FWN/Issue227

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 227 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 227 for the week ending May 26, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This week's issue kicks off with many announcements from the Fedora Project over the past week, including much detail on the release of Fedora 13, amongst many other items. In news from the Fedora Planet, some discussion on Google-sponsored new VP8/WebM open video standards, a last chance to vote in the various Fedora Board elections, and an article on "12 tips to getting things done in open source." In this week's Fedora In the News, we cover previews and reviews about the brand-new Fedora 13 release from around the globe. In Ambassador news, lots of coverage from the recent Fedora Ambassador Day North America, including links to blog postings about last week's event held at Iowa State University. The QA Team brings some brief news focused around the lead-up to Fedora 13. Translation team news is next, including recent changes in the design of Fedora documentation structure, an overview of Fedora 13 tasks from this past week and a new member of the Fedora Localization Project for Arabic. Security Advisories covers the security-related packages released for Fedora 11, 12 and 13 over the past week. News from the KDE SIG is next, including arrival of KDE SC 4.5 beta to KDE-RedHat unstable repositories for Fedora 13, and recent work on a new Phenon backend for VLC. This issue wraps up with updates from the Fedora Summer Coding Project, with a status update on what students and their mentors are up to. Enjoy Fedora 227 and Fedora 13!

The audio version of FWN - FAWN - is back! You can listen to existing issues on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

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, selected announcements to the Fedora user list , development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 13 Released
Our top announcement this week was yesterday's release of Fedora 13, which is looking like a very strong release indeed. Paul W. Frields announced :

"I'm proud to announce the release of Fedora 13, the latest innovative Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat.

If you can't wait to get the distribution, simply visit

If you want a quick tour of highlights in this release, check out

You can also find this announcement text at

Or read on for loads of information about the new release and all the leading edge technologies we've packed into it. More links are available at the end of this message, too. Enjoy!



Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. We bring to you the latest and greatest release of Fedora ever, Fedora 13! Join us and share the joy of Free software and the community with friends and family. We have several major new features with special focus on desktops, netbooks, virtualization and system administration.

For desktop users
A universe of new features for end users:


 * Streamlined Installer. The user interface of Anaconda, the Fedora installer, has changed to handle storage devices and partitioning in an easy and streamlined manner, with helpful hints in the right places. Thanks to Chris Lumens and others on the Anaconda team, and Máirín Duffy, Fedora Design team lead, for her user interface review.


 * Automatic print driver installation. We're using RPM and PackageKit for automatic installation of printer drivers, so when you plug in a printer, Fedora will automatically offer to install drivers for it if needed. Thanks to Tim Waugh and Richard Hughes.


 * New desktop applications and enhancements. The Shotwell photo manager, Deja-dup backup software, Pino Identi.ca/Twitter client, and Simple Scan scanning utility are all delivered by default to provide an enhanced desktop experience out of the box. Palimpsest, the desktop utility for handling storage devices, can now manage LVM and RAID disks easily. As with the past several releases, Fedora 13 includes enhanced webcam support. Hans de Goede from Red Hat has specially focussed on better support for dual mode camera's for this release.


 * NetworkManager improvements include better Mobile Broadband, Bluetooth, and new CLI abilities. NetworkManager was introduced in Fedora 7 and has become the de facto network configuration solution for distributions everywhere. NetworkManager is now a one-stop shop for all of your networking needs in Fedora, be it dial-up, broadband, wifi, or even Bluetooth. In Fedora 13 NetworkManager adds mobile broadband enhancements to show signal strength; support for old-style dial-up networking (DUN) over Bluetooth; and command line support in addition to the improved graphical user interface. Thanks to Dan Williams of Red Hat for his extensive work on these features upstream and within Fedora.


 * Color management. Do you like your printouts to look the same as they do on screen - or your scanner output to look the same as what you just scanned? Color Management allows you to better set and control your colors for displays, printers, and scanners, through the gnome-color-manager package. Thanks to Richard Hughes from Red Hat for his involvement upstream and in Fedora.


