announce February 2009

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Reminder: Fedora Board IRC meeting 1900 UTC 2009-03-03
by Paul W. Frields 27 Feb '09

27 Feb '09

The Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Tuesday, 3 March 2009, at 1900 UTC on IRC Freenode. The Board has settled on a schedule that puts these public IRC meetings on the first Tuesday of each month. Therefore, the next following public meeting will be on 7 April 2009. For these meetings, the public is invited to do the following: * Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation. This channel is read-only for non-Board members. * Join #fedora-board-public to discuss topics and post questions. This channel is read/write for everyone. The moderator will direct questions from the #fedora-board-public channel to the Board members at #fedora-board-meeting. This should limit confusion and ensure our logs are useful to everyone. We look forward to seeing you at the meeting. -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug

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Unofficial FAQ Update: 2009-02-24
by Max Kanat-Alexander 24 Feb '09

24 Feb '09

Hey Fedora users! :-) I've updated the Unofficial FAQ quite a bit in these last few days: * The Installing Software question was updated to still work even though rpm.livna.org is down. * The Radeon 3D driver question has been updated to contain a command to rebuild your initrd after you install it, in case your kernel was loading a conflicting driver (which would have caused X to not start after you installed the driver). * I've added back the "How do I play MP3s in Fedora?" question! http://www.fedorafaq.org/#mp3 * I've fixed up lots of minor issues and typos. As always, the FAQ is at: http://www.fedorafaq.org/ I'd love to have some more contributions, particularly more translations! Details on contributing are here: http://www.fedorafaq.org/contribute/ -Max -- http://www.everythingsolved.com/ Competent, Friendly Bugzilla and Perl Services. Everything Else, too.

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Fedora Weekly News #164
by Pascal Calarco 23 Feb '09

