FWN/Issue217

Fedora Weekly News Issue 217

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 217 for the week ending March 14, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In announcements, lots of exciting news related to Fedora 13, including details on last week's Alpha launch, slogan release, as well as freeze on the F13 release notes. In news from the Fedora Planet, thoughts on Fedora Spins, how to create a rocket using Inkscape, an excellent essay on "Open Source Philosophy" including a brief history of the movement, and much more. In the News summarizes an interview with Fedora Project leader Paul W. Frields on Fedora 12 and beyond. In Quality Assurance news, details from last week's Test Day on webcams, great coverage in the QA team weekly meetings and other activities, Fedora 13 Alpha and Beta updates, and details on a proposed draft of a package update policy. Translation reports details on last week's Transifex 0.74 upgrade, availability of a Fedora 13 image with the latest translations, and many new members of the Fedora Localization Project team. In Art/Design Team news, coverage of recent discussion on Fedora 13 beta artwork, and the design suite as a Fedora talking point. This issue wraps up with pointers to last week's security advisories for Fedora 11, 12 and 13. Enjoy!

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: Pascal Calarco

Fedora Announcement News

There were no announcements on the announce@lists.fedoraproject.org last week.

Fedora Development News

Google Summer of Code proposal: Better iptables management

Zubin Mithra invited comments on a Google Summer of Code proposal to improve iptables in Fedora:

"My name is Zubin Mithra and I am aspiring to get into GSoC on behalf of Fedora. I wish to work on making a library for better iptables management. Details can be viewed in the proposal which I have attached along with the email.

I would love to hear your views on it."

A PDF of the proposal is available.

Note: comps moved to Fedora Hosted git

Bill Nottingham announced

"As discussed both on-list, and at this week's FESCo meeting the 'comps' module used for mapping packages to package groups in Fedora has moved from CVS to Fedora Hosted git.

You may view the module at: http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=comps.git and check it out at any of: http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/comps.git (r/o) git://git.fedorahosted.org/comps.git (r/o) ssh://git.fedorahosted.org/git/comps.git (r/w, for packagers)

Access control and policies remain the same. The old comps module in CVS will remain in a read-only state while users of it upgrade their scripts.

If you have any issues with the new location, please file a ticket in release-engineering trac

Thanks, Bill Nottingham"

Release Notes Wiki Freeze

John J. McDonough reminded the community that:

"Next week is the wiki freeze for Fedora 13 Release Notes.

If you have something important that needs to be in the release notes, update the appropriate wiki beat.

Go above and select the appropriate beat. Then add a note to that beat.

Your update need not be polished prose; if you can summarize the key points that need to be documented and perhaps include a link to more details, the Docs Project can take it from there.

As in Fedora 12, we are not looking to document every little change. The release notes will highlight significant changes, and include a link to the upstream page for all changes. If your component is hosted by Fedora, please consider enhancing the information pointed to by the yum link, which is what will appear in the release notes.

Thanks for your help --McD"

Announcing the release of Fedora 13 Alpha!

Jesse Keating announced the availability of Fedora 13 Alpha:

"The Fedora 13 "Goddard" Alpha release is available! What's next for the free operating system that shows off the best new technology of tomorrow? You can see the future now

What is the Alpha release?

The Alpha release contains all the features of Fedora 13 in a form that anyone can help test. This testing, guided by the Fedora QA team, helps us target and identify bugs. When these bugs are fixed, we make a Beta release available. A Beta release is code-complete, and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. The final release of Fedora 13 is due in May.

We need your help to make Fedora 13 the best release yet, so please take a moment of your time to download and try out the Alpha and make sure the things that are important to you are working. If you find a bug, please report it -- every bug you uncover is a chance to improve the experience for millions of Fedora users worldwide. Together, we can make Fedora a rock-solid distribution. (Read down to the end of the announcement for more information on how to help.)

