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Fedora Weekly News Issue 220

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 220[1] for the week ending April 7, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This week's issue kicks off with a couple announcements, including news on opening bids for FUDCon 2011 locations, details on the one week slip on Fedora 13 beta, and links to upcoming Fedora events globally. From the Fedora Planet, news and views from Fedora community members including availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, lots of libguestfs tips, the creation of "A K12 Educator’s Guide to Open Source Software", and the availability of the open source texbook on Open Source. In Marketing news, details on work on building bridges between Ambassadors and Marketing teams, a wiki challenge to the Marketing Team, details on work with students from Allegheny College sprinting on Fedora Marketing deliverables, and much more. In Quality Assurance news, details on last week's two Test Days, on the implementation of SSSD by default and on ABRT, the Automated Bug Reporting Tool in Fedora. The upcoming test day will be on virtualization Thursday of this week. Details also on the ongoing Fedora 13 beta candidate build testing, and discussion about the possibility of BugZapping classes. In Translation news, an overview of upcoming Fedora 13 translation tasks and deliverables, including a request for translation of a Fedora 13 countdown banner, and a new self-introduction page for new prospective members of the Translation team. In Design news, details on a request for a new Fedora t-shirt for the upcoming FUDCon in Zurich, another iteration of Fedora 13 wallpaper, and discussion around a Fedora 13 banner on fedoraproject.org. We're pleased to present a special topic on the first Fedora Summer Coding for the next few issues, and include here details on this project that will be of wide interest to the Fedora community, including a call for ideas, an invitation to participate, and a call for sponsors of the work this summer. We conclude this week's issue with this past week's security advisories for Fedora 13, 12 and 11. Read on!

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[2] and have a listen!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[3]. 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[1], development announcements[2] and Events[3].

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Fedora Announcement News

Reminder: Fedora Board IRC meeting 1600 UTC 2010-04-01

Fedora Project Leader Paul W. Frields announced [1] on Thursday, April 1 on 00:54:41 UTC 2010, "The Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Thursday, April 1,

2010 at 1600 UTC on IRC Freenode. For this meeting, the public is invited to do the following:

  • Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation.
  • Join #fedora-board-questions to discuss topics and post questions. This channel is read/write for everyone.

The moderator will voice people from the queue, one at a time, in the #fedora-board-meeting channel. We'll limit time per voice as needed to give everyone in the queue a chance to be heard. The Board may reserve some time at the top of the hour to cover any agenda items as appropriate. We look forward to seeing you at the meeting!"

Fudcon North America 2011 -- bids opening!

Paul W. Frields announced [1] on Monday, April 5 at 21:31:46 UTC 2010," The Fedora Project holds a number of global FUDCon events each year. Typically the Community Architecture team's budget supports one of these large events each Red Hat fiscal quarter (with the fiscal year starting on March 1). This year we have the Latin American event, FUDCon Santiago[2] in Chile, in Q2; the event for EMEA, FUDCon Zurich in Switzerland[3], in Q3; and a North American FUDCon event in Q4.

In each case, typically the event will happen sometime in the first two months of the quarter, so that we can ensure all bills are paid by Red Hat's financial deadlines. That deadline usually comes a couple weeks before the end of quarter, so the first two months are the ideal time to actually stage an event. So the North American FUDCon event will happen in either December 2010 or January 2011. The bidders will work with the Community Architecture team to resolve the exact timing.

In the past we've often heard from community members that they'd love to have an event in a warmer clime during the chilly winter months. We couldn't agree more, and now we have a way to empower our community to make that happen. FUDCon Honolulu? Maybe not, but we're open to other possibilities! We want to find a place for the next North American event that includes:

  • Reasonable travel, room and board costs
  • Availability of inexpensive or free event space
  • A little warmer than Boston (we hope!)
  • Active FOSS/other interested communities that might like to attend
  • Consideration of academic schedules for students who want to attend
  • Consideration of holidays for people in North America
  • One or more organizing Fedora community members with the time and energy to help prepare

We now have a bid process[4] that lets interested community members propose FUDCon in their region, or even backyard. Nothing Olympic style -- simply a way for excited Fedora folks in the locale to help secure event space, lodging, and other logistical details. We've already kicked this process off for FUDCon Zurich 2010, and are looking to start this cycle for North America as well. In the summer, after FUDCon Santiago concludes, we will kick the same process off for Latin America again for a 2011 conference.