23 Feb '09

Fedora Weekly News Issue 164 Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 164 for the week ending February 22nd, 2009. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue164 This week Announcements showcases Fedora Unity respins of Fedora 10, PlanetFedora selects some great blog entries on how to tag audio streams in PulseAudio and use func, QualityAssurance explains how to participate in test days, Developments covers the "Fedora 11 Mass Rebuild", Translations describes the new "L10n Infrastructure Team", Artwork covers some pretty "Evolving Fedora 11 Artwork" and Virtualization examines attempts to bridge the gap between libvirt and host network interface configuration. If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list(a)redhat.com FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join -- Announcements -- In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents Contributing Writer: Max Spevack --- General --- Your faithful correspondent announced[1] that this year's European FUDCon will be held in Berlin from June 26 - 28, overlapping partially with LinuxTag. Everyone is encouraged to read the full announcement and to register[2] for the event. Ben Williams, whose wife knits incredible scarves with Tux on them, announced[3] that a new set of Fedora 10 respins have been released by the Fedora Unity[4] team, containing all updates through February 10. Technical Jesse Keating reminded[5] the community that "due to a number of features, every package in Fedora 11 needs to be rebuilt." A wiki page[6] has been created that package maintainers should look to for more information. Peter Gordon announced[7] that an update to rb_libtorrent includes a soname bump that impacts other packages. --- Upcoming Events --- February 27 - March 1: FOSSMeet @ NITC[8] in Calicut, India. February 28: Fedora Round Table[9] in Karlsruhe, Germany. March 5-7: Computer Using Educators[10] in Palm Springs, CA. March 9: Florida Linux Show[11] in Jacksonville, FL. March 10-12: FOSE[12] in Washington, DC. March 13-15: Chemnitzer Linux Tage[13] in Chemnitz, Germany. --- FUDCon Berlin 2009 --- FUDCon Berlin[14] will be held from June 26 - 28 in Berlin, Germany. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-February/msg00010.… 2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009_attendees 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-February/msg00009.… 4. http://fedoraunity.org 5. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-February/msg00011… 6. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Mass_Rebuild 7. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-February/msg00014… 8. http://nitc.fossmeet.in/ 9. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/FRT 10. http://www.cue.org/conference/ 11. http://floridalinuxshow.com/ 12. http://fose.com/ 13. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/CLT 14. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDConBerlin2009 -- Planet Fedora -- In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide. http://planet.fedoraproject.org Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin --- General --- Michael DeHaan discussed[1] various Linux system configuration applets and some ideas how to unify/integrate them. On an unrelated note, he also wrote[2] about HTML Slidey[3]: Slide Shows in XHTML. Gary Benson announced[4] that Zero has passed the Java SE 6 TCK, which means that OpenJDK in Fedora 10 for 32 and 64 bit PowerPC-based systems are now pretty much guaranteed to run anything you can throw at them. Daniel Walsh explained[5],[6] some SELinux history, voodoo and how to rebuild bits of the policy RPMs. Jeremy Katz reviewed[7] the book Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug and how that applies to web usability. Red Hat Magazine[8] spotlighted[9] Func, which "makes it easy to write commands across large numbers of machines remotely and securely". Ankur Sinha wrote[10] an article about the history of Fedora and its four core values. Jef Spaleta wondered[11] how popular Git was, and found some interesting statistics from GitHub. He also discovered that apparently some[12] Canonical developers (the kernel folks) do used Git instead of Bzr. Roland Wolters announced[13] that RPM Fusion[14] ("a merge of several former Fedora 3rd party repositories providing licence/patent problematic packages") has entered the testing state. Ryan Lerch described[15] how to "Create a Lightbulb Icon that follows the tango! guidelines". Jack Aboutboul wrote[16] about what can be done to rejuvinate Fedora Marketing. Lennart Poettering explained[17] how to "tag" audio streams so that Pulse Audio can automatically manage sound policy ("For example, starting in 0.9.15, we will automatically pause your media player while a phone call is going on"). Seth Vidal described[18] how to adapt to the change to SHA256 checksums in yum/createrepo on EL5. 1. http://www.michaeldehaan.net/?p=862 2. http://www.michaeldehaan.net/?p=871 3. http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy/#(1) 4. http://gbenson.net/?p=130 5. http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/26428.html 6. http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/26759.html 7. http://velohacker.com/fedora-notes/recent-reading-web-usability/ 8. http://magazine.redhat.com/ 9. http://magazine.redhat.com/2009/02/17/video-spotlight-on-func/ 10. http://dodoincfedora.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/fedora-article-for-the-lugm-m… 11. http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/34910.html 12. http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/35246.html 13. http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/rpm-fusion-enters-testing-state/ 14. http://rpmfusion.org/ 15. http://ryanler.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/create-a-lightbulb-icon-that-follow… 16. http://jaboutboul.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-fedora-marketing.html 17. http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/tagging-audio.html 18. http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/yum-createrepo-hashlib-rhel5centos5… --- Events --- Francesco Crippa posted[1] some photos from FOSDEM 2009. 1. http://people.byte-code.com/fcrippa/2009/02/16/fosdem-2009/ -- QualityAssurance -- In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1]. Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA --- Test Days --- This week's regular test day[1] was on 20 Second Startup[2]. Harald Hoyer was the developer present, and there was a great turnout of 20 people contributing test results. Further results are still welcome from anyone - a full set of instructions for running tests is available on the Wiki page. As a result of the testing, Harald has made several modifications already that will help to optimize boot times for Fedora 11. Next week's test day[3] will be on the Crash Catcher[4] feature planned for Fedora 11, which aims to make it easy for non-power uses to file useful reports when an application crashes. It will be held on Thursday (2009-02-26) in the #fedora-qa channel on Freenode IRC. Please drop by if you would like to help test this important new feature for Fedora 11 - no special equipment or expertise required! 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-02-19 2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/20SecondStartup 3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-02-26 4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/CrashCatcher --- Weekly meetings --- The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-02-18. The full log is available[2]. Will Woods gave a status report on the progress of the autoqa[3] project, which is working on creating automated test scripts to run whenever certain events happen. The group agreed to create an autoqa component in the fedora-qa trac instance, and create a new mailing list for autoqa reports to be sent to (this will not be a discussion list). Adam Williamson, James Laska and Jóhann Guðmundsson then initiated a discussion about creating a short-term solution for more organized reporting and collection of test results. Follow up a mailing list discussion, a system created by the Laptop.org[4] project, implemented as a Mediawiki plugin, was discussed. The group agreed that it seemed suited to the purpose, and James will propose it to the Infrastructure group, to see if they approve of the system, and whether they would prefer it to be added to the main Wiki or a special-purpose Wiki instance created just for this use. Finally, the group discussed the (then) upcoming test day, and agreed preparations were well in hand. The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[5] was held on 2009-02-17. The full log is available[6]. A broad initial goal for the Bugzappers project was agreed: to stabilize the number of bugs in NEW (i.e. un-triaged) status on the components previously agreed to be the most significant. Brennan Ashton's metric reporting tool will be used to track this. Brennan demonstrated the current state of his tool on a small set of test data, to general approval. The group voted on Adam Williamson's proposal to have a stock signature appended to comments by members of the Bugzappers team in Bugzilla, both to identify the Bugzappers and to increase the visibility of the project. This was approved, and Matej Cepl will implement it using Greasemonkey, adding it to the Greasemonkey script already used by most Bugzappers. The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-02-25 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-qa, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-02-24 at 1700 UTC in #fedora-bugzappers. 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings 2. http://wwoods.fedorapeople.org/fedora-qa/fedora-qa-20090218.log.html 3. http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=autoqa.git;a=summary 4. http://www.laptop.org 5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings 6. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings/Minutes-2009-Feb-17 --- Wiki re-organization --- Adam Williamson announced[1] that the first phase of the Wiki re-organization project was complete, with the new front page and 'how to join in' page for the QA Wiki space put into place. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00710.html --- Reporting bugs to Bugzilla --- Christopher Beland encouraged[1] testers to report bugs to Bugzilla as well as sending a mail about them to the test-list mailing list, and told the group that he had added some text to this effect to the QA group front page on the Wiki. Adam Williamson suggested[2] that the text might be better placed on the Wiki page about how properly to report bugs, rather than the QA group front page. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00837.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00844.html --- Semantic - test reporting plugin for Mediawiki --- James Laska sent in a report[1] on Semantic, the Laptop.org project's Mediawiki extension for managing test reports. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00756.html --- Encouraging Rawhide testing --- Mark McLoughlin made some suggestions[1] about how to improve the ongoing quality and consistency of Rawhide, in order to make it possible for more people to test it. He suggested that a definition should be made of what should be expected to work in Rawhide all the time - e.g. basic installation, booting, network and a few core applications - and a RawhideBlocker tracker bug be created on Bugzilla to track bugs in Rawhide which breaks any of these functions, with the intention that those bugs be addressed as a matter of high priority. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00846.html -- Developments -- In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized. Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley --- Fedora 11 Mass Rebuild --- Some complications resulting from the inconsistent application of Fedora Packaging Guidelines were manifested when the mass rebuild discussed last week(FWN#163[1]) gained[2] a more concrete shape. Jesse Keating posted[3] a request that all maintainers would read the wiki page describing what needs to be done, especially the Maintainer Actions section. The rebuild should kick-off this Monday (2009-02-23). The wiki page describes the relatively narrow timeframe in which maintainers can attempt their own rebuilds and the way in which they can avoid the auto-rebuild. Concern was expressed by Tom Lane that the rebuilds were non-ordered. Jesse responded[4] that ordered builds were "[...] generally only are necessary when bumping sonames or otherwise bootstrapping items. Given that neither of those apply for this rebuild, effort spent trying to order and chain builds would be effort wasted." Ralf Corsepius challenged[5] this with the observation that pkgconfig BuildRequires are added automatically. Ralf suggested[6] the problem could be solved by "[...] checking which packages in current rawhide contain *.pc's but do not Provide nor Require pkgconfig(foo) and to rebuild them (in manually presorted order) in advance to the mass rebuild." Jon Masters appreciated[7] Jesse's work and worried that the rebuild might leave some statically built binaries using i386 instead of the promised i586 (see FWN#162[8]). Subsequent rebuilds were suggested as a means to work around the problem but Jesse preferred to identify specific problems and stated[9]: "I think the most I'd be willing to do would be a second build pass across the static packages. IMHO everything else should be left up to testing discovery and fixing the assumptions rather than hiding them." Another approach was suggested by Conrad Meyer based on using BuildRequires: *-static. When Ralf replied that this would not work because many packagers who had not used static subpackages Conrad pointed[10] to the guidelines. Nicolas Mailhot ruefully responded[11] that his experience with the fonts guidelines suggested that enforcement was necessary. Later discussion with Jakub Jelínek about the presence of libc.a in glibc-devel suggested[12] that it will not be simple to apply this particular guideline to glibc without gcc -static ceasing to behave as expected. 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue163#Mass_Rebuild_Coming_Soon 2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Mass_Rebuild 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01281.html 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01287.html 5. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01297.html 6. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01303.html 7. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01298.html 8. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue162#Fedora_11_Will_Support_i586_Inst… 9. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01300.html 10. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01307.html 11. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01312.html 12. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01322.html --- Virtual Provides for Login Managers --- Following problems reported[1] with booting to runlevel 5 by default with the slim login-manager [Lumens] sugges:ted[2] that "[...] all packages containing a login manager include a special Provides: that we can query on." This would allow anaconda to determine whether a login-manager is installed without the difficulties of curating a list. Patrice Dumas, and others, provided[3] a good deal of feedback which seems to have led to a consensus that Provides: service(graphical-login) will be added to all packages which provide a login manager. An interesting sub-thread developed in which Colin Walters argued[4] that adding display managers (other than gdm and kdm should be strongly discouraged. This was met[5] with a good deal of disagreement from Tom Callaway and Seth Vidal. Colin explained[6] that the ramifications of changing such an integral part of the OS were complex and that while anyone should be free to add such software it should also be "[...] within the rights of the people working on the desktop to close any bugs filed by people using something else WONTFIX." Jesse Keating and Seth Vidal seemed[7] to agree that it should be possible for the Fedora Project do define specs to which login managers should conform. The thread blossomed into several discussions. One focused on the technical challenges occasioned[8] by the interaction of GDM, PAM, gnome-keyring, NetworkManager and ConsoleKit. Another saw[9] Toshio Kuratomi and Colin debating the strategic merits of making it more or less easy for interested parties to add their software to the Fedora Project ecosystem. 1. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=485789 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01237.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01399.html 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01400.html 5. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01403.html 6. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01404.html 7. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01407.html 8. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01408.html 9. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01434.html --- Reducing the Number of (Dis)Charge Cycles for Laptop Batteries --- A certain amount of excitement resulted when Brad Longo asked[1]: "[...] if Fedora's power management tool has something built in so that when the battery reaches full charge, it will then discharge to lets say around 95% before beginning to charge again." The excitement arose from Brad's premise that "[...] leaving your laptop plugged in and charging with a full battery charge is harmful for the battery." Several responses rejected[2] the premise and pointed out that smart chargers implement trickle-mode charging. Matthew Garrett replied[3] with some specific information about how laptop battery charging happens at a firmware-controlled threshold level. Matthew speculated that Brad wanted "[...] presumably an interface to modify that threshold. This is device specific. The tp_smapi driver (which is not in the kernel for exceedingly dull reasons) allows this to be configured on Thinkpads. I don't believe that we know how to on any other systems." Hans Ulrich Niedermann had[4] an out-of-kernel module for tm_smapi which was configurable via /etc/sysconfig. Matthew Saltzman reported[5] some experiences with Windows setting the charge-threshold to 85% which is supposed to lengthen the battery life. Callum Lerwick referenced[6] a Wikipedia article which claimes that the "[...] optimal storage charge for a Li-Ion is %40. Also, heat causes Li-Ion batteries to degenerate much faster, so if you're really worried about preserving your battery, don't leave it in the laptop while it's running. Yet another argument for less power usage. Less power, less heat, longer battery service life. Fewer toxic batteries going in to the land fill if you like that angle." 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01194.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01201.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01202.html 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01257.html 5. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01269.html 6. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01304.html --- config.guess Reporting Incorrect Configuration Name? --- Panu Matilainen asked[1] if it was a problem that the config.guess script from autotools no longer reported "redhat" as the manufacturer part of the configuration triplet. Panu referenced the documentation which suggests that "[...] the manufacturer part of the configuration name is the manufacturer of the CPU, not `OS vendor' so the former `redhat' was always incorrect. I don't know the history behind the decision to stomp `redhat' in there to begin with nor why it was then dropped later on. But having gotten used to it, people occasionally think the `unknown' (or `pc' for that matter) is a bug." While Jakub Jelínek thought that providing the "redhat" string provided more information than "pc" or "unknown" Stepan Kaspal argued[2] strongly that reverting to maintaining such a patch was wrong. He suggested that either upstream should be convinced to change the use of "manufacturer" or that the %configure macro in the specfile could be used to explicitly avoid calling config.guess. From here on the thread became too technically detailed to summarize although it is relatively brief as of going to press. Those learned in the lore of autotools and cross-compilation will find much to gladden their hearts. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01338.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01355.html --- Build-time Trapping of Python Syntax Errors --- Tim Waugh initiated[1] verification that Python code can be parsed correctly: "[...] since we are already byte-compiling Python code at build time, it is no extra effort to verify that it can be parsed and fail if not." Reaction was[2] uniformly positive and when Panu Matilainen explained the simple errors which the byte compile would catch and suggested[3] a simple method of determining affected packages Florian Festi took up the challenge. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01563.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01574.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01584.html --- YUM Plans for Transition to Fedora 12 i686 Architecture --- When Paul Howarth asked[1]: "Now that Fedora 11 x86_32 is going to be based on i586 packages rather than i386 packages, does it follow that yum's $basearch will change from i386 to i586 and hence repository directory layouts changing too, or will it stay at i386?" a brief discussion between Seth Vidal and Josh Boyer started[2] with a discussion over whether repositories should be named after specific architectures. Seth Vidal differentiated between $arch and $basearch and explained[3]: "The whole reason I liked used $arch was that it meant when fedora stopped producing a 586 compatible tree, we didn't stop any one else from making a 586 compat tree and having it available like secondary arches are." Jesse Keating explained[4] that "i386" was a misnomer for the x86 offering. Josh Boyer was[5] unsure whether i586 would actually "go away" for Fedora 12. Dennis Gilmore was sure that it would and offered[6]: "Anyone who wants to continue i586 support post F11 i look forward to talking to about setting up i586 as a secondary arch." 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01533.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01551.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01557.html 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01561.html 5. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01581.html 6. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01587.html -- Translation -- This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee --- L10n Infrastructure Team --- In response to PaulFrields' call[1] for putting in place an L10n Infrastructure team, FLSCo announced a 4 member team to oversee the Fedora Localization Project Infrastructure operations[2]. The team includes DimitrisGlezos, DiegoZacarao, AsgeirFrimannsson and AnkitPatel. 1. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00103.ht… 2. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00120.ht… --- Proposed L10n Infrastructure Plan for Fedora 11 --- Earlier, DimitrisGlezos had announced[1] a proposed roadmap for the L10n Infrastructure for Fedora 11 Translation period. This included using Transifex version 0.5 for generation and display of statistics in place of Damned Lies and Transifex version 0.3 for submissions. A test interface of this setup is currently available at: http://publictest14.fedoraproject.org/tx/languages/ AsgeirFrimannsson suggested[2] an alternative approach to use the new Django supported version of Damned Lies for statistics and to also test its possible utilisation for translation submission. 1. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00089.ht… 2. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00093.ht… --- Sponsor Role for Translation Team Coordinators --- FLSCo member NorikoMizumoto has requested[1] all the coordinators for the existing Translation Teams to inform about their FAS account names so that they could be upgraded to the role of "Sponsor". This would help the new members in their team to be approved faster. 1. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00080.ht… --- New Members in FLP --- Peter Belko (Slovak)[1], Seyyed Mohsen Saeedi (Persian)[2], Jorge Izaac Zavaleta Escalante (Spanish)[3], and Victor Lopez (Spanish)[4] joined the Fedora Translation Project last week, 1. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00106.ht… 2. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00109.ht… 3. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00111.ht… 4. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00112.ht… -- Artwork -- In this section, we cover the Fedora Artwork Project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei --- Evolving Fedora 11 Artwork --- Paul Frields expressed[1] concern on @fedora-art about the artwork process and the Fedora 11 schedule: "The F11 Beta freeze arrives on March 10th, and it would be good to have a background ready somewhat before that so there's time to tweak it before the freeze[.]" In reply[2] Máirín Duffy was confident: "I *think* we're going to be okay. I'll know by Monday whether or not we might have an issue." and called for a work session over the week-end "I am going to cram this weekend and try to iterate on what we've got. If anyone's with me, pop in #fedora-art this weekend :)" In the meantime [[Paolo Leoni and Thomas Kole experimented[3][4] with an alternate concept[5] based on world maps, navigation and ships. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-February/msg00050.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-February/msg00068.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-February/msg00053.html 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-February/msg00064.html 5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:F11-wallpaper-night-deepsky-mockup2.jpg -- Virtualization -- In this section, we cover discussion on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list, @fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list of Fedora virtualization technologies. Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley --- Enterprise Management Tools List --- This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list ---- New Options for Guest Cloning ---- Cole Robinson posted[1] a patch to enable virt-install to "build a guest around an existing disk image, skipping the OS install step." Cole also posted[2] a patch for virt-clone which allows for cloning from an XML file "rather than require the use of a guest defined on the current connection." 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-February/msg00051.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-February/msg00050.html ---- Obtaining Guest IP Address from the Host ---- Thomas Mackell inquired[1] about a way to obtain the IP address of a guest that was easier than logging into it and running ifconfig. Cole Robinson pointed out image:Echo-package-16px.pngvirt-mem[2] which is a collection of utilities for interrogating KVM guests. Tools included are virt-uname, virt-dmesg, virt-ps, and virt-ifconfig. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-February/msg00036.html 2. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-mem/ --- Fedora Virtualization List --- This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list. ---- Fedora Virt Status Update ---- Mark McLoughlin posted two[1] [2] very detailed weekly status reports since the last FWN Virtualization beat. Each one is full of details on the latest bugs and developments in the field. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00077.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00078.html ---- Qemu Packaging and noarch BIOS Firmware ---- The process [1] of building BIOS firmwares to support architecturally diverse guests on architecturally diverse hosts is very involved and repetitive. Glauber Costa learned[2] of changes coming to Koji which could simplify the process by allowing for bundled BIOS images to be built as "noarch" RPMs. These would be readily available to hosts on any architecture in the repository. Save for some "second class citizens"[3] in the repo. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00066.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00068.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00072.html --- Fedora Xen List --- This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list. ---- dom0 Kernel Experimentation Continues ---- Michael Young continued[1] to help others experiment with the nacent dom0 support in the image:Echo-package-16px.pngkernel and posted another RPM. There are still significant problems precluding its use for anything beyond testing. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-February/msg00031.html --- Libvirt List --- This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list. ---- Support for Snapshot Volumes ---- Nick Moffitt asked[1] "Is there any interface to libvirtd that allows it to create volumes that are snapshots of existing volumes?" Daniel P. Berrange pointed[2] out this feature was recently added to image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibvirt 0.6.0. "Basically when creating a storage volume, you just need to pass information about the backing storage volume. It'll thus create a volume which is a snapshot of this backing store." 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00195.html 2. http://libvirt.org/formatstorage.html#StorageVolBacking ---- netcf Network Interface Configuration Library ---- David Lutterkort has been working on the disconnect between image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibvirt and host network interface configuration for some time. (See FWN#159 "Configuring Host Interfaces RFC") [1] "After talking with Dan Williams, who is working in image:Echo-package-16px.pngNetworkManager", it became[2] clear to David that solving this problem "is also useful for NM and would help them with handling system-wide interface configuration." David then began work on netcf[3] Mark McLoughlin complimented[4] the work and updated the shared network interface feature page[5]. The goal of this feature in development is to "Enable guest virtual machines to share a physical network interface (NIC) with other guests and the host operating system. This allows guests to independently appear on the same network as the host machine." 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue159#Configuring_Host_Interfaces_RFC 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00228.html 3. http://git.et.redhat.com/?p=netcf.git;a=tree 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00229.html 5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Shared_Network_Interface -- End FWN #164 -- ---- Pascal Calarco Fedora Ambassador, Indiana USA http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pcalarco

