FWN/Issue213

Fedora Weekly News Issue 213

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 213 for the week ending February 14, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

We begin this issue with a few announcements, including dnssec-conf updates in Fedora 11 and 12, release of Fedora 12 re-spins, and a number of Fedora development announcements. In news from the Fedora Planet, coverage of Day 7 of the Inkscape class @ Boston, RHEL 5.5 beta availability, and Nokia N900 (Maemo 5) SDK on Fedora. In Ambassador news, reports from FOSDEM, and looking towards SCALE 8X and another Fedora Activity Day! In Quality Assurance news, coverage of the weekly QA meetings, Fedora 13 Alpha test compose, and recent developments in automated live image testing. In Translation news, upcoming Fedora 13 tasks, translators invited to FreeIPA details, and new members and sponsors for the team for Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian. In news from the Art/Design team, enthusiasm for an upcoming single-window GIMP, updates on theming for Fedora 13, and a 'cheat cube' for Fedora. This week's issue rounds out with security advisories over the past week for Fedora 11 and 12. Enjoy FWN 213!

We're also pleased to note the availability of Fedora Audio Weekly News (FAWN), an audio version in Ogg Vorbis format for a few past FWN issues that one of our contributors has begun. Find it on the Internet Archive and have a listen!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, including general announcements, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Fedora Announcements

Notice: dnssec-conf updates in Fedora 11 and 12

Paul W. Frields, Fedora Project Leader, announced that the Fedora Project recently had been issued an update to the dnssec-conf package, to fix an issue that had been caused Fedora 11 and 12 systems using BIND (named) to put an inordinately heavy load on RIPE nameservers. He also mentioned, "However, this update has been found to break some BIND configurations as seen in this bug:

The problem occurs in these packages:

dnssec-conf-1.21-3.fc11
dnssec-conf-1.21-7.fc12

To determine if your system is affected, run the following command:

rpm -q dnssec-conf

If one of the above package descriptors does not appear, your system is not affected and you may safely ignore this message. If you are affected, please continue reading.

Workaround

If you have already accepted this update, you can downgrade the package and start the failed BIND (named) daemon again using these commands:

su -c 'yum downgrade dnssec-conf'
su -c 'service named start'

Solution

System owners running BIND name servers on Fedora 11 or 12 systems are advised not to accept the specific dnssec-conf pacakge updates listed above. There are several ways to avoid these specific updates.

• If you use the PackageKit graphical client, or another graphical client, deselect the dnssec-conf update in the dialog that lists package updates.
• If you use the yum command-line client, use this command to exclude dnssec-conf from the list of packages to be updated:

su -c 'yum --exclude=dnssec-conf update'

Remediation

A new update is being prepared to address this problem for Fedora 11 and 12 users, and will be pushed to our mirrors as soon as possible. Users who are not running BIND nameservers (named) on their Fedora 11 and 12 can safely disregard this notice. When the new updates are pushed, a follow-up announcement will be made here. At that time, affected system owners can safely accept the replacement updates."

Notice: dnssec-conf updates in Fedora 11 and 12

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 16:13:52 UTC 2010, Fedora Project Leader Paul W. Frields briefed, "Packages are now available in the updates-testing repository, and most mirrors should include them at this point. Community testing for these packages would be appreciated. To install them:

su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update dnssec-conf'

To report findings:

• Fedora 11:
• Fedora 12: "

Fedora 12 re-spins Released

Ben Williams announced that the Fedora Unity Project was proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins of Fedora 12. He also mentioned, " These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 12 installation media and include all updates released as of February 2nd, 2010. The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64, architectures via Jigdo or Torrent starting Wednesday February 10th, 2010 (saving about 437MB of updates for a default install).

Go to to get the bits!

We are glad to be able to announce the current Fedora 12 Re-Spin, 20100202, despite problems in this Re-Spin. Nonetheless, we, Fedora Unity, have decided to release this Re-Spin with the following side-note:

Due to a newly discovered bug the re-spins do not include all the SCSI drivers (BUSLOGIC as an example which is used by VMware)

We would like to give a special thanks to the following for testing this Re-Spin:

• vwbusguy- Scott Williams
• Southern_Gentleman Ben Williams
• kanarip Jeroen van Meeuwen
• fenrus2 Dennis Johnson
• BobLfoot Bob Lightfoot
• adm1 Davis Leggett

Fedora Unity Re-Spin 20100202 Changelog ( )

Testing Results A full test matrix can be found at our Test Matrix ()

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.

This is a community project, for and by the community. You can contribute to the community by joining our test process.

