First draft for community newsletter #118.

Further Kiosk testing; working with Helio, identified the problem causing many packages not to be updated by the KDE and GNOME bundle installs (the requires in some KDE and GNOME packages were not version-specific enough to ensure the bundle installation caused already-installed packages to be updated to the available newer versions). Will test the fixes tomorrow.

Passed on a user's suggestion of a free software philosophy page for www.mandriva.com.

Prompted by a planet.gnome.org post, mailed our GNOME guys to check we are using the GTK icon cache correctly.

Posted to the Cooker mailing list to start a discussion about resolving the common IPv6-related network issues for 2007 in some way.

Resurrected an old discussion with Warly and Vincent re 2006 community signature issues with a new suggestion (allow urpmi to read multiple signatures on a package).

Mailed One development team to check on progress of revised One image (to fix non-booting-on-i586 issue).

Slightly revised Inside business page draft. Also slightly revised One article page, not a public draft as it contains obvious text alignment issues I'll fix tomorrow.

Rewrote Newbie Area page on Club site

Followed up on yesterday's testing of Kiosk with various developers

Discussed future Club releases and possibility of future updated 2006 Free with David Barth

Tested user report that Club Firefox 1.5 package does not work with Club Java package - cannot reproduce with latest Java package, both Firefox 1.0.6 and 1.5 seem to recognise it

Further Kiosk testing; still broken :)

Wrote Rick James (who is joining the Club team) a cheat sheet for the company

It seems I've now been with Mandriva for more or less a year - time flies when you're having fun!

Today I spent several hours testing Kiosk, the new web-based one-click software installation system. Identified several bugs and potential improvements. Will be doing more testing tomorrow in various situations. VMware is turning out to be an absolute godsend for this; it's wonderful to be able to keep a copy of a clean 2006 install, then mess it up in various inventive ways to do testing, then be able to start again from the clean version simply by copying it back.

Revised draft of One article for Inside

New layout draft for first page of One article, with real text and some tweaks

Planned to try Kiosk in order to write second half of Inside article, was stymied by yet another Redbus outage. apparently routing this time, not power. yay.

Filed bug #21768 on drakfirstboot failing to correctly set up Club urpmi media, discovered while testing One.

Called for Club forum volunteers to test updated ATI driver packages, possibly fixing the problem when updating X on a system with the ATI drivers installed.

Yes, Redbus's power is down. Again. Same drill as before, we'll be up when they are. Found this post from another dissatisfied customer of theirs - the caption on the picture reads "Power your own servers! A generator provided at every location." :)

New layout draft for business section of Inside

post news about latest Redbus outage on the Club

post Spanish and Dutch translations of latest newsletter

discuss Kiosk testing plan with development team

clarify exactly how functional drakfirsttime is in One for Inside article on One / Kiosk

yesterday: new install of One in VMware to take screenshots for Inside article, wrote first draft of the One section of the article

So, once more all the Mandriva sites are down thanks to a Redbus / Interhouse power outage. This time it's a planned power outage, which obviously makes it so much better. Sigh. The outage started at 8p.m. local time and was apparently scheduled for around two hours, so things should start returning about an hour and a half after I post this. Sorry again for the inconvenience.

If you look at Redbus / Interhouse's PR they proudly pimp their zillions of redundant power supplies, making outages almost impossible, which becomes less impressive when you Google redbus outage and see how many times it's happened before. Why munchkins like this get to run vital infrastructure, I don't know.

Just to note that most Mandriva sites and services are down right now. This is beyond our control - Redbus (one of the major peering points in France) has had a power outage, and we're just one of the casualties. As soon as they're back up, we will be, but in the mean time, we can't do anything. :( This is just to get the word onto Planet Mandriva so people will see it.

I like Warly's activity log on the MDV development wiki. It's a good way to see a lot of the stuff that we're really doing. I thought it might be nice to do something in the same style, to give an idea of what I do all day long, so those of you who give us your money can see where it's going :). Don't know if I'll remember to keep it up, but anyway, here's the first one. Of course, I read the Club forums every day, so I don't note that :)

Worked on layout and content for Mandriva Inside issue #2 (EDIT 2013: previously linked to drafts here, they have been lost)

Published newsletter #117 and translations on the Club and sent to news sites

Discussions with development team on issue with X.org update breaking ATI proprietary drivers

Discussions re new default home page with dbarth and romain - my suggestion to include links to release notes and errata

Proofread Kiosk flash email

You have to hand it to Microsoft:

"Microsoft today confirmed that Windows Vista, the next generation of the Windows client operating system, is on target to go into broad consumer beta to approximately 2 million users in the second quarter of 2006. Microsoft is on track to complete the product this year, with business availability in November 2006 and broad consumer availability in January 2007."

Anyone who's worked in a PR-related capacity anywhere has probably at one point or another crossed their fingers and told a little white lie (or possibly a big whopper), but using in one short paragraph both the phrases "on track" and "on target" to announce that Vista is in fact nothing of the sort constitutes a raising of this fine art form to a hitherto unheard of level...