Fedora People

Warren Togami: Upgrade Tivo HD hard drive to 750GB

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:50:28 +0000

My Tivo HD recently passed the 1 year warranty, so I decided it was time to upgrade my hard drive capacity. I searched around for info of what exactly I need to do and what I need to buy. Unfortunately, a lot of the info online about Tivo hacking and upgrading are referring to the old Series 1 and Series 2 Tivo's. There is very little about Series 3 and HD Tivo's.

Weaknees.com seems to be the most prominent source of information and pre-configured upgrade kits for Tivo's. My Tivo HD came with a 160GB SATA drive. I was able to identify the model of Weaknees' 750GB SATA drive that they sell pre-configured for $250, and found it at Newegg for $99. After searching more online, it seemed that I could use the mfstools package already in Fedora to copy my old Tivo SATA drive to the new, and expand its non-standard partitioning format to fill the entire disk. I also had to purchase a Torx T10 and T15 size screwdriver to open the Tivo and unmount the hard drive.

Unfortunately, upon plugging both drives in and booting F10, I discovered that the mfstools.sourceforge.net shipping in Fedora does not support Tivo Series 3's disk format. The project stopped sometime during 2005 and seems dead upstream now. mfsinfo says "Volume header corrupt" when it tries to read the Series 3 SATA disk. Searching more found mfslive.org which forked mfstools and provides their own minimalist LiveCD ISO (only 7MB) to make it easy to use their fork of mfstools. At first I tried their tarball of mfstools source, but after a few minutes of fighting broken Makefiles I gave up building it and just tried his LiveCD. His LiveCD worked fine. I was able to copy the drive and expand to fill all capacity in the new drive. It might be good to upgrade the Fedora mfstools package to the mfslive fork.

The new drive seems to be working fine now. It seems to be a little louder than the stock 160GB drive, but that doesn't bother me.

Paul W. Frields: The best laid plans, No. 73.

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:18:32 +0000

I was going to spend some time tonight writing a big warm and fuzzy blog post about looking forward to Fedora 10 and all the good times ahead. That would have been awesome.

Instead, it’s my sad duty to report that my spiffy little Dell XPS M1330 took its own life tonight somewhere between shutting down iptables and powering off. The screen turned white for no apparent reason, to which I thought, “Hm, that’s odd, haven’t seen that before.” Then my eyesight seemed to blur a bit and I looked at my glasses to see if they were smudged, and realized they were fine — it was actually “the magic smoke” escaping from the back of the laptop.

It did manage to power off, but the powering back on? Not so much.

However, the good folks at Dell were very responsive even at half-past midnight on Friday night. They will have a new laptop here in 7-21 days, and until then I suppose I can get along with my crappy home office desktop, IMAP, and a couple well-placed shell accounts. And I feel pretty confident in saying it had nothing to do with Fedora 10, which has been increasingly spectacular since after the Beta.

Of course the Fedora Infrastructure team burst into action when they heard my sob story, and made sure I’d have something faster than the old hunk of junk desktop in my office on which to build the Fedora 10 release notes zero-day updates. Thanks guys, you rock hardest.

I guess I’ll have a little more relaxing Thanksgiving than I’d planned.

I think the worst part is that I’ve spent 9 months building up a nice, healthy covering of beautiful, colorful free software boosterism on my laptop’s lid, and I’ll have to kiss it all goodbye. Maybe the folks at Dell will get a kick out of it and give the lid a good home on one of their machines… Or maybe they’ll make a “mistake” and send the lid on a unit going to Redmond.

Michael DeHaan: Talking 'bout My Generation

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:41:22 +0000

More EKG stats.

Here is the project Kevin Bacon graph system described here, with two major alterations --I've removed jboss.org projects to make the graphs less cluttered, and I've eliminated all graph links with weights equal to 1.

The resultant graph more closely shows mutual interest levels between projects. Due to the weighting system, more closely related communities will appear closer together.

Community hubs can be seen to have higher gravitational weights inside the bubbles -- note the high score for fedora-devel, which is obviously one of our central hubs.

SVG format raw data in dot format

If we filter out the redhat.com domains, we get a somewhat different graph (and new hub score numbers) -- indicating we hop between projects in different ways.

SVG format

Michael DeHaan: These Are The People In Your Neighborhood

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:22:29 +0000

I've written about EKG a lot on Fedora Planet before. Originally EKG was designed to show what mailing lists were active, growing, and what the mix of the community participating in them was like. It turns out, this is only one small part of what we're capable of doing.

One of the statistics I've been interested in for a long time is what I'd like to call the "Amazon statistic". Users who like X also like Y. This statistic is usually gathered actively in communities like Ohloh, which results in extremely poor data samples -- it only gathers data from the obsessive compulsive types who are willing to enter in their preferences to a web site they really don't need to use. Amazon finds this data out automatically and it results in much more interesting results.

For this experiment, the question is this: do we know our communities? How closely do communities of tools like Cobbler and Func overlap? Are oVirt folks interested in FreeIPA? These are questions we usually acquire in surveys (or we guess), but we have an entire datastore of mailing list archives waiting to tell us more.

In the case of the new Kevin Bacon Module for EKG, we compute what I'll call "gravity" between projects by tracking the number of mailing addresses (not domains!) shared in common between posters of any two mailing lists -- for the entire amount of data that we have scanned. At the same time, we'll compute the specific gravity (sorry for the pun) of any given project as the sum of the gravity scores of all connecting projects.