Features

Among the top features for end users, we have:

• Automatic print driver installation. We're using RPM and PackageKit for automatic installation of printer drivers, so when you plug in a USB printer, Fedora will automatically offer to install drivers for it if needed.
• Automatic installation of language packs. Yum language packs plugin support makes software installation smarter and easier for everyone worldwide, by automatically downloading language support for large suites of Fedora software when the user's environment requires it.
• Redesigned user management interface. The user account tool has been completely redesigned, and the accountsdialog and accountsservice test packages are available to make it easy to configure personal information, make a personal profile picture or icon, generate a strong passphrase, and set up login options for your Fedora system.
• Color management. Color Management allows you to better set and control your colors for displays, printers, and scanners, through the gnome-color-manager package.
• NetworkManager improvements include CLI. NetworkManager is now a one stop shop for all of your networking needs in Fedora, be it dial-up, broadband, wifi, or even Bluetooth. And now it can all be done in the command line, if you're into that sort of thing.
• Experimental 3D extended to free Nouveau driver for NVidia cards. In this release we are one step closer to having 3D supported on completely free and open source software (FOSS) drivers. In Fedora 12 we got a lot of ATI chips working, and this time we've added a wide range of NVidia cards. You can install the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package to try out the work in progress.

For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:

• SystemTap static probes. SystemTap now has expanded capabilities to monitor higher-level language runtimes like Java, Python and Tcl, and also user space applications starting with PostgreSQL. In the future Fedora will add support for even more user space applications, greatly increasing the scope and power of monitoring for application developers.
• Easier Python debugging. We've added new support that allows developers working with mixed libraries (Python and C/C++) in Fedora to get more complete information when debugging with gdb, making Fedora an exceptional platform for powerful, rapid application development.
• Parallel-installable Python 3 stack. The parallel-installable Python 3 stack will will help programmers write and test code for use in both Python 2.6 and Python 3 environments, so you can future-proof your applications now using Fedora.
• NetBeans 6.8 first IDE to support entire Java 6 EE spec. NetBeans IDE 6.8 is the first IDE to offer complete support for the entire Java EE 6 specification.

And don't think we forgot the system administrators:

• boot.fedoraproject.org. (BFO) allows users to download a single, tiny image (could fit on a floppy) and install current and future versions of Fedora without having to download additional images.
• System Security Services Daemon (SSSD). SSSD provides expanded features for logging into managed domains, including caching for offline authentication. This means that, for example, users on laptops can still login when disconnected from the company's managed network. The authentication configuration tool in Fedora has already been updated to support SSSD, and work is underway to make it even more attractive and functional.
• Pioneering NFS features. Fedora offers the latest version 4 of the NFS protocol for better performance, and in conjunction with recent kernel modifications includes IPv6 support for NFS as well.
• Zarafa Groupware. Zarafa now makes available a complete Open Source groupware suite that can be used as a drop-in Exchange replacement for Web-based mail, calendaring, collaboration and tasks. Features include IMAP/POP and iCal/CalDAV capabilities, native mobile phone support, the ability to integrate with existing Linux mail servers, a full set of programming interfaces, and a comfortable look and feel using modern Ajax technologies.
• Btrfs snapshots integration. Btrfs is capable of creating lightweight filesystem snapshots that can be mounted (and booted into) selectively. The created snapshots are copy-on-write snapshots, so there is no file duplication overhead involved for files that do not change between snapshots. It allows developers to feel comfortable experimenting with new software without fear of an unusable install, since automated snapshots allow them to easily revert to the previous day's filesystem.

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list and details of each new cited feature is available

We have nightly composes of alternate spins available

Contributing

For more information including common and known bugs, tips on how to report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the release notes

Thank you, and we hope to see you in the Fedora project!

-- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating

F13 Release Slogan - Rock it.

Robyn Bergeron announced the slogan for Fedora 13:

"For the 13th Release of Fedora, "Goddard," the Fedora Marketing team ran an open, community based process of slogan submissions,. That processincluded guidelines for producing great slogans, and as a result ofour call, we received a large number of slogan contributions

After an exciting and enjoyable Marketing Team meeting, the release slogan for Fedora 13 "Goddard" has been chosen and approved: "Rock it!"

We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated in this process.

Cheers!

