FAmSCo Election - Ends tonight
by hagr182
People:
The FAmSCo election end today SATURDAY 20TH at 23:59, we need your votes to
ensure the right people get into the comitee, and by the right people I mean
the ones that adapt better to the project´s ideals, as everyone seems to be
good to me, but not everyone can win.
So please do vote, to do so go to:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/about/famscof11 .
Regards
Hector Gonzalez
15 years, 4 months
Promotional Material on FOSDEM 2009
by Pierros Papadeas
Hi folks!
In order to make a robust appearance at the upcoming FOSDEM it would be
great if we could have some flyers [1] to give away combined with
stickers and of-course the live CDs.
F10 live CDs will be brought by Max so we are OK on that.
I will bring ~1500 Stickers of Fedora Logo (9cm square).
For the flyers, I designed [2] an updated version independent (for use
even with F11 in the future) A4 3-folded flyer. I would love some
feedback on that.
When we are ready with the design i contacted a printing-company which
offers to print as 1000 A4 and ~1000 A5 (illustration paper ready
folded) for about 270 Euro (~370 $) which is pretty good price for Greek
standards. Of course we need to design an A5 flyer too, but that's
something easy.
For those attending FOSDEM it would be nice if you could get a quote
from a local printing-company of yours in order to compare prices.
In my opinion the quantity (1000+1000) is right for FOSDEM and if there
is a surplus it could be used in other EMEA events.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/Flyer
[2] http://ppapadeas.fedorapeople.org/files/fedora-flyer-ind-en.odt
Waiting for your ideas,
~π
--------------------------
Pierros Papadeas
PGP key: 0x6130DBF8
<ppapadeas(a)gmail.com>
liknus @ GRnet , Freenode
15 years, 4 months
F10 release events -- reimbursement $$$
by Max Spevack
If you have not been reimbursed for your F10 release event, please send
your receipts and your PayPal information to me off-list, and I will try
to get the money to you before I go on Christmas vacation.
Thank you so much for all your hard work organizing these events. The
reports and pictures have been fantastic.
--Max
15 years, 4 months
Re: About Fedora coffee table book....
by Doug Berry
>Nicu Buculei wrote:
>Why do you make the assumption that we don't know to use GIMP? And we are >talking here about imported photos, not about newly created images.
The GIMP or any other imaging program is just a means to an end - it is a way of taking lesser quality images and enhancing them. You can bet that every photograph published in a book anywhere was gone over and enhanced at some point, either by the original photographer or some where down the line.
>Yes, we don't have the perfect conditions, but knowing the goal is print >we can work a bit more on the photos.
Exactly. The point may have gotten lost somewhere, but ultimately, it should be the picture taker who test prints and enhances their own photos before they submit them.
>Do you think we use our mobile phones to take photos? Most of the cameras >I saw used at the last FUDCon were DSLRs. Isn't this enough?
Maybe, maybe not. Most digital cameras are set to take lower resolution photos, simply so you can fit more pictures onto the storage disc. Taking more pictures is the assumed goal. For example, a digital photo shot at 150 dpi may come in at 100K. If you beefed it up to say 600 or1000 dpi it might top out at 100 megs. Most people set there camera resolutions as low as possible to get more pictures.
And digital cameras are still relatively expensive and not everybody in the Fedora World Community may have them. Many dinosaurs like me still use film.
>I don't remember seeing something about turning a profit.
I think someone said something about donating any proceeds to charity, or something like that.
>We have over 600 photos made at the Brno FUDCon and a lot more of them >were left out: http://www.flickr.com/groups/fudconbrno/pool/ (and we have >not planned for a book)
I'm sure we could probably come up with thousands of photos, worldwide. And if they are all high-res digital quality then that would make to job so much easier. But it is probably best to assume that most will not make the cut for one reason or another.
>How I can run trough a scanner my photos, they are already in a digital >format...
Are submissions for the book only open to persons who have digital cameras?
I would think that would rule out a lot of people from participating, right there.
>Scribus *is* part of Fedora, however, not part of the default install.
>I for one would be interested in reading a bit about how Scribus can be >used to create such a book with it.
Scribus is great, I have used it for so much and it keeps getting better and better. On the Scribus website, www.scribus.net, they list several books that were developed using Scribus. One new one is a Chinese language text book on the morphology of the leaf-beetle.