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FUDCon Berlin 2009
by Max Spevack 17 Feb '09

17 Feb '09

Hi there Fedorans, In September 2008, we had an excellent FUDCon in Brno (credit to the local team there, led by Radek Vokal, who helped to make the event happen. Feedback about FUDCon Brno was all incredibly positive, and we'll bring FUDCon back to Brno for sure. However, the one thing that we heard was to make sure that we move the event around Europe, to encourage folks from all over the region to attend. Therefore, the Fedora Project is pleased to announce that our next Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) will take place in Berlin from June 26 - 28, 2009. This year in Berlin, we are partnering with LinuxTag -- one of the largest FOSS events in Europe -- to help make FUDCon happen this year. LinuxTag takes place from Wednesday June 24 - Saturday June 27, and FUDCon will take place from Friday the 26th - Sunday the 28th, meaning that there will be two days of overlap during which a large number of people who would otherwise never attend a FUDCon will have a chance to see Fedora up close, and in great detail. FUDCon will consist of: * pre-scheduled technical and user-focused talks on Friday and Saturday. * a "BarCamp" on one of the days of the event. * two days of hackfests, focusing on Fedora 12 and upstream projects that are important to the Fedora Project. * a social event. === The purpose of this message is: (0) To give people general information about this year's event. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009 (1) To encourage people to pre-register for the event, because this helps us tremendously with our planning. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDConBerlin2009_attendees We are working on a hotel deal that will allow us to have a huge block of double rooms at a reasonable price. Please stay tuned for lodging information regarding FUDCon. (2) To ask that anyone who is interested in giving a talk at FUDCon sign up. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon_Berlin_and_LinuxTag_2009_talks === I think that the wiki pages are pretty clear, and I hope that this email has been informative as well. If there are any questions about FUDCon, or about anything related to Fedora or community activities in the EMEA region, please don't hesitate to send me an email. Thanks, Max

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Fedora Unity Announces Fedora 10 Re-spins
by Ben Williams 16 Feb '09

16 Feb '09

*The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins of Fedora 10.* These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 10 installation media and include all updates released as of February 10th, 2009. The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64, PPC architectures via Jigdo and or Torrent starting Monday February 16th, 2009. Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits! PPC Re-spins PPC isos are being released marked * **UNTESTED**, *Please Test and give us feedback, Thanks to We would like to give a special thanks to the following for testing this Re-Spin: - zcat Jason Farrell - vwbusguy- Scott Williams - Southern_Gentleman Ben Williams - kanarip Jeroen van Meeuwen - fenrus2 Dennis Johnson - Harley-D Dana Hoffman Jr Testing Results A full test matrix can be found at http://spins.fedoraunity.org/Members/Southern_Gentleman/fedora-10-20090210-… <http://spins.fedoraunity.org/Members/Southern_Gentleman/fedora-10-20090210-…> A full list of bugs, packages and changelogs that have been updated in this Re-Spin can be reviewed on http://spins.fedoraunity.org/changelogs/20090210/ About Fedora Unity Re-Spins Fedora Unity has taken up the Re-Spin task to provide the community with the chance to install Fedora with recent updates already included. These updates might otherwise comprise more than 2.05GiB of downloads for a full install. This is a community project, for and by the community. You can contribute to the community by joining our test process. Go to* http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins* to get the bits! Assistance Needed If you are interested in helping with the testing or mirroring efforts, please contact the Fedora Unity team. Contact information is available at http://fedoraunity.org/ or the #fedora-unity channel on the Freenode IRC Network (irc.freenode.net). To report bugs in the Re-Spins please use http://bugs.fedoraunity.org/ -- Ben Williams Window-Linux Specialist Mathematics Department-Virginia Tech 561E McBryde Hall 540 231-2739

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Fedora Weekly News #163
by Pascal Calarco 16 Feb '09

