence on IRC (for instance, #utah on Freenode has 73 people in it as of this writing, #ubuntu-ut-us has 26 people in it). In contrast, the only usergroup I can find in Washington that has more than 5 members is The Greater Seattle Linux User’s Group. Their single IRC channel is #gslug on Freenode, and currently has 18 users. There is no #washington. There is a Washington Ubuntu User’s group, but it’s very low on membership.

Maybe I can help change all this, but I have to wonder. Is Utah the one that’s different? Is it the “Hive” mind thing we’ve got going on here? Or, is Washington the difference?

The Utah OpenSource Conference went underway yesterday. I thought I'd share my experiences and thoughts here as the con progresses.

Day 1

Today I registered, and manned the Ubuntu booth with Mike Basinger, Bryan Petty, Matthew Washburn, and James VanTassel for the entirety of the day. All the laptops demonstrating Ubuntu at the booth were mine, so I wasn't very comfortable leaving for a presentation. Tomorrow I'll just bring my desktop, it'll be a lot harder for someone to walk off with and I'll be able to see some of the ones I want to see.

The Ubuntu booth got some pretty good participation, lots of people stopped and either asked for more information about Ubuntu, or just to tell us what they already knew and liked. Lots of questions about 9.10 coming out on the 29th. During most of the day there were about 4-5 people gathered around talking.

Day 2

Manned the Ubuntu booth again. Today I got to see the keynote by Stormy Peters, which brought up some interesting aspects and some of the downsides of being paid for work on opensource projects.

I also went to Mac Newbold's presentation entitled "Why FreeBSD is the Best Linux Distro*", which inspired me to, yet again, try to install FreeBSD as my main operating system on my home desktop machine. I am compiling the x11/gnome2 port as I am typing this article. He spent most of the time presenting about how Linux is different from FreeBSD, rather than aspects of why he thinks FreeBSD is actually better than Linux. Currently, I believe that unless you're hell bent on believing that installing packages from source is the best way, the only compelling reason for me is the license. I happen to like the FreeBSD license more than the GPL. More than that, I find FreeBSD to be a fun challenge, much like Linux was when I first started using it. I'll have to see how it goes once I'm done getting everything installed - I'm pretty determined this time to figure out all there is to figure out about using FreeBSD as a desktop operating system.

Day 3

Wasn't feeling well this day, so I didn't end up going. Yes, I realize that makes the conclusion of the article a little anti-climactic. However, I did end up getting Gnome in FreeBSD working well, and I'll write up what I needed to do, how long it took, etc, in another blog entry.

Photos

These will be updated as the conference progresses. Go http://picasaweb.google.com/arolsen/UtahOpenSourceConference2009 here to see the full photos and captions.

For whatever reason (I can only assume it has to do with the product being released /after/ Ubuntu 9.04 came out) the Ubuntu devs have decided to call Firefox 3.5 “Shiretoko”. You can install alongside your regular Firefox installation by typing aptitude install firefox-3.5 and you can run it by typing firefox-3.5. That’s all well and good, except that the User-Agent string is set to:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090803 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Shiretoko/3.5.2

instead of:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090803 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.5.2

Which breaks sites like Facebook (Facebook chat doesn’t work). To fix this, I installed the “User Agent Switcher” extension, which, after a few days of use, I have decided I don’t like. It doesn’t remember user preferences, and you have to reset your default User-Agent every time you start Firefox.

Looking around on the web, I found a much easier way to solve this problem. Type “about:config” in your address bar, and search for the “general.useragent.extra.firefox” entry, right click on it, choose “modify” and change “Shiretoko” to “Firefox”.

This month is my company’s national convention. This combined with a secret project I’m working on after hours means I basically have no time to work on Exaile until October. So, no thanks to me, Exaile 0.3.0.1 has been released. This one is brought to you by the other members of the team, and is a bugfix release for 0.3.0. This includes fixing the bug that was causing 0.2.14—>0.3 migration problems for most people. Enjoy!

Check out our homepage for more information.