Saturday, October 29th, 2005 at 1:22 pm by shura

Another week of endless tweak-burn-reboot … and my CD Writer is almost dying. Well, not really dying but badly needs the firmware upgrade, and the upgrade code only runs on that other OS that I don’t carry for a few years now.

However, the second one in the series, the Linux Genealogy Install CD 1.0, has finally been released tonight, and I hope it will be no less successfull than the Live CD. In the meantime, the Live CD was reviewed by Dick Eastman in his Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter. This probably is the most detailed review of a Live CD I’ve ever seen. But it has its reasons, since genealogists (as a stereotype, at least) tend to be older than average, and may not be all that savvy with computer details. All in all, a very nice piece, if you ask me.

Now that the CD mastering is finished for me for a while, I hope to get some time to hack on python, that is on GRAMPS. But the plan is to release the next version of both discs after the next Ubuntu release.

It is interesting how things work in open source: we grab bytes from Ubuntu and re-package them and distribute the disc. But the bytes weren’t really theirs, since Ubuntu gets all its stuff from Debian. So it’s Debian’s then. But Debian is mainly re-packaging other people’s code (upstream in Debian-speak), that is, the code from people like us. Any attempt to meaningfully assign ownership in this chain fails, so it only makes sense if everything is free. Which it is, of course. Which does not prevent anybody from selling it, as is incorrectly assumed all too often. Which is exactly what I am going to do and which I invite everybody interested to do as well.

Update: The Linux Genealogy Install CD was also covered by Dick Eastman just recently.