16 Feb '09

Fedora Weekly News Issue 163 Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 163 for the week ending February 15th, 2009. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue163 This week's issue provides some detail on the upcoming Fedora Activity Day (FAD) at Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE), many posts from the Fedora Planet blogosphere, and selected wonderful event reports from FOSDEM. We welcome a brand new Quality Assurance beat this issue, with coverage of the latest test day focusing on iSCSI for Fedora 11, summary of the latest QA weekly meeting, and discussion of the process for critical-release bugs. In Development news, discussion of FLOSS multimedia codec support in Fedora, preview looks at F11 release notes, and the availability of CrossReport, a tool to evaluate the ease with which applications can be ported to Windows using the MinGW libraries. From the Translation team, updates and details on the infrastructure roadmap for translation, and migration of Damned Lies to the new Django-based interface. Infrastructure reports availability of WordPress multi-user for Fedora sub-projects, and planning for cgit as a replacement for gitweb on hosted2. Artwork has updates on the continuing evolution of Fedora 11 artwork. The Security Week beat examines recent discussion on Slashdot regarding 'how to argue the security of open source software,' and this issue wraps up with a summary of the security advisories for Fedora 9 and 10 over this past week. Enjoy! If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list(a)redhat.com FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join -- Announcements -- In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents Contributing Writer: Max Spevack --- Slow News Week --- It was a quiet week on the announcements front, with nothing more than a few outage notifications being sent to the primary Fedora announcements mailing lists. Your correspondent promises to make an announcement this week, so that this space may be used to its full potential in next week's issue. --- Upcoming Events --- 2009-02-20: Fedora Activity Day @ SCaLE[1] 2009-02-20 - 2009-02-22: Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE)[2] Also, people are encouraged to register for Fedora or JBoss.org related speaking slots at LinuxTag 2009.[3] 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_at_SCaLE_7x 2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCaLE_7x_Event 3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon_Berlin_and_LinuxTag_2009_talks -- Planet Fedora -- In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide. http://planet.fedoraproject.org Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin --- Activism Alert --- Oron Peled wrote[1] about a proposed new IETF standard for "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Authorization Extensions" which may be patent-encumbered before it is even approved. Paul W. Frields appealed[2] for prior art against a patent that covers a user interface that has multiple workspaces (filed 1987-03-25). --- General --- Dave Jones announced[3] some changes to the Fedora kernel packaging "to drop the regular 686 kernels. As of Fedora 11, the only 32-bit kernels built are '586' and '686-PAE' (and their -debug variants)." Lennart Poettering described[4] some of the new changes in the latest PulseAudio 0.9.15 release, including Flat Volumes, On-the-fly Reconfiguration of Devices (aka "S/PDIF Support"), Native support for 24bit samples and support for Airport Express. David Nalley wrote[5] about the Fedora Ambassadors giving away free XO laptops! To qualify, either "Package and maintain a sugar-* package for 2 releases or more" or "Build a Sugar activity that helps meet the 'holy list of 4th grade maths[6]'". Andrew Overholt announced[7] the release of the Linux Tools project for Eclipse. The release has lots of features from profiling and tracing with SystemTap to autoconf and RPM spec file editor (with autocomplete) support. Jef Spaleta expressed[8] mild excitement at Canonical's "Renewed focus on suspend resume". In a later post, he wrote[9] about comparing Linux (and even OSX) user experiences with respect to functionality regressions after an update. Seth Vidal mused[10] on the fact that a poster on Planet Gnome[11] had said that "Fedora is held to a higher standard" than certain other distributions. Harish Pillay reacted[12] to an IDC report claiming "Proprietary software products are much better documented than open source because of the volunteer nature of open source software development". 1. http://life-with-linux.blogspot.com/2009/02/internet-draft-transport-layer-… 2. http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1490 3. http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/2009/02/09/fedora-kernel-packaging/ 4. http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/oh-nine-fifteen.html 5. http://www.nalley.sc/david/?p=196 6. http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Gdk/4th_Grade_Maths 7. http://overholt.ca/wp/?p=117 8. http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/34551.html 9. http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/34592.html 10. http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/fedora-is-held-to-a-higher-standard/ 11. http://planet.gnome.org/ 12. http://harishpillay.livejournal.com/139904.html --- How-To --- Devan Goodwin explained[1] how to perform bandwidth-limited secure encrypted backups using duplicity and Amazon's S3 Storage Service. Mohd Izhar Firdaus Ismail described[2] how to enable "Disk snapshot backup in Linux". Lennart Poettering requested[3] that D-Bus interfaces be properly versioned, and described some best-practices including the hows and whys. 1. http://crispyinthedark.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/amazon-s3-duplicity-backups/ 2. http://blog.kagesenshi.org/2009/02/disk-snapshot-backup-in-linux.html 3. http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/versioning-dbus.html --- Events --- Once again: So many people have written about attending FOSDEM that it would take an entire issue of FWN post all of the links. Instead an arbitrarily selection will be randomly chosen. http://gnu.wildebeest.org/diary/2009/02/11/some-fosdem-pictures/ http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009/02/fosdem-day2.html http://spevack.livejournal.com/74638.html http://gregdek.livejournal.com/45847.html http://digitaurora.blogspot.com/2009/02/fosdem-2009-day-one.html http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2009/02/report-fel-fosdem-2009.html And on a slightly different note, Arindam Ghosh wrote[1] about (and posted photos of) Mikti'09[2]. 1. http://arindamghosh.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/mukti09-event-report/ 2. http://mukti09.in/ -- Ambassadors -- In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero --- FAD SCaLE coming up 2009-02-20 --- The Fedora Activity Day[1] at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE)[2] will be from 9am - 6pm on 2009-02-20 at the Westin Airport Los Angeles, in Los Angeles, California. There will be breaks and such, but the FAD will be treated much like a sprint. We're here to get something accomplished -- specifically font packaging and documentation -- so come on by and help us out for an hour or all day. We'd love to have you there! Also, if you can make SCaLE from the Southern California area, stop by the Fedora booth. SCaLE takes place on this weekend at the Westin Airport Los Angeles. For more information, visit the Southern California Linux Expo site[3]. 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_at_SCaLE_7x 2. http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/ 3. http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org --- Got Ambassador News? --- Any Ambassador news tips from around the Fedora community can be submitted to me by e-mailing lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org and I'd be glad to put it in this weekly report. -- QualityAssurance -- In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1]. Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA --- Test Days --- This week's regular test day[1] was on iSCSI[2]. Martin Sivak and Hans de Goede represented the developers, and testing was lead by Marian Ganisin with assistance from Chris Williams, Mike Anderson, Michael Christie and James Laska. Test cases worked on during the test day can be seen on the page. Please record any additional test ideas or considerations at Exploratory Testing iSCSI. Consult the quick start guide[3] for creating a software-based iscsi target for use with testing. Next week's test day[4] will be on the 20 Second Startup[5] feature planned for Fedora 11. It will be held on 2009-02-19 in the #fedora-qa channel on Freenode IRC. Please drop by if you would like to help test and improve boot speed for Fedora 11. 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-02-12 2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Features/iSCSI 3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Scsi-target-utils_Quickstart_Guide 4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-02-19 5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/20SecondStartup --- Weekly meetings --- The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-02-11. The full log is available[2]. Will Woods gave a status report on the progress of the autoqa[3] project, which is working on creating automated test scripts to run whenever certain events happen. He also reported on progress with the Nitrate[4] project, which is for collecting test cases and test plans and compiling results from running them. Jóhann Guðmundsson asked if it will be possible to pull existing test cases from the current Wiki-based system into Nitrate when it is released, and Will Woods said this is likely to be possible. The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[5] was held on February 10th. The group agreed that the current list of most-important components should be updated, and Edward Kirk will do this. Edward Kirk, Brennan Ashton and Adam Williamson (links) agreed that simple goals should be set for the group, but did not reach final agreement on what these should be. Adam Williamson suggested that Bug Days be revived and made weekly, and this idea was supported by Edward Kirk and Brennan Ashton. The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-02-18 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-qa, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-02-17 at 1700 UTC in #fedora-bugzappers. 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings 2. http://wwoods.fedorapeople.org/fedora-qa/fedora-qa-20090211.log.html 3. http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=autoqa.git;a=summary 4. http://fedorahosted.org/nitrate 5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings --- Wiki re-organization --- Work continued on the ongoing project to rewrite and re-organize the main pages in the QA team's Wiki space[1]. Adam Williamson, Jóhann Guðmundsson, Christopher Beland and Leam Hall all contributed ideas, suggestions and drafts.[2][3] 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00126.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00371.html --- Release-critical bug process --- Adam Williamson initiated a discussion[1] regarding the process for handling release-critical bugs. Matej Cepl, James Laska, Jesse Keating, and John Poelstra contributed opinions. In the end it was agreed that the basic shape of the current process is a good one but the groups involved - BugZappers, release engineering, and developers - should communicate and collaborate more in deciding on release-critical bugs. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00276.html --- Xorg/Mesa/DRI testing --- François Cami, together with others, proposed a project[1] to conduct organized testing of X.org and DRI functionality with a range of common hardware for Fedora 11. He highlighted four important areas he felt were needed for this: an opt-in system to record what hardware is owned by what testers (possibly utilizing Smolt), a system for producing test plans, a system for recording the results of tests, and regularly scheduled test sessions. Jóhann Guðmundsson supported the idea[2] and suggested that, while some of the features would require help from the infrastructure group, the QA group could at least immediately start writing test cases. James Laska pointed out that extensive information is needed to diagnose and fix X issues remotely. François will work with the X maintainers to define exactly what information needs to be provided. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00554.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00559.html -- Developments -- In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized. Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley --- FLOSS Multimedia Codec Support --- Inspired by previous discussions on whether Fedora should distribute FLOSS content[1] Martin Sourada tried[2] to start a discussion about the poor support of FLOSS multimedia. Martin noted: "Out of the combinations of two FLOSS containers (matroska and ogg) and two FLOSS video codecs (dirac and theora) I know only one (ogg + theora) actually works in xine-lib (used by KDE4) which is pathetic." He asked for help in documenting the situation on a wiki page[3]. When Bastien Nocera suggested that the most important thing was to file bugs Martin responded[4] that this was what he was doing after first performing tests. An information packed sub-thread started[5] by Gregory Maxwell expanded the scope of the tests and started a discussion with Dominik Mierzejewski about the problem of ffmpeg providing sub-optimal implementations of unencumbered codecs. It seems that for reasons of efficiency ffmpeg re-invents the wheel from scratch instead of using and improving upstream implementations. Kevin Kofler also rose[6] to the implied challenge that GStreamer was preferable to xine-lib. 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue161#Electronic_Design_Automation_Con… 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00794.html 3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Mso/Open_Multimedia 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00826.html 5. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00800.html 6. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00806.html --- Multiple Packages from One Source ? --- A question about how to handle the situation where a single source could be compiled with alternate databases was posted[1] by Steven Moix. The motion video motion detector software can be compiled to use either MySQL or Postgres. Steven explained that the problem was that "[...]you can't divide it into sub-packages, at the end it generates one big binary file [...]" and wondered should he just choose the database he preferred or propose two packages. Manuel Wolfshant expressed[2] what appeared to be the common wisdome: "personally I would compile twice, once enabling mysql and another time pgsql, and create 2 packages. each package would install a "motion-dbname" binary, and a symlink would allow access via the well known name "motion". Using alternatives would allow a switch between the two." Although it was admitted that David Woodhouse's suggestion[3] to make the program use loadable plugins was the ideal Tom Lane thought[4] that was "[...] a bit above and beyond what a packager should do. If he's also an upstream developer, then he should undertake that addition with his developer hat on; but it's *well* beyond the size of patch that a Fedora package should be carrying." The ability to specify alternate requires (similar to those used in the .deb package format[5]) was discussed[6] by Richard W.M. Jones and Tom Lane and dismissed as impractical in this case anyway due to variations in SQL. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00918.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00920.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00923.html 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01091.html 5. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html 6. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01097.html --- Take a Peek at the Fedora 11 Release Notes --- Fresh from his work on the RHEL-5.3 Release Notes Ryan Lerch apprised[1] the list of the latest changes to the Fedora 11 Release Notes. Ryan sought early feedback and changes to documentation beats in order to give the community an early preview of the release notes. Initial feedback from Thorsten Leemhuis and Kevin Kofler and others indicated that the use of fixed-width instead of liquid layout was disliked by some people and loved[2] by others. Ryan also provided[3] an rpm of this Release Notes mockup. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00910.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00942.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00911.html --- Heads Up: Noarch Subpackages Landing Soon --- Florian Festi warned[1] that the ability to produce noarch subpackages will soon be available in Fedora. This brings the benefit of being able to share these packages among different architectures thus reducing disk space and mirror bandwidth. Although rpm-4.6 supports noarch fully there are still some fixes to make to koji before the Fedora buildsystem can cope with noarch subpackages. Florian suggested that those who wanted to could experiment in mock with rpmdiff to compare the results across different architectures. He assured readers that there were no plans to force packagers to use this feature and invited anyone interested in developing the use of noarch in future release to a discussion. Florian later warned[2] that one potential negative outcome of using such sub-packages would be a proliferation of packages and consequent bloating of metadata which might affect yum. VilleSkyttä suggested[3] that it would be wise to make sure that use of BuildRequire: rpm-build >= 4.6.0 was enforced in order to ensure that earlier versions of rpmbuild did not produce noarch versions of the main package and other potential subpackages. Florian's response recognized[4] the problem but deprecated the use of BuildRequires to such an extent. One possible alternative which he proposed was to "[have Panu Matilainen backport a check that will make noarch packages (both regular and noarch) fail to build if they contain binaries [and ensure that this] additional check will be in place before koji will be updated[.]" This latter proposal stimulated a good deal of interest from Ralf Corsepius and Richard W.M. Jones as they were both concerned with cross-architecture issue. The definition of a "binary" seemed to be one unclear point. In a later thread Florian updated[5] a list of packages which could be easily turned into noarch subpackages. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01012.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01020.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01023.html 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01046.html 5. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01105.html --- Mass Rebuild Coming Soon --- Jesse Keating drew attention to "[...] a perfect storm brewing for Fedora 11" due to the need to rebuild with GCC-4.4 (see FWN#161[1], the use of i586 as the default supported architecture (see FWN#162[2] and the support of stronger hashes (last paragraph of FWN#107[3]). Apparently the time-constraints led to a desire to start the rebuild as soon as possible without giving maintainers an explicit window in which to do their own builds. Jesse preferred to give maintainers an ability to opt-out and sought suggestions on how this could be achieved. Jesse suggested that interested parties should either reply to the thread and/or participate in the 2009-02-16 IRC meeting in #fedora-meeting at 1800UTC. 1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue161#GCC:_Default_ISA_Flags_and_Glibc 2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/LatestIssue#Fedora_11_Will_Support_i586_I… 3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue107#Crypto_Consolidation --- New Tool Measures Ease of Cross-compiling to Windows --- Richard W.M. Jones announced[1] the availability of CrossReport, a tool to evaluate the ease with which applications can be ported to Windows using the MinGW libraries. After some issue with platform dependency were reported by Michael Cronenworth were sorted[2] out it seemed[3] the tool is ready for use. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01055.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01074.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01076.html -- Translation -- This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee --- Additions to talk.fedoraproject.org --- Rafael Gomes has volunteered to update content on talk.fedoraproject.org[1] and would be creating the .pot file to make it available for translators. Additionally, Lucas Do Amaral has volunteered to add content regarding ekiga configuration[2] that would ensure error free display of the translated content, as had been earlier reported by Richard van der Luit [3]. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00026.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00040.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00029.html --- Further discussion on the Infrastructure Roadmap --- In continuation to the earlier discussion, Dimitris Glezos mentions that the important issue currently is the inconsistent uptime of the system due to the lack of administration resources [1]. He also mentions that adding Publican support to the Transifex instance would be possible with support from the Fedora Publican group. Additionally, he mentions that Transifex v0.5 to be released in March, would have support for Statistics based display as a start to the future goal of supporting all the features of Damned Lies. It is to be noted that FLP uses Damned Lies and Transifex for its Translation infrastructure. Domingo Becker added a wishlist[2] for the current system, that includes reservation of files for translation, timeout and notification system to the co-ordinator. In a separate thread, Francesco Tombolini voiced his opinion about the lack of the file locking feature and the downtime in the statistics page [3]. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00033.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00059.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00078.html --- Migration of Damned Lies --- Asgeir Frimannsson had announced[1] the imminent migration of the old Damned Lies instance to the new Django-based Damned Lies instance. Damned Lies is used by http://translate.fedoraproject.org for generating the translation statistics. --- New Members in FLP Daniel Yousefi (Persian) [2], Ahmad Razzaghi (Persian) [3], Daniele Catanesi (Italian) [4], Mads Bille Lundby (Danish) [5], and Zoltan Sumegi (Hungarian) [6] joined the Fedora Localization Project last week. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00057.html 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00051.html 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00076.html 4. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00043.html 5. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00014.html 6. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00011.html -- Infrastructure -- This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-infrastructure-list http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure Contributing Writer: Huzaifa Sidhpurwala --- Calendaring system --- Discussion on this topic continues from last week. Adam Williamson said [1] that there are a couple of calendaring plugins which will allow for "days" will be allocated. Clint Savage mentioned that the point is that it should support caldev or something better[2] 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg… 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg… --- wordpress-mu install --- Mike McGrath asked who wanted to finalize our wordpress-mu install[1] Mike further said that it has got built and there is a ticket for it[2] 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg… 2. http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/342 --- cgit to replace gitweb? --- Seth Vidal said[1]that he has setup cgit as a replacement for gitweb on hosted2 and it is available at hosted2.fedoraproject.org/cgit/ He said that he would like to replace gitweb as a web based git repo browser but that would mean that the urls from gitweb will not work any more. He said that he would like to get some feedback on this. Bill Nottingham suggested[2] that we may be able to able to do a rewrite rule. 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg… 2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg… --- Artwork In this section, we cover the Fedora Artwork Project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei --- Evolving Fedora 11 Artwork --- The development of the Fedora 11 artwork evolved on @fedora-art. Máirín Duffy posted[1] a new wallpaper mockup[2]: "It's more really an attempt at a nice backdrop, and maybe we can layer some of the trees and buildings we were talking about on top[.]" Charles Brej investigated[3] boot animations: "On the plymouth front, I am likely to be a bit busier at work this release than the F10 one, so I would really appreciate some of ideas as to what people would like during the system boot. The possibilities are pretty much limitless but it would be a good thing to conserve the CPU and keep the number and size of images included in the initrd to a minimum". 1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-February/msg00024.html 2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:Artwork_F11_greek-concept_mockup2_mo.png 3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-February/msg00025.html -- Security Week -- In this section, we highlight the security stories from the week in Fedora. Contributing Writer: Josh Bressers --- Is Open Source Software Secure? --- This week there was a story posted to Slashdot titled How To Argue That Open Source Software Is Secure?[1]. Quoting the post: ... saying that they were warned that they are dangerously insecure because they run open source operating systems or software, because 'anyone can read the code and hack you with ease.' This issue seems to keep coming up from time to time. This argument is of course silly and one of those "Prove it ... you can't? So it's true!" There is no way to prove that a piece of closed source software is more or less secure than a given piece of Open Source Software. If you can't see the source, you can't be certain that the vendor did or didn't fix issues. You need to unconditionally trust your vendor. If the source code is wide open for anyone to see, it keeps the vendor honest. You can't sweep issues under a transparent rug. You can try, and maybe hide a few piles of dust, but the really scary piles of dirt will stick out like sore thumbs. The issue at hand isn't is application A more secure than application B, but do you trust vendor A more than vendor B? 1. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/11/007216 -- Security Advisories -- In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce. http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce Contributing Writer: David Nalley --- Fedora 10 Security Advisories --- * xine-lib-1.1.16.2-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg003… * squid-3.0.STABLE13-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg003… * squidGuard-1.2.1-2.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg003… * python-fedora-0.3.9-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg003… * asterisk-1.6.0.5-2.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg004… * moodle-1.9.4-1.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg006… * fail2ban-0.8.3-18.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg007… --- Fedora 9 Security Advisories --- * squidGuard-1.2.1-2.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg003… * python-fedora-0.3.9-1.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg003… * squid-3.0.STABLE13-1.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg003… * lighttpd-1.4.20-6.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg003… * xine-lib-1.1.16.2-1.fc9.1 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg003… * moodle-1.9.4-1.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg004… * asterisk-1.6.0.5-2.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg006… * dahdi-tools-2.0.0-1.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg006… * libresample-0.1.3-9.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg006… * dnsmasq-2.45-1.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg006… * fail2ban-0.8.3-18.fc9 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg007… ---- end FWN #163 ----

