FWN/Issue226

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 226 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 226 for the week ending May 19, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This week's issue kicks off with announcements from the Fedora Project, including details on the third Community Gaming Session, news of Jon Stanley joining the Fedora Project Board, and a series of upcoming Town Hall meetings for Fedora elections. In news from the Fedora Planet, a trip report from the Linux Audio Conference 2010 in Utrecht, news from Greg DeKoenigsberg's exciting new opportunities, and a continuation of discussion of target audiences for Fedora. We have lots to offer in Fedora In the News, including several more Fedora 13 reviews and experience pieces in the trade press and an exclusive interview with Paul W. Frields. Translation gets us up to date on Fedora 13 activities including a review of upcoming tasks, documentation translation and a new version of Publican. From the Design Team, updates on Fedora 14 supplemental wallpapers, discussion of Fedora 13 release party posters, and discussion of an archive for the Fedora Project media. This week's issue is complete with Security Advisories, overviewing the security-related software packages released during the past week.

Unfortunately, as Kamisamanou Burgess is busy with study, the audio version of FWN - FAWN - is on hold until early May. You can still listen to old issues on the Internet Archive, though. 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

Community Gaming Session 3 - armacycles-ad
Bruno Wolff III announced :

"There will be another Fedora Community Gaming session this weekend. We will be playing armacyles-ad which is a light cycle game.

We will be starting at: UTC: 1700 Saturday May 22, 2010 EDT: 1pm Saturday May 22, 2010

The game has short rounds, so drop ins and outs should be easy to accommodate. 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 pregame meet up. We'll also use in-game chat and I'll have Fedora Talk set up as well.

A bit more information is at ."

Board appointment
Paul W. Frields announced a new appointment to the Fedora ProjectBoard:

"I'm pleased to announce that Jon Stanley will join the Fedora Project Board. He'll be seated along with the other newly elected and appointed Board members at the first meeting in June, which is an IRC public meeting.  Jon brings several years of experience with the Fedora Project and also with FESCo, and is presently involved most closely with our Infrastructure team.

As part of the normal Board succession process, a Board appointment is made before elections for the elected Board seats take place. Elections will begin on 2010-05-20 UTC 0001, as shown on the Fedora wiki's Elections page. All community members are encouraged to cast votes for the Board and for FESCo up until the elections close on 2010-05-26 UTC 2359. After the end of elections, a final appointment will be made to the remaining Board seat."

FESCo and Fedora Project Board Elections - Town Hall Schedule
Robyn Bergeron announced upcoming town hall meetings regarding upcoming Fedora Project elections:

"As many of you know, the FESCo and Board elections are right around the corner.

In each election cycle, a series of town hall meetings is conducted to give the community an opportunity to ask the candidates questions - and hear their answers - on IRC. The town halls for each election are held twice, to allow for participation by community members in varying time zones.

The town hall schedule is as follows:

Friday, May 14, 2010 - FESCo town hall - 16:00 UTC (12:00pm US Eastern)

Monday, May 17, 2010 - Fedora Project Board town hall - 00:00 UTC (8:00pm US Eastern, -SUNDAY-, May 16)

Monday, May 17, 2010 - Fedora Project Board town hall - 17:00 UTC (1:00pm US Eastern)

Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - FESCo town hall - 02:00 UTC (10:00pm US Eastern, -TUESDAY-, May 18)

The town hall schedule, as well as important information about how you can participate in the town halls via IRC, can be seen on the wiki at.

For more details on the elections and candidates, please visit.

I'm hoping for an excellent community turnout for these town halls - I encourage everyone to join in and participate.

-Robyn"

2010-05-18 - F-13-Final go / no go meeting recap
James Laska sent log summaries of the Fedora 13 final go/no go meeting:

Meeting started by jlaska at 23:58:40 UTC. The full logs are available

Meeting summary

 * Waiting for critical mass (jlaska, 23:59:07)

* The purpose is to decide whether the Final release criteria have been met (jlaska, 00:04:10) * LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Final_Release_Criteria (jlaska, 00:04:16)
 * Why are we here? (jlaska, 00:03:40)

* LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=587627  (adamw,    00:08:41) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=592345  (jlaska,    00:09:44) * 1 remaining preupgrade bug -- fix needed by F-13 GA (jlaska,    00:13:21) * AGREED: F-12 preupgrade packages don't impact decision to go / no go   (jlaska, 00:19:17) * Validation test summary - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-May/091001.html (jlaska, 00:20:34) * AGREED: F-13-RC3 meets Final release criteria - Go for launch! (jlaska, 00:24:58)
 * Go or No Go? (jlaska, 00:04:42)

* LINK:
 * What's next? (jlaska, 00:25:17)

http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2010/05/fedora-13-delay-fixes-linux-gr.html < -- who is this guy? (ender2070, 00:27:37) * ACTION: jlaska to sync up with hughsi to see if he needs more testing on F-12 preupgrade (jlaska, 00:29:40)

Meeting ended at 00:30:47 UTC.