 * Enhanced iPod functionality. Newer Apple iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone models are supported by some of your favorite photo management software and music library applications such as Rhythmbox. The devices are automatically attached using the libimobiledevice library, so you can work with your content more easily.


 * Enhanced streaming and buffering support in Totem. Totem's Movie Player and web browser plugins are now better at handling large streaming media, such as HD movies and Podcasts, thanks to the new disk-buffering support in GStreamer.


 * 3D support for ATI cards (R600 and R700) via Radeon driver. In Fedora 13, 3D support for many ATI cards has moved out of experimental status and is enabled by default. 2D support for the latest generation (R800) is integrated as well in this release. Thanks to Red Hat's Dave Airlie and many others for involvement upstream and in Fedora.


 * Experimental 3D graphics support extended to free Nouveau driver for NVidia cards. This release also adds experimental 3D support to a wide range of NVidia cards, adding them to the list of liberated video capabilities. Install the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package to try out the work in progress. Thanks to Red Hat's Ben Skeggs for involvement upstream and in Fedora.


 * KDE improvements. KDE in Fedora continues to provide tight integration with the latest technologies in Fedora. In this release, we have improved integration with PulseAudio via Phonon and the volume control KMix, which controls per-application volumes and moves application sounds between hardware devices, as well as with the latest PolicyKit authorization framework. We have also integrated new major versions, based on the KDE Development Platform 4, of the KOffice office suite, the K3b CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning application and, for developers, the KDevelop IDE, which provide better integration with the KDE 4 Plasma Desktop and no longer require the KDE 3 compatibility libraries. Thanks to the work of a growing community of KDE contributors in Fedora.


 * DisplayPort support improvements. Fedora 12 added initial support for the new DisplayPort display connector for Intel graphics chips. Support for Nvidia and ATI systems has now been added in this release. Thanks to Red Hat's Xorg team.


 * Experimental 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. Try out the work in progress. Thanks to Matthias Clasen from Red Hat's Desktop team and others.

For developers
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. Thanks to Mark Wielaard from Red Hat.


 * 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. Thanks to David Malcolm from Red Hat.


 * Parallel-installable Python 3 stack. The parallel-installable Python 3 stack 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. Thanks to David Malcolm from Red Hat.


 * NetBeans Java EE 6 support. The NetBeans 6.8 integrated development environment is the first IDE to offer complete support for the entire Java EE 6 specification. Thanks to Victor G. Vasilyev from Sun/Oracle for his maintenance and support of NetBeans in collaboration with Fedora.


 * IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, Java IDE. Along with Eclipse and NetBeans already provided by Fedora, IDEA is a popular Java-based development environment newly introduced in this release. It comes with an intuitive GUI, integration with Ant and Maven, extensive language support, version control systems and test tools integration and compatibility with Eclipse projects. Thanks to Lubomir Rintel and Michal Ingeli, Fedora community volunteers, for packaging and integration of this feature.

For system administrators
And don't think we forgot the system administrators:


 * boot.fedoraproject.org (BFO). 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. Thanks to Mike McGrath, Fedora Infrastructure lead.


 * System Security Services Daemon (SSSD). SSSD provides expanded features for logging into managed domains, including caching for offline authentication. Now 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. Thanks to Stephen Gallagher from Red Hat.


 * 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. Thanks to Steve Dickson from Red Hat.


 * Zarafa Open Source edition Groupware. Zarafa Open Source edition is a complete, 100% free and open source groupware suite that can be used as a drop-in Microsoft 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. Thanks to Robert Scheck, Fedora community volunteer, for packaging and integration of this feature.