Go to 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 "

New paths for development

Jesse Keating announced,"As part of the No Frozen Rawhide initiative, a couple new paths are showing up on our public mirrors. Previously rawhide was published to pub/fedora/linux/development/<arch>. In the very near future that path will change to pub/fedora/linux/development/rawhide/<arch>. At the same time, a new path will appear, pub/fedora/linux/development/13/<arch>. This path will be where the Fedora 13 stabilization happens as we work toward releasing Fedora 13. Rawhide will move on and start seeing changes more appropriate for Fedora 14 and beyond.

This change will happen at the Alpha freeze point, which is this coming Tuesday. In the mean time, these new paths are visible on our master mirror but they are just hardlinks back to the existing content in pub/fedora/linux/development/<arch> These hardlinks are there to help mirrors prepare for the new paths.

Look forward to more announcements regarding No Frozen Rawhide as the freeze date nears!"

Fedora Development News

qt-4.6/kde-4.4 updates

Rex Dieter announced, "the kde-sig is beginning work to prepare qt-4.6/kde-4.4 updates, which will be landing in f11 and f12 koji buildroots shortly.

Maintainers of qt/kde packages, please be aware of this if doing builds yourself. If you have any concerns or questions, please drop by #fedora-kde on freenode/irc (or followup to this on -devel list)."

No Frozen Rawhide coming soon! New paths on mirrors!

Jesse Keating announced,"With a burst of testing last week, we confirmed that our infrastructure should handle No Frozen Rawhide. Feature freeze is tomorrow, which is when we'd branch our source control, and when we'd enact no frozen rawhide. The timing is a bit tight, so we may have to delay a day or two in order to get this done, but the end result would be two nightly trees being published.

/pub/fedora/linux/development/rawhide/ will become the new path of Rawhide. It will continue to not have install images, and it will be the place where builds from the devel branch in CVS go to. It'll be Fedora 14 intended content.

/pub/fedora/linux/development/13/ will become the new path of the branched Fedora 13 content. This is where builds from the F-13/ branch in CVS will go, after they pass through bodhi as "stable".

/pub/fedora/linux/updates/testing/13/ will be where potential Fedora 13 builds go after passing through bodhi as "testing". This is where you'll find the latest stuff proposed for freeze break and where testing and peer review of these freeze breaks will happen. When a maintainer feels enough testing has happened, or enough karma triggers the bodhi auto request, the build will be marked "stable" and show up in the development/13 tree at the next nightly compose.

Even though we've been talking about No Frozen Rawhide for quite a while, this will indeed surprise some people, so we will be trying to be extra verbose in what we are doing over the next few days, and always available for questions. Unfortunately I have to step out for a few hours and thus any responses to this email will not be seen by me for a few hours.

You can find us at #fedora-devel on Freenode if you wish to discuss live, or help us with documenting these changes and setting expectations with our developers and users."

He would be updating with current progress and plans.

LD Changes To Implicit DSO Linking Update

Charley Wang announced, "This is an update to let maintainers know that the changes to LD outlined here : have been pushed to Fedora rawhide.

The details behind what this feature will do, along with how to get failing packages to build can be found here :

Also, packages that have failed to build under these new changes can be found here :

Roland Grunberg and I will rebuild these packages continually and update the DSOLinkBugs when we can and/or suggest patches.

We will also be available as much as possible via e-mail and on IRC freenode at #fedora-DSO to help you make the necessary changes." He also thanked everyone for their time.

Fedora 13 Alpha Freeze in one week (minus one day)!

Jesse Keating announced on Thu Feb at 11 00:23:55 UTC 2010 that the Fedora 13 Alpha freeze is this coming Tuesday.

Jessy also briefed, "This time around things are going to be different and interesting. We're in the middle of deploying No Frozen Rawhide which will change how freeze breaks are requested. The intention is to use bodhi to submit update requests for Fedora 13. When requested for testing, these will be published to the fedora 13 updates-testing repo where peers can review and provide karma on your request. If marked stable, they will go into pub/fedora/linux/development/13 and be included in the Alpha. We're still working on the documentation for all of this.

More announcements to come!"

Fedora 13 Milestone Reached: Feature Freeze-2010-02-09

John Poelstra announced , "A friendly reminder that yesterday, February 9, 2010, we reached Feature Freeze for Fedora 13."

A summary of the Fedora 13 milestones and exception process is here:

As previously noted, at Feature Freeze it is expected that all features are *significantly* "feature complete" and ready for testing:.

A review of the status section on the following feature pages shows that the following feature pages have had a recent update OR the feature does not appear to be "feature complete" based on the information provided.

Feature owners, please update your feature page as soon as possible so that we have the most current information possible going into our first test release. Feature pages which remain updated or feature incomplete by 2010-02-16 will be sent to FESCo for review.

p.s. All feature owners have been bcc'd on this email."

