Well, things went a bit quiet in the election over reading week, but they're going to hot up today as I, and the other three candidates, are introduced to students at the Midlands Centre for Youth Ministry and some of the students from Partner Churches. (We'll then do the same with a different group of each tomorrow). Good to have a chance to answer a couple of questions, and say a little bit about why I believe that students should be represented by me.

I'm not expecting to win the election - that would be crazy (and so much hubris), but with four candidates and a Single Transferable Vote system - who knows...

If you're a St John's student, be sure to fill in your ballot paper in full, ranking all four candidates, remembering that who you choose as choices 2-4 will not affect the chances of who you choose as choice 1.

Well, I like AJ's response to my query about the partitioner in Beta5, so I think I'm dropping 10.0 (and with it support for it within usr-local-bin).

Thing is that I've run out of CDs to burn, so I need to pick up a fresh spool before doing the install.

(Chuckle!)

Thinking about switching my laptop to Factory, and while this potentially screws up my package building (certainly means no more usr local bin packages for 10.0) I've been getting really frustrated with using 10.0 with the supplementary GNOME packages. My big problem is bug #152399. At the moment whenever I want to upgrade, I'm having to let Smart remove evolution (and any packages that depend on it) and then reinstall all of them (and at that point let Smart downgrade evolution-data-server and gnome-panel).

So, I've got the ISOs for 10.1 Beta5 downloaded, and I'm planning to use them as the starting point for my Factory transition if I like the response to this mail on the Factory list.

Thing is that at the moment, Factory isn't what I'd envisioned it being back in September. My vision back then was to have two permanent trees within the OpenSUSE project (which would equate to what are currently named Stable and Factory), with a third (Beta) being created a fork from Factory when the beta program for each release started. It would then become the Stable tree at release. Thing is that, although at the moment there are apparently three trees in play: Stable, Factory and Current (10.1 Beta 5), the Current tree (ie what I would expect to be the Beta tree) is basically a stripped down version of Factory made into ISOs.

I think that Factory should be a no-holds-barred bleeding edge tree. If it's not likely to blow a hole in your CPU, order pizza on your credit card or sleep with your daughter, then it's too safe for Factory! It's quite simply not that though, and that's probably because it's the same as the Beta tree. There has to be some degree of stability in Beta^[1] because of the intention of it being used to iron out bugs for the next stable release, but Factory should be for moving forward. Example: Factory should have GNOME 2.13.x in. It should currently be carrying the first release candidate of 2.14, but it's not, it still has 2.12. This not only means that it's not fulfilling what I think its remit should be, but it also means that GNOME 2.13/2.14 is not getting the testing it could be getting from the OpenSUSE community.

On the future of my packages, once we have the Build Service available, that issue is done I suppose, and that's likely to be before 10.2. Also, this is around the time in the beta process that I normally switch to the incoming version anyway.

In other news, a whole bunch of OpenSUSE types are at FOSDEM - have a great time guys!

^[1]Reckless new package manager not withstanding

Rob: That rocks pretty hard - nice one. Can't wait to see it land in Factory.

Well, I installed Xgl this morning, using the instructions found here (also updated it to have the correct versions of packages it links to) and I have to say it simply rocks my socks.

Might have to add a note to that page about having to manually edit gdm.conf but otherwise, went very smoothly.

One thing that's annoying me is that when I have a conversation window open in Gaim and the person I'm chatting to types something, that window now grabs focus. Quite confusing when I was in the middle of typing an email...

Banshee 0.10.6 is out, and you can get packages for SUSE from the usual place (updated ipod-sharp packages too).

College reading week this week, and I have a 1,500 word reflection to write by Thursday - shouldn't be a prob. Also on my TODO list for this week:

• Finally update the full GStreamer 0.10 stack for 10.0
• Write a piece on the importance of a political system for appointing student representatives
• Prepare for leading worship at St Luke's on Sunday

Today I was nominated for Student President, and so the campaign really began this afternoon. Posters have gone up, and manifestos made available. Have spent a fair amount of time pressing the flesh as well.

Tomorrow's my mother's birthday, and since I know she reads my blog, Happy Birthday Mum!

It's time again for college elections, and hopefully by the end of this week I will have my nomination in for student president, along with Jenny and Chris who are already nominated. I've launched my campaign website, and my literature is ready for deployment at college.

• Uploaded new banshee (0.10.5) and gimp-unstable (2.3.7) packages. Note the change in package name from gimp-beta - this is to match the SUSE nomenclature for this package.
• Tonight is the College Revue, with myself and Marc as comperes. Reckon it should be a good night, and will hopefully have photos available after the event.

Check it out. A mail sent yesterday by Andreas J to the announce mailing list mentioned that Xgl is now in Factory.

Here's the mail - it's the final paragraph that you should read.

Michael, my DDO was in college today, met up with him this afternoon for an hour and had a good and fruitful chat.

Have sent a patch with the Tomboy changes to Alex for him to check before I commit.

Novell has announced its contribution of the Xgl subsystem to the X.org project and boy is it schweet! Check out the videos, especially the spinning cube. Eye-candy-a-plenty. Can't wait to see this starting to be utilised.

Tomboy changes are now ready to commit, just need to make sure I don't need to include any dependency checks for the two plugins in question. A day away from the code (at college) and then revisiting allowed me to see that I'd missed a $ in my checks for Fixed Width.

Preached at St Luke's this morning: Jesus in the power of the Spirit: Healing. Seemed to go pretty well, although will have to watch it back before being sure of that. It was my video-assessed sermon. What got it off to a really good (!) start was that the clip-on mic decided to fail just as I was starting after we checked it before the service. I had to go grab the handheld, and in doing so dropped part of my notes on the floor. Anyway, none of this was the end of the world.

Working on allowing the non-core plugins for Tomboy to be enabled by the configure script, but for some reason the fixed width plugin doesn't get enabled. Sure it's something simple I'm missing, but as far as I can tell I've basically done the same for it and for Note of the Day, but NotD works. Could be at the can't see the wood for the trees point, so will revisit.

Think I'm coming down with a cold, which is pretty sucky, or it could just be my body not quite knowing how to process the fact that this evening I ate a meal that contained nothing but vegetables - I made a very hot chili-stir fry vegetable dish, and it was gorgeous. Blew our heads off though.

Liverpool really need to get back to winning. The 2-0 loss to Chelsea today puts us six points behind Man Utd, the two games in hand potentially put us level on points, but they have a far superior goal difference.

tomboy package updated to version 0.3.5 and new sub-package, tomboy-plugins added.

Pretty full day at college today; preparing for the College Revue followed by prep for Thursday night's service this afternoon.

Big thanks to William Jon McCann who has fixed my bug in gnome-screensaver. There are fixed packages of the latest CVS version available now.

Congrats to Davis and Ann on the birth of their child.

After cell group tonight went and joined the college Karaoke Night at the Double Top pub. Time was short to register before the night was up, so I recklessly chose the first song I saw that I knew I know. It was All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow (or, All I Wann Do by Cheryl Crow as it appeared in their list). Big mistake as it's about 4 keys too high for me. Maybe next time I'll do Every Rose Has Its Thorn...

I have a gnome-screensaver bug open.

It's GNOME bug #329311 and Novell bug #146434.

Fix it, and if you're ever in the Nottingham area, a beer on me is yours.

(I know it's not quite GNOME Bounties, but I'm not made of money... )

Have removed the Make Poverty History banners from my site and Planet SUSE because the organisation has reached the end of its intended lifespan. Don't forget to keep keep campaigning though. There are many organisations with campaigns happening in 2006. Please join at least one, and continue to make a difference.