FWN/Issue132

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 132 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 132 for the week ending June 28, 2008.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue132

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. Being a Fedora Weekly News beat writer gives you a chance to work on one of our community's most important sources of news, and can be done in only about 1 hour per week of your time.

We are still looking for beat writers to cover the highlights of Fedora Planet each week, Fedora Security Advisories, and to summarize the Fedora Events and Meetings that happened during each week.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join

Announcements
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project.

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-announce-list

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-announce

Contributing Writer: Max Spevack

Fedora Board Election Results
Paul Frields announces on his blog[1],

"Tom 'spot' Callaway, Jesse Keating, and Seth Vidal have been elected to full two-release terms on the Fedora Project Board. Jef Spaleta has been re-elected to a half-length, one-release term. You can read the entire result set here.

Chris Tyler has been appointed to the final seat on the Board."

[1] http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1045

kdebindings -> PyKDE4 split
Rex Dieter announces on fedora-devel-announce[1],

"kdebindings currently includes bindings for many languages, including python, ruby, etc, and currently bundled all together into a single monolithic package. The KDE SIG will be working to split these out (where it makes sense). The first one is python, which has been split into it's own PyKDE4 package (should land in the next rawhide iteration)."

This split will propogate back to F-9 when kde-4.1 is released (late July-ish)

[1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2008-June/msg00007.html

Marketing
In this section, we cover Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

ScreenCast on Miro updates
The ScreenCast thread from last week continues to advance, with ScreenCast samples now available on Miro as Fedora TV. This past week, Lucas Saboya (1) and his folk have started a web form for contributors to upload entries. Jeff Spaleta [2] and others continue to work through the remainder of defining editor workflow for these submissions

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00162.html [2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00173.html

Fedora 9 Falls a Little Short
Rahul Sundaram shared a LinuxPlanet review of Fedora 9 [1]. The writer was a bit disappointed with the stability of this release.

[1] http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6492/1/

FedoraLife Concept update
Discussion on the "fedoraLife" concept continues. Valent Turkovic pointed to some of the work that had been done on Diva, which is applicable here, with background [1], Valent's screencast of Diva with additional links [2], and pointed out two other projects, saya-videoeditor [3] and myvideoeditor [4]. Anybody with coding experience is encoraged to joint those projects. Rick Garcia, Project Lead from the saya videoeditor project added [5] that saya will work with a any decoding library, so that this effort need not be encumbered by patented software codecs. Discussion continues!

[1] http://www.mdk.org.pl/2006/12/7/state-of-diva [2] http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-184428.html [3] http://saya-videoeditor.blogspot.com/ [4] http://myvideoeditor.blogspot.com\ [5] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00187.html

Student partnership program
Susmit Shannigrahi suggested [1] an idea originating on the AFEC Fedora Ambassadors meeting to begin a programme to allow students to contribute to the Fedora project [2] Grady Laksmono noted [3] that something like what was proposed is already in place at California State-Los Angeles [4] Jonathon Roberts added [5] that this general idea has come up a few times recently. Francesco Ugolini also expressed support for the idea [6] and suggested that FAmSCo might be able to help with this effort, with some planning.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00177.html [2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora-Student_Mentor_Programme [3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00178.html [4] http://www.calstatela.edu/ [5] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00182.html [6] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00201.html

Page for tracking local Media (CD/DVD) requests
Susmit Shannigrahi offered [1] a wiki page [2] to help track local media requests.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00192.html [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/FreeMedia/India/LocalContacts

Fedora 9 How to in Spanish
Diego Escobar offered [1] a Fedora 9 how-to page in Spanish [2], and invited those who might find this useful to download it.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00203.html [2] http://suservidorwp.googlepages.com/fedora9.pdf

[2] http://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/features/2218856/hands-secrets-fedora

Distrowatch: From Fedora 9 to OpenSUSE 11
Pascal Calarco forwarded [1] a recent post [2] by the editor of Distrowatch, a popular meta-Linux distribution news and reviews site. They had been using Fedora 9 since its release, and were now moving to try out SUSE 11.0. In doing so, he made a few comments about the stability of the Fedora 9 release in comparison with Fedora 8:

"It seems to be a trend among Linux distributions that an excellent release is often followed by a mediocre one. It's as if the distribution developers became complacent after one or two successful versions, thinking that nothing could possible go wrong six months down the line. As such, they get more adventurous, make wrong decisions, and add experimental features, the combination of which is often disastrous. With Fedora 9, I feel that the developers have negated all the great work they had done with previous 2 - 3 releases and went overboard with bleeding-edge software and features."

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00212.html [2] http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080623#feature

Kernel Developers Release Statement on Closed-Source Drivers & Commentary
Rahul Sundaram forwarded [1] a position statement from a group of 160 kernel developers [2] on closed-source kernel drivers:

"We, the undersigned Linux kernel developers, consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable. We have repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem. Such modules negate the openness, stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development model and shut their users off from the expertise of the Linux community. Vendors that provide closed-source kernel modules force their customers to give up key Linux advantages or choose new vendors. Therefore, in order to take full advantage of the cost savings and shared support benefits open source has to offer, we urge vendors to adopt a policy of supporting their customers on Linux with open-source kernel code."

James Bottomley of The Linux Foundation provided some editorial commentary on this issue, with respect to graphics drivers [3], using Fedora as a recent example:

"In essence this is because binary drivers totally negate the shared support and maintenance burden which is what makes Open Source so compelling. Additionally, there is also a drag effect these binary drivers have on the rest of the ecosystem: for instance, Fedora was under enormous pressure not to release Fedora 9 until there was a solution that allowed it to run with the Nvidia binary driver (Fedora chose to ship with a pre-release of the X windows system which Nvidia refused to support and because the driver was binary Fedora couldn't simply fix the problems and ship anyway)."