So here's what you need to do to get the ball rolling:

  • Join the fudcon-planning list[5] and let us know you want to bid.
  • Make a wiki page called [[FUDCon:Bid_for_<Your_Town>_2011]], with the information outlined on the bid process[3] page.

The bid process will be open for a period of approximately 3 weeks. At that point the FPL and Community Architecture teams, as major

stakeholders in the event, will go through the bids and make a decision on where we'll locate FUDCon North America. "


Fedora Development News

Fedora 13 Beta Slip 1 week

Jesse Keating announced[1], "Despite a heroic effort by developers and testers, we have not been able to reach Beta release criteria by the time of the Go / No Go meeting. There are still unresolved bugs and unknown test results. Because of this we've enacted a 1 week slip of the Beta release date. This does not mean we will be pulling in a bunch of "nice to have" updates, we will instead be concentrating only on release blocking issues in order to produce an RC that achieves Beta release criteria. Promotion of builds into "stable" for F13 will continue to be extremely targeted until an RC goes "GOLD".

Because this is the second slip in the Fedora 13 cycle, we have also decided to bump the rest of our release dates by 1 week. The schedules will be updated tonight and tomorrow to reflect these new dates."

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)[1]
  • Central & South America (LATAM) [2]
  • Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)[3]
  • India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)[4]

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events[1]

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[1] - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide. This edition covers highlights from the past three weeks.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

The Red Hat Press office announced[1] the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 which includes: Virtual desktop support, Import and export, V2V : Virtual machine conversion, a Data Warehouse, and increased performance.

In other virtualization news, Richard W.M. Jones provided lots of libguestfs tips: Edit the Windows Registry in your VMs from the host[2], using virt-rescue on raw file or disk images (in addition to VM images)[3], quickly getting help in guestfish[4], using virt-df to find out when filesystems are full[5] (and an update[6]) and using hivex to unpack a Windows Boot Configuration Data (BCD) hive[7].

Luis Villa wrote[8] a piece on opensource.com about lawyers and open source. "There is a fairly common perception among FOSS hackers that there is no community of FOSS lawyers. Scratch the surface, though, and it turns out that- despite our handicaps- the FOSS legal community is there and growing. Since this question recently came up in the context of Mozilla's decision to revise the MPL, I thought it might be a good time to talk about this community here at opensource.com."

Rajith Attapattu posted[9] a couple pieces on managing software projects, starting with "The Way We Set It Up Is How It Ends Up" and continuing[10] "Dealing With Change".

Máirín Duffy mentioned[11] the creation of "A K12 Educator’s Guide to Open Source Software" with the goal of "introducing elementary school children to free & open source software, particularly creative tool."

Jeff Sheltren announced[12] that the Open Source textbook on Open Source has been completed, and Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote[13] an article about it on opensource.com, titles "Can Professors Teach Open Source?"

Karsten Wade made a number of announcements regarding Fedora's Summer Coding 2010 opportunities (See also the special section of this weeks Fedora Weekly News). First[14], there is a call for sponsors. That means universities, corporations, foundations, individuals and creative ideas. Ideas should be submitted by April 9[15]. And Karsten's latest post has[16] lots of useful links for getting involved and finding out more.

Tim Waugh wants[17] your printer device IDs so that Fedora 13 can automatically install printer drivers.

Bryan Clark released[18] a new quick filter addon for Thunderbird for easier single-folder searching.