 * Btrfs snapshots integration. Btrfs is capable of creating lightweight, copy-on-write filesystem snapshots that can be mounted (and booted into) selectively. Automated snapshots allow system owners to easily revert to a filesystem from the previous day, or from before a yum update using the yum-plugin-fs-snapshot plugin. Btrfs is still an experimental filesystem in this release and requires a "btrfs" installation option to enable support for it. (This option is only available for non-live images.) Upcoming releases will integrate the snapshot functionality into the desktop while working on stabilization of the filesystem in parallel. Thanks to Josef Bacik, Btrfs filesystem developer at Red Hat, for filesystem work and the new yum plugin and Chris Ball from OLPC team for leading this effort.


 * LVM Snapshots merging support. Recent LVM (and device-mapper) snapshot advances included in Fedora 13 allow system owners to merge an LVM snapshot back into the origin. In the process you can rollback the origin LV to the state it was in before the system upgrade. As noted earlier, the yum-snapshot-fs-plugin can work with both Btrfs and LVM volumes exposing this functionality and making it easier to use. This feature was developed and merged upstream by Red Hat's storage team.


 * Virtualization enhancements. Fedora continues its leadership in virtualization technologies with improvements to KVM such as Stable PCI Addresses and Virt Shared Network Interface technologies. Having stable PCI addresses will enable virtual guests to retain PCI addresses' space on a host machine. The shared network interface technology enables virtual machines to use the same physical network interface cards (NICs) as the host operating system. Fedora 13 also enhances performance of virtualization via VHostNet acceleration of KVM networking, Virtx2apic for enhanced guest performance on large multi-processor systems, and Virtio-Serial for simple IO between the guest and host user spaces. Thanks to the Red Hat virtualization team for their ongoing contributions.


 * Dogtag Certificate System Dogtag is an enterprise-class open source Certificate Authority (CA) supporting all aspects of certificate lifecycle management including key archival, OCSP and smart card management. Brought into the fold as part of the Red Hat acquisition of Netscape technologies, this certificate server is fully free and open source and now included in Fedora. Thanks to the PKI team at Red Hat.

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list with details of all the new features on board Fedora 13 is available at

OK, go get it. You know you can't wait.

If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to

In particular, Fedora has made preupgrade a more robust solution and pushed several bug fixes to older releases of Fedora to enable an easy upgrade to Fedora 13.

For an quick tour of features in Fedora 13 and pictures of many friends of Fedora, check out our "short-form" release notes

Fedora 13 full release notes and guides for several languages are available at

Fedora 13 common bugs are documented at

Fedora Spins
Fedora spins are alternate version of Fedora tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations. Fedora 13 includes four completely new spins in addition to the several already available, including Fedora Security Lab, Design Suite, Sugar on a Stick and Moblin spin. More information on these spins and much more is available at

Power PC Support
With Apple moving to Intel based machines and Sony PlayStation dropping Linux support, Fedora PowerPC (PPC) usage has dropped considerably. In Fedora 13, PPC is now a secondary architecture and the Fedora release engineering team no longer manages PPC releases. If you would like to participate in the PPC effort or any of the secondary architecture teams, refer to

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

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, design and do artwork, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!

Fedora 14
Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes to improve the Fedora 13 experience, our next release, Fedora 14, is already being developed in parallel, and has been open for active development for several months already. We have an early schedule for an end of Oct 2010 release

Contact information
If you are a journalist or reporter, you can find additional information at

Fedora Community Gaming Session 4 - Hedgewars
Bruno Wolff III announced :

"There will be another Fedora Community Gaming session this weekend. We will be playing hedgewars which is semi-realtime game.

We will be starting at: UTC: 1700 Saturday May 29, 2010 EDT: 1pm Saturday May 29, 2010

The game seems like it will be short depending on choices made for the game. I'll be hanging around at least two hours, and can let the server run as long as people want to play.

This game comes recommended by a third party, but I'm still acting as the organizer.

We'll meet pregame in #fedora-games. If any experienced players want to recommend server settings, please speak up in the pre-game meet up. We'll use the in-game chat once we get started and I'll have Fedora Talk set up for those that want to use that in addition.

We need to match versions, so players on F11 or F12 systems will need to install scratch builds.

New players will definitely be welcome as I definitely qualify as one. So expect some teaching to be going on.