To simplify: if 9 people post to both project A and project B, the gravity score for the link between A and B is 9, and the specific gravity of project A and B both is incremented by 9.

Using this output, we can feed this data into graphviz, one of my all time favorite software packages, to generate a map showing how closely associated various communities are (or aren't).

Graphviz (specifically "dot") uses a parameter called "weight", for which we'll use the linkage gravity score verbatim. We'll also include the specific gravity score of each node in the label for that node.

The resulting PNG file is in fact huge, and in some point, I'll see about doing some better color coding.

We can now use the results to gain a supremely accurate view of our communities -- if folks care about X, are they involved with Y? What sort of universes and ecosystems exist within the greater Fedora / Red Hat / JBoss sphere?

In the interest of full disclosure, there exist some problems in the output below.

Namely, the dataset I've run against is not complete. Max Spevack possesses a fuller scan and /that/ data would produce a more accurate graph. However, this graph /does/ contain data from the last year, and should be /quite/ accurate. It is also true that I could have scanned more lists, and the lists included in the scan are largely ones we host -- so it's a bit of an insular report -- to be complete, we should include other lists in the comparison, for instance -- the mappings between other systems management projects would be highly revealing. Also, some lists are newer than others, and there is no multiplier applied to give them higher correlations.

Without further ado, the map data:

dot format

And, more interestingly, the map itself:

svg format

However that map is a bit huge and hard to view. Shortly I will be posting a graph is an adaptation that removes some of the jboss lists from the scan, to just show Fedora and EPEL data. We obviously want to generate reports for both though, as we all know, graphviz does not scale exceptionally well. Another possible improvement is to not count links with insufficient weight, for instance, a link score of less than 3 is probably not a valid link.

(more...)

Bastien Nocera: A bit of visibility

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:48:13 +0000

fprintd (the D-Bus libfprint front-end with PolicyKit goodness) now has something visible for people to see: Documentation!

Still a bunch more TODOs on the list, but work on the front-end for enrollment should start soon.

Michael DeHaan: This Is Your Brain On Friday

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:19:59 +0000

I just found myself writing the following comment in a loop as I was trying to stop it early for debugging purposes:

lists.sort().each { |list| with_each_list(list,f,months) break # for squirrels }

I am officially cut off.

Soumya: Hacking up my Canon Powershot A620

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:48:01 +0000

Its 3.12 AM midnight here at India, at last successfully hacked up my own Powershot A620. I am now able to shoot and process raw images taken by it. Its a great experience of post processing the pictures taken by your own camera. I am loving it …!!!!

Thanks to chdk

Greg DeKoenigsberg: Dear Lazyweb...

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:34:43 +0000

A good friend of mine has asked me the question, "from a geek's perspective, what websites have awesome navigation?"

I have no answers at all. I'm hoping that you all do. Otherwise, I will lose all of my geek credit.

urlsplzkthxbai :)

Fabian Affolter: Fedora Versionshinweise aka Release notes

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:17:00 +0000

Lieber zu spät als nie...nun sind auch die Versionshinweise komplett übersetzt. Durch die anfängliche Hilfe von Daniela Kugelmann konnten alle String vor dem Release von Fedora 10 übersetzt werden. Momentan sind wir noch im Stadium der Rohfassung und ich hoffe, dass das 'zero-day update' eine überarbeitete FAssung enthalten wird.

Weil es so schön ist, dass mal die komplette Dokumentation auf 100 % ist, ein Screenshot :-)

Für Fehler, Verbesserungen, Anmerkungen und sonstiges bitte einen Bug report in Bugzilla eröffnen. Merci

Kulbir Saini: Fedora: Spicebird Beta 0.7 Final Released

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:13:34 +0000

Reporting from Spicebird blog,

Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application. The application is based on projects like Thunderbird, Lightning and Telepathy and adds more functionality and integration among its components.

This release of Spicebird adds the following functionality:

Chat with friends on services like Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and Jabber
Add iGoogle Gadgets to Spicebird
Disable the applications that are unused
Access Google calendar
Experimental support for managing blogs
Available in more than 10 languages
Basic set of add-ons
Import data from Thunderbird, Outlook and Outlook Express

For a detailed description of this release, see the release notes.

Get Spicebird!

See how to install Spicebird on Linux. I'll review the latest release very soon :)

John (J5) Palmieri: Work Smarter Not Harder

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:58:40 +0000

I was driving up to work today and thinking about productivity and how I utterly fail when having to switch contexts between say, web programming to desktop programming to filling out status reports (which I avoid for this same reason) to working on finances for the board. The problem isn’t that I can’t switch contexts fast and effectively. When there are tools around, say a fairly nice IDE, I can easily jump from hacking on Python TurboGears controllers, to ToscaWidgets to plain old HTML, CSS and JavaScript. If items are organized properly jumping from task to task, even in the middle of an ongoing task, is pretty much a non-issue.

The Promise of the Desktop

Computers in general were created to simplify our lives but the Desktop was created to simplify the lives of office workers by taking the papers on a desk metaphor and adapting it to a digital world. What we ended up with was the same (metaphoric) clutter that happens on any physical desktop, requiring us to manually reorganize our Desktop every once in awhile. In this scenario we start out very productive but then that productivity starts to decline as the clutter builds up from every day use.