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Patent defense, FOSS-style
by Robert Tiller 16 Feb '09

16 Feb '09

I wanted to let everyone know of a new development in the lawsuit against Red Hat and Novell brought by IP Innovation, a subsidiary of the noted patent troll firm Acacia Technologies. We are inviting FOSS community members to submit prior art relevant to the patents, which may be used to help invalidate the patents. On Friday we posted information regarding the three patents in suit on the Linux Defenders website in its Post Issue Peer to Patent area. The site was developed with Red Hat's assistance by the Open Invention Network and the Center for Patent Innovations at New York Law School, which is now being run by our old friend Mark Webbink. The site is here: http://www.post-issue.org/user-interface-with-multiple-workspaces-for-shari… The claims of the patents, which can be reached from the site, concern a user interface that has multiple workspaces. Red Hat has strong defenses in this lawsuit, but this will likely reinforce them. We also view this as an additional opportunity for creative collaboration with the community. -- Robert H. Tiller Vice President & Assistant General Counsel, IP Red Hat, Inc. 1801 Varsity Drive Raleigh, N.C. 27606 (919) 754 4232 rtiller(a)redhat.com

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Outage Notification - Koji, Wiki, Smolt, Transifex, Bodhi, PackageDB, FAS
by Ricky Zhou 12 Feb '09

12 Feb '09

Outage Notification - 2009-02-12 19:00 UTC There was be an outage starting at approximately 2009-02-12 19:00 UTC, which lasted approximately 40 minutes. To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/UTCHowto or run: date -d 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC' Affected Services: Buildsystem Database Fedora Hosted Mirror System Translation Services Unaffected Services: CVS / Source Control DNS Fedora People Fedora Talk Mail Torrent Static Websites Ticket Link: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1183 Reason for Outage: Red Hat's internal DNS stopped responding for *.fedora.phx.redhat.com queries. Contact Information: Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage.

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Fedora Weekly News #162
by Oisin Feeley 09 Feb '09