A bit more information is at.

ATrpms for Fedora 13; upcoming EOL for Fedora 11
Axel Thimm announced :

"ATrpms is officially launching Fedora 13 support

o The actual download location is. Mirrors are listed

o "stable", "testing" and "bleeding", the three subrepos per distribution are not cumulative inclusive on the server side. E.g. you need to add "stable" for "testing", and both "stable" and "testing" for "bleeding".

ATrpms is a 3rd party general purpose package repository. It currently supports

o F13/i386, F13/x86_64, F12/i386, F12/x86_64, F11/i386, F11/x86_64 o RHEL6beta/i386, RHEL6beta/x86_64, RHEL5/i386, RHEL5/x86_64, RHEL4/i386, RHEL4/x86_64, RHEL3/i386, RHEL3/x86_64

F11 support will be EOL'd once the Fedora Project drops support for it (e.g. in about a month's time).

Configuration for package resolvers (replace i386 with x86_64 as needed)

o yum [atrpms] name=Fedora 13 - i386 - ATrpms baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f13-i386/atrpms/stable

o smart [atrpms] name=Fedora 13 - i386 - ATrpms baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f13-i386/atrpms/stable type=rpm-md

o apt repomd http://dl.atrpms.net f13-i386/atrpms/stable

you can provide feedback or request support on the ATrpms lists, or the common bug tracker.

Enjoy! -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net

Announcing Sugar on a Stick v.3 (Mirabelle)
Sebastian Dziallas announced :

"Mirabelles have arrived!

I am proud to announce the availability of Sugar on a Stick v.3, code-named Mirabelle. More information about Sugar on a Stick, including download and installation details, are available.

Changes in Sugar on a Stick since the last release (v.2 Blueberry):

Sugar version 0.88. The most recent release of the Sugar Learning Platform features support for 3G connections, increased accessibility, and better integration with our Activity Portal allowing students and teachers to update their sticks with additional Activities. More information about the 0.88 release of Sugar is available.

Customize your own remix of Sugar on a Stick. You'll notice that v.3 Mirabelle has a smaller Activity selection than its predecessors, Blueberry and Strawberry. We realized we'll never be able to create an Activity selection suitable for all deployments - instead, we've chosen to include and support a core set of basic, teacher-tested Activities in the default image, and invite deployments to use this as a base on which to build a customized Activity selection for their classrooms. Instructions on how to do this are available.

Sugar on a Stick is now a Fedora Spin. After two prior releases of being based on the Fedora distribution, Sugar on a Stick has recognized by the Fedora Project as an official Spin. This ties us more closely to Fedora's release cycle and gives us resources from their engineering and marketing teams, which extends the reach of Sugar on a Stick and makes the project itself more sustainable. In exchange, users of Fedora have access to an easily deployable implementation of the Sugar Platform; it's a great example of a mutually beneficial upstream - downstream relationship.

The biggest difference in v.3 of Sugar on a Stick has been in its release processes and engineering sustainability; it's now much easier for new contributors to get involved. We continue to move towards our long-term vision of bringing stability and deployability to Sugar's personalized learning environment, and invite all interested parties to join us.

If you'd like to contribute to the next version, due for release in early November, join us at our Contributors Portal. All types of contributions are welcome, from the technical to the pedagogical, and we're happy to teach what we know and learn what you have to share.

Thank you especially to the Sugar on a Stick team and all the people involved for their awesome work on this release!

Sebastian Dziallas Sugar on a Stick Project Lead

CVS branches for F-11 closed
Dennis Gilmore announced :

Since Fedora 13 was released today new CVS branches for F-11 will not be allowed. The policy in effect means that F-11 is now in a maintenance only cycle, with EOL fast approaching. The EOL date was set to June 25th by FESCo.

Dennis

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.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General
Michael Tiemann thanked Google for VP8 and WebM, the royalty free, newly opened (standard) video codec.