Good applications however have a way of focusing us on the task at hand. To clean up in an application one can simply start from scratch. After one task is done a fresh new slate awaits the next task. Applications for the most part are fairly targeted at doing a specific task well, and if well designed presents the tools you will use for that task in a well organized fashion. Mind you there are a lot of bad applications out there and the good ones could get much better but we can agree that they are in much better shape in terms of organization and focus then the Desktop.

Traditionally Desktops are places for launchers, various bits of information and a place to stick your most used data for easy access. This is all well and good, and a tool for organizing oneself but the problem is the Desktop is global so that each task has to deal with the cruft from the last task. There is no clean slate aside from clearing all of your tasks and with the more tasks a user has to deal with, productivity starts to decelerate at an exponential rate.

If the desktop wants to be smarter it will have to think and present itself as an application which organizes a user based on tasks. Pagers take a first stab at this by allowing the user to organize open applications per workspace. Whenever I have a different task - say communications (e-mail, irc, blogging) - I open the applications up on one workspace and then switch to another workspace for say development. I still however get the same launcher and same files on the desktop, 99% of which I don’t use for this particular task.

I was pretty excited about the GNOME 3.0 mockup for workspaces in which the user had to specifically add a workspace by clicking a button. By making workspace creation explicit instead of implicit it meant people who don’t need this feature don’t get confused when all of their windows disappeared, but also that the user has a chance at discovering why multiple workspaces are convenient. The problem is the scope of the workspace changes were targeted at fixing the issue of confusion and not at making the user more organized. It is a step in the right direction but in my opinion does not go far enough.

If the Desktop was an application to organize the tasks I needed to complete, a created workspace would allow me to first name it for easy reference, un-stick itself from modifying the global Desktop state and let me customize it for the task at hand. I could then switch between tasks and have only the data I care about and the launcher for applications which would be used for the task at hand, present. The Desktop would then allow me to delete a workspace when I will no longer be performing the task it was setup for and even save the workspace so it is no longer in my rotation of tasks but still available for recall in the future when I have a similar task come up (e.g. taxes require organization to do effectively but only consume at most a month of my thought each year).

But, but, but, you can do this with fast user switching today. Well, yes and no. Completely separate sessions would archive what I am looking for if it were fast and actually worked. There is a laundry list of other features needed which fast user switching can’t provide:

Users would have to be able to be setup and removed on the fly with little fanfare (e.g. the add workspace button in the GNOME 3.0 mockups)
I still would want the ability to share a home directory and copy and paste data from one task to another
Switching to a “subuser” would need to be as easy and fast as ctrl-alt-arrowkeys are which means a spacial layout and no password dialog every time I switch

With the ability to setup a desktop focused on a task and tear it down or start from a clean slate without effecting other tasks, switching between the many hats one needs to wear in a typical day becomes much less cumbersome. It also slows down the effects of productivity sapping cruft which will always build up over time. True there is some overhead in setting up and managing each desktop but I tend to see this happen constantly. As people switch their task priorities their desktop changes with it.

We use so many external and non-integrated tools to organize ourselves already, wouldn’t it be nice if task organization was built into the desktop and applications such as a todo list could key off the current task without any extra configuration? Perhaps there is no good UI for this sessions in a session idea and it would in fact make life a lot harder for people. Think about it anyway - if a Desktop is supposed to make the user more productive by giving them tools to organize their work, why not have that built in? Why not make the Desktop and applications one big integrated application (not one big process mind you) for getting work done?

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

Aanjhan Ranganathan: FOSS.IN - Call for participation in unofficial GNUSim8085 workout

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:54:52 +0000

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls!!!

If you are still clueless as to what FOSS.IN is all about (even after reading through this sentence) then it probably isn’t for you And the news is I will be saying “Hola”, “Bonjour”, “Hi”, “Hallo”, “Nihao”, “Namaskara”, “Vanakkam”, “Namasthe” to a lot of my friends this year too. Apart from the “scheduled” talk on “Fedora Electronics Laboratory” on Friday (yes, my talks always coincide with a more glamorous session *always*), I have planned to have some workouts (unofficial ones from those listed on the site). One such planned workout is the GNUSim8085 Workout.

If you are interested in taking part, please use this doodle link to give your preferred time and I will blog about the timings sometime around Sunday evening. The venue of the workout is most probably the terrace or corridor or some place which has a free power socket .
The Current agenda of the workout is as follows:

Get the Windows Version of the package released (long time pending and also means people with “official” laptops running Windows are welcome and wanted for testing)
Fix lying around small bugs.
Brainstorm on further development and maybe get a base framework done on one of these ideas.

Looking at the current state of things it could either happen on Wednesday or Thursday. This is just not it. Some Fedora and Debian work will also be done. Details in another blog. See you then.

PS for Students: I believe this is a very apt small package to start contributing to Free software. You are the most welcome. This doesn’t mean oldies are prohibited .

Clint Savage: Mind Maps: The Fedora Project

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:14:32 +0000

Recently, I’ve been plagued with trying to come up with an organizational model for the Utah Open Source Foundation and it’s relationship to the Utah Open Source Conference. This is in addition to the new Non-Profit structure we’re building.

To that end, I created a very shabby hierarchical structure which I passed around a week ago at the Core Team after conference dinner. It went over okay, but people had a lot of questions about how the structure was organized and what not.