Paul W. Frields announced[19] that the planning process has begun for FUDCon 2011 this winter, including a bidding process for picking a location.

  1. http://press.redhat.com/2010/03/29/red-hat-announces-beta-availability-of-red-hat-enterprise-virtualization-2-2/
  2. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/edit-the-windows-registry-in-your-vms-from-the-host/
  3. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/tip-virt-rescue-not-just-for-virtual-machines/
  4. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/tip-quickly-get-help-for-guestfish-commands/
  5. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/tip-find-out-when-filesystems-get-full-with-virt-df/
  6. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/tip-find-out-when-filesystems-get-full-with-virt-df-working-version/
  7. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/use-hivex-to-unpack-a-windows-boot-configuration-data-bcd-hive/
  8. http://opensource.com/law/10/3/community-lawyers
  9. http://rajith.2rlabs.com/2010/03/29/managing-software-projects-the-way-we-set-it-up-is-how-it-ends-up/
  10. http://rajith.2rlabs.com/2010/03/31/managing-software-projects-changes-are-inevitable-are-you-ready/
  11. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/a-k12-educators-guide-to-open-source-software/
  12. http://sheltren.com/teachingopensource_textbook
  13. http://opensource.com/education/10/4/can-professors-teach-open-source
  14. http://iquaid.org/2010/04/02/seeking-sponsors-universities-corporations-foundations-individuals-creative-ideas/
  15. http://iquaid.org/2010/04/06/ideas-for-summer-coding-due-by-9-april/
  16. http://iquaid.org/2010/04/06/fedora-summer-coding-organizing-halp/
  17. http://cyberelk.net/tim/2010/04/01/printer-device-ids-wanted/
  18. http://clarkbw.net/blog/2010/04/02/quick-filtering-in-thunderbird/
  19. http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=3108

Marketing

In this section, we cover the happenings for Fedora Marketing Project from 2010-03-31 to 2010-04-06.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

Mel Chua[1] started a thread about briefing Ambassadors which led to a wiki page[2] to get started with ideas. This came back from marketing FAD as a way to create bridges among Marketing and Ambassadors. The idea is to provide tools for Ambassadors dealing with new release activities.

Max Spevack unleashed a wiki challenge[3] and created a wiki[4] page to keep track of this challenge. This consist in look statistics for pages with high number of request and low maintenance, to update those pages.

Paul Frields[5] pointed us to a wiki page where we can start working on Fedora 13 Beta Announcement[6].

Mel Chua[7] reports from Allegheny College that she has 40 students engaged on doing some hand on work for Fedora Marketing which now is just gearing up, but soon we shall see a lot of work produced.

We now have a valuable resource for recording video interviews[8], Ryan Rix uploaded a video[9] of Colby Hoke in an impromptu "how to do interviews". Colby s part of Red Hat Public Relationship staff.

There is a call for help made by Neville Cross[10] to help with modules of what will be a more comprehensive Press Kit[11]

Amit Shah[12] shared some fine articles published in "Linux For You" magazine regarding virtualization and put all of them available on the wiki[13]

Finally after a call of "No_meeting_today" there was a meeting anyway, we have got momentum and keep up the work, logs are available as usual[14].

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1]. It seems like the new layout has been a success, so we'll stick with it for the future.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

We had two Test Days last week. The first[1], on Tuesday 2010-03-30, was on the implementation of SSSD by default[2]. This feature is very useful to those who use accounts on a remote server which may not always be accessible from their system. A small group of dedicated testers were able to expose five bugs, which the developers are now investigating. The second[3] was on ABRT[4], the automated bug report tool which has been included with Fedora by default since the release of Fedora 12. This event resulted in mostly positive test results, but also exposed six bugs, three of which have already been closed by the developers.