John Palmieri continued the discussion about VP8/WebM and the problem that software patents may *still* pose to supposedly patent-free codecs.

Michel Salim noticed that the Free Software Foundation Europe's logo involves a cross, and compared the FSFE to certain Christian ideals.

Kyle Baker wants to make Linux a better place for artists and designers. "In order to make Fedora grow in to an OS that looks as good as it functions, we need to better bridge these worlds of design and development. The open source community can not do this alone. We need help from everyone who has colored a pretty picture or dreamt of doing so."

Toshio Kuratomi discussed some of the issues and bottlenecks involved with getting people involved in the Fedora infrastructure process.

Máirín Duffy announced that Fedora Board elections are open up soon, though by the time you read this, it may already be too late. Included are links to information about each candidate.

Sami Wagiaalla linked to an article by Stormy Peters titled "12 tips to getting things done in open source". "Most people used to the proprietary software world, with no experience in open source software, are amazed that anything gets done. (And lots gets done in the open source, way more than in most proprietary software companies!) And people new to open source are usually at a loss as to where to start. Often they come with a great idea, tell a couple of people who confirm it’s a great idea, and then … well, and then they don’t know what to do and the great idea fades."

Ben Boeckel showed off a ZSH with version control system (git/CVS/SVN) integration built in to the prompt, similar to Jesus Rodriguez's "git branch in shell prompt".

Marketing
In this section, we cover the happenings for Fedora Marketing Project from 2010-05-19 to 2010-05-25.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

Mel Chua gave a call for help on screenshots for the one release notes which some days later resulted in a awesome work

Garland Binns has keep up with the Keyword optimizations for our web pages. Paul Frields reminded us to use the short links for tracking hits to our web pages

As usual, every Tuesday there is marketing meeting, and its logs are avaliable

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

Fedora 13 released with open 3D drivers and Python 3 stack (Ars Technica)
Kara Schlitz forwarded an article from Ars Technica from 2010-05-26:

"I tested Fedora 13 myself to see how it compares to the previous version. It's a fairly solid release, certainly one of the better offerings from Fedora that I've seen in a while. The improvements relative to version 12 are somewhat modest, but compelling enough to motivate an upgrade. The general level of fit and finish has increased since the previous version. After spending several hours with Fedora 13, my conclusion is that the new hat is a good fit."

The full post is available.

Fedora 13 Linux "Goddard" Takes Flight - (CIO Update)
Kara Schlitz posted links to a posting originally appearing in InternetNews.com in CIO Update this week. The article quotes an interview with Fedora Project leader, Paul W. Frields, and highlights some of the significant features in the new release. The article finishes with:

"The new Fedora 13 release comes as Red Hat is ramping up its development effort for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL). While Fedora benefits from contributions made by Red Hat staffers, Frields doesn't think that the Fedora Project has been starved for resources as a result of RHEL 6 development.

"We get a lot of support from Red Hat as a sponsor and from Red Hat engineers because they really look at Fedora as being an intrinsic part of their jobs," Frields said. "Making things work well in Fedora makes things better for Red Hat in the future versions of RHEL." "

The full post is available

Rock it (The H Open - UK)
Kara Schlitz posted links to an overview of the feature set of Fedora 13:

"With its modern open source drivers often developed mainly by Red Hat/Fedora developers, a quite recent kernel and a generally very current and in many places sophisticated set of components, Fedora 13 once again lives up to its reputation of being a cutting-edge distribution which field tests new technologies and programs before other distributions follow suit. Nevertheless, even the pre-release version of Fedora 13 has worked without major problems on several test systems in the past few weeks.

However, the tests also demonstrated Fedora's peculiarities which are already familiar from previous versions and caused by the distribution's modern software range as well as its exclusive focus on open source software. These include a rather tiresome installation of the NVIDIA drivers and the incompatibility with AMD's proprietary drivers – neither of which is Fedora's responsibility, but many a user might not see it this way. Despite such inconveniences and probably especially because of its comprehensive and current software range, Fedora has attracted a stable and apparently growing fan base and user community. "

The full article is available.

