Big changes within CentOS and Xen

As most of you know I've been rather disconnected from the CentOS project for a few years. For both personal and professional reasons I had stepped away to get some things straight for myself. About 2 months ago Karanbir and Johnny Hughes reached out to bring me back into the community. As part of the return, we have been working together to collaborate on some truly significant changes within the product.

While the core of the CentOS ideology has been to be 100% binary compatible with our upstream vendor, we've decided that in some areas, WE need to take the initiative. To that end we've been collaborating with some outside projects to help build things into a more cohesive framework. We wanted to grow the project to be more than rebuild, and today we're taking a major step forward in this initiative.

With help from Stefano Stabellini of the Xen project, we're pleased to announce the fruit of a major collaborative effort. As Stefano has put so much of his own time into the project I'll let him explain it.

http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2013/04/01/bringing-open-source-communities-closer-together/

We're pleased to partner with the Xen.org folks to help bring about this monumental shift in the linux ecosystem, and we can't wait to hear from the community! Look for your downloads to be available soon!

Copy nearly every file with bash

I found an interesting trick in bash today that may help a few other folks as well. Occasionally I find that need to copy almost every file in a directory, except for one or two. Usually I'd copy everything and then delete the stragglers I didn't want from the destination directory. There had to be a better way, but as I said I'm lazy. Turns out I found the better way today.

[jperrin@ferrata ~]$ cp -r !(file_to_ignore)  /destination/

This little trick gets a bit better. Bash is slick enough to understand 'or' in this context. So I can also ignore multiple files if I need to

[jperrin@ferrata ~]$ cp -r !(file_to_ignore| this-one-too)  /destination/

Hopefully someone else finds this helpful as well.

Really Gnome?

I really don't want to turn this blog into an anti-gnome3 themed thing, but they seem to insist on terrible things. Being the type of person I am, if I find terrible things, I'm going to share terrible things. So in that spirit, here's your terrible thing: http://www.slideshare.net/juanjosanchezpenas/brightfuture-gnome

This slide deck starts off like any other. A bit of backstory, a bit of self-promotion, no big deal. This is all reasonably mundane, until about slide 10. Slide 10 makes it achingly apparent that you're now listening to a zealot. No amount of logic, evidence, discussion or negotiation is going to change this fanatical mindset. 

Slide 15 also caught my eye as being counter to logic. I wasn't at the talk so I can't speak from context, but a slide stating a lack of corporate involvement is a bit striking given the number of gnome developers who work for Red Hat, and the amount of money RH puts into Gnome.

Have a look over the slide presentation yourself. Have a look at slides 10, 15, 23, and 33. Drink in what this means. I've have used gnome for over a decade, but in light of recent events, you'll find me in XFCE from now on. 

Gnome is just not getting the message

While I've bounced around to various desktop environments, I have found that I always end up coming back to gnome. That is, until now. Gnome3 has already been widely regarded as a step in the wrong direction, however the developers appear to be largely ignorant of what the users want. The arrogance, and ignorance coming from the gnome community has finally pushed me to the breaking point. It's time to search for a permanent replacement to gnome now. If you want to read what finally pushed me to this point, have a look at this:  http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/

At this point I'm thinking XFCE may be my new home, but I'm certainly open to suggestions.