Action Items
preupgrade
 * jlaska to sync up with hughsi to see if he needs more testing on F-12

Action Items, by person
* jlaska to sync up with hughsi to see if he needs more testing on   F-12 preupgrade * (none)
 * jlaska
 * **UNASSIGNED**

People Present (lines said)

 * jlaska (69)
 * adamw (27)
 * Oxf13 (17)
 * ender2070 (5)
 * fenris02 (5)
 * MiKylie (5)
 * zodbot (3)
 * stickster (3)
 * gholms (2)
 * poelcat (2)
 * nirik (1)
 * hno (1)
 * McGiwer (1)

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. This edition of the Planet Fedora covers the past two weeks.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General
Venkatesh Hariharan wrote an article entitled "Open Source offers more to CIOs" for IT Next magazine in India's "Moneywise" column.

Lennart Poettering attended the Linux Audio Conference 2010 in Utrecht and came away with some interesting ideas about how to make the two work well together. "even many pro audio folks are not sure what Jack does that PulseAudio doesn't do and what PulseAudio does that Jack doesn't do; why they are not competing, why you cannot replace one by the other, and why merging them (at least in the short term) might not make immediate sense. In other words, why millions of phones on this world run PulseAudio and not Jack, and why a music studio running PulseAudio is crack."

Lennart also mentioned that systemd now has its own website, mailing list, Bugzilla component and new git repositories.

David Lutterkort offered a top for using augeas to add users to a group.

Richard W.M. Jones shared a number of tips, including how to collect and use core dumps, using guestfish to extract ISO images without needing to be root and using git's cherry-pick carefully apply individual fixes or patches to a codebase.

Daniel Berrange wrote a series of articles on provisioning KVM virtual machines on iSCSI, both using QNAP and virt-manager and "the hard way" (without).

The Red Hat Press Office posted a piece giving an overview of some of the major changes being introduced to the kernel as part of RHEL 6. Lubomir Rintel added a request for people to help test the beta.

Greg DeKoenigsberg has decided to leave Red Hat to join the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) as their CTO. Greg added "I’ll still be around Fedora, don’t worry about that; you can't get rid of me that easily."

Seth Vidal believes that he is one of the dissidents mentioned in Greg's outgoing blog post, and wrote about some of the ways in which these "dissidents" can be used to help or hinder Fedora.

Stephen Smoogen continued the discussion of "target audiences" in Fedora.

Jakub Hrozek explained how to use MALLOC_PERTURB_ to help find memory-management bugs.

Dan Williams wrote a D-Bus-for-beginners style writeup. "Every so often I get questions about D-Bus and I end up giving a mini-lesson on what D-Bus is and how it’s used. It took me a while to wrap my head around D-Bus long ago so I don’t expect everyone to pick up D-Bus like Yo-Yo Ma sight-reading.  So this is D-Bus, simplified."

Karel Zak described how Linux and its partitioning and file system creation tools handle hard disks 4096-byte sectors.

Karsten Wade applauded a post to the Fedora developer list about how to send sensible e-mails.

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

The five best things coming in Fedora 13 Linux (Computerworld)
Kara Schlitz forwarded an article from ComputerWorld from 2010-05-18:

"When Fedora 13, Goddard, is released on May 25, it's not going to be your usual Fedora Linux release. In the past, Fedora has been seen as a great Linux distribution for Linux experts. Paul W. Frields, the Fedora Project leader, told me though that this release is more new-user-friendly and that is no longer just for experienced Linux users. Based on my early look at this Red Hat community Linux distribution, I agree."

The full post is available.

Fedora 13 - Ready to roll (My Broadband - South Africa)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article last week from a South African blog:

"For desktop users there are a number of key additions in Fedora 13. Chief among these are the automatic print driver installations. Although there have long been print drivers available for Linux for a wide range of hardware, it has typically been difficult for inexperienced users to install these. Fedora 13 will now automatically offer to install appropriate drivers when a new printer is plugged in.