09 Feb '09

Fedora Weekly News Issue 162 Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 162 for the week ending February 8th, 2009. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue162 This week we're happy to announce the return of several beats: Marketing reports on following Fedora activity via Twitter; Ambassadors tantalizes with some Fedora polo shirts and the news that "North American Ambassadors Take Reins of XO Program"; Infrastructure notes a possible "Public Calendaring System" for the community; SecurityWeek shares an xkcd comic in "Encryption Security". Announcements highlights the K12Linux Fedora 10 Live Server in "Technical Announcements", PlanetFedora rounds up a lot of must-read blogs, Developments clarifies that "Fedora 11 Will Support i586 Instruction Set", Translation links to the "L10n Infrastructure Roadmap Proposal", Artwork suggests some "Context Free Art", SecurityAdvisories lists packages you really, really want, Virtualization defies easy summary but one exciting tidbit is "Merging KVM and Qemu Packages", and finally we have another AskFedora concerning the possibility of a "Standardized Package Format". If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list(a)redhat.com FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join Contents Fedora Weekly News Issue 162 1.1 Announcements 1.1.1 Fedora 11 Alpha 1.1.2 Technical Announcements 1.1.3 Upcoming Events 1.2 Planet Fedora 1.2.1 General 1.2.2 FOSDEM 2009 1.3 Marketing 1.3.1 Draft Fedora 11 Schedule 1.3.2 Fedora Twitters 1.3.3 Fedora 11 Alpha Ships with Windows Cross Compiler 1.4 Ambassadors 1.4.1 North American Ambassadors Take Reins of XO Program 1.4.2 North America Polo Shirt Order 1.4.3 FAD SCaLE coming up 2009-02-20 1.4.4 Got Ambassador News? 1.5 Developments 1.5.1 Fedora 11 Alpha Released 1.5.2 Fedora 11 Will Support i586 Instruction Set 1.5.3 RFC: Power Management 1.5.4 Rawhide Report 2009-02-07 1.5.5 New module-init-tools Uses Binary modules.dep|alias|symbols 1.5.6 New Georgian Fonts Packaged Rapidly 1.5.7 Distro-agnostic /boot Metadata Standard ? 1.5.8 GCC-4.4 Mass Rebuild Successful 1.5.9 Help Rel-eng Accelerate Updates Processing 1.6 Translation 1.6.1 Fedora 10 Release Notes Updated 1.6.2 L10n Infrastructure Roadmap Proposal 1.7 Infrastructure 1.7.1 CSI (Security Policy) Help 1.7.2 Public Calendaring System 1.8 Artwork 1.8.1 Echo Monthly News 1.8.2 Context Free Art 1.9 Security Week 1.9.1 Encryption Security 1.9.2 Running Things as root is a Bad Idea 1.10 Security Advisories 1.10.1 Fedora 10 Security Advisories 1.10.2 Fedora 9 Security Advisories 1.11 Virtualization 1.11.1 Enterprise Management Tools List 1.11.1.1 virt-manager and QEMU Disk Polling Logs 1.11.1.2 virt-viewer Persistance Through Guest Reboots 1.11.1.3 virt-install Wait Indefinitely for Windows Guests 1.11.2 Fedora Virtualization List 1.11.2.1 Fedora Virt Status Update 1.11.2.2 Merging KVM and QEMU Packages 1.11.3 Fedora Xen List 1.11.3.1 bzImage Dom0 Support in Rawhide Xen 1.11.3.2 Test Dom0 Xen Kernel RPM Available 1.11.4 Libvirt List 1.11.4.1 Fix for Fallout From Failed QEMU Guest Starts 1.11.4.2 sVirt Patches to Merge in libvirt 1.11.4.3 Manage iptables with libvirt 1.12 Ask Fedora 1.12.1 Standardized Package Format == Announcements == In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/ Contributing Writer: Max Spevack === Fedora 11 Alpha === JesseKeating announced[1] the release of Fedora 11 Alpha. The release is available at http://get.fedoraproject.org and includes MinGW (for Windows cross-compiling), the ext4 filesystem, GNOME 2.26, KDE 4.2.0, and XFCE 4.6 Beta. Furthermore, James Laska informed[2]the community about a Fedora Test Day focused on ext4. === Technical Announcements === Martin Sourada published[3] the latest issue of Echo Monthly News. Warren Togami announced[4] "the release of K12Linux F10 Live Server. K12Linux is Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP.org) integrated with Fedora 10, in a convenient LiveUSB or DVD media installer." The release inclues auto-configuration of diskless thin clients, sound forwarding over the network via PulseAudio, and more. All package maintainers should read the updated[5] package update guidelines[6], as announced by Mark McLoughlin. === Upcoming Events === Fedora will have a presence at several events in the next few weeks. Feel free to join us, February 20 - 22: Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE)[7][8] Also, people are encouraged to register for Fedora or JBoss.org related speaking slots at LinuxTag 2009.[9] 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-February/msg00004.… 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-February/msg00003… 3. ↑ https://fedorahosted.org/echo-icon-theme/wiki/MonthlyNews/Issue6 4. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-February/msg00002.… 5. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-February/msg00004… 6. ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Package_update_guidelines 7. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCALE7X_Event 8. ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_at_SCaLE_7x 9. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LinuxTag_2009_talks == Planet Fedora == In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide. http://planet.fedoraproject.org Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin === General === Paul W. Frields announced[1] the Fedora 11 Alpha, as well as an explanation of why Alpha releases exist and how you can get a sneak-peek at what will be in the next release while helping Fedora improve. Chris Brown wrote[2] about some of the other features that may make an appearance in F11. Dwayne Bailey developed[3] a system to manage the localization of software and integrated[4] it with some existing libraries to produce Virtaal[5]. Gary Benson continued[6] his excellent series "Inside Zero and Shark", a must-read for anyone interested in virtual machines or Java internals. Dave Jones explained[7] the status of Dracut, "the shiny new initramfs creation tool." Chris Tyler wrote[8],[9] [10] about getting a multiseat system set up using a single computer and dual ATI R710 video cards. In the latest installment the ATI setup was compared[11] to a similar configuration using Dual NVIDIA 9800GTX and various driver combinations. Steven Moix benchmarked[12],[13] the performance of Solid State Disks using various I/O schedulers running on Fedora 10. Tim Waugh showed off[14] the eye candy of system-config-printer that can be expected in Fedora 11. Adrian Likins pondered[15] the availability of "a mailing list summary page. The page would scan the mailing lists, and post the content most likely to need attention." Fedora Weekly News? Michael DeHaan shared[16] an essay, "Lessons Learned From OSS Software Development". Tim Waugh described[17] "How I use git" which shows some useful tips and tricks. Venkatesh Hariharan wrote[18] a draft FOSS manifesto for Indian political parties, which could actually be valuable for any country in the world. 1. ↑ http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1467 2. ↑ http://www.chruz.com/2009/02/07/icantbelieveitsnotbtr/ 3. ↑ http://www.translate.org.za/blogs/dwayne/en/content/localisation-informatio… 4. ↑ http://www.translate.org.za/blogs/dwayne/en/content/libtranslate-tm-plugins… 5. ↑ http://virtaal.org/ 6. ↑ http://gbenson.net/?p=124 7. ↑ http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/2009/02/02/dracut-status/ 8. ↑ http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/180-Multiseat-on-Dual-ATI… 9. ↑ http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/181-Multiseat-radeonhd.ht… 10. ↑ http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/182-Multiseat-on-Dual-ATI… 11. ↑ http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/184-Multiseat-on-Dual-ATI… 12. ↑ http://www.alphatek.info/2009/02/02/ssd-performance-vs-linux-kernel-io-sche… 13. ↑ http://www.alphatek.info/2009/02/02/io-scheduler-and-ssd-part-2/ 14. ↑ http://cyberelk.net/tim/2009/02/03/screenshots-system-config-printer-11/ 15. ↑ http://adrianlikins.com/?p=481 16. ↑ http://www.michaeldehaan.net/?p=853 17. ↑ http://cyberelk.net/tim/2009/02/04/how-i-use-git/ 18. ↑ http://osindia.blogspot.com/2009/02/draft-foss-manifesto-for-indian.html === FOSDEM 2009 === So many people have written about attending FOSDEM that it would take an entire issue of FWN post all of the links. Instead an arbitrarily selection will be randomly chosen. Pierros Papadeas took[1] a nice set of photos including some general shots of Brussels. Joerg Simon got[2] some shots of the Fedora booth. 1. ↑ http://digitaurora.blogspot.com/2009/02/fosdem-2009-day-zero.html 2. ↑ http://kitall.blogspot.com/2009/02/fosdem-impressions-day1.html == Marketing == In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing Contributing Writer: Kam Salisbury === Draft Fedora 11 Schedule === The draft Fedora 11 schedule was made[1] available on the wiki by Jonathon Roberts. Now is as good as a time as any to get involved with Fedora Marketing by reviewing the goals of Fedora Marketing[2] and then joining[3]. 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jonrob/MarketingSchedule 2. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/ 3. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/Join === Fedora Twitters === You can now follow most major Fedora announcements via Twitter. Just choose to follow fedora_linux[1] from your Twitter account. Alternately, you can choose to follow Fedora Linux major news announcements via RSS[2]. Twitter[3] provides a social network tied together via 140 character status messages. 1. ↑ http://twitter.com/fedora_linux 2. ↑ http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/16598186.rss 3. ↑ http://twitter.com/about#about === Fedora 11 Alpha Ships with Windows Cross Compiler === Fedora 11 now includes the Windows cross compiler MinGW[1], a development environment for Fedora users who want to save time and duplication of effort by cross-compiling their programs to run on Windows without actually having to use Windows during development. 1. ↑ http://www.mingw.org/ == Ambassadors == In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero === North American Ambassadors Take Reins of XO Program === During the week following FUDcon, it was suggested that the Fedora Ambassadors in North America run the NA Developer XO program for an initial period of 6 months. The reasons for Ambassadors taking the reins on this project are: * Ambassadors can help the NA Developer XO program by seeking help, freeing up developers already involved to concentrate on their work. * The Ambassadors are already in place, going to every major event and tons of minor events recruiting contributors to Fedora. * Ambassadors have had some moderate success getting people involved with both Fedora and OLPC/Sugar. OLPC decided to take the Ambassadors up on the offer and shipped 100 XOs to the FAmNA. Guidelines have been set - subject to the guidance of the OLPC SIG -- and the wiki, which has just been started and is in the process of refining, can be found here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_developers_XO_program Essentially the bar that has been set is: * Maintain a sugar-* package in Fedora and agree to maintain it for two releases. Alternately maintain a package that was in OLPC4 and has been merged. * Develop a Sugar activity. To keep this in focus I have adopted Greg Dekoenigsberg's 'holy list of 4th grade math lessons' as acceptable activities: http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Gdk/4th_Grade_Maths * QA (well not really): While FAmNA isn't actively looking for QA help, but if someone with extensive QA experience and lots of time presents itself we won't pass it up. === North America Polo Shirt Order === Pascal Calarco has initiated another round of ordering for Ambassador Polos for North American Ambassadors as announced on the Fedora Ambassador mailing list. There is also additional information here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Ambassadors_North_America_(FAMNA)#Fedo… === FAD SCaLE coming up 2009-02-20 === The Fedora Activity Day[1] at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE)[2] will be from 9am - 6pm on Friday, February 20th at the Westin Airport Los Angeles, in Los Angeles, California. There will be breaks and such, but the FAD will be treated much like a sprint. We're here to get something accomplished -- specifically font packaging and documentation -- so come on by and help us out for an hour or all day. We'd love to have you there! Also, if you can make SCaLE from the Southern California area, stop by the Fedora booth. 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_at_SCaLE_7x 2. ↑ http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/ === Got Ambassador News? === Any Ambassador news tips from around the Fedora community can be submitted to me by e-mailing lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org and I'd be glad to put it in this weekly report. == Developments == In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized. Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley === Fedora 11 Alpha Released === Jesse Keating announced[1] the availability of Fedora 11 Alpha on 2009-02-05. His beautiful poetry was accompanied by a suggestion to read the Release Notes[2]. One change which drew[3] extensive commentary on @fedora-test was the default disabling of the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination. This traditionally kills the X server and to regain the usual behavior it is necessary to create an Xorg.conf file (these no longer exist by default either) and add the line Option "DontZap" "false" to it. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-February/msg00004.… 2. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Alpha_release_notes 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00118.html === Fedora 11 Will Support i586 Instruction Set === Last week (FWN#161[1]) we reported on a proposal to cease building Fedora 11 for the i586 CPU instruction set. FESCo had delayed its decision in order to discuss the matter further. The issue was addressed[2] on 2009-02-05 with the outcome that a proposal by Dennis Gilmore to continue supporting i586 for the duration of Fedora 11 but to transition to i686 for Fedora 12 was supported. Prior to the meeting Warren Togami summed up[3] the advice of Jakub Jelínek as: "Jakub recommends i586.rpm for Fedora 11, because it doesn't gain us much of anything to go with i686 minimum. The benefits of i586 to i686 are simply not important because cmov is usually not a worthwhile optimization on ia32." An interesting suggestion by Adam Jackson was[4][5] that if there is a committed user-base of i586 users they could probably support it in the Secondary Architecture (see FWN#92[6]) infrastructure. Ulrich Drepper and Dominik Mierzejewski debated[7] whether the use of cmov can in some circumstances cause performance degradation. It is unclear exactly what performance benefits could be obtained by passing various architecture-specific flag combinations to GCC but it does seem that the burden of building and maintenance will be eased significantly by these changes. As a related change[8] x86_64 kernels will be installed with a 32-bit userspace. 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/LatestIssue#Dropping_Support_for_i586_Arc… 2. ↑ http://bpepple.fedorapeople.org/fesco/FESCo-2009-02-05.html 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00200.html 4. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00282.html 5. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00407.html 6. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue92#Secondary_Arch_Proposal_Cont. 7. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00240.html 8. ↑ http://bpepple.fedorapeople.org/fesco/FESCo-2009-02-05.html === RFC: Power Management === Phil Knirsch initiated[1] a discussion of attempts to decrease power consumption especially in userland. A wiki page[2] reflects some of the research Phil has pulled together. Richard Hughes pointed[3] out some interesting work on DeviceKit-power where he built on powertop. Olivier Galibert raised[4] a possible problem with Richard's use of D-Bus itself causing wakeups, but according to Colin Walters a patch existed[5] to fix this problem. Many of the items suggested in Phil's page for documentation were suggested by Bill Nottingham as desiderata for defaults. While Phil agreed[6] in general he itemized some of the problems. These include problems with network interfaces and hard-disk spindowns which may be approachable as a result of a tuned daemon on which Phil is working. An addendum of audio hardware power-saving was made by Eric Sandeen along with a list of bugs which led[7] Phil to wonder if a tracker bug to collate all the information would be useful. Matthew Garrett expressed[8] some worries that hard-disk power-saving would cause physical wear and the relatime patches to work around over-aggressive deletion of content in /tmp would continue to be stalled. The importance of separating out KDE and GNOME dependent features was noted[9] by Kevin Kofler. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00365.html 2. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PowerManagement 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00376.html 4. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00430.html 5. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00642.html 6. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00406.html 7. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00413.html 8. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00415.html 9. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00403.html === Rawhide Report 2009-02-07 === The last report[1] lists 14 new packages added, 57 modified and some broken dependencies. New packages include dissy, a graphical front-end to objdump and python-pygooglechart a Python wrapper for the Google Chart API. Richard Hughes suggested[2] that the update to PolicyKit-gnome-0.9.2-1.fc11 might be useful: "If you're having problems with PackageKit and buttons "not working" you need this update." Some of the x86_64 broken dependencies were due to to mono-2.4 being pushed to rawhide which led David Nielsen to suggest[3] that a heads up would have been useful. Alex Lancaster requested[4] that API/ABI breakage would be announced on @fedora-devel-announce instead of on the high-traffic @fedora-devel. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00661.html 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00669.html 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00674.html 4. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00746.html === New module-init-tools Uses Binary modules.dep|alias|symbols === An update to module-init-tools-3.6 was pushed to rawhide by Jon Masters in order to speed up[1] boot time significantly. The files modules.dep, modules.alias and modules.symbols will have binary versions which are used in preference to their old text versions. Jon asked[2] if the need to run depmod -a after upgrades to module-init-tools would upset anyone. There seemed to be general approbation of his changes and they should land soon for Fedora 9 also. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00477.html 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00353.html === New Georgian Fonts Packaged Rapidly === A call was put out[1] by Nicolas Mailhot for someone to package a completely new Georgian font pack created by Besarion Paata Gugushvili. Nicolas was especially keen to get this done quickly as he had contacted Besarion and been rewarded with completely new fonts not shipped by any other distro, licensed with the FSF font exception to the GPL all within nine hours! Tom Callaway responded[2] within mere hours. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00281.html 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00308.html === Distro-agnostic /boot Metadata Standard ? === A negative review in German IT magazine "c't" led[1] Christoph Höger to ask if it was possible to preserve the ability to boot other GNU/Linux distros after installing Fedora. The most annoying point seemed to be that Windows installations are preserved. A moderately long thread resulted and covered several ideas to allow the GRUB bootloader to identify other distributions. One such was[2] .that there should be an agreement among distributions to use a shared metadata standard on boot partitions. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00273.html 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00345.html === GCC-4.4 Mass Rebuild Successful === Jakub Jelínek reported[1] that a mass rebuild of rawhide (snapshotted on 2009-01-26) of 6228 packages had produced only a few hundred failures. He listed these by type of failure. Several of the packages listed failed to build for reasons other than GCC, for instance Java packages failed[2] due to maven being broken. Thorsten Leemhuis provided[3] a list of packages and owners sorted by owner which was generally appreciated. He pointed out: "Finding all your packages in such a long list gets really hard as soon as you maintain 10 or 15 packages." Problems reported due to a mismatch between the libstdc++ headers requirement of -march=i486 and Koji's default use of -march=i386 led[4] Jakub to whip up some fixes. He requested that CFLAGS were not altered in SPEC files. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00180.html 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00220.html 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00229.html 4. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00257.html === Help Rel-eng Accelerate Updates Processing === One bottleneck in the processing of updates to packages is that they need to be signed. Work is ongoing to automate this (see FWN#147[1]) with a signing-server codenamed "sigul". Christoph Wickert wondered[2] why it had taken over five days for an update to one of his packages to get to testing. When Josh Boyer responded that it was because one human (Jesse Keating) had to sign the packages and he had been also busy getting Fedora 11 Alpha released, Daniel P. Berrange suggested[3] adding more humans to help. Jesse Keating suggested[4] that anyone who wished to help could take some of the load off the release-engineering team so that they had more time for package signing. 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue147#Unsigned_Rawhide_Packages_an_Att… 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00508.html 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00515.html 4. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg00576.html == Translation == This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee === Fedora 10 Release Notes Updated === JohnMcDonough announced some updates for the Fedora 10 Release Notes[1]. The deadline for the submission of the translated updates has been declared as 17th February 2009[2]. The translations have to be submitted in the f-10 branch. 1. ↑ https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00001.ht… 2. ↑ https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00007.ht… === L10n Infrastructure Roadmap Proposal === Further to the discussion[1] initiated by AsgeirFrimannsson about the L10n Infrastructure Roadmap, NorikoMizumoto has commented[2] that considering the upcoming deadline for F-11 and the past troubles faced during F-10, the current infrastructure would need a maintainer to ensure its smooth running at present. 1. ↑ https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00000.ht… 2. ↑ https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-February/msg00006.ht… == Infrastructure == This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-infrastructure-list http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure Contributing Writer: Huzaifa Sidhpurwala === CSI (Security Policy) Help === Frank Chiulli said[1] on the @fedora-infrastructure-list that he had implemented the CSI Security policy and he was seeing some strange messages in the logs and asked if someone could help him with that. Mike McGrath replied[2] to that saying that he suspected that before he was blocking these messages but did not notice. Seth Vidal said[3] that those are Windows/Samba/CIFS messages and if you have samba and/or windows running on the same network you will notice those. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg… 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg… 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg… === Public Calendaring System === Adam Williamson introduced[1] himself on the list saying that he was new in the Fedora QA department at Red Hat, his job is to drive community involvement in Fedora QA. He further said that something that would be nice to have for QA community is a public calendar system where dates of events like test days can be published. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-February/msg… == Artwork == In this section, we cover the Fedora Artwork Project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei === Echo Monthly News === Martin Sourada posted[1] on @fedora-art the latest issue of Echo Monthly News[2] with information about the Echo Perspective theme and the new Echo Artist Scripts and Supporting Icon Artist Library. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-February/msg00009.html 2. ↑ http://fedorahosted.org/echo-icon-theme/wiki/MonthlyNews/Issue6 === Context Free Art === Máirín Duffy introduced[1] a "Programmatic Art Generator"[2], something she consider a "nifty FOSS tool [...], and it's even already in Fedora", with regrets[3] for not knowing about it when she created the "4 Foundation" posters[4]. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-February/msg00010.html 2. ↑ http://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/index.php 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-February/msg00012.html 4. ↑ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mairin/3181889947/ == Security Week == In this section, we highlight the security stories from the week in Fedora. Contributing Writer: Josh Bressers === Encryption Security === With all the recent talk of encrypting hard drives, the cold boot method, and using proper passwords, this[1] xkcd comic reminds us of the weakest link in all cryptography, the person with the password. 1. ↑ http://xkcd.com/538 === Running Things as root is a Bad Idea === While I always knew this, this article still sort of blows my mind: Windows Security Improved By Denial Of Administrative Rights[1] To quote the article: ... configuring users to operate without administrative rights mitigates the impact of 92% of "critical" Microsoft vulnerabilities ... 92%, that is mind boggling. It's been sound advice for a long time in the Linux world, not to do things as root. I suspect if we expected everyone to be doing everything as root, virtual any minor security flaw would suddenly become a very serious matter. 1. ↑ http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/app-security/showArticle.jhtml… == Security Advisories == In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce. https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce Contributing Writer: David Nalley === Fedora 10 Security Advisories === * roundcubemail-0.2-7.stable.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * sudo-1.6.9p17-5.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gpsdrive-2.09-7.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * libcdaudio-0.99.12p2-11.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gnumeric-1.8.2-6.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * nss-3.12.2.0-4.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * boinc-client-6.4.5-2.20081217svn.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-9.b14.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * xulrunner-1.9.0.6-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * firefox-3.0.6-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * epiphany-extensions-2.24.0-4.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * devhelp-0.22-3.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * epiphany-2.24.3-2.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * evolution-rss-0.1.2-4.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * blam-1.8.5-6.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * galeon-2.0.7-5.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * google-gadgets-0.10.5-2.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gnome-web-photo-0.3-14.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gnome-python2-extras-2.19.1-26.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gecko-sharp2-0.13-4.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * kazehakase-0.5.6-1.fc10.3 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * mozvoikko-0.9.5-6.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * Miro-1.2.8-2.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * pcmanx-gtk2-0.3.8-5.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * mugshot-1.2.2-5.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * ruby-gnome2-0.18.1-3.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * yelp-2.24.0-5.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… === Fedora 9 Security Advisories === * boinc-client-6.4.5-2.20081217svn.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * roundcubemail-0.2-7.stable.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * nss-3.12.2.0-2.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gpsdrive-2.09-7.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * libcdaudio-0.99.12p2-11.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gnumeric-1.8.2-4.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * xulrunner-1.9.0.6-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * firefox-3.0.6-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * chmsee-1.0.1-8.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * epiphany-extensions-2.22.1-7.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * epiphany-2.22.2-7.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * cairo-dock-1.6.3.1-1.fc9.3 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * blam-1.8.5-5.fc9.1 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gnome-python2-extras-2.19.1-23.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * galeon-2.0.7-5.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gnome-web-photo-0.3-17.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * devhelp-0.19.1-8.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * evolution-rss-0.1.0-6.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * google-gadgets-0.10.5-2.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * kazehakase-0.5.6-1.fc9.3 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * Miro-1.2.7-4.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * mozvoikko-0.9.5-6.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * gtkmozembedmm-1.4.2.cvs20060817-25.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * ruby-gnome2-0.17.0-5.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * mugshot-1.2.2-5.fc9 -https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00258.html * totem-2.23.2-10.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… * yelp-2.22.1-8.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-February/msg00… == Virtualization == In this section, we cover discussion on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list, @fedora-xen-list, and @libvirt-list of Fedora virtualization technologies. Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley === Enterprise Management Tools List === This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list ==== virt-manager and QEMU Disk Polling Logs ==== Radek Hladik noticed[1] "when image:Echo-package-16px.pngvirt-manager is running and polling VMs stats image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibvirt log in /var/log/libivrt/qemu/vmname is filling with messages" on the number of disk operations. After a day the log had grown to 100MB. Daniel P. Berrange accepted[2] on behalf of libvirt and Cole Robinson described[3] how to turn of disk polling in virt-manager. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-February/msg00019.html 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-February/msg00021.html 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-February/msg00020.html ==== virt-viewer Persistance Through Guest Reboots ==== Daniel P. Berrange said[1] that by Fedora 11 image:Echo-package-16px.pngvirt-viewer will persist and wait for a guest to resume rather than exit when a guest reboots. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-February/msg00004.html ==== virt-install Wait Indefinitely for Windows Guests ==== Since Windows reboots during installation, John Levon patched[1] virt-install to wait 120 minutes while installing a Windows guest. After some discussion it was decided it should wait indefinitely instead. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-February/msg00005.html === Fedora Virtualization List === This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list. ==== Fedora Virt Status Update ==== Mark McLoughlin composed[1] another informative weekly update on the status of virtualization development in Fedora. Some highlights included: * A pvmmu problem casues some guest installs on an F11 Alpha host to oops during heavy network activity (RHBZ #480822) * Work has begun on Fedora 11 virtualization release notes. * The 0.6.0 release of image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibvirt was not completely without problems. * All Fedora 11 virtualization features can be found all together. * The KVM/QEMU merge project has settled on a naming scheme. * KVM PCI device assignment continues to have issues. The "core of the problem is that devices must be reset before being assigned if they have been previously used in the host." * The addition of bzImage loading support to the Xen hypervisor is enabling users to build test Dom0 kernels. * A detailed of accounting reveals the bug count going from 191 to 192. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00061.html ==== Merging KVM and QEMU Packages ==== A feature[1] in the works for Fedora 11 is a merge of the image:Echo-package-16px.pngkvm package with the image:Echo-package-16px.pngqemu package. Glauber Costa recently took the first step in this process by creating a test build[2] and starting a very long thread[3] on naming of all the subpackages which will soon make up QEMU. 1. ↑ Features/KVM_and_QEMU_merge 2. ↑ http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1105051 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00000.html === Fedora Xen List === This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list. ==== bzImage Dom0 Support in Rawhide Xen ==== Pasi Kärkkäinen announced[1] the latest image:Echo-package-16px.pngxen builds in Rawhide support bzImage compressed dom0 kernels. Xen previously only supported zImage compressed kernels. This development was one of the pre-requisite work items for the Xen pvops Dom0 feature. This good news was tempered by the fact that there is still no dom0 capable image:Echo-package-16px.pngkernel in Rawhide. However, such a kernel can be built[2] for testing. Gerd Hoffmann reports[3] success doing just that. Such kernels are not yet stable enough for use[4]. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-February/msg00001.html 2. ↑ http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00027.html 4. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-February/msg00055.html ==== Test Dom0 Xen Kernel RPM Available ==== M A Young built[1] a dom0 capable kernel RPM. It's suitable only for testing; "use it very much at your own risk". 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-February/msg00014.html === Libvirt List === This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list. ==== Fix for Fallout From Failed QEMU Guest Starts ==== Daniel P. Berrange fixed[1] a series of events which manifested when a QEMU guest failed to start. Subsequent client connections would fail, CPU would rise to 100%, and virsh would hang. (RHBZ #484414) 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00104.html ==== sVirt Patches to Merge in libvirt ==== Daniel J Walsh looked[1] at James Morris sVirt[2] patches for image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibvirt. "James patch, allows libvirt to read the SELinux context out of the xml database and execute image:Echo-package-16px.pngqemu with the context. The second componant [sic] is to pass the context of the image(s) and allow libvirt to not only set the image, but also update the default labels on disk, so a relabel will not change the context." Daniel J Walsh started working on this second component and wondered if they were acceptable for committing to libvirt yet. Daniel P. Berrange expressed[3] satisfaction with how the patches integrate with libvirt adding "If yourself & James are happy with what they're doing from a SELinux / security model point of view, then there's no reason they shouldn't be posted for final merge now." 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00144.html 2. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SVirt_Mandatory_Access_Control 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00145.html ==== Manage iptables with libvirt ==== Karl Wirth asked[1] "What if we could flexibly change the iptables rules for the different guests as they are deployed onto the node/host". This thought was not new.[2] David Lutterkort pointed[3] out some of the thorny problems with this proposal including the fact that "network devices may be directly assigned to guests - in that case, we won't even see any of the packets the guest sends or receives". Summarizing that "iptables management belongs into a higher-level management app, like ovirt[4], not libvirt." 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00147.html 2. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue138#Libvirt_and_Persistent_Iptables_… 3. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-February/msg00152.html 4. ↑ http://ovirt.org/ == Ask Fedora == In this section, we answer general questions from Fedora community. Send your questions to askfedora AT fedoraproject.org and Fedora News Team will bring you answers from the Fedora Developers and Contributors to selected number of questions every week as part of our weekly news report. Please indicate if you do not wish your name and/or email address to be published. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AskFedora Writers: Chris Tyler, Rahul Sundaram === Standardized Package Format === Arthur Pemberton asked: "When are the big players in the Linux ecosystem going to converge on a single package system which is a superset of .deb and .rpm? This seems like something that needs to be done before this mostly unnecessary difference gets too ingrained to be changed." Two reasons are usually given for converging on a single packaging standard. The first is to create packages that can be installed on many distributions without change; this is particularly attractive to third-party software vendors who wish to create a single repository of their software for use with a range of distributions rather than package and distribute their software within those distributions. In order to support truly portable packages, it is necessary to standardize not only the package format, but the available libraries, library versions, file locations, utility commands, and system services. This is proved by the fact that, for example, Fedora and SUSE RPMs may not usually cleanly install on the the other distribution, despite using a common package format. It is similar for Debian and Ubuntu. The Linux Standard Base (LSB)[1] project of The Linux Foundation[2] has been working on such a system-wide standard for many years, walking the fine line between standardizing too little (yielding an ineffective standard) and standardizing too much (leaving little room for differentiation between distributions). The work of LSB has been internationally recognized as ISO/IEC 23360. However LSB is a trailing edge standard and Fedora usually is much ahead. In terms of packaging, LSB mandates support for a restricted version of RPM[3], without triggers and with restrictions on the content and execution-order requirements of scriptlets[4]. These restrictions ensure that LSB-compliant RPMs can be successfully processed by conversion tools such as Debian's "alien" command. However, as its name implies, the LSB defines only a base for a distribution, and many of a distribution's packages need to take advantage of a broader feature set than provided for by the LSB. This need is expressed in the more advanced features provided by the full RPM and DEB package specifications. It should be noted that a number of package systems have been developed which attempt to address cross-distribution packaging issues, including Autopackage[5], ZeroInstall[6], and Klik[7] (ZeroInstall and Klik also enabling user-level package installation) -- but these have not gain widespread support. The second advantage to a standard package format is a reduction in the duplication of labour by each distribution, especially if packaging information (such as a basic RPM .spec file) is provided by the upstream software source. However, packaging standards, security configuration (such as SELinux policy), and naming conventions vary so significantly between distributions that extensive customization of the package is usually required, greatly reducing the value of distributing standard package information. The existence of multiple GNU/Linux distributions fuels a productive competitiveness which spurs innovation[8]. As long as multiple distributions thrive, multiple package formats are likely to remain in use. Freedesktop.org provides a cross distribution forum[9] which many distributions have been using to discuss and collaborate on common issues. The Fedora Project also prefers to work closely with upstream software[10] as a matter of principle to minimize differences. 1. ↑ http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/LSB 2. ↑ http://www.linuxfoundation.org/ 3. ↑ http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-gener… 4. ↑ http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-gener… 5. ↑ http://autopackage.org/ 6. ↑ http://zero-install.sourceforge.net/ 7. ↑ http://klik.atekon.de/ 8. ↑ http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090202#feature 9. ↑ http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions 10. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream -- Oisin Feeley http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OisinFeeley