Organizing My Thoughts is Hard!

I didn’t know what exactly to do. As it is, I’ve never been an integral part of an organization before like this one. Nor have I ever created organizational charts that were very well done. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. But, something amazing did happen in the span between last Friday and today, that was VYM, or View Your Mind.

When a “Mind Map” was first suggested to me by my buddy Doran Barton, I thought “well, I’ll look into that later”. However, the more I kept trying to cram jobs into places they didn’t go, the more I got frustrated that there wasn’t a good application to accommodate the structure I was trying to build.

VYM is an application that helps get your thoughts out onto a structure. It lets you move it around quickly and easily and even associate pictures and notes where applicable. The problem for me was understanding how to use VYM in an environment I already knew and UTOS was not the right place!

The Fedora Project “Mind Map”

It turns out that a lot of people always wonder how the Fedora Project is structured, where the pieces go and who, what, where and how the project is put together. Because I could at least see all the pieces, I decided that would be a good place to start. While it’s not complete by any means, I present to you the Fedora Project VYM “Mind Map”. From VYM, one can create pdf, png and other output sources, so I created a pdf as well

Contribute!

I’d like to see the Fedora Community take this up and add many pieces to it as it grows and builds into something more than I could make. It’s fairly simple to add pieces as well. You can create separate maps which can be integrated into the larger map. Or, since the format is a zip file (essentially) with an xml definition file, I believe patches could work.

Cheers,

Herlo

David Nielsen: Vacation notice

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:27:41 +0000

I’ll be in Brazil from Nov. 22th till Dec. 18th, assume little if any access to mail and no ability to performing package reviews during that period. Work will resume when I get back I promise.

Adrian Reber: Kover 4

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:44:09 +0000

I finally finished porting kover to KDE4. I also changed it to use cmake. There are not really any new features, but the porting to KDE4 was in large parts a complete rewrite. Some parts of the code were still using functions which were deprecated since QT2 and so I had a chance to do a big cleanup of the code while porting it to KDE4. It is still the same application with the same user interface and I probably also ported all the bugs it has.

It can be downloaded from http://lisas.de/kover/download.php3 or using git from http://lisas.de/kover/git.

Max Spevack: moscow trip report (teaser trailer)

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:58:43 +0000

A full trip report of my 3 days in Moscow with Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen (Red Hat's Director of Central and Eastern Europe) won't be ready until sometime next week.

But here are a few pictures from Andrew Markelov, including me wearing a really nice black suede Fedora (I didn't get to keep it) and a very yummy example of Trademark Fail.

Before anyone asks: the Fedora 7 backdrop in my talk wasn't my choosing. It was already being projected onto the screen when I got there. I would have used the Fedora 10 wallpaper. :)

Kulbir Saini: Life: Long Time No Post , Quick Update

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:49:22 +0000

I have been too busy to write a post on this very blog Here are quick update.

Released a few versions of youtube_cache in last couple of weeks. Youtube Cache now supports caching videos from 10 websites. A few ISPs are using it.
IntelligentMirror also received updates.
Placements are here. And I am still f**cking with this caching thing. Too addictive.
Inclination towards higher studies as more and more companies decline campus recruitment. How tough GRE can be?
Sudden fear of losing all the friends sucks big time
Proxy war with a professor. Just kidding
No outing in last two weeks.
Mahaveer’s Compete India is doing really great

Rest laterz.

David Nalley: Running for FAmSCo

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:31:13 +0000

So I finally went and placed my name on the nominations page for FAmSCo. All of that after repeatedly and occasionally publicly saying that I wouldn’t run.
So what changed? Actually a number of things. First a number of people contacted me and voiced their opinion that I should run, which was followed up by a nomination from Joerg Simon. My concern was really time related and being able to provide enough time to dedicate to FAmSCo. Some of that has been greatly relieved by Brian Powell stepping up and becoming the Northeast Regional NA Ambassador Coordinator. Aside from Red Hat employees there are, to my knowledge, only three Ambassadors in the Southeast.
The other item that helped sway my thinking was when another Ambassador observed that I had repeatedly noted of late that the environment around the Ambassadors and particularly around FAmSCo was changing. Rather than constantly comment and discuss it, I decided that I should try to be part of that evolution.
On the upside that does bring us up to 9 nominees, which is the minimum number required for an election per the Election Rules.

Abhishek "abby87" Rane: Better Firefox in KDE4

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:20:07 +0000

Well I simply love KDE4 but one thing that really annoyed me was the way firefox looked in KDE4 and so after googling a bit I found some simple solutions to make firefox look more Kde4ish.

Step 1

Install gtk-qt-engine package.

Fedora: sudo yum install gtk-qt-engine

Direct download of the package(fedora rpm) can be found here

Ubuntu 8.04: sudo apt-get install gtk-qt-engine-kde4

Ubuntu 8.10: sudo apt-get install gtk-qt-engine

Now go to System Settings > Appearance > Click on the Gtk Styles and Fonts tab on the left side and select the following options there

Use my KDE style in Gtk applications

Use my KDE fonts Gtk applications

Then finally click on install scrollbar fix

Step 2:

Install KFirefox theme for Firefox from here

I found Kfirefox theme better than the oxygen theme for firefox coz kfirefox integrates better with firefox and looks good

Step 3:

Open With

In Kubuntu 8.10 whenever I downloaded something in Firefox and tried to open it, Firefox’s Download Manager told me that its an unknown application and to select an application to open it.

