FWN/Issue167

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 167 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 167 for the week ending March 8th, 2009.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue167

This week Announcements links to some helpful "Fedora Classroom IRC Logs" including one on using. PlanetFedora big-ups several posts including David Lutterkort's explanation of how config file manipulation can be simplified using  to query. Marketing notes the latest meeting log. QualityAssurance reports that the last "Test Day" for Intel graphics chipsets was valuable and advertizes the next for XFCE. Developments summarizes the "Provenpackager Re-Seed" and watches aghast as the "Mono Conflagration Jumps to Blog". Artwork listens to some ideas about a "Theme Song". Virtualization reports the Xen "dom0 Kernel: Better, Still not Ready" and KVM "Snapshot Support Discussed".

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com will be replaced with  (with requisite kernel arch changes too).

Jef Spaleta asked : "How do we want casual users to do a Fedora Desktop install?" In other words, should Fedora be pushing new users towards DVD install media, or installable Live CDs?

Joseph Smidt wrote about the massive number of users downloading Fedora. According to the statistics, around 100,000 new users have started using Fedora 10 since Fedora 9 (based on unique IPs checking in using ).

Jeroen van Meeuwen responded to an earlier post (that may have lacked context) by explaining how certain dependency checks would be handled in  for ris-linux and Windows provisioning.

David Lutterkort explained how you can use  and XPath to easily and uniformly query a system's configuration files.

Bastien Nocera boasted about the new Gnome Volume Applet.

DVD with the  repository enabled resulted in a broken   due to a missing dependency on. Jud pointed out that although he could install the missing library from the DVD the situation would present a serious problem to anyone that tried "[...] a network install with updates [...] the result (a system without network access) can't be fixed without A) network access, or B) another Fedora image (also possibly requiring more network access)."

In answer to Jef Spaleta's questions Jud revealed that: "[libudev.so.0] doesn't seem to actually be installed by the stock F10 image. If I do a plain install (no updates), NetworkManager works fine.  Running a `yum update' then pulls down all the updates, as well as `Install libudev0'.  So at some point I suppose NetworkManager picked up a dependency on libudev0, but for some reason updating during the installation process doesn't pull this new package in." Kevin Kofler and Jesse Keating both pointed out that: "[T]he updates repo isn't the Everything repo. To really do a proper install with updates you have to enable both the Updates repo and the Everything repo." Kevin added that this was why the install from DVD with updates enabled was not an officially supported method.

Several people, including Thorsten Leemhuis, suggested that modifying the  installer to be aware of which repositories depend on each other would be useful. Jesse Keating was not averse to the idea as long as it could be done in a "[...] distro agnostic way. Avoiding hardcoded hacks specifically for Fedora is one of the goals of anaconda upstream."

Later Jeremy Katz explained that the thinking behind the installer ignoring unsatisfiable dependencies in such cases is to "[...] get someone installed and then let them clean up afterwards[.]"

with  as the default media-player in  some follow-up clarifications were made by parties to the discussion and the conflagration jumped between @fedora-devel and the personal blog of David Nielsen, the   ex-maintainer and perhaps the main force behind the Mono SIG.

Bill Nottingham put forward a concise time-line which attempted to show that the proposal had been handled in a straightforward and usual manner. Bill noted that the Desktop SIG had expressed a lack of enthusiasm early in the process and that the imminent beta-freeze meant that the decision had to be taken without further prolonged discussion.

AdamWilliamson suggested that because 's Microsoft links worried many F/OSS developers it would have been a good idea to address such concerns: "[...] explicitly rather than just pretend they don't exist in your initial proposal (the word 'Mono' does not actually occur a single time in the initial version of the Wiki page you posted)."

A question put by Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wondered whether there was anything preventing the Mono SIG from creating their own Fedora spin in which  was given pride of place as the default media-player. Rex Dieter confirmed that there were no obstacles on this path.

A proposal to adopt a Code of Conduct modeled upon Ubuntu's was made by Richard W.M. Jones. He also expressed regret that David was leaving Fedora and apparently moving to  as referenced by a blog entry. Reading the blog suggest that  seems more to David's taste although one comment does point out that Ubuntu "[...] head community people have been calling for volunteers to increase the work surrounding Mono and have a huge love for banshee and Canonical isn’t anti-mono since some of their new job postings desire Mono as a skill ."

Seth Vidal was among those who wondered specifically how such a code could be enforced and also where specifically the Fedora Project could be alleged to have engaged in misconduct on this issue. Reading David's blog seems to suggest both that any rudeness was privately exchanged and that his perception is that "[...] Mono isn't welcome in Fedora, and will always be a second class citizen[.]"

images of  using   as the development platform had been stymied by changes to. Jeremy added that even if this single change were reverted Christoph would need a newer  and   and more.

Later Jeremy clarified that the combination of  +   were complicated by   but that this had been addressed by recent work.

One complication is that  uses NEXTRELEASE even for updates to stable releases. After some confusion on this point LukeMacken posted that anyone wanting to change the behavior should file a ticket.

,, and. Start, stop, add or remove virtual devices, connect to a graphical or serial console, and see resource usage statistics for existing VMs on local or remote machines. Uses as the backend management API.

New features:
 * Redesigned 'New Virtual Machine' wizard (Jeremy Perry, Tim Allen, Cole Robinson)
 * Option to remove storage when deleting a virtual machine.
 * File browser for libvirt storage pools and volumes, for use when attaching storage to a new or existing guest.
 * Physical device assignment (PCI, USB) for existing virtual machines.
 * Bug fixes and minor improvements.

is a module that helps build and install  based virtual machines. It currently supports,   and   virtual machines. Package includes several command line utilities, including  (build and install new VMs) and   (clone an existing virtual machine).

This is largely a bug fix release.

support makes it into the vanilla, which should happen for 2.6.30, and then decide if   can be enabled and if the patches for full   support can safely be added without affecting ordinary operation."

"At the moment there are still things that are broken such as  support in some cases, and there are also Fedora patches that have been omitted because they were tricky to merge, so it is too early to start adding   support to official Fedora kernels."

has been restored , however a bug remained in  or.

windows guests, Matt McCowan created a checkpoint   function. "Modelled on the function it takes an optional script which it will execute (and pass the name of the domain as an argument) while the domain is paused, then resume the domain." Within this script, a backup of the guest domain could be created.

The patch was seen as too ad-hoc, and not accepted as-is.

Daniel Veillard commented "I think this can help administrators in a controlled situation, but I'm hoping a real snapshotting API will be possible at some point where goes though the list of storage resources used by the domain and properly make a snapshot using a storage API or return an error if that's not possible."

Daniel P. Berrange described what he would like to see. "In terms of API I think I'd like to see snapshotting available as part of a more generic save/restore API. I tend to think of the current API as providing 'unmanaged save/restore'". Libvirt does not track saved images, so does not know if a snapshot is available to be started at the restart of ."

"Thus I think the first step towards a general snapshot facility would be to provide an API for 'managed save/restore' where we explicitly track saved images." "With this, you could configure, so that when starting up, it" would "see if the guest was suspended before the previous host shutdown, and if so, then restore from that saved image automatically. Or make it skip autostart completely, if any save images exist, and allow an admin defined initscript to do auto restore from the save image."

QEMU driver to fully support memory ballooning. "Memory ballooning allows you to have your guest dynamically change it’s memory usage by evicting unused memory during runtime. This is a useful feature because it reduces the impact your guest can have on memory usage of your host by giving up unused memory back to the host."