FWN/Issue190

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 190 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 190 for the week ending August 23, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This issue kicks off with an announcement of the next FUDCon, to be held in Toronto, Canada, in early December, along with update on the Fedora 12 release schedule. In Marketing news, Fedora Insight will be launched along with the Fedora 12 beta timeframe, and a test version of zikula is now available. Highlights from the most recent Test day and Fit and Finish meeting, along with much detail on work towards Fedora 12 is covered in the Quality Assurance beat. In Translation news, updates from the Fedora Localization Project, including new FLP members, freeze break requests for comps and initscripts, as well as updated Fedora 12 translation schedule. In Art/Design news, coverage of recent discussion on design schedule, generally speaking. Also news of a new icon artist who has joined the Design team. Our issue rounds out with virtualization news, with updates on Fedora virtualization for Fedora 12, and also detail on recent discussion regarding the Dom0 kernel under Xen on Fedora 11. We hope you enjoy this issue of FWN!

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

The Fedora News team is collaborating with Marketing and Docs to come up with a new exciting platform for disseminating news and views on Fedora, called Fedora Insight. If you are interested, please join the list and let us know how you would like to assist with this effort.

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

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

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Fedora 12 (Constantine)
The only major news this week was "Updated Fedora 12 Schedule--Final Release Date 2009-11-10". On another announcement, John Poelstra mentioned, "The Alpha Release of Fedora 12 is scheduled for public availability one week from today on Tuesday, August 25, 2009. As a result of our announcements around this release many journalists and other people curious to find out what's on the way for Fedora 12 will come to read your feature page." The new Alpha release date is August 25, 2009 ."

Announced FUDCon Toronto 2009
Fedora Project Leader Paul W. Frields has announced FUDCon Toronto 2009 on December 5-7, 2009, in Toronto, Canada at the Seneca @York campus. In his announcement he says, "Thanks to the dedicated efforts of some of our ardent fans and friends in the Fedora community in the great nation of Canada, we are heading across the border for the next North American Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon)! The next FUDCon will happen December 5-7, 2009, in Toronto, Canada at the Seneca @York campus." .

Switch from OpenAL to OpenAL-Soft
LinuxDonald has announced at all packagers, "when you have openal as dependency please change it to openal-soft and recompile your package for f-12 please." .

Upcoming Events
Please, consider attending or volunteering at an event near you!


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

Marketing
In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Chaitanya Mehandru

Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-08-18
Meeting logs and notes for the 2009-08-18 Fedora Marketing Meeting were made available. All Marketing meetings and notes are open to the public.

Alpha readiness meeting
Three words: we're on track.

Fedora Insight updates
FI will be launched alongside F12's Beta release. The final workflow and software freeze is due by 2009-08-25. and An instance of zikula is up on publictest6, and Robyn Bergeron is working to provide a document form of the workflow chart we will be using.

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
Last week's main track Test Day was on ABRT, the Automated Bug Reporting Tool. There was a solid turnout of testers and developers, and several bugs were filed and fixed.

Last weeks' Fit and Finish Test Day was on printing. The Fit and Finish team and some volunteer testers filed several bugs which should improve the friendliness of printing and printing configuration, seven of which have already been fixed.

Next week's main track Test Day will be on Dracut. Dracut is a new initrd (or, more properly, initramfs) generation tool designed to replace mkinitrd and nash for Fedora 12. An initrd or initramfs is the basic pre-built filesystem image that is initialized along with the kernel when your system first boots up, allowing the necessary hardware to be initialized to access your real storage devices and thus permitting the main boot process to proceed, so obviously it is a critical component of any system; if there's a problem with Dracut, it could very well stop your system from being able to boot at all. So it's vital that we get as much testing as possible on as wide a variety of hardware as we can. We're particularly interested in testing on more complex setups, where the root partition is on a RAID or LVM array, or even LVM-on-RAID, or where the root partition is mounted across a network connection. There will be live CD images available for testing, so you can test without a Rawhide install too. Please come along and help out! The Test Day will be held on Thursday 2009-08-27 in IRC #fedora-test-day (note the change of IRC channel).