Right-Click on a downloaded file and click on ‘Open Containing Folder’ and click on Select Application and give it a path to /usr/bin/dolphin and every file will open with dolphin.

Next for other file types open Firefox > Edit > Preferences click on Applications tab and choose the appropriate file types needed to open.

This error is only observed in pure KDE distros like Kubuntu .In fedora the folders open in nautilus which can also be changed to Dolphin by the above method.

Posted in Browser, fedora, Firefox, KDE4, linux Tagged: Browser, fedora, Firefox, KDE4, kubuntu

Peter Gordon: Deluge 1.0+ for Fedora 9

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:10:08 +0000

(Also posted on the Fedora Forums.) Hi, all. [...]
Since upstream has decided to no longer support the 0.5.x series (and also by popular demand ), I've begun to build official F-9 packages for recent Deluge releases. An update is currently enqueued and should hit updates-testing on a mirror near you soon.

Please note that these updates will likely stay in the testing repositories indefinitely though, as the 1.0 series is a near-complete rewrite and thus requires recreation of many aspects of a user's configuration - and I do not wish to intentionally break existing configurations for those users who are happy and comfortable with 0.5.9.3 (the latest stable update for F-9).

That said, however, I intend to continue pushing new updates to the F9-updates-testing repositories as they come out and I as push them to F10-updates, so whenever you need to update it on Fedora 9, it should in theory be as simple as:
yum --enablerepo=updates-testing-newkey update deluge
Another benefit to this is that you can verify that it is an "official" and far more trustworthy package to install/use, through Yum's use of package-signing and whatnot.

Regards...

I've decided against this; and will shortly push the packages to my personal webspace instead.

John Poelstra: Painless Wiki Editing

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:46:38 +0000

A big thanks to Christer Edwards for posting on the fantastic Firefox plugin called It’s All Text!

I just started using it on the Fedora wiki and it is superb for large and complicated edits. Make sure you enter the full path to the text editor you add to the preferences or it won’t work.

After installing It’s All Text you’ll soon see a little blue edit box on certain web pages which, if you click on it, activates your specified text editor.

Posted in Fedora, Linux, Productivity

Ian Weller: Creative Commons Highlight: Kerri Humphries

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:40:29 +0000

It’s time to do another one of these. Today we’ll look at Kerri Humphries, who licenses her work on Flickr under a CC-BY license.

John Poelstra: Fedora 11 Feature Process Swings Into Action

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:24:13 +0000

Two weeks ago at the FESCo meeting we did our third post mortem of the feature process, made a few minor tweaks to the process, and started accepting features for Fedora 11 this week! This is our best start yet for the feature process because we have never started reviewing and accepting features for the next release (Fedora 11) before the current release (Fedora 10) ships. Streamlining the tracking process back in August with Paul Frields’ help made this easier to track.

If you are working on something new and exciting and want to make sure it brings attention to Fedora and the people working on it, please consider creating and submitting a feature page. It doesn’t take that long to do and I will be glad to personally guide you through the process if you have questions. My contact information is here.

See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList for the accepted Fedora 11 features we have so far. This is not a guarantee of which features will be in Fedora 11, but it does give a good idea of what people are working on or might want help with.

Posted in Fedora

Susmit: (I am) Running for FAmSCo Election.

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:12:05 +0000

Nominated and encouraged by Sankarshan da, I decided to run for Ambassadors steering committee Election in this December.

At first I was apprehensive whether I would be able to do justice to the job, but it seemed to be a challenge worth taking up.

So here goes my nomination and agenda.

Looks like I am the only one from India and APAC (Asia Pacific) running for it.

Jef Spaleta: All I want for Christmas...

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:48:13 +0000

Is a an e-ink based digital photo frame. All these lcd photo frames which are clogging up the store shelves really piss me off.
Not only are they little energy vampires of the worst sort.... but the fact that they are active displays and glow really is distracting when you try to put one in a living space that needs "mood" lighting.

What really concerns me is that someone will accidently gift me one of these things thinking that since I'm such a technology geek that it would be "perfect" for me because I don't already have one. These things are the absolute wrong technology for the task...we need e-ink.

I'd pay a premium for even a black and white e-ink frame that gave me that old dot matrix ascii art feel to my own digital photos just to help kick off the adoption of e-ink or any stateful ambient light display technology that attempted to address the short comings of using LCD displays for predominately static content.

-jef

Ian Weller: Street View: Always interesting

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:23:22 +0000

Today, I took a drive through the KTA toll booth without paying a toll.

Matthew Garrett: Separated at birth?

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:39:12 +0000


Christoph Hellwig	Nuclear Man from Superman IV

Jesse Keating: 272 pending Fedora 10 updates.

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:34:51 +0000

sheesh!

Jesse Keating: Another release in the can

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:19:48 +0000

I don't know why, but this one has been super stressful for me, to the point where I was physically shaking during lunch today, and I haven't been able to keep my shoulders un-hunched for a week now. Thankfully, it's all but over now. The bits are going to the mirrors, torrents are being handled by seth, and I have a liver to destroy.

I took some time yesterday while I was waiting for the second set of composes to finish to start a list of things I want to accomplish before the F11 boulder is rolling behind me. The list is depressingly long, but I think it'll be fun to work on some of that, something other than the release grind.