Fedora Events

Fedora events are the source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Upcoming Events (December 2009 to February 2010)

• North America (NA)
• Central & South America (LATAM)
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
• India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)

Related Events

RHCE Loopback in Washington, DC

On Thursday, February 25, 2010, Red Hat will hold a free, informal conference for RHCEs, offering information sharing on a variety of topics at Busboys and Poets on 14th Street. Complimentary dinner will be served, and more details are available.

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events

Additional information

• Reimbursements -- reimbursement guidelines.
• Budget -- budget for the current quarter (as distributed by FAMSCo).
• Sponsorship -- how decisions are made to subsidize travel by community members.
• Organization -- event organization, budget information, and regional responsibility.
• Event reports -- guidelines and suggestions.
• LinuxEvents -- a collection of calendars of Linux events.

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide. This edition covers highlights from the past three weeks.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

Dave Malcolm extended GDB to handle debugging of Python internals by using the embedded Python interpreter to pretty-print python innards.

Máirín Duffy continued with Day 7 of an Inkscape class at a Boston-area middle school.

Richard W.M. Jones shared a tip for using mock to build Rawhide packages under RHEL 5 if they work fine locally but mysteriously fail when built by Koji.

Red Hat has announced a beta for RHEL 5.5. Enhancements include new hardware support, improved virtualization and better Windows interoperability.

Daniel Berrange showed how to control "guest CPU & NUMA affinity in libvirt with QEMU, KVM & Xen". In a later post, Daniel explained how to manage some low-level hardware configuration in libvirt.

Steven Moix installed, the Nokia N900 (Maemo 5) SDK on Fedora, though there were a few minor hiccups.

A common task when writing DocBook is turning a comma-separated list into an <itemizedlist>. Joshua Wulf wrote a set of macros for both TextMate and gedit to automate the task.

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

FOSDEM a success for Fedora

Luca Foppiano reports from FOSDEM, held Feb. 6-7 in Brussels, Belgium. "What it will remains impress in my mind, from this FOSDEM, it will be the friendly spirit and the coperation we had." Luca writes. "It was impressing how we managed the booth and the organization, in particular was terrific the cooperations cross-distribution we have with other guys from Debian, Centos . . . I believe the decision of the FOSDEM organization to mix the distributions rooms was a good choice . . . It was worthy for my coming to this event, I went home with a lot of new ideas and motivations."

Luca's report can be found here: http://blog.foppiano.org/2010/02/14/fosdem-2010/

Photos from FOSDEM can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lfoppiano/sets/72157623426101136/

SCALE starts this week in Los Angeles

The Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 8x starts Friday, Feb. 19 at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel and runs through Sunday, Feb. 21.

Karsten Wade will be giving the Saturday keynote, and Fedora will be hosting a Fedora Activity Day on Friday. Over the weekend, Fedora will host a booth on the event floor.

Watch next week for a report on the event.

Fedora 12 is here

With Fedora 12 Constantine now here, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events -- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

There was no Test Day last week. Next week's Test Day will be on color management. This significant new feature for Fedora 13 makes it easy to set up color profiles for monitors, scanners and printers, meaning you can rely on seeing the true colors of images from production all the way through to final printing. This is particularly significant for photographers and designers, but a correct color profile can improve anyone's desktop experience, so please come along to make sure the new color management tools get tested on a wide range of hardware. We would particularly appreciate testing from anyone with access to a colorimeter. The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2010-02-18 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2010-02-08. The full logs are available. James Laska and Kevin Fenzi arranged to update the list of RSS feeds tracked by the QA IRC bot, zodbot.

James Laska reported that Will Woods and Kamil Paral had arranged a meeting the next day to discuss plans for the AutoQA results database. James also mentioned he had not had time to discuss updating the QA calendar with John Poelstra.

James Laska, Jesse Keating and Adam Williamson discussed the planned Wiki page for 'last known good' Rawhide builds. Jesse clarified the process from the release engineering side, and James planned to document everything in a trac ticket to track the creation of the Wiki page.

James Laska noted that the third automated Rawhide acceptance test point had passed the previous week, and had been marked as a failure due to a bug resulting in high memory requirements for installation.

Will Woods was not around to provide an AutoQA project update, but had provided a blog post with some information. Kamil Paral reported that he had not made any progress on rpmguard this week. James Laska passed on a report on installation automation from Liam Li, who had been discussing the best approach for booting with custom kernel parameters with the virtualization team. On gwt packaging, James reported that he had had feedback from upstream developers about the bundled JARs. He was aiming to have one package in progress during the week.

