Following to the email sent regarding the French law known as “HADOPI” (I blogged about it a few weeks ago), I had a meeting this afternoon with my local representative.
This half an hour meeting allowed me to explain my fears regarding this “firewall” which could be set up on French citizens’ computers to enable them to prove their non-culpability (provided their computer runs a popular proprietary OS).
I had written a few weeks ago about my new (almost) empty xorg.conf file and explained how I had to edit an HAL .fdi file to change my keyboard layout and define my compose key.
The Debian Xstrike Force have written a complete guide on the Debian wiki explaining this input hotplug system.
I have found that there is no need to edit .fdi files, just set the following options at the end of /etc/default/console-setup:
XKBMODEL="pc105" XKBLAYOUT="fr" XKBVARIANT="latin9" XKBOPTIONS="compose:lwin"
Even better, they should now be automatically grabbed from your existing xorg.conf when upgrading!
Following to an issue with esound not playing GNOME system sounds, I have decided to give Pulseaudio a try.
Installing the pulseaudio package pulled all necessary dependencies, including the esound compatibility plugin. I have added local users to the pulse-rt group, as recommended. After this, all worked perfectly except the main channel was muted and its volume set to 0% after rebooting.
I have found that not loading the module-device-restore does fix this issue, strangely. If you encounter the same problem, try and comment out the line load-module module-device-restore in /etc/pulse/default.pa.
The recent problem of the Portuguese translation of GCompris shows how important a good translation is, especially as far as free software are concerned.
I have not been able to find any news in English relating this story, and think it is essential to spread it so that people better appreciate the role translators play in the free software development process.
The Portuguese Magalhães Project lead to provide 300,000 netbooks to Portuguese children aged of 6 to 10, for a fee varying from 0€ to 50€, depending on the earnings of the family. These netbooks have a dual boot, with Windows and Linux (a distribution based on Mandriva called “Caixa Mágica” – Magic Box in English).
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I wasn’t sure to really understand this project of law until I read a lot about it during the past days. As some of you might already know, this law, called “Internet et Création”, but mainly referred as “HADOPI” law 1, is a “Three Strikes” scheme to fight against illegal downloads proposed before the last summer by the French government, and then voted in the Autumn by the Sénat (the first of the two French houses of Parliament).
Not that I am in favor of illegal downloads of movies and music, but the way this law plans to fight against them is a real threat for French free software developers and users.