Now off to something far far away from computers with my wife and child. I'll hook back into the matrix at some point tomorrow.

Thierry Delmonte: Internet et les thèmes de Gmail

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:01:00 +0000

Comme chacun qui utilise le webmail Gmail, je le trouve très ergonomique et simple d'accès, mais tout le monde à le même webmail que moi, et ça c'est triste ...

Heureusement Gmail vient à notre secours en nous proposant plusieurs thèmes pour personnaliser nativement l'interface de votre webmail préféré.

L'annonce a été faite sur le blog officiel de Gmail, il y a maintenant la possibilité sans ajout de plugins divers et variés de choisir entre 30 thèmes pour personnaliser l'interface de Gmail.

Voici quelques exemples :

De quoi donner un peu de vie et une touche plus personnelle pendant la lecture de nos e-mails. Pour ma part voici le thème que j'ai choisi :

Cliquez vite sur ce lien pour vous aussi changer votre thème.

Et vous c'est lequel votre thème?

Fabian Affolter: Fisch-Logos

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:21:01 +0000

Manchmal tauchen richtig schöne Logo auf. Das Logo des Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server ist so eines.
Im Vergleich dazu hat es das Logo, resp. Maskottchen von GNU Project Debugger etwas schwer.
Zum Glück hat Fedora immer noch nur ein Lo

Kulbir Saini: Fedora: Youtube Cache plugin completely rebased ( youtube_cache version 1.5 )

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:37:17 +0000

Till now youtube cache was storing everything in squid directories. For example,

core plugin code -> /etc/squid/youtube_cache/
cached videos -> /var/spool/squid/video_cache/
logfiles -> /var/log/squid/

The cached videos in squid sub directories created serious problems with permissions and Apache was not able to access videos due to strict permissions for /var/spool/squid/ . Due to this fact, almost every user faced access denied problem from Apache and even after disabling SELinux and IPtables, problem persisted.

Also, since youtube cache is being packaged for Debian. See this bug report. I had some IM sessions with Joao Eriberto Mota Filho, who is packaging youtube cache for Debian. He told me few things about Debian packaging guidelines. According to them, you can't intrude other packages' directories like I did above.

Keeping in mind the above things, I decided to rebase the complete plugin so that it can have its own directories to do different things. So here is the new structure

core plugin code -> /usr/share/youtube_cache/
cache videos -> /var/spool/video_cache/
logfiles -> /var/log/youtube_cache/
/etc/youtube_cache.conf is a symlink to /usr/share/youtube_cache/youtube_cache.conf .
Apache config file -> /etc/httpd/conf.d/youtube_cache.conf (can't be moved).

Apart from above, spec file to generate rpm has received a lot of improvements. The previous rpms has a flaw that they didn't actually create /var/spool/video_cache/ because it was not mentioned in %files section in spec file which lead to a tons of errors.

But another problem was that all the directories and files mentioned in %files section are deleted when rpm is uninstalled. So, have to place special code in %preun and %postun to take care that cached videos are not deleted even when the rpm is uninstalled.

All the doc files included in the package and the webpages on cache videos have been updated accordingly. The plugin takes care of the migration of cached videos. So, you need not worry about possible loss of already cached videos. And in case you were using base_dir other than /var/spool/squid/video_cache/, then replacing the same in your new config file will be enough.

The new version will not be as problematic as previous version were with respect to directory permissions and other similar stuff.

And yes youtube cache works on Mac OS X out of the box. Try in case you are interested :)

Availability

Latest version of Youtube Cache is available for download in different formats for Unix/Linux based operating systems.

Installation and Configuration

For detailed instructions on installing and configuring youtube cache, check installation page and configuration page.

In case of any doubt, checkout frequently asked questions.

Note : Even if you install from rpm, you should follow the above Readme file for configuration.

Do tell me about your experience with youtube cache on forums.

Chris Tyler: Multiseat approved as an F11 feature!

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:33:00 +0000

The Multiseat proposal was approved as a feature for Fedora 11 at yesterday's FESCO meeting.

Soumya: Warming up for FOSS.IN

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:23:39 +0000

In the meanwhile for a month I was not in touch with my blog and the preliminary reason this time being my visit to the native. If you are moving home after about a year, you feel like heaven and at any circumstances don’t want to be back. But your work, job , responsibilities drive you away from your home.

Coming to the point of today’s blog —–> Time for FOSS.IN
After the 2nd day of Barcamp rocked and got to know many people out, I really loved Barcamp. Now its time for FOSS.IN and somehow I managed for leave at my Office and am really excited anticipating the fun out here at FOSS.IN this time. Expecting much things from FOSS.IN, hopefully it will meet up my expectations.

So on the way to meet a lotta people and having a lotta fun.

Remi Collet: Journée des Logiciels Libres de Reims

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:09:00 +0000

Dans le cadre des festivités de son 40 ème anniversaire, le département informatique de l'Institut Universitaire de Technologie organise les premières journées du logiciel libre à REIMS.

Ces journées auront lieu les 21 et 22 novembre à l'IUT de REIMS. .

Jose M Manimala: cRaZy!

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:42:44 +0000

Freaking out when anyone hurts you….

Never waiting to understand I erupt in my own rage…

Not knowing where I am headed but knowing… I love you and justice… is all… justice… why did they have to?