>How about using something like lulu.com as a publisher? For example >http://www.lulu.com/en/products/photo_books/?cid=en_product_portal
Lulu is okay, but they are pricey. Print-On-Demand is great for authors. It pays the highest royalties in the business. And the process, where no books are printed unless there is a paid order, is good too. As compared to large print runs for a fixed price. But if the books do not sale you have a garage full of books.
But what POD publishers do not do, or for which they charge a fortune, is all the little things that add quality to a book. Like: spell-checking, grammar-checking, fact-checking, cover art (many force you to use gaudy one-size-fits-all cover templates), and layout. Layout is the most important part of the process, and is something that authors should do themselves: authors or their Book Packagers.
So, as far as a publisher goes, POD is a viable option, but perhaps something like Cafe Press would be a better choice. Although I have never used them, as I understand and this may have changed, if we laid out and created the embedded PDF files containing the book, burn them onto a CD or DVD, send them to Cafe Press, for a nominal fee ($200.00, I've heard, but it may be more for a coffee table book) they assign an ISBN, create the bar-code and send the book to Lightning Source, their printer fulfiller.
Or we could bypass a publisher altogether and publish it ourselves. Fedora Publishing Project, and how you might ask would we accomplish that. Well, Red Hat must already be a digital or even a print publisher, perhaps we could spin-off a print franchise or something. Red Hat must also have some sort of relationship with a quality printer, for labels, brochures, advertising, etc. RED Hat may already have everything we would need. Such as ISBN numbers (block of ten around $300.00), since published software requires ISBN type control numbers, bar-codes, and the like. Packaging a DVD is not much different then packaging a book.
We already have the necessary software to layout and create all the elements of the book. Using Scribus, OO, Abiword, and the GIMP, we could create every part of the book ourselves. In fact, I think we already have everything we would need to make the book; it is more like assembling it then it is creating it from scratch.
Or we could take Fedora Publishing to Lightning Source. They are a division of Ingrams and they do not charge their publishers a fortune. They make their money printing and selling books. They charge a reasonable set-up fee, and a small per book printing charge. Then they take the order, print the book, and mail it to the customer . Publisher does none of that.
As an example of this, Scribus just had published their latest manual in book form. I am assuming they did all the layout and the book is coming out almost as we speak. Is different then out book, a 450 page tome, that costs 26 pounds. So this is just an example to show it can be done.
-- w Douglas Berry --
slasherzee(a)fedoraproject.org
15 years, 4 months
About creating a Fedora coffee table book....
by Doug Berry
Hey Guys,
I think Ian, Jack, and Lisa, and all the others, have come up with a great idea. A Fedora coffee table book would be a great visual aide as well as a great keepsake for the Fedora community. Pictures from all over the world would demonstrate the diversity of the Fedora community, like nothing else.
I am a book packager and author. I have put together several books, both my own and for others, and I think I have a fair understanding of what might entail with putting together a coffee table book. So let me chime in as follows.
First the downside:
1. Coffee table books, or any picture book, are the most expensive books to create and publish, going. The "4-color" offset process means four plates for every image or picture.
2. Ordinary snapshots, taken at an event or FUDCON, would be totally unsuitable for such a book. Mainly because of quality, but also because of content. Web graphics, as many of you know, look fine at 72 DPI (dots per inch), which is the standard setting in the GIMP for web graphics. But picture book quality graphics, especially large visual images, start at 600 DPI. Many publishers now want 1200 DPI: and up.
3. Most high quality pictures (above 600 DPI) are staged. Meaning they are models (or ordinary people) being absolutely still. Any movement appears as a blur.
4. The above means the pictures must be shot with a high quality camera. Cameras that will overcome movement are expensive.
5. Such books usually use high quality and thus, more expensive paper suitable for photo images (and water-proof), adding to the end price of the book.
6. Binding for such a book, is usually stitched. Perfect Bound, clumps of folded pages glued together, the most inexpensive binding going, would need a larger amount of pages, usually above 130 before they will hold together.
7. Taking all of this into account, the cost-driven price of such a book would probably be in the $25.00 dollar range and up, even as a paperback. Assuming there was a need to generate a profit from the book.
8. Coffee table books are usually larger, 11 x 16, or something. The size will determine the photographs used and will establish a quality goal for them. A 6 x 8 photo may look good at that size, but scale it up to say 12 x 16 and it may be unsuitable. An old rule of thumb is to scan photos instead of scaling them. Scaling is one-dimensional; scanning allows you options.
The plus side:
Now, having said all that, I still think it would be doable. The main downside would be getting the high quality photographs we would need.
