FWN/Issue180

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 180 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 180 for the week ending June 14, 2009.

In this week's issue, we open with useful links announcing the hot-off-the-bitpresses Fedora 11 (Leonidas) release, and also reminders about voting for the code name for Fedora 12 and other Fedora elections. There are many FUDCons, FADs and other Fedora events, helpfully listed as well. From Planet Fedora, two interesting samples: news from Fedora blogs and contributors including an interview with Eric Sandeen about ext4, linux filesystems and Fedora 11, and rave reviews on Presto, Fedora 11's enhanced DeltaRPM service that can be configured. In the Quality Assurance beat, review of the Bugzappers weekly meeting and changes this will have to triage work, as well as availability of a set of Fedora 11 delta ISO images. In Translation news, announcement of new localization team members for Norwegian and Arabic, and reports on work to convert the Translation Quick Start Guide (TQSG) to a format usable by Publican. In Design team news, detail on the recent discussion to potentially redesign the fedoraproject.org homepage, and summary of a heated debate over distribution branding in general and spins in particular. The 20 year-old hacker e-zine, Phrack 66, is noted in the Security Week beat along with a Firefox security update, and in virtualization news, details on how to add a custom-built vm to virt-manager, and discussion about how to restrict VNC to specific VMs per guest. We finish this week's issue off with AskFedora, which answers general questions posed by the community. In this installment, find out what Fedora's official policy on Mono is. Read on, and enjoy!

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

, Linux filesystems and Fedora 11.

Bryan Clark created a (the new extension framework for Firefox) addon to detect mid-air collisions in Bugzilla before hitting the submit button.

Udit Sharma collected more than 70 Firefox-themed wallpapers from around the interwebs, for your viewing pleasure.

Peter Hutterer continued his series on XI2, the new X11 Input API. "In this part, I will cover how to query and modify the device hierarchy." Sample code included.

Mel Chua has worked to bring "open-source educational technology to the Philippines. The OLPC and Sugar projects serve as convenient starting places for this." Along the way, objections were raised, to which Mel posted "Responses to objections on transparency" which can serve as a starting point for other projects experiencing similar issues.

Andreas Thienemann traveled to Amsterdam, and ended up having a productive conversation with airport security:

"I was asked to take my notebook out of my bag and put it on the belt by itself. Easily done. Usually the security guys ask you to switch it on for a moment. No idea why that is though. Anyway, this time it was a bit different, the security guy asked me if the notebook sporting the Linux advertisement (lovingly applied by Alex Maier) is actually running Linux. After confirming this and stating that it's only natural as I've been with Red Hat in the past, was wearing my Spacewalk Hacker shirt and am still doing Fedora work, the guy was very happy as he seemingly could vent his frustration with Linux at someone knowledgable."

Peter Gordon wrote about some of his favorite new features in Fedora 11, including : "Size of all updates downloaded from Presto-enabled repositories: 14M Size of updates that would have been downloaded if Presto wasn't enabled: 128M This is a savings of 89 percent"

Ryan Lerch mentioned that in Fedora 11,  no longer immediately and forcibly kills the X server, but posted instructions for how to easily re-enable such functionality.

Matthew Garrett hacked the new Palm Pre to see what goes on behind the scenes and also noted that "It's recognisably Linux in a way the Android isn't."

Michael DeHaan wondered about the "Just Works" philosophy in operating systems, and whether Fedora should go after OS X in this respect.

Matt Domsch suggested that split-media CDs should be killed off for Fedora 12 (and included statistics to back up why this would be a good idea).

Steven Moix noticed that there are a lot of different options to choose from on the Download page, which may cause confusion for new users. A possible solution follows.

The tool was suggested and worked for Dennis. There is also a perl script that can be used to create an XML definition from the set of  command line arguments used to create the guest. There is a public API in  for converting back and forth between the native hypervisor configurations and XML representations.

Finally,  added an   option which allows creating a guest from an existing disk image, bypassing any OS install phase.

(better name recommendations appreciated). This library will provide OS meta data for use in virt applications, replacing the dictionary we currently keep in ." The work was based on a post by Daniel Berrange.

Libvirt List
This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.

VNC Authorization per Guest
Christian Weyermann asked how to restrict "users to only be able to connect to their own virtual machines via VNC."

Daniel Berrange said "there is no way to specify authorization data on a per-VM basis. So if you authenticate successfully you have access." Hugh Brock added "It is on our wish list for Real Soon Now, but we haven't identified anyone to actually do the work yet... patches welcome :)"

Ask Fedora
In this section, we answer general questions from Fedora community. Send your questions to askfedora AT fedoraproject.org and Fedora News Team will bring you answers from the Fedora Developers and Contributors to selected number of questions every week as part of our weekly news report. Please indicate if you do not wish your name and/or email address to be published.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AskFedora

Writers: Paul W Frields, Rahul Sundaram

What is the official Fedora policy on Mono?
Arthur Pemberton asked: "Fedora traditionally holds fairly strict guidelines for inclusion of software, and the pursuit of Free Software. As such I consider their decisions on such things to be quite important. With that in mind, I would like to ask: what is the official Fedora policy on Mono? Specifically in terms to its FOSS nature and legality."

Paul W Frields, Fedora Project Leader responds:

Until certain ambiguities such as those concerning Mono's patent licensing and redistribution are resolved, there is no formal policy that I'm aware of. We have concerns which are being researched, and any official policy would likely come through Fedora Legal and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. The substitution of Gnote for Tomboy on the Desktop Live image and in the default installation for Fedora 12 reduces package load in the standard Fedora Desktop Live image, but for now Mono remains in the Fedora repositories.