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12 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 2009-08-17. The full log is available. James Laska reported that a first release candidate for the Fedora 12 Alpha had been uploaded to alt.fedoraproject.org, the installation test matrix had been created, and that testing was needed to fill it out. Adam Williamson asked how the blocker list looked, and James reported that it contained only two bugs, both in MODIFIED state, and both appearing to have been fixed. On overall readiness, James and Jesse Keating reported that the installer seems to be in good shape, but the final round of testing would confirm that. Adam felt that X.org was in good shape, certainly good enough for an Alpha release. In general the group felt the current state was good enough for an Alpha release.

Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. He had now implemented a system for all tests to report their results to the autoqa-results list (sign up for this list if you want to see the results of the AutoQA tests!) He had updated the test writing notes and fixed the test watcher script so that the tests run regularly, automatically, with no manual intervention needed. He was planning to write a draft of a 'How to write a test' document. He had also made a blog post to summarize current progress. Kamil Paral pointed out that Petr Splichal is working on a package sanity test tool, and it might be a good idea to integrate his work into the AutoQA framework. David Pravec suggested inviting Petr to the next QA meeting to discuss the proposal, and Kamil contacted Petr to ask him to speak to Will.

James Laska gave an update on Test Day status. He had not seen a post-event report for the Fit and Finish team's Peripherals Test Day, but Adam Williamson noted he had run his test day report script on the Peripherals page and it showed 10 NEW, 2 ASSIGNED and one CLOSED bug report. He noted the Fit and Finish Printing Test Day and the main track ABRT Test Day were upcoming, and that David Pravec and Kamil Paral were running the ABRT event. James asked Jóhann Guðmundsson if he would like to lead the upcoming Dracut Test Day, but Jóhann did not respond, so James promised to find out who would be leading the event later.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-08-18. The full log is available. Niels Haase asked if the switchover in procedure for marking bugs as triaged could be added to the QA project calendar. Adam Williamson promised to check with James Laska whether this could be done.

Brennan Ashton gave an update on the status of the triage metrics project. He intends to redesign the entire codebase from scratch to make it easier to maintain in the long term, and have the new version online in one month. He had to take down the current implementation temporarily while the server it is hosted on was upgraded, and intended to leave it down until the new code was ready, but Adam Williamson asked him to re-enable the existing system once the host server had been upgraded, so there was still some system available. Brennan also stated he might have someone interested in becoming a co-maintainer of the project. Adam wanted to make sure that once the re-design was complete the system would be able to stay in place consistently over the long term, as long term reliable and consistent reporting is vital to the metrics project. Brennan assured him this would be the case.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-08-24 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-08-25 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

NetworkManager Test Day report
Adam Williamson reported on the NetworkManager Test Day held on 2009-08-13, with a list of all bugs reported during the Test Day and their current statuses. He also provided the command he had used to generate the list, for the benefit of others doing future Test Day reports.

Alpha release candidates
Liam Li and James Laska announced the availability of, respectively, Fedora 12 Alpha RC1 and RC2, together with a plea for group members to test installation of these images and report their result to the test matrices: RC1 , and RC2.

DeltaISOs for Alpha test builds
Andre Robatino announced the availability of DeltaISOs for going from the Alpha Test Compose to Alpha RC1, and later for going from Alpha RC1 to Alpha RC2. If you have downloaded the Test Compose or RC1 and would like to test RC2, please consider using these DeltaISOs to reduce the strain on the server.

Test Day live image creation guide updates
Kamil Paral announced that he had updated the Test Day live image creation guide once more, with some refinements to the included applications and desktop icons.

Daily Rawhide live spins available
Adam Miller announced that, with the help of Kevin Fenzi and others, a system was now in place to generate and make available daily Rawhide live images for several spins, so it will always be possible to test a bleeding-edge Rawhide system without installing anything to hard disk. Several list members posted heartfelt thanks for their efforts.

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Updated Translation Schedule for Fedora 12
Due to a delay of one week in the Fedora 12 schedule, the Translation schedule has also been updated. A summarised version of the Translation schedule has been posted by Noriko Mizumoto.

Ticket Filed with FESCo for Test Packages
As a follow-up of the official request sent to FESCo last week for test builds of packages, a ticket has also been filed with the FESCo.

Freeze Break for comps and initscripts
Freeze break requests were made to the FLP by the maintainers of comps and initscripts. Both the requests were approved by the FLP members.

New Members/Coordinators in FLP
Yulia Poyarkova took over as the new coordinator of the Russian translation team. The team was earlier led by Andrew Martynov. Also,  Jens Maucher joined the German translation team.