Your love and crimson, a sorrow that sweeps my very soul… Even as I mourn the blood drips from your wet clothes…
My love! My life I shall live and fight for justice and not let the freedom of your love be tarnished by my grief… I shall be strong and my hand and feet will not grow weary…

Every moment I want to commit into the arms of an angel so as to see you once more… But then again my love for you will cease and never will I be able to show to world what it means to love and be loved…

Your love powers my Lust! Blood Lust… for justice… for strength… for the meek and the humble…

For now and for ever more… I will love giving all… Never taking anything in return… Tender.. Please oh, tenderly remember me!

Never again shall my rage surge… But never will my rage stop when your love is questioned… even as you depart my dear! The Life you gave me shall flow… To struggle and live as a monument… CRAZY… A testament for you! Forever!

At my loves death bed I have sworn - “Cherish your last glimpse always I shall… A Symbol am I to what you have given me… Never will I lose it again”

Jose M Manimala

Tim Waugh: Chip and PIN

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:09:02 +0000

Part of the problem with Chip and PIN is the logo. It subliminally tells you to use one out-stretched finger to type in your PIN, in full view, as clearly as possible to any onlookers.

This seems to be the wrong message. There are plenty of things wrong with Chip and PIN, but mostly it isn’t an intentional lowering of security. (In fact it mostly seems to be about shifting liability onto the consumer). But this logo doesn’t even seem to be trying to get it right.

Now, I’m no artist, so if you are disturbed by unnatural-looking hands, look away now.

Dimitris Glezos: Fedora 10 release party στη Θεσσαλονίκη

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:32:17 +0000

(In English)

Ακολουθούμε την παράδοση των Fedora release parties. Με αφορμή το Fedora 10 που βγαίνει στον αέρα σε μερικές ημέρες, βρισκόμαστε μαζί λινουξάδες του χωριού και των περιχώρων για να γνωριστούμε, να λύσουμε απορίες, να δούμε τα νεότερα από το leading edge του Linux.

Σε καμιά βδομάδα λοιπόν ο Χρήστος Μπαχαράκης (ο ήρωας πίσω από το σούπερ-επιτυχές Serres installfest) οργανώνει το Fedora 10 release party στη Θεσσαλονίκη. Θα έχουμε παρουσίαση των πλούσιων τεχνικών χαρακτηριστικών που μαγείρεψαν οι Fedora developers — τα οποία σε μερικούς μήνες θα κυλίσουν στις άλλες διανομές… <evil grin>. Μερικά από αυτά είναι blazingly fast startup (Plymouth), Glitch-free audio, Improved webcam support, Printing simplified, RPM 4.6, Ad-hoc network sharing, First Aid Kit Automated Recovery, VirtStorage, Sectool, GNOME 2.24, Netbeans, Openoffice 3.0, και αρκετά άλλα.

Α ναι, θα έχουμε και αρκετά αυτοκόλλητα που μας περίσσεψαν από το Athens Digital Week. =)

Fabian Affolter: Vergleich der Webseiten-Downtime

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:20:52 +0000

Da stehen die Opensource-Projekte im Vergleich zu den Multimillionen-Unternehmen gar nicht so schlecht dar. Der Artikel bei Royal Pingdom zeigt die "ganze" Wahrheit.

Die Parallelen zwischen Red Hat und Fedora sind nicht von der Hand zu weisen.

Nicu Buculei: Fedora Weekly Webcomic: On The Tubes

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:03:31 +0000

The final preparations are in place, everybody is gearing for the release, so the webcomic can't stay behind. Now back to filling those tubes...

Paul Nasrat: puppetdoc goodness

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:46:39 +0000

More puppet goodenss from masterzen in the form of improved puppetdoc allowing inline manifest documentation:

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetManifestDocumentation

Sample output here:

http://www.masterzen.fr/puppet/rdoc/index.html

Kushal Das: Foss.in promo video and kde-in posters

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:59:33 +0000

foss.in team made a cool promo video, you can watch it here.

Just like the last year, kde-india team came up with some awesome posters again, thanks to Kamaleshware Morjal for these nice works.

You can see them all here.

James Morris: FOSS.IN/2008 next week!

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:49:15 +0000

I'm preparing to travel to Bangalore for FOSS.IN, which is happening next week from the 25th to the 29th of November.

It's looking very much like the deeply developer-focused event the organizers were hoping for. On the schedule is a mix of technical talks and workout sessions. I'll be involved in the Kernel Quality Improvement Workout headed up by Christoph Hellwig, as well as giving a talk on Fedora Kiosk Mode. This will be expanded a little on the talk I gave at FOSS.MY due to extra time available.

I was going to talk about sVirt at the planned Fudcon, but the Fudcon was unfortunately cancelled. Fedora folk will still be there, though, and if anyone wants to talk about sVirt and get involved in some really cool and innovative hacking, catch up with me.

The main hall has been set aside for an entire day to host a Linux Kernel Hacker Gathering (LKHG), with sessions on Filesystems, Tracing, Power Management and Porting. It seems that this will be something like an open mini kernel summit, with participants to include Suparna Bhattacharya, Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli, Christoph Hellwig, Aneesh Kumar K V, Balbir Singh, Srikanth Srinivasan, Harald Welte, Srivatsa Vaddagiri, Amit Shah, myself, and Dipankar Sarma.