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00214.html [2] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Kernel_Driver_Statement [3] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Linux_Graphics_Essay

Fedora Contributor Stories
Ricky Zhou suggested that it might be good to try to collect some of the stories of Fedora users talk about informally at FUDCon, as an effort to encourage new contributors to the Fedora Project, and suggested this could be a component of the various Fedora video efforts under discussion. This generated much discussion in support from several people. Jonathan Roberts mentioned [2] that efforts are underway to establish this based on WordPress MultiUser.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00225.html [2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00260.html

PackageKit Finds Sweet Spot
Rahul Sundaram forwarded [1] a posting about Fedora's PackageKit from Linux.com [2] and some history, current status, and future prospects behind the project from Richard Hughes, who developed PackageKit while interning at Red Hat and now maintains it.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00233.html [2] http://www.linux.com/feature/137115

Recruiting Students: Campus Ambassadors
Jack Aboutbol shared [1] that he has been working on a new effort, Campus Ambassadors, "... something similar to what Mozilla does with the Firefox Campus Rep program--to have someone who can speak to the student body about Fedora and represent Fedora at relevant campus events." He plans to present the idea formally at a Community Architecture meeting next week in Raleigh. This generated a lot of positive interest to get involved from existing Fedora Ambassadors who are student members.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00255.html

Fedora News Channel
Markus McLaughlin offered [1] that the community should create a Wordpress weblog for sharing a wide variety of Fedora news items. Nicu Buculei suggested [2] that FWN is likely to evolve in this direction, supporting RSS feeds, multimedia, etc., and invited others to contribute to the news beats that are open [3]. Clint Savage suggested [4] that these could be added to the Fedora TV channel [5] on Miro. Jonathon Roberts confirmed that audio can be added to Miro as well [6], and offered to make the audio from Paul Frields' talk from FUDCon.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00264.html [2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00268.html [3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN [4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00274.html [5] https://www.miroguide.com/channels/6891 [6] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-June/msg00283.htm

Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors

Contributing Writer: JeffreyTadlock

North America Ambassador Polos
Pascal Calarco has posted [1] the last call for North American Ambassdors to order their Fedora polos. If you are interested in a Fedora polo to wear when you work at an event representing Fedora, be sure to check the mailing list post for all of the details.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-ambassadors-list/2008-June/msg00396.html

Fedora Portugal Meet up
Vitor Domingos posted an announcement [1] to the ambassador mailing list regarding a meet up with Fedora users and Ambassadors. Please check the announcement for complete details.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-ambassadors-list/2008-June/msg00277.html

How-to in Spanish
Diego Escobar posted [1] a How-To in Spanish that is a compilation of posts made on his blog in Spanish. It covers basic configuration topics with Fedora 9 and was originally prepared for use at a Local LUG.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-ambassadors-list/2008-June/msg00322.html

Tech Day - Garlasco, Italy
Gianluca Varisco posted [1] to his blog a report from a recent Tech Day in Italy. The event was an afternoon session that featured six presentations. Be sure to check out the blog post for some of the highlights.

[1] http://www.techtemple.org/blog/2008/06/tech-day-report/

Infrastructure
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-infrastructure-list

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure

Contributing Writer: HuzaifaSidhpurwala

Fedoranews.org - Old blog still online
Gianluca Varisco writes for fedora-infrastructure-list [1]

Due to FedoraNews [ 2 ] old blog platform still public. It would be better to update it (actually using a very old version of WordPress released on June 29th 2005: 1.5.1.3) or put it off-line.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2008-June/msg00088.html

[2] http://fedoranews.org/blog/

Request for hosting resource
Robin Norwood writes for fedora-infrastructure-list [2]

Robin has been working (with lots of help from Toshio and Luke) on the Amber project (Fedora Application Database) for a few weeks now, and have been getting perilously close to the point where it would be useful to have a public place to host a proof-of-concept style demo site. It is a turbogears app (with sqlalchemy, genshi and (soon) postresql). Does the fedora infrastructure group have resources for this kind of thing?

[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2008-June/msg00094.html

Artwork
In this section, we cover Fedora Artwork Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork

Contributing Writer: NicuBuculei

Echo Icons
This week the Echo icon theme [1] development was considerable, with new images [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] created and improved in a collaborative way on the Fedora Art mailing list, mostly as work made by Luya Tshimbalanga with feed-back from Martin Sourada.

In addition to creating icons, Luya came with with a logo proposal for the icon set [6] in an "identity search", whcih with input from Martin and Nicu Buculei evolved in the same collaborative way, in a good looking logo [7].

[1] - https://fedorahosted.org/echo-icon-theme/

[2] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00158.html

[3] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00168.html

[4] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00191.html

[5] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00234.html

[6] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00176.html

[7] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00233.html

Artwork for Kids
On the Fedora Art list Arnav Kalra offers his contribution [1] for a Fedora spin for kids. He is joined [2] by Sebastian Dziallas who works on the Education SIG [3], the most appropriate consumer for this kind of graphics.

The discussion then goes into specific pieces, namely website banner and desktop wallpaper, Mairin Duffy wonders [5] about the license of the Firefox cartoon and the possibility to use it and Nicu Buculei points [6] to the incompatibility "it is licensed under a CC-NC (non-commercial) licensee, making it unusable by us".

[1] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00177.html

[2] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00181.html

[3] - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Education

[4] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00183.html

[5] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00196.html

[6] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-June/msg00201.html