Arch Hurd does Software Freedom Day
On Saturday the 18th of September, I and Matt (hayashi) will be at the Software Freedom Day event in Manchester; located in Madlab, lasting from 1000 to 1600. If you're going to the event, or will just be in the area (or city), drop by and say hi. Plans include:
- Demonstration Machine
- We plan to bring a computer running Arch Hurd for people to have a look at. Haven't quite figured out the logistics yet (or which of us will be bringing the computer), but we'll definitely have one.
- LiveCDs
- I'll bring a stack of (working) live cds to give away to anyone who wants one. I'm not sure how many to bring, but if I run out I'll just distribute copies of the ISO (if you have some form of portable media with you).
- Meeting People
- This'll probably be what we'll spend most of the time doing, and it should also be the most fun. If you're in the area on the day, come and say hi :)
- Keysigning
- if you have proof of identity, I'll make a note and sign your GPG public key when I get home after the event.
I've never gone to a free software event before, so this'll be a nice gentle start to our plan of showing up and giving a talk at ArchCon 2011 next year. It should be a fun day :)
FSF Membership Card
Well, my FSF membership card arrived today. It's pretty incredible really — fits in a wallet, and yet has 2GB of storage. It's, obviously, thicker than the average card, but it's not fat. If there is one thing flash memory is good for, it's things like this.
Naturally, I immediately wanted to try the copy of Trisquel Live, a completely FOSS GNU/Linux distribution ASAP but, much to my chagrin, it didn't actually work on my computer, though it did in qemu. Rather than think "Great, it doesn't work", I instead thought "Great, an opportunity to learn how to use syslinux" :)
So I made three partitions, a 600MB fat32 partition for sharing files, a 1GB ext2 partiton for syslinux to live on, and a 250MB partition for a writable home folder to live on. Setting things up with unetbootin was incredibly easy, I just downloaded the latest Trisquel ISO, mounted my ext2 partition, and ran unetbootin. Unfortunately, though, unetbootin tried to use syslinux which only works on vfat partitions, so I had to manually install extlinux (with the command extlinux -i), and it booted!
Once I knew it worked, I decompressed the squashfs image and made a few changes — mounting the ext4 and fat32 partitions — remade the image, and rebooted to check it still worked. Well, it's now working wonderfully, and I've put some GNU stuff on the fat32 partition if ever I'm in need at a Windows machine, currently I've added
- The Freedom Fry video
- Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman PDF
- The latest edition of the FSF Bulletin (I plan to add new bulletins as and when they come out)
Can't think of anything else, but that should be enough for now. Oh, and my geek points have shot through the roof now that I have this thing in my wallet :P
Warm fuzzy feeling
Noticed the little array of buttons on the right there? They're the cause of the warm fuzzy feeling I'm currently experiencing. Of course, there's the normal warm fuzzy feeling that every webmaster feels when their site validates in both the (X)HTML and CSS versions of their choice, but there's another button there, cause of another warm fuzzy feeling.
I've just become a student member of the Free Software Foundation and, with it comes several things:
- Warm fuzzy feeling for supporting Free Software
- My very own @members.fsf.org email address (contact page will be updated imminently)
- USB membership card containing Trisquel Live, a completely free GNU/Linux distribution
- Free entry to the LibrePlanet conference—just in case I ever decide to go
- Discount from their shop (though I haven't really seen anything I like/want…)
- And… a biannual postal bulletin, sent to me by genuine FSF postal monkeys.
Now, if only the GNU chief webmaster would get back to me about that volunteer webmaster position…