Fedora 13 – Linux for Applephobes (The Register - UK)
Kara Schlitz posted links to an article from The Register this week that offers some comparison between Fedora 13 and recent Ubuntu releases. The article finishes with:

"Fedora has long had a reputation as the Linux you use when you grow up, when you get more sophisticated, and Fedora 13 is no different. Fedora 13 might eschew the flash of Ubuntu in favor of the more serious, but it still packs some useful, new features and applications while being every bit as easy to use.

If Ubuntu is uncomfortable because it leaves you feeling a bit like you're sharing ideals with Apple, take Fedora 13 for a spin. "

The full post is available

Red Hat releases Fedora 13 (v3.co.uk)
Kara Schlitz posted links to a concise review of some Fedora 13 highlights, including:

"Improvements include a smaller installation process, thanks to Fedora's Anaconda installer which has been designed to better handle storage devices and partitioning.

Fedora will automatically offer a driver installation prompt when the user plugs in a printer, for example, while improved colour management tools make it easier to print and produce high quality images.

Fedora 13 can be used in conjunction with a variety of Nvidia cards to enable 3D displays, the firm said, and new DisplayPort connectors are also supported on Nvidia and ATI cards.

The software now has extended support for stable PCI addresses and new shared network interface technology. Fedora 13 also features improvements in performance for KVM networking and large multi-processor systems."

The full post is available

Fedora 13 brims with updates: Lucky for some (The Inquirer - UK)
Kara Schlitz posted links to to a posting this week from the UK's The Inquirer that briefly highlights other aspects of Fedora 13:

"Developers working in mixed libraries (Python and C/C++) will have new tools it added, and will get more complex information when debugging applications, while a new Systemtap utility adds support for static probes, giving programmers better visibility over coding errors.

Python will be easier to debug, when working with gdb, and a parallel-installable Python 3 stack will let programmers write and test code for use in both Python 2.6 and Python 3 environments, it added.

Support for Netbeans Java EE6 has also been increased, and according to Fedora its NetBeans 6.8 integrated development environment is the first IDE to offer complete support for the entire Java EE 6 specification. IDEA Community Edition support is also featured.

Some experienced users, frustrated with Fedora as is, may appreciate the redesign to the user account tool and accounts dialog and accounts service test packages, which the group said would make it easier to do things like configure personal information, make a personal profile picture or icon, generate a strong passphrase, and set up login options.

Anyone attending the 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in late June in Boston can take away Fedora 13 on a free USB key."

The full post is available

Seven Reasons to Upgrade to Fedora 13 (Linux.com)
Kara Schlitz forwarded an article by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier from Linux.com last week on the final days before Fedora 13's release:

"Fedora 13 is right around the corner. Code-named "Goddard," the Fedora 13 release sports tons of updates from Fedora 12 and some really exciting new features that will have Linux power users running for their CD burners. You'll find everything from better printer support to experimental 3D support for Nvidia cards and filesystem rollback. Ready to roll up your sleeves? Let's take a look at the best of Fedora 13. Fedora's focus is slightly different than Ubuntu, openSUSE and some other Linux distributions. The project is focused on  emphasizing software freedom and being first to innovate and ship new features. While Fedora isn't the most polished Linux distro you'll find, it's one of the most exciting to use. If you're on Fedora 12, we've got seven reasons you should be thinking about upgrading to Fedora 13 now or when it's officially released late this month."

The full post is available

Oh My Goddard! An Early Look at Fedora 13 (Linux Magazine)
Kara Schlitz forwarded Linux Magazine's recent preview of Fedora 13 from last week:

"Fedora 13 is on the way and while it innovates in its own right, it also borrows some major features from other distros such as Ubuntu and Mandriva. This is looking to be yet another great release from the Fedora community!

It might not have as much bling as Ubuntu, but Fedora still has a lot to offer. While the former focuses primarily on making life easier for new users (and generally does a great job at that), Fedora has been concentrating on the underlying technology and making the best possible entirely free operating system.

