[PLUG] minutes of today's monthly meet

[Rahul Sundaram]

shirish wrote:

> 
> The other thing which happened is that Ramky (always forget his full
> name, sorry) from Redhat showed us a demo of frets on fire. 

Ramakrishna Reddy and it is Red Hat.

I had
> heard of this game but had never run due to its 2 GB RAM system
> requirements. http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/
> 
> It was yesterday's nightly build and the demo was good enough for us.
> (There's a bit of humor in the demo which is cool)
> 
> What would be more interesting is to know if there have been any
> attempts to use sheet music or notations alongwith the game. There are
> some softwares to write notations and stuff in GNU/Linux.
> 
> Of course the copyright laws for sheet music suck but that's a matter
> for a different day.

This game is also unfortunately mirrored in patent issues and will never 
be included in Fedora.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-games-list/2008-January/msg00022.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-games-list/2008-January/msg00041.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-games-list/2008-January/msg00033.html

> (Couldn't help wondering the difference with ATi now opening up some
> of their specs and stuff but that's a different topic altogether)

Well, the difference is that if hardware manufacturers opened up 
specifications, people who know how to write good drivers can do so. It 
will take more time but likely will work better.

> Anyways, the discussion then veered towards Ubuntu spoiling things.
> 
> The argument being put forth were :-
> 
> a. They make things too damn easy. While people may still have to
> configure stuff, most of the things become pretty much built-in so a
> newbie/amateur programmer/developer who wants to play with the
> internals doesn't need to know.

[There are a number of valid criticisms against any distribution but 
these aren't IMO]

This is just elitism. There is a difference between people learning 
because they want to vs people who are being compelled to learn to get 
things working.

> b. Because the software is on a CD, all the tools are not there due to
> which one has to have good net connectivity to download anything.
> While the need is similar for other distros. as well but its usually
> something off-beat.

http://get.fedoraproject.org offers a live cd by default too. Sure, 
there are other images (including multi-cd and dvd images). The 
alternative images might be more hidden in the

> 
> Lastly, the discussion veered into still issues of hardware support
> specifically with scanners and printers who are below the 5k range.
> Some of the models were of HP, while some of Humax and others.
> 
> What would have been also interesting to also point out would have
> been this resource
> 
> http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/
> 
> I actually wanted to get reactions from the free software community
> about this line given on the project main page.
> 
> "*** DON'T USE the foo2zjs package from:
>          Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandrake/Manrivia, Debian, RedHat, Fedora,
> Gentoo, Xandros, EEE PC, Linpus, MacOSX, or BSD!
> *** Download it here and follow the directions below. "

There are a number of such projects where the developers are often 
hostile towards some of the downstream distributions or in this case, 
almost all of them. Such projects including cdrecord or XFree86 have forked

Rahul.