The final slot will be open for lightning talks from the audience, with the kernel hacker panel providing feedback, followed by an open Q&A session. This is somewhat based on the format of the LF symposium BoF day, and will be a great opportunity for people working on kernel projects to bounce their ideas off upstream kernel hackers. This includes people working on drivers and various kernel projects which are not currently upstream (i.e. work projects), who would like to get some advice on how to get their project upstreamed and how to work more effectively with the community.

A CfP will go out for the lightning talks soon, so if you want to participate, keep an eye out for that.

The organizers have made a video to promote and explain the conference:

And yes, you can hack on the roof of the building, or even hold talks: there's an outdoor auditorium up there.

Currently, there's over 900 delegates registered, which is a lot for a developer conference. (Linux Plumbers had 300, IIRC).

I think this promotional banner sums up my experience so far:

Not your typical Linux conference, by any means.

Adrian Reber: MirrorManager In RPM Fusion

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:17:15 +0000

RPM Fusion now also has a MirrorManager instance running. I have written some minimal documentation about RPM Fusion’s MirrorManager setup but it is pretty much the same as already documented for Fedora. It took me a few days to understand how all the different parts of the MirrorManager are working together, but I think I have now a pretty good overview how it all works. Matt has really written a nice piece of software and he accepted all my patches. My patches were mostly getting rid of hardcoded Fedora URLs and putting Fedora specific stuff in configuration files.

The public mirror list can be accessed here: http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mm/publiclist/

The mirrorlist which is generated for yum can be accessed here: http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mirrorlist?…

To provide at least some kind of “high” availability mirrors.rpmfusion.org consists of two hosts. One is run by me and the other is provided by Oliver.

The MirrorManager database web interface is running at https://lisas.de/mm/. The reason for not running it under the rpmfusion.org domain was that I have signed SSL certificate for lisas.de and because it transmits a user name and password I wanted it to run over an encrypted connection. But as only mirror admins have to use that interface it should cause not too much confusion for the users of RPM Fusion.

I am using the information from the mirrorlist accesses to generate some statistics about the countries where RPM Fusion is used as well as statistics about the usage of the repositories and architectures: http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/statistics/

Dimitris Glezos: ftp.cc.uoc awesomeness

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:49:59 +0000

Γουάου! Μόλις πρόσεξα ότι τα παιδιά πίσω από το φανταστικό ftp.cc.uoc έκαναν ήδη mirror το νέο RPM Fusion και καταχώρησαν το mirror τους στον RPM Fusion mirror manager. Thumbs-up!

Sankarshan: Singularity

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:49:23 +0000

The Law of Singularity states that the most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness. What is a brand? A singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of the prospect. It’s as simple or as difficult as that.

The wonderful folks at FOSS.IN have a promotional video out. And, as Shreyas puts it - this year it is about doing ‘big’ things. This year, and, possibly for the coming years, it is about developers and development and doing things that are used by an ever growing section of folks.

If you still haven’t registered for the event, you haven’t really taken a look at the schedule.

Daniel Berrange: libvirt User Mode Linux driver and other new features

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:39:51 +0000

It has been a while since I reported on libvirt development news, but that doesn't mean we've been idle. The big news is the introduction of another new hypervisor driver in libvirt, this time for User Mode Linux. While Xen / KVM get all the press these days, UML has been quietly providing virtualization for Linux users for many years - until very recently nearly all Linux virtual server providers were deploying User Mode Linux guests. libvirt aims to be the universal management API for all virtualization technologies, and UML has no formal API of its own, so it is only natural that we provide a UML driver in libvirt. It is still at a fairly basic level of functionality, only supporting disks & paravirt consoles, but it is enough to get a guest booted & interact locally. The next step is adding networking support at which point it'll be genuinely useful. To recap, libvirt now has drivers for Xen, QEMU, KVM, OpenVZ, LXC (LinuX native Containers) and UML, as well as a test driver & RPC support.

In other news, a couple of developers at VirtualIron have recently contributed some major new features to libvirt. The first set of APIs provides the ability to register for lifecycle events against domains, allowing an application to be notified whenever a domain stops, starts, migrates, etc, rather than having to continually poll for status changes. This is implemented for KVM and Xen so far. The second huge set of APIs provide a way to query a host for details of all the hardware devices it has. This is a key building block to allow remote management tools to assign PCI/USB devices directly to guest VMs, and to more intelligently configure networking and storage. Think of it as a remotely accessible version of HAL. In fact, we use HAL as one of the backend implementations for the API, or as an alternative, the new DeviceKit service.

Paul Nasrat: puppetdoc goodness

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:21:05 +0000

More puppet goodenss from masterzen in the form of improved puppetdoc:

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetManifestDocumentation

Marek Mahut: Linux distros’ homepage uptime

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:44:35 +0000

Interesting report from pingdom about uptime of Linux ditros’ homepage (but also Apple and Microsoft). I’m more than happy to see Fedora and Red Hat taking leading positions in this benchmark.

Steven Moix: NetBeans IDE 6.5

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:21:00 +0000

The final version of NetBeans 6.5 is out, you can grab it on http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html

It can be installed in your home directory on F9/10 without problems, it doesn’t taint your system in any way. You may wonder why I don’t use NetBeans 6.1 packaged in Fedora 10? I simply need the EE version with the GlassFish server.