. ..

The effort that the community continues to put into each and every day truly makes for great, feature-full releases. To you we must say thank you - we appreciate all of your hard work! If you’re a user who’s never tried Fedora, why not give this exciting new release a try? It might not have as much bling as Ubuntu, but it’s a rock solid release based on the best free software has to offer."

The full post is available

Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Fedora Ambassador Day North America held
Fedora Ambassador Day North America, a three-day event, was held on May 21-23 in Ames, Iowa, on the campus of Iowa State University. Among the topics discussed and decided on during the event were changes in the North American Ambassadors program including: changes included publicizing opportunities for non-ambassadors to promote Fedora at non-digital events; streamlining and creating an event owner checklist; discussion of policy of handling Ambassador funding; doing away with Regional Ambassador titles and streamlining the swag inventory system.

The following blogs, starting with Dave Nalley's comprehensive report, detail the happenings at the event:

David Nalley's blog can be found here.

Larry Cafiero's blog can be found here.

Max Spevack's blog can be found here.

Campus Ambassadors up and running
The Fedora Project's Campus Ambassadors program is up and running, and is looking for participants. If you're a high school or college student who wants to help promote Fedora on your campus, this is the place for you.

For more information, visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Campus_Ambassadors

Let us know about your Fedora 13 activities
Fedora 13 has now launched and Ambassadors are encouraged to hold release events. If you are planning to hold an event, let Fedora Weekly News know. Drop a line to lcafiero=at=fedoraproject-dot-org with the details and we'll get it in FWN.

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Fedora 13 testing
The QA group spent the last two weeks completing Fedora 13 testing and documentation. Following the one week delay of the Fedora 13 release discussed in FWN 225, the team got down to testing the third release candidate. We were able to produce a full installation test matrix and desktop test results for GNOME and KDE, thanks to the contributions of many team members. With the help of these results, the group was able to confidently support the nomination of RC3 as the final Fedora 13 release compose at the 2010-05-18 go/no-go meeting. Finally, the group tested an updated preupgrade package for Fedora 12 which was being prepared in order to be ready for the final Fedora 13 public release date, to ensure that preupgrade-based upgrades from Fedora 12 would run smoothly.

Fedora 13 QA Retrospective
At the 2010-05-17 weekly meeting, James Laska reminded the group that there was a page to gather thoughts about the QA process throughout the Fedora 13 cycle, including things that had gone well, things which had not gone so well, and ideas for future enhancements to the QA process.

Making QA sexy
At the same meeting, Adam Miller initiated a heroic attempt to achieve the improbable: making QA work sexy. Adam suggested providing customized swag for top QA contributors, such as a special QA group t-shirt. Others were thinking of ways to identify top contributors. James Laska suggested looking at Bodhi feedback. Will Woods thought about a way for developers to nominate testers and bug reporters who had made significant contributions.

Triage scripting
At the 2010-05-18 Bugzappers weekly meeting, Matej Cepl mentioned that he was rewriting his browser scripts to assist the process of triaging, and would be presenting on the topic at GUADEC on 2010-07-28. He explained that "the idea is a) to propagate existence of the scripts around among developers, b) to make them compatible with multiple instances and making upstream ... I have somebody working on something similar for (Mozilla)".

AutoQA
James Laska proposed an email update instead of a weekly meeting for 2010-05-24. In his email, he noted that a new version of AutoQA was due, which would include backlinks from test results to the test logs , and the ability to subscribe to test results for a specific package. Replying, Kamil Paral noted that his package sanity tests were now working "for the most basic cases" and he was now looking into sandboxing the testing via libvirt. Will Woods reported that he was continuing to work on a watcher script for noticing Bodhi updates (as part of the dependency check tests), and hoped to have the post-bodhi-update hook "up and running by the end of this week".