This week's Test Day[5], on Thursday 2010-04-08, will be on virtualization[6]. This is mainly focused on the Fedora virtualization stack, based around KVM, libvirt, and virt-manager. There've been many improvements throughout the stack for Fedora 13, so there's a lot of new stuff to test as well as making sure the basic functions are working properly. Virtualization is a very important area these days, so please come out to help us test it! The event will take place all day in the #fedora-test-day channel on Freenode IRC. If you can't make it on the day, you can still provide your results on the Wiki page before or after the event.

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[7].

Fedora 13 testing

Once again, the week was occupied with much testing of Fedora 13 Beta candidate builds. The second release candidate was announced[1] on Wednesday 2010-03-31, and closely followed by the third release candidate on the same day[2]. As usual, Andre Robatino provided delta ISOs[3]. Installation validation testing on RC3[4] revealed a blocker bug in support for encrypted partitions[5]. This led the group, along with release engineering and development groups, to take the decision to delay the Beta release by a week[6].

Update acceptance testing

Adam Miller revised his proventesters SOP proposal[1] based on feedback received from Adam Williamson[2] and Jesse Keating[3].

Stock response for ABRT symbol failures

Christopher Beland proposed[1] a BugZappers stock response for the situation where ABRT fails to download the packages to provide debugging symbols in an automatically-generated bug report. After receiving no objections, he later reported[2] that he had added this to the page[3].

BugZapping classes

During the weekly BugZappers meeting[1], the group discussed the possibility of providing more ways for new members to get started. Chris Campbell volunteered to look into the possibility of running a test Bugzapping class. Shakthi Kannan suggested creating screencasts as examples of each step in the triage process, and Adam Williamson said he would forward this idea to the mailing list.

Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project[1].

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Upcoming Fedora 13 Tasks

John Poelstra informed[1] the list about the upcoming tasks for Fedora 13. At present, the translation for the Fedora Guides and F13 Beta Release Notes are on the schedule.

F13 Countdown Banner Translated

Alexander Smirnov from the Fedora Design team, had put forward a request[1] for the translation of the Fedora 13 countdown banner. The banner has now been translated in more than 30 languages[2].

F13 Release Notes Update Frequency

Fedora Documentation team member, Ruediger Landmann requested a straw poll from the Translation team, asking about an optimal frequency for refreshing the POT and PO files for the F13 Release notes[1]. The suggestion to update twice weekly garnered the maximum votes.

The F13 beta release notes are available for translation via translate.fedoraproject.org[2].


New Self-Introduction Wiki Page

Noriko Mizumoto put together a sample 'Self-Introduction' page on the Fedora wiki[1]. New members in the FLP are required to send an introduction mail to the list. This page[2] would assist them to put together all the relevant information that is generally required by the Language Team and Maintainers.

Publican 1.6.2 Released

Ruediger Landmann announced the release of Publican v 1.6.2[1].


New Members in FLP

Alejandro Perez T (Spanish)[1], Felipe Garcia (Spanish)[2], Joe O'Dell (British English)[3], Bertrand Juglas (French)[4], Pierre Carrier (French)[5], Suchakra (Hindi) [6] joined the FLP recently.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team[1].

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

FUDCon T-Shirt Design

Marcus Moeller, one of the organizers of the upcoming European FUDCon asked[1] for a T-Shirt design "As this years EMEA FUDCon will happen in Zurich we would be very pleased if you could helps us desinging a Logo/T-Shirt", Nicu Buculei highlighted[2] a few technical constraints "a small number of colors, the number of color will directly affect the price, 2 colors would be OK, 3 colors would be high and we can use 4 only if our sponsor agree; - no small details on the design: small details are hard to print cheaply, the clouds design had *too small* letters and we had problems with printing" and Máirín Duffy pleaded[3] for a beautiful design "We should make something that someone would want to wear even if they didn't know what Fedora was - then they will start a conversation with the T-shirt wearer - 'where did you get that shirt?' which opens up the opportunity to sell Fedora :)"

Fedora 13 Wallpaper

Máirín Duffy posted[1] another iteration of the wallpaper for Fedora 13 "I tried flipping the original vertically but it looks really odd. So I made another from scratch" and since other overdue tasks depends on this item, later she proposed[2] going in parallel with the development and basing those on the Alpha design "Since the wallpaper is taking a bit longer than anticipated, and since it'll look very similar to what we already had for the alpha anyway (same colors, same texture, maybe composition a little different) would you mind starting on this design now, and we can swap out the screenshot showing the wallpaper (should you choose to use one) later on, so at least the basic framework of the banner is in place?"