Artwork
In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Design and the Schedule
Paul Frields wondered about the impact of having a precise schedule over the Design team, "How do people think the schedule is helping with design tasks, in general? Do you feel the wallpaper refresh schedule is reasonable? Are we on target for another refresh (iteration) and repackaging?", question echoed also by John Poelstra, who is trying to sanitize the release process, and was worried for an apparent lack of blogging about the team's activities "We've had a couple of tasks to blog about the new wallpapers... I don't think I've seen any on planet.fedoraproject.org". Martin Sourada pointed explained the slip "We're in a slip as well too. I'm still waiting on updated wallpapers for packaging", while Máirín Duffy pointed some blogging happened "Martin blogged the first set here" and outlined the plans for future "We met some days ago and are planning to ship an updated version of María's handdrawn vector tiles. If they're not ready though, our backup plan is to use a perspective-ized version of the flat vector tiles graphic that shipped in the initial set."

A New Icon Artist in the Team
After recently joining the team with a first proposal for the Echo Icon theme, Kris Thomsen built his confidence and returned with more contributions "I have made two more icons - based on the user-desktop-icon. And now I'm confident enough to share them". Welcome Kris, you are an useful addition to the Echo team!

Virtualization
In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @fedora-virt and @fedora-xen-list lists.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Fedora Virtualization List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.

Fedora Virtualization Status
Mark McLoughlin produced another detailed virtualization status report. Among the details of various package releases and bug updates Mark reminds us that "The Fedora 12 Alpha release is now baked and will be released next week on August 25th."

The final list of virt features for Fedora 12 looks like:


 * KSM - Allow KVM guest virtual machines to share identical memory pages. This is especially useful when running multiple guests from the same or similar base operating system image. Because memory is shared, the combined memory usage of the guests is reduced.
 * KVM Huge Page Backed Memory - Enable KVM guests to use huge page backed memory in order to reduce memory consumption and improve performance by reducing CPU cache pressure.
 * KVM NIC Hotplug - Allow the addition of a guest network interface (NIC) a guest virtual machine without needing to restart the guest.
 * KVM qcow2 Performance - Improve the I/O performance of virtual machines using disk images in the qcow2 image format.
 * KVM Stable Guest ABI - Allow guest virtual machines to be presented with the same application binary interface across QEMU upgrades.
 * libguestfs - A library for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images.  guestfish is an interactive shell tool for editing virtual machine disk images. Technically, this actually launched in F11, but not as a "Feature".
 * Network Interface Management - Provide tools to easily set up commonly used network configurations, like bridges, bonds, vlan's and sensible combinations thereof, in particular for virtualized hosts.
 * SR-IOV - Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is a PCI feature which allows virtual functions (VF) to be created that share the resources of a physical function (PF).
 * VirtgPXE - Replace the deprecated etherboot pxe booting infrastructure with the more modern and currently upstream supported gpxe.
 * Virt Privileges - Improve security by adjusting the privileges of QEMU processes managed by libvirt. Also, allow KVM to be used by unprivileged users.
 * Virt Storage Management - Enable VM hosts to discover new SAN storage and issue NPIV operations.
 * Libvirt Technology Compatibility Kit - Provide a functional test suite for virtualization and report on hypervisor compatability. "Note, FESCo didn't approve TCK as a feature, but that should't stop us pimping it :-)"

Be sure to check out Mark's full report below.

Fedora Xen List
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.

Dom0 Kernel Status
Pasi Kärkkäinen forwarded a pvops dom0 roadmap from Jeremy Fitzhardinge. Pasi also noted "the 32bit PAE (i686) dom0 kernel crash problem has been fixed".

Daniel Berrange reported "FYI, I have just installed a Fedora 12 x86_64 guest on a Fedora 11 x86_64 KVM host". "Once installed, I installed the Xen dom0 kernel from http://fedorapeople.org/~myoung/dom0/ re-configured grub, and successfully rebooted into a Xen Dom0, and was able to create paravirt guests successfully. Most of the libvirt-TCK test suite passed, and the only bugs look trivial to solve in libvirt's Xen driver."

"So for that environment at least, the Dom0 kernels are looking pretty good when used with F12 and the libvirt Xen driver is still functioning reasonably well."

Boris Derzhavets recently wrote detailed instructions for creating a F11 dom0.