-Robyn

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 (March 2010 to May 2010)

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

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

Justin O'Brien was one of many to announce that the Fedora 13 Alpha has been released. "We need your help to make Fedora 13 the best release yet, so please take a moment of your time to download and try out the Alpha and make sure the things that are important to you are working. If you find a bug, please report it – every bug you uncover is a chance to improve the experience for millions of Fedora users worldwide. Together, we can make Fedora a rock-solid distribution."

Richard W.M. Jones shared a tip: How to "use SystemTap to monitor SELinux changes to files". The problem: "Something unknown was changing the labels on certain devices behind my back. We couldn’t find out what it was using ordinary diagnostics, so I decided to investigate if we could do this with SystemTap."

Aamir Aijaz Bhutto wrote an excellent essay on "Open Source Philosophy" including a brief history of the movement.

Dave Malcolm mused on the topic of "What variability exists within proposed updates to the Fedora package collection?"

Joshua Wulf posted a giant comic-like diagram explaining what Publican is.

Nicu Buceli explained how to create a rocket ship using Inkscape.

Max Spevack asked: Are Fedora Spins a thread or a menace? Max shared some "thoughts about Fedora's Spins -- both the idea behind having spins, and some of the marketing-related challenges that exist as a result."

Marketing FAD

Fedora held Marketing "Fedora Activity Days" and here are bunch of random links that seem to sum it up nicely:

• http://blog.melchua.com/2010/03/14/marketing-fad-day-1-remotees-of-the-world-unite/
• http://blog.melchua.com/2010/03/15/marketing-fad-day-2-brand-folks-visit-actionability-brainstorm/
• http://blog.melchua.com/2010/03/14/marketing-f12-postmortem/
• http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=3072
• http://www.nalley.me/david/?p=228
• http://wordshack.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/marketing-fad-day-1-midnight-add-post-hockey-blogging-at-its-finest/
• http://www.braincache.de/wp/2010/03/14/fedora-mktg-fad-2010-day-1/

Fedora In the News

In this section, we cover news from the trade press and elsewhere that is re-posted to the Fedora Marketing list

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Paul Frields on Fedora 12 and Beyond (LinuxForU.com)

Kara Schlitz forwarded a summary of the following article posted to LinuxForU.com on 3/9/2010:

"Paul Frields on Fedora 12 and Beyond By Janani Gopalakrishnan Vikram

Two months after the launch of Fedora 12, we spoke to Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat, about how this release has been received by the community, and what is in store for the next. Though it started as a technical discussion on what Fedora 12 offers IT admins and developers, it graduated into a more serious conversation on the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the distinction (if any) between commercial and community Linux.

The full article is available

QualityAssurance

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week's Test Day was on webcams. We had a great turnout, with many users testing all sorts of different cameras, so thanks to everyone who tested. Most cameras were reported to work well, but we did identify a few models which did not, and Hans de Goede will be working to improve support for those. Thanks to Hans for helping to organize and look after the event.

Next week's Test Day will be on Fedora 13 changes to disk management, via the udisks (previously DeviceKit-disks) backend and the Palimpsest front end. The major new features are better support for LVMs, support for multipath connections (a system with multiple connections to the same drive, common with enterprise storage systems) and support for remote access, allowing you to inspect the disks on one system from another with Palimpsest. As always, we'll be working to make testing as easy as possible, and most testing should be possible from a live environment. The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2010-03-18 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

No QA group weekly meeting was held on 2010-03-08 as James Laska was unavailable and there were no pressing items needing discussion.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2010-03-09. The full log is available. Matej Cepl confirmed that he is an administrator of the Fedorahosted triage space, and that XML-RPC access to the space is now working again.

Adam Williamson provided a recap of Brennan Ashton's work on triage statistics, and on his current plan to develop this within the Fedora Community group.

Adam Williamson and John Poelstra discussed the planned rebase of bugs to Fedora 13, in regards to some questions raised by Till Maas on the development mailing list. They confirmed that each specific rebase does not need approval by FESCo, and could not see how Till's proposed refinement of the rebase query would be an improvement.