Website Banner

Fabian A. Scherschel proposed[1] a first proposal for the banner to be used on the website for Fedora 13 and asked for feedback "I especially want to know if the second rocket replacing the number one in 13 is too much and/or if it is too hard to grog at first sight." Nicu Buculei [2], Paul Frields[3], Misha Shnurapet[4] and Máirín Duffy[5] provided ideas "I really like the angle you've got the screen at; it's an inviting angle, it makes you feel drawn in. The coloring and lighting is perfect."

Special topic: Fedora Summer Coding

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Summer 2010 Coding[1].

Contributing Writer: Karsten Wade

Students invited to submit proposals

In an announcement on 07 April, Fedora Summer Coding 2010 is inviting students to begin submitting proposals, as explained in the section "You are a student"[1] on the Summer Coding 2010 page.

Ideas for Fedora Summer Coding Due April 14th

Please submit your ideas for students to work on for the Fedora summer 2010 coding projects by April 14th. The Fedora Summer Coding SIG revised the date since the below blog post was written.

Karsten Wade writes[1],

"While we finish the Summer Coding 2010 page, it is past time for you all to let us know the problems you would like to see solved by summer coding/internship students." The idea[2] page has all of the ideas thus far, and there is also a page on how to fill out the ideas page[3]

"Let’s get this filled with serious ideas you are willing to mentor for or help find the mentor.

Join the discussion list and be prepared to talk about your ideas or proposals. If you were already a mentor and want to help with mentoring, such as proposal reviews, let us know and join the mentors list.

Tracking these ideas is a PITA and in fact the lack of an ideas page lead to us not getting in the Google Summer of Code this year. This is all part of a larger issue around tracking smaller ideas for beginners and students, but for now this will have to do.

Anyone want to hack on OpenHatch.org[4], please help. We’re hoping some of the functionality we are handling manually may be included in upcoming versions of OpenHatch. If that direction gets us fruit, we may use OpenHatch as an ongoing way to expose projects to students and other new contributors."

Sponsors sought for Fedora Summer Coding 2010 Projects

Karsten Wade writes[1], "[a] cornerstone of our Fedora Summer Coding is connecting sponsors (those with resources to share) with students (those with time, passion, and skills to share.) It’s not necessary as a sponsor to have ideas of how your resources should be used, that’s what the Fedora Project and JBoss.org mentors and sub-projects are prepared to do.

We’ll also sort the student ideas, generate the list of approved proposals, work with the students throughout the summer, and make sure you hear back about how things went. You can learn more about the model we are using in this blog post, Summer Of Code Swimchart: Now With More Generic[2]."

Help organize Fedora's first solo summer coding effort

Karsten Wade writes[1], "[w]e are trying to turn the lights on for a new program this year, Fedora Summer Coding 2010[2]. ... If you are at all interested, join the SIG mailing list[3] where we are discussing how all the structure comes together. Use the step-by-step guide for organizers[4] to get started."

The blog post continues, "This is more than making lemonade out of lemons[5]. After we figured out[6] that the whole idea of summer coding wasn’t kinda-sorta-good but actually pretty great when done right for your own community, it was clear we needed to do our own implementation of the summer coding model[7] that Google first defined.

Although the plan was to test ideas during GSoC this year, we don’t get that luxury. Instead, we get the enviable position of taking a cool brand, Fedora, and create for it our own program to meld college students, mentors, summers, code, and community."


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

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

Fedora 11 Security Advisories