That would mean we would have to be selective in the photo-images we used. We could possibly use images from a FUDCON, but not all images. Maybe some could be cropped and be suitable, others could be dithered with, others still might pass right from the start. But we would probably need hundreds of photographs to get the few necessary.
That means that having hundreds of people sending in stacks of photos, is probably not going to work. A photo has to be chosen according to its print quality and not just "cool" content. As much as we would all like to have a copy of that photo showing Paul Fields shoving Bill Gates off a cliff, if it does not print well it would not make the book.
However, there is a reliable test everyone can do to weed out the unsuitable pictures before they get submitted, meaning that whoever is selecting the photos for a book, would not be as swamped. This is a simple test that many printers use to determine photo quality for printed material. Take the photo, run it through a scanner, one that you can set the resolution and DPI values to at least 600 DPI. And you can play with these values somewhat. High quality scanners often allow you to dither with the photo. Now, don't look at the image on your computer screen, print it out and see what you get. Even a cheap ink jet printer (or better) will give you an idea of what the results will be.
The actual packaging of the book is nothing. I or someone else could do that for nothing. There have been several books packaged using Scribus, an
up-stream open source package that was not part of F10, but easily added.
So, having said all that, please understand that I am not claiming to be the "be all and end all" of publishing or book packaging. In fact, I am probably somewhat behind the times and if anybody has a better idea or way, lets hear it. But I know enough to know that creating a quality book product depends on the quality of the material that makes up the book and not just the publishing or printing aspect.
I have not even mentioned publishers, or printers. Today they are really just middlemen; publishers are quickly becoming book marketers and not book creators. They are still necessary, but are slowly becoming obsolete as the industry reels from innovation.
So, perhaps we could do this as a start. Maybe we could get a couple hundred photos, from all over the planet and the Fedora community, and pass them around a committee. Everyone chooses the ones they like and we toss the rest. Then we could put the selected ones on-line and people could vote or something. For a 110 page book, with print quality photographs on the base pages and text on the back pages, we would need probably 50 or 60 good photographs. Double that with photos on the back pages.
So, what do say you? Anyone want to take a shot at this?
-- w Douglas Berry --
slasherzee(a)fedoraproject.org
15 years, 4 months
Regarding password reset
by Saadeddine AlSaidi
When I try to reset my password, on the following link,
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/user/resetpass, I just get a blank
page, and I never did get any email.
Any advice.
--
Saadaldine AlSaidi
IT Manager
AlShora International
Tayyouneh Rotary
Old Saida Road - Princess Buldg.
Beirut - Lebanon
Tel: +961 1 391140
Fax: +961 1 381140
Mob: +961 3 934285
15 years, 4 months
DVD Media for North America
by Clint Savage
Hi all,
So I anticipated this somewhat, but was hoping the prices were a bit
closer to the CD media. It turns out the media company we chose for
replicating CDs gave us a great price:
Item Quantity Price per Disc
Total Price
x86 Live CDs 3000 $.576 $1728
These discs are in production and are slated to arrive on my doorstep
December 23. (A discussion of distribution has already been had, so
please don't address that here.)
Unfortunately, and it makes total sense, the DVD media requires more
components and such, so the pricing is a bit higher:
x86 Install DVDs 3000 $.785 $2355
x86_64 Install DVDs 3000 $.785 $2355
Which brings us to the dilemma. The budget we just finished at
yesterday's meeting indicates that we wanted two runs of DVDs at
$1800. Had I been thinking about it, the costs should have been
higher for DVDs over CDs, so I apologize for the at oversight.
However, the dilemma still remains, thus we have some options. I
discussed some of this with folks in IRC this evening and here are the
options I see possible.
Option 1: Produce Live CDs for x86_64 as well as a smaller run of x86
Install DVDs (approximately $1800 worth)
Option 2: Produce smaller amounts of the installer DVDs (both x86 and
x86_64), approximately 2300 could be produced at this price. The
price point might be higher, I've got an email into the media company
asking this exact question.
Option 3: Produce more Live CDs of x86_64 and then add Live CDs for
x86 (or respins if they are ready soon). This would ignore the
install DVDs totally, and isn't an unreasonable idea, but I'm not for
this one.
There are probably other options, combinations of these that I didn't
list because of time/space. If you think one of these are viable,
let's talk about them over the next couple days. I'd like to place
the order on Friday before 5pm EST.
Cheers,
Clint
15 years, 4 months