Adam Williamson briefly outlined upcoming events, noting the first Alpha test compose was due in the coming week, with installation and desktop validation testing planned. The second Alpha blocker bug meeting was also on the calendar.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2010-02-09. The full log is available. Adam Williamson reported that he had sent a draft stock response text for bugs filed against orphaned packages to the mailing list for review. The group agreed that the draft looked good.

Chris Campbell reported that he was looking into implementing multi-row button capability for the triage Jetpack script, as having a button for each stock response would result in more buttons than it is currently capable of handling. He said he would give another update next week.

Adam Williamson highlighted the upcoming second blocker bug review meeting for Fedora 13 Alpha, and asked group members to elevate any bugs they thought might constitute Alpha blockers. Chris Campbell said he wasn't aware of any really serious nouveau bugs at present. Adam said he would check on intel and radeon bugs.

Edward Kirk reported that he had not yet been able to send out the email to discuss rearranging the weekly meeting time.

Edward Kirk reported for Juan P. Daza on his update of the active triager list. He had emailed all known triagers and found 23 did not respond (while 56 did). None of those 23 were listed on the active triagers page, so no adjustment would be necessary.

Edward Kirk noted that he was still working on updating the housekeeping procedures for closing blocker tracking bugs for Fedora releases that have already gone out. He expected it would only need some Wiki page updates, and will report next week.

During the open floor period, it became clear that almost all components on the components list were listed as not requiring help. The group thought this was probably not desired, so Adam Williamson and Edward Kirk promised to look into it.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2010-02-15 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting. The next Bugzappers weekly meeting will be held on 2010-02-16 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 13 Alpha test compose

Rui He outlined the upcoming Fedora 13 Alpha test compose validation testing schedule, with the release due 2010-02-11 and desktop and installation validation testing due to run through 2010-02-17. She linked to the installation and desktop results matrices, and asked group members to contribute results if they could.

Automated live image testing

Jon Jaroker kindly explained some work he has been doing on implemented ongoing automated testing of the Fedora live desktop image. His goal is to have an automated testing system which tests both the boot process and some basic desktop functionality using automated scripts, and flags up regressions. Adam Williamson thanked Jon for his work and suggested he co-ordinate with Adam Miller on live image automation, and consider integrating his work into the AutoQA framework.

Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project.

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Upcoming Fedora 13 Tasks

The software string freeze for Fedora 13 is scheduled for 16th February 2010. Subsequently, the final software translation period starts from 16ht February 2010 and would end on 23rd March 2010.

Outage on translate.fedoraproject.org

translate.fedoraproject.org underwent an outage of about 15 hours last week, due to a problem with an update that was run on the servers. The problem was fixed with the help of the Fedora Infrastructure team.

Translators Invited for FreeIPA

On behalf of the FreeIPA team, John Dennis has invited translators to contribute to the FreeIPA project localization. The project is currently hosted on transifex.net and the team is preparing for an alpha release of version 2. At present there are 120 strings, but the string count is expected to go up in the near future.

Sponsorship Queue Cleared

Noriko Mizumoto cleared the membership queue for the 'cvsl10n' group, by removing the unapproved requests which did not have a corresponding 'Self Introduction' mail as required by the FLP.

New Members/Sponsors in FLP

Hajime Taira returned to the Japanese Translation team and Ben Seo joined the Korean Translation team. Teguh DC has been upgraded to a 'Sponsor' role for the Indonesian Translation team.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Single-Window Mode GIMP

Valent Turkovic forwarded to the Design and Desktop list a preview "Can't wait to get my hands on single-windows GIMP!" and a lot of contributors, like Máirín Duffy, showed their interest in this feature "I want that so bad!" A lot of persuasion from Valent, started to work for the package maintainer, Nils Philippsen: "I'm thinking about it, but prefer to wait for a 'real' 2.7.1 release if it won't take too long."

Theming Progress

With only a few days before the deadline, the design concepts for Fedora 13 continued with a number of submissions from Máirín Duffy, Mola Pahnadayan, Hristo Petkov and Kanza Aman. Also, Stephen J Smoogen delighted everyone with a beautiful NASA photo

Fedora Cheat Cube

Juan Rodriguez created a 'cheat cube' for Fedora "No longer does using the terminal have to involve memorizing obscure commands, you can always have a fun cube around to remember the important things, like yum commands and navigating with the terminal" which was instantly liked so Kris Thomsen announced a Danish translation and Konstantinos Antonakoglou a Greek one

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

• gnash-0.8.6-13.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035080.html
• gnome-screensaver-2.28.2-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034904.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

• gnash-0.8.6-13.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035093.html
• kernel-2.6.30.10-105.2.23.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035070.html
• bugzilla-3.2.6-2.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034977.html