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Announcing Fedora 11 Alpha (blink)
by Jesse Keating 05 Feb '09

05 Feb '09

To blink or not to blink: that is the question; Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous users, Or to take arms against a see of power drains. And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more: and by a sleep to say we suspend. Ok enough of that. The Fedora project is proud to present the availability of Fedora 11 (Leonidas) Alpha. Now is the time to test, now is the time to improve. The Alpha release provides the first opportunity for the wider community to become involved with testing Fedora 11 by way of Rawhide: Alpha represents a sanitized snapshot of rawhide, Fedora's development branch, which undergoes rapid changes before becoming the next major release. * The Alpha should boot on the majority of systems, and provides: * A look at what new features are to be included in the next release * A way to provide feedback and bug reports to help ensure that the next release is as good as possible For information about what new and wonderful things Alpha brings us, please check out the release notes: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Alpha_release_notes What to test Test status is being tracked here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Fedora_11_Alpha_Install_Test_Results Check out this page before reporting problems, including looking through the bug trackers as linked on that page. Get the Alpha http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-prerelease (Please bear in mind that our mirrors are still picking up the permission change and you may get a few permission denied messages while this happens this morning) Join Fedora To find ways you can help and participate, visit: http://join.fedoraproject.org/ -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating

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announce February 2009