Just a quick note to everyone who had shown interest in this: I have now released version 0.01 of Katian. This release mirrors pretty much the state of my machine right now and I am putting it out for anyone who liked the first version but is looking for fresher packages based on Xubuntu Karmic. I do not, however, recommend installing it. This version is still very rough around the edges and also a bit transitional since I will try to base .02 on Ubuntu proper (with Gnome). The reason for this is that I have run into some limitations with Xfce — I still love Xfce, but I think full Gnome is getting a lot faster on Ubuntu and since I’m not really concerned with .iso sizes I will try if it suits me more. And yes, this distro is bloody massive already.  If you want to try it out, I really recommend using UNetbootin to make a bootable USB stick — It’s so much more 21st century and also saves the planet by not coating it in unused Linux distro discs.

If despite all the warnings you still want to try this new version out, you can download it here. Make sure you have a recent backup and enjoy! And keep your eyes on this blog or on the Launchpad page for news of version 0.02 which should be arriving relatively soon…

Miguel de Icaza

Welcome to the new blog everyone, I hope you like it. Fab has done a lot of hard work here and I think it’s really paid off. I’d like to share some exciting news with you all and hopefully get your input too. We had Dan Washko from TLLTS on a while back talking about why he doesn’t like Mono and even removes it from all his systems. At the time I said we wanted to get someone on the show to give the pro-Mono viewpoint as we don’t want to appear biased on this subject. I kept mentioning this over the weeks as it dragged on, I was having trouble finding someone really involved in the project to come and talk to us but now we’ve fixed all that, big time! We’ve only gone and gotten the main man himself Miguel de Icaza to agree to join us on episode 74. In case anyone doesn’t know, Miguel is the creator of Mono. He also created Gnome (a true love of mine) and he’s currently working hard on Moonlight, an open and cross-platform implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight. He’s also the Vice-President of Developer Platform at Novell. So it’s safe to say he’s a pretty big cheese, in fact think of the biggest cheese you’ve ever seen and then grate some more on top and we’re getting close.

I’m pretty excited about all of this as you can probably tell and I’m really looking forward to hearing what he has to say about his work at Novell and the wider issues in the Free Software world. I’m a bit late in writing this as the interview is only 3 days away now but I wanted to give everyone the chance to post your questions for Miguel too. To that end I’ve created a new thread on our Linux Outlaws forum for you to post your questions. Feel free to post anything you like, I can’t promise we’ll have time to read them all but we’ll use as much as we can.

Listener input is always important to us so please get involved.

I’m currently listening to Miguel’s interview on LugRadio Season 5 Episode 1 and I recommend it to anyone interested in Mono and the whole Microsoft relationship. We’ll try not to ask all the same questions but perhaps cover how things have changed since late 2007 when that interview was conducted.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts, thanks guys

Dan

EDIT:

We’ve had to postpone the interview for personal reasons so it may not be in episode 74 but will be as soon after as we can. We’re still very keen to do this and so is Miguel, it WILL happen I promise that. In the meantime you can continue to post your questions and discuss the topic on the forums. Thanks everyone, I’ll give you more information as soon as I have it.

Dan