I guess it was holiday season, after all ;)

I'll try to summarize what has been going on.

First of all, as someone noted on Planet GNOME, Ximian is slowly taking over Novell ;). Novell hired Rob Love (a Linux kernel hacker) to work on desktop integration issues, but this is already old news.

Real news is that Rob is doing very well, which means there's stuff like Gnome Volume Manager. It's good stuff, and he has promised to put it into CVS soon.

The other big stuff around desktop-devel-list is discussion of proposed modules for Gnome 2.6. Since module selection time is (I think, check the release map at yourself, I'm lazy now ;) January 12th, it got pretty heated up. As it seems, most of the proposed modules are not going in (monkey-bubble, g-s-t, gnome-network), some are already in (gnome-keyring, gswitchit), and others are still debatable (rhythmbox, evolution, gal, gtkhtml and evolution-data-server). I'd like Evolution to be in the desktop, but I'd prefer Totem over Rhythmbox (alas, Totem was not even proposed this time, even though it was accepted in 2.4 timeframe, but withdrawn at maintainer's request later on). Actually, what I'd like even more is to see evolution-data-server, and simple addressbook and calendar application. Though, I don't see those simple apps anywhere ;)

Still in the Gnome news, GVADEC (Gnome Users And Developers European Conference) is on schedule for June 28-30, 2003 in Kristiansand, Norway, and there's a call for papers, as well. Call for papers seems modified (I first noticed it with a deadline for abstracts of February 1st, not 16th as it is now), which probably reflects issues Miguel raised in this mail: not enough abstracts submitted, because CFP indicates that they want research papers. That's fine for the D in GUADEC, but it wouldn't really work for the U. I think it will be tragic if it stays that way.

For the rest of the stuff, turn to Planet GNOME, puppet of Jeff's, on a new fancy address.

At the same time, I notice a couple of folks I know started blogging more actively: Jordi Mallach of Debian, and Catalan translator in Gnome, Carlos Perelló Marín (once a Spanish translator, creator of current translation status pages, and most recently, author of a nice Locale and Culture configuration applet).

The new Carlos' applet is good stuff — I hope this will mean no more explaining to folks what is LC_ALL, LANG, LANGUAGE, what priorities do they take, what's LC_MESSAGES, etc. Yeah, I surely hope this will help folks choose their own language in a more natural and easier way.

This is a Dell Inspiron 1100, which is widely available for below $700 at Dell's online store to... US residents. Still, it's possible to use eBay to find someone who's willing to ship it overseas, and that's how I got mine.

This one is a Celeron 2.3GHz, with 256MB memory and 20GB hard drive, and a combo DVD and CD writer. Of course, modem, network, sound and graphics is integrated into Intel i810 board. Network card requires either the latest Linux kernel in the series 2.4 (2.4.23), or getting yourself a separate driver (search for bcm4400). BIOS is riddled with bugs which makes i810 driver in XFree86 4.3 suck (BIOS limits video memory to 1MB, and doesn't accept the request from the driver to change it — reportedly fixed in CVS, which will become 4.4 soon), but there's a simple tool to allow it to be used even with 4.3.

I didn't get modem working, though I didn't even try very hard (I've got a PCMCIA card).

As always, this machine came with Windows preinstalled (XP Home). It took up entire hard drive, and wouldn't let it go. Since I wanted to keep it until I try out Serbian translation of Windows XP, but didn't want it to take over more than 2GB, I had to dump it, and reinstall it later.

Now, I was not too much surprised that my ancient Slackware 8.0 install (which doesn't autodetect anything) didn't detect a thing, though most of it was painless to get working. But, when XP started in 640x480 mode with 16-bit colors, and complained how I should enlarge my resolution (same problem as with X: cannot use more than 1MB of video memory), without a clue about the network card, modem or audio, I started to wonder where is that usability I was often convinced there is (like in discussions on EliteSecurity web forums a couple of months back). Yes, of course, all the drivers were available on a CD. But that usable is any other system too: if vendor provides the drivers, it's not a problem to put them onto a CD, web, or anywhere else. Dell could have also put all the drivers for the Linux kernel and for the XFree86 on a CD (they're all available, except maybe for the modem — Inspirons 1100 apparently come with 3 distinct modem chipsets, and I got the one that has the slightest chances of working).

Ok, point I tried to make earlier got confirmed — installing basic hardware is not easy, and doesn't belong into everyday's work on any system.

As a sidepoint, late in the last year I got a digital camera to play with, and it installed seamlessly as USB storage (once I modprobed all the USB stuff, of course, since this is ancient system ;), and I used Nautilus to view my images. Great, I loved playing with that, but it had to go back ;). Now, I'm seriously considering getting a good digital camera (this one was HP PhotoSmart 850, which is not bad, but is a bit slow on responding).