Adam Williamson reported that he had updated the bug workflow Wiki page to reflect the new No Frozen Rawhide process. He noted that it had been slightly cumbersome to rewrite and welcomed reviews of the changes. Christopher Beland volunteered to update the Rawhide page similarly.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2010-03-15 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting. The next Bugzappers weekly meeting will be held on 2010-03-16 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 13 Alpha and Beta

Jesse Keating announced the release of Fedora 13 Alpha on 2010-03-09. The first blocker bug review meeting for Fedora 13 Beta was held on 2010-03-12, where all Beta blocker candidate bugs were reviewed and some Fedora 13 blocker candidates upgraded to Beta blocker status.

Package update policy

Kamil Paral posted a proposed draft of a package update policy, driven mostly by the need for a framework for the integration of AutoQA tests. Kamil's policy was eventually discussed at the FESCo meeting which decided to move forward with Bill Nottingham's proposal focused on the requirements for updates to be published. Kamil planned to work with Bill to ensure his proposal would cover the important areas of Kamil's draft.

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Transifex v 0.7.4 Upgrade Complete

After tests on a staging server, the transifex v 7.04 instance is now live on translate.fedoraproject.org. This version, brings in the much awaited feature that supports Publican style documents comprised of multiple .po files.

As informed by Ruediger Landmann, the .pot files for Fedora Documents served by translate.fedoraproject.org would need to be regenerated and merged with the earlier translations. Translation submission is presently disabled for a number of these documents.

Translation Review Image Available

An image file for a Fedora 13 build containing the latest translations has been made available by the Fedora Release Engineering team. Using this image, translators can directly review the translations on the User Interface.

New Category, 'Upstream', on translate.fp.org

After discussions on the mailing list, several modules including PulseAudio*, Transifex etc. have been moved to a new category titled 'Upstream' in translate.fedoraproject.org. These modules, are integral to the Fedora Project, but do not use the Fedora Infrastructure to host their source or receive translations.

New Members/Co-ordinators in FLP

Geunsik Lim (Korean), Christian I. Ponce G (Spanish), Peter Bojtos (Hungarian), Ryo Fujita (Japanese), joined the Fedora Localization Project recently. Hyunsok Oh has taken over as the new co-ordinator of the Korean team.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Preparing Beta Artwork

Máirín Duffy wrote on her blog asking for feedback about the artwork in Fedora 13 and ways to improve it for the Beta release "So now that Fedora 13 Alpha is out…. have you given it a try? What do you think about the wallpaper? We want to hear your feedback, because there isn’t actually that much time to update the wallpaper for beta, I think a little over a week. We haven’t gotten much feedback about it yet, so we need to hear from you now!". Anyone is encouraged to leave feedback either on her blog or on the team's mailing list

The Design Suite is a Talking Point

Sebastian Dziallas reported on @Design-Team about the Design Suite being listed as a Talking Point for the upcoming Fedora 13 "I've quickly copied some stuff for the talking points together (since the Design Suite *is* in fact a talking point, heh)" and invited people to contribute and enhance the page.

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 13 Security Advisories

• tar-1.22-16.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037251.html
• libpng10-1.0.53-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037237.html
• viewvc-1.1.4-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037224.html
• nss-3.12.6-1.2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037028.html
• cups-1.4.2-34.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037027.html
• esorex-3.7.2-6.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036913.html
• samba-3.5.1-58.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036902.html
• sudo-1.7.2p5-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036855.html
• moin-1.9.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036843.html
• bournal-1.4.1-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036764.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

• cups-1.4.2-28.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037100.html
• nss-3.12.6-1.2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037093.html
• samba-3.4.7-58.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036963.html
• curl-7.19.7-7.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036744.html
• bournal-1.4.1-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036701.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

• cups-1.4.2-26.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037174.html
• squid-3.0.STABLE24-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037159.html
• curl-7.19.7-5.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037143.html
• samba-3.4.7-0.50.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036861.html
• bournal-1.4.1-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036697.html
• sudo-1.7.2p5-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/036656.html