Yes, Ubuntu Hardy Heron works just great on the Mac mini. Well, at least for the most part. I you have an Apple keyboard you will have to pull of some tricks to get it working 'better'. For example the 'num lock' does not work and will screw up your keyboard usage, I found you can reverse the effect by pressing the 'fn' key, which is located at the 'insert' key location on a PC keyboard.


You can easliy solve this buggerness by enabling this function in the 'keyboard layout' options in the 'preferences' (see screenshot). Another thing is the none-working function keys. Really great, luckily these can be enabled simply by the command;

echo 2 > /sys/module/hid/parameters/pb_fnmode

put this in your '/etc/rc.local' or for your lazyness. The one major drawback is that the sleep function isn't working. It is probably kernel related, as 2.6.24-12 from rc1 worked just fine, but the current 'stable' 2.6.24-16 doesn't. I'll try to figure out which part is responsable later.

About a month ago a press release was issued about a study from the Standish Group International, where they claim that OSS is costing software vendors $60 Billion, or about 6% yearly.

That is just great news. I suspect it will only increase in these financial challenging times. The bottom line is that we all have been paying $60 Billion to much all these years. Money we could have used to expand our own businesses.

Another way to look at it is from in investors side of things. When you think about it, it means that right now, OSS is already a $60 Billion business. And the 'commercial' OSS market is still very young and growing. It sure does look tempting to invest in such a growing market which is already eating away at other long lasting companies (well, long lasting for IT anyway).

What is going on these days, are people losing their common sense or what? Recently Kif Kif, a Belgian multi-culturian organization, wants to ban all racist posts on (Belgian) internet forums. They have a petition going right now, that you can sign, but I'm urging you not to do so.

First of all, they will have a hard time enforcing this, ever, and even if they would succeed in doing this for Belgian sites, it wont stop this from happening on millions of  sites around the globe.

They claim to be an independent instance providing a voice for a diversity of people and a place for discussion. Sounds to me that only the opinions they like are allowed, how can you have a discussion if some parties are not allowed to be heard.

If it's not true what they are saying, it should be easy enough to counter any argument the made. If they are correct in their statements, it is of the most importance that they be heard.

This brings us to Fitna, a short movie of about 15 minutes long that cuts and pastes all kind of images, sound bits, newspaper articles and news clips to make some kind of statement. Most of Europe is going nuts over it, though so far nobody has given any good argument against it.

It's funny that, by trying to 'save' us from right wing ideas, they use the same techniques they would not accept from these extremist right political parties.

I've been looking around for a good book on XCode, the development environment included with MacOS X. It's neat, but also huge and there is a lot of documentation available, but mostly it's still based on an older version of XCode and not 3.0 included with Leopard.

That's until now, because a great free online resource has been made available; Become An Xcoder. Although it starts right from the basics, you can just skip those chapters and get an update on the other bits.

Support Bruce Perens! And add your signature to this petition for accepting him as a member of the executive board of OSI.

For people who don't know him, or what he stands for, you can read up on him on wikipedia or his own web site. I know him as a former HP employee where he started Debian. He's also the founder of the LSB, busybox and a great evangelist of open source in general, up there together with ESR and RMS.

You can find him (very) active on certain discussion topics on slashdot, but he's always very willing to help anybody out. When I had some open source related problems myself, I turned to him for help and he didn't leave out cold. I can't say who else is so much available, that approachable in the OSS scene other then Bruce. He deserves your signature if you care about anything OSS related.

Fosdem 08, two days of open source talks, speeches, meeting people and discovering new stuff that's out there.  You can download most talks on the Fosdem website, so I'm not going to go over them again like I did in my previous post the last few years. 

Instead I would like to present some pictures, that might give you an idea how the event is like (if you haven't been before).

Outside a 2CV station wagon (is this a hack? i never heard or saw this type of 2CV before) was parked, advertising the Document Freedom Day 08. 

I'm a loyal Fosdem donator, each year I make my donation to this free event. It has an added bonus that from a certain amount you can pick a O'Reilly book and you get included in a price draw at the end of the conference. 'The Bash Cookbook' was my pick for this year, it contains a lot of scripting tips, a good guide for any Unix system administrator. Oh, and speaking of the prizes, I actually won this amazing piece of hardware, more on this when the box arrives.

Even outside the conference rooms there is action going on. Most high profile projects and distros have their own stand, displaying demos, gadgets, advice and friendly chatter.

OK, a few emering trends I saw this year. First, the amount of Apple laptops that were used. Here a picture taken in between 2 talks. In this shot you see both a MacBook and a MacBook Pro. It almost looked like everybody had them, there were that many. Also, for all the talks I 'd been to, There were only 2 non-Mac speakers (the guys from fedora/centos).

Another trend, when you don't have an Apple, at least show up with an Eee PC. I don't think they are available in Europe yet, still that didn't stop them from popping up everywhere you looked.

Aaw, who could ever hurt such a little cute foxy.

Nobody is going to pin me down.

Yep, the usual suspects, last year the OLPC was shown during an opening talk, this year a truckload of them were displayed and usable for everybody.

That's how a fried sliced potato looks like from behind. Poor guy, dragging laptops, water and all kinds of stuff around the place.

Most talks were hot, certainly the Mozilla dev talks during the first day.

The room was packed, all the time! I believe the most successful talks were given by the Mozilla people this year. Can you blame them? There are so many interesting project building on and around the Mozilla project, not just Firefox and Thunderbird. But also Songbird and Miro, check them out!

This was something new, never before seen on Fosdem - Beer. There was a lot of beer drinking going on. I had never seen this the previous years, but luckily everybody was smart enough not to get drunk so the only hindrance you got was empty bottles lying all over the place. I'm a Belgian, and thus I don't have anything against beer (I like it more then wine in fact), but this conference is not the place for massive beer consumption.

Outside view of one of the buildings.

Don't forget to wash your hands.

Did you ever code with the daemon in the pale moonlight?

I loved this idea, it's brilliant! Users of Gnome (the best desktop environment for Unix systems) had this up on the wall at their stand. On the left you could leave a post-it on what you really loved about Gnome, on the right side you could leave a message on the worst bug or most needed currently missing feature.

This year Fosdem was extremely good. A lot of quality talks, a lot of people. And that could be the rising problem. Fosdem is growing, it's getting bigger, but the location stays the same. Some rooms were so packed that there was no possible way of getting in anymore. Perhaps they should start looking out for a new location or get more rooms from the VUB for next year event.

The Wii might just turn out to be the greatest console for all 30-somethings. It's nice for kids, it has great games and nostalgica galore, which now even reaches another peak with the introduction of C64 games in VC!