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Problems with Guide Submissions
Members from various translation teams have reported about difficulties that they were facing while submitting translations for Guides with multiple files, particularly the Installation Guide, Installation Quick Start Guide and Wireless Guide. Some translators have requested for a feature to submit multiple files in an archive format to avoid the current problems like timeouts a that they are facing on translate.fedoraproject.org.

Changes in Fedora Website Pages
Due to changes in the design of the docs.fedoraproject.org website, a number of navigational links were altered, which needed to be updated in the Fedora Website pages. At present, Ricky Zhou from the Fedora Website team has created a script to automatically replace the older links with appropriate new ones for the language on the build pages. The URLs for the translated versions would be included in the .PO files after the release of Fedora 13.

Fedora 13 Tasks for the Week
John Poelstra informed the list about the upcoming tasks for Fedora 13. Translation of the nightly builds of the F13 Release Notes were scheduled to be completed on 0-day before the release of Fedora 13.

New Members in FLP
Ahmed Mohamed Araby (Arabic) recently joined the Fedora Localization Project.

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

 * aria2-1.9.3-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041753.html
 * gnustep-base-1.18.0-9.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041716.html
 * krb5-1.7.1-10.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041615.html
 * cacti-0.8.7f-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041864.html
 * pidgin-2.7.0-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041812.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * aria2-1.9.3-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041754.html
 * gnustep-base-1.18.0-9.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041702.html
 * krb5-1.7.1-9.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041654.html
 * openssl-1.0.0-4.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041887.html
 * html2ps-1.0-0.4.b5.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041883.html
 * cacti-0.8.7f-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041880.html
 * pidgin-2.7.0-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041846.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * aria2-1.9.3-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041758.html
 * gnustep-base-1.18.0-9.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041676.html
 * krb5-1.6.3-31.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041645.html
 * cacti-0.8.7f-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041896.html
 * html2ps-1.0-0.3.b5.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041867.html
 * pidgin-2.7.0-2.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041803.html

KDE
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora KDE Special Interests Group.

Contributing Writer: Ryan Rix

KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 coming to kde-redhat/unstable
Rex Dieter has begun pushing builds of KDE SC 4.5 beta 1 to the KDE-RedHat unstable repositories for Fedora 13. KDE SC 4.5 brings many new changes across the entire Software Compilation. While there is currently no official changelog, the 4.5 Feature Plan gives an overview of the new features that are going to hit the kde-redhat/unstable repositories. Dieter will not be pushing Fedora 12 builds until beta 2 or possibly RC1.

If you are interested in testing the KDE SC 4.5 beta, you can find instructions on how to enable the repository at the kde-redhat homepage. Please note that this release may have many bugs. Please report them under the Rawhide component in bugzilla or to rdieter in #fedora-kde on irc.freenode.net.

New VLC-based phonon backend available
Amarok developer Mark Kretschmann has been working with the VideoLan team, developers of the VLC media player to work on a new Phonon backend which uses VLC. Not only does this create a cross platform Phonon backend as VLC has been successfully ported to Mac OS X and Windows, but it is far more stable than existing VLC backends.

Rex Dieter has built a version of VLC which is compatible with this backend, along with the backend itself in the KDE-RedHat unstable repository for testing on Fedora 12 and Fedora 13. If you are interested in testing this new backend, you can find instructions on how to enable the repository at the kde-redhat homepage. Install the phonon-backend-vlc package and set it as the primary Backend in System Settings->Multimedia->Backend.

Special topic: Fedora Summer Coding
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Summer Coding 2010 program.

Contributing Writer: Karsten Wade

Program quiet while mentors work
This week the mentors for Fedora Summer Coding 2010 are working via private discussion list. The mentors have these responsibilities:


 * Advocate for their own proposal(s)
 * Help reach consensus about all proposals
 * Participate in ordering accepted proposals so the program can offer funding to the top selections.

With over 40 proposals submitted, competition is very strong with a range of proposals but only a few being accepted, and even fewer funded. Mentors are scheduled to announce the accepted and funded proposals by the end of the week.