I’m using Fedora, so I joined the Fedora Project

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fedora-logoI’ve been using Fedora — the Xfce spin — for about a week now after a lengthy testing period. And with the Fedora Project being so welcoming and all, I decided to join.

There’s a Join Fedora page. And from this Planet Fedora post, I learned about the Fedora Join SIG. I joined the SIG IRC channel and mailing list to get myself started.

One thing I can tell you is that there’s no easy way to actually join Fedora on the Join Fedora page. This is not good. (I’ll file a bug.)

But you can get a link to join the Fedora Project on the “Join Fedora” portion of the project wiki.

So if you really want to join Fedora (and I just did), you can start on the new accounts signup page. Don’t linger — the CAPTCHA has a limited shelf life (and forces you to do simple arithmetic). The first time I tried, I had to re-enter my information to keep the CAPTCHA fresh enough to answer.

Never mind all that. I wanted to join Fedora, and I did. You can too.

Video: EFI in Debian with Steve McIntyre at DebConf 2012

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Kilt-wearing Debian Developer (and former Debian Project Leader) Steve McIntyre talks about the state of EFI in Debian in this DebConf 2012 video.

I have done an EFI installation of Debian Wheezy, and while the installation was ultimately not successful, the EFI part went smoothly.

Given that pretty much all new PCs will ship not only with EFI but with Secure Boot, it’s vitally important that Linux handle EFI — and handle it well.

I’m not sure what the state of Secure Boot is in Debian at this point. I know that Secure Boot did not make it into Wheezy, though there’s some kind of solution where you enter your own key (a solution I know nothing about).

Let me just say that UEFI is both the present and the future, and any operating system that wants to stay relevant in the coming years needs to support it.

Video: International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield sings David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ … in space

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Not so much irony as planned coincidence, Commander Chris Hadfield — who is very musical if this is him singing — does David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” aboard the International Space Station.

Hadfield has a YouTube channel, and it appears he really can sing.

Ever tried to make a Windows 8 recovery image? ‘Pain in the ass’ covers it

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So I have this new HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop that shipped with Windows 8.

It runs with Secure Boot over UEFI. And the Windows product key? Embedded in the firmware.

Back in the Windows 7 days, which for me were last month, I had an ISO and could (and did) reinstall from it with my product key.

Now I don’t see ISOs and don’t know if they’ll even work.

So I set about trying to make “recovery” images from the D: partition on the hard drive.

I used the HP Recovery Manager, which as far as I know is a wrapper for what Windows uses to do this same task.

I had a choice: six DVDs or a 32 GB USB flash drive. I got a killer deal on the flash drive, and who wants to burn six DVDs?

Anyhow, three failed tries later (at 2 hours each), I gave up on putting the Windows 8 recovery image on the 32 GB flash drive. Fail. After fail.

I buckled, grabbed six DVDs, and now I’m on the fifth out of six.

Then I’ll start torturing Windows 8 proper. I’ll be dual-booting with either Fedora 18 Xfce or Xubuntu 13.04. I’d love to run GNOME 3, but the 3D acceleration needed for that and this HP laptop’s AMD video hardware (part of the combination CPU/graphics chip called the APU) aren’t playing well at all right now.

Eventually the Linux kernel, Xorg and the AMD/Radeon drivers will catch up (and I prefer the open drivers because the closed-source ones are hard to maintain and often, in my case anyway, fail to work at all).

I even had a not-so-spirited Twitter exchange with Microsoft over this. When you’re used to sub-1 GB Linux distributions that include a full range of applications, having to make SIX 4.7 GB DVDs to restore Windows WITHOUT almost any applications seems so very, very wrong.

I’m one DVD away from being done with this “recovery” operation. It can’t be soon enough.

Holy crap: Xubuntu 13.04′s Secure Boot fail and Fedora 18 with Xfce’s Secure Boot success

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I still can’t believe it.

I’m testing distros on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us, which has optional Secure Boot for Windows 8, and I’ve run into a huge problem.

Xubuntu 13.04 boots from a DVD just fine with Secure Boot switched on. The image has no problem booting to the live desktop and doing the install.

But when I reboot into my new Xubuntu system on the hard drive, the kernel (or whatever else is involved) won’t validate, and the system won’t start. The only thing I can do is go into the laptop’s setup and turn off Secure Boot.

This is the Beta 2 image. I don’t know if there was a fix before the final release yesterday, but not being able to start an installed distro with Secure Boot is a pretty huge bug. Even though 3D video performance is extremely poor at this stage for this hardware, I’m downloading an Ubuntu 13.04 final ISO to see if the bug persists in Ubuntu proper.

I confirmed that it wasn’t my hardware by installing Fedora 18 with Xfce from live media. The ISO booted fine, the install went fine (even though the new Anaconda is more awkward than not), and the system started right up upon reboot. With Secure Boot enabled.

I’m doing a huge update right now in Yum Extender, an application I’ve never heard of before. But it’s not a bad GUI front end for Yum. You get a whole lot more information on the screen than with PackageKit in GNOME.

If I can get Skype running in Fedora 18, this is pretty much a done deal.

And a working (and working-under-Secure Boot) Fedora system is a powerful incentive not to screw with what sure looks like success.