Fedora 13 also includes a number of desktop enhancements, including the Shotwell photo manager, Deja-dup backup software, the Pino Twitter/Identi.ca client and the Simple Scan scanning application."

The full post is available

QA: Fedora Project Lead Paul Frields on the "Grown Up" Distro (Linux.com)
Jonathan Nalley forwarded an interview with Fedora Project leader Paul W. Frields on Fedora 13:

"Henry Kingman today shares with the Linux.com community his exclusive interview with Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields. Frields goes into detail on the upcoming Fedora 13 release, his decision to transition out of the Project Leader position and how many contributors to Fedora are being paid by Red Hat, among many other topics. Grab a cup of coffee for this in-depth discussion."

The full article is available.

Clearing the Air About MeeGo (ITWorld)
Jonathan Nalley forwarded an article on the Fedora Project's relationship to MeeGo:

"And there's more evidence that the situation is not as dire as I painted earlier this week. Fedora Community Manager Paul Frields got back to me this morning with a very detailed status update on how MeeGo fits within the Fedora Project. I'll just get out of the way and let you read the bulk of his reply:

The Fedora Project, and particularly our special interest group for small devices, the Fedora Mini SIG, has substantial interest in MeeGo as a next-generation platform. The Mini SIG is following the MeeGo work to see how we can integrate its revolutionary interface and other development to provide an enhanced user experience for small devices in Fedora. This is made easier by the high degree of remixability and upstream compatibility that Fedora maintains..."

The full post is available

Fedora 13 gives off plain vibe, but offers power and stability under the hood (ITWorld)
Ryan Rix forwarded on experience using Fedora 13 since initial release:

"I have been using Fedora 13 since the initial alpha release, and have been very impressed with the stability of this platform to date. And I don't have to make allowances for this being a pre-release product: I can honestly say that I have never seen a more stable alpha-to-beta series of releases in a Linux distro. I have seen just two -- count 'em -- two bugs, both minor, and both gone now, so I won't even detail them. That seems a very small point, but to me that points to a level of craftsmanship that shows up in other aspects of this distribution."

The full post is available

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Fedora 13 Release Delayed
As a result of the 1 week delay in the Fedora 13 Release, the documentation and website related tasks have also been delayed accordingly. Hence, an additional week is now available for the translation tasks related to these projects.

Upcoming Fedora 13 Tasks
John Poelstra informed the list about the upcoming tasks for Fedora 13. At present, translation of the nightly builds of the F13 Release Notes .POT files and GA Announcement are on schedule. However, Noriko Mizumoto pointed out that the schedule may need to be revised due to the slippage in the Fedora 13 Release date.

Documentation Page Translation
The Fedora Documentation website, docs.fedoraproject.org can now be translated. The welcome page and other components are available under the docsite-publican module on translate.fedoraproject.org.

New Documents Available for Translation
SELinux FAQ, Managing Confined Services Guide , and Wireless Guide are now available for translation via translate.fedoraproject.org.

Publican 1.6.3 Release
Ruediger Landmann announced the release of Publican 1.6.3. This is a bug fix release and addresses several issues related to tags and string division. However, considering the upcoming release of Fedora 13, the Guide owners have been advised not to refresh the .POT files of their books with publican 1.6.3, as this would break the books.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Fedora 14 Supplemental Wallpapers
With Fedora 13 almost out of the door, is the time to start planning the next release, so Máirín Duffy proposed for this release cycle to take care about something that missed in Fedora 13 "We missed included supplemental wallpapers again in F13. I feel really badly about this. I think if we start looking for some early on as we also think about the default theme we'll be better on track to make sure we make it happen for F14" and Martin Sourada went further with the planning "I've added key milestones [1] for it (without exact dates yet) and added a respective section to the main F14 Artwork wiki page and created a sub-page for the submissions."

The Archive
Henrik Heigl proposed the Archive project "for some time we all working on tasks where we reuse templates, pictures, Textual templates, etc. for all kind of work. But there is no place where we keep that collected work, that snippets of small peaces that could be reused in other ways.[...] The idea is to collect these pieces out there in one place to reuse them for other work and not to invent the wheel new every time ;-)"

Fedora 13 Release Posters
Máirín Duffy reminded about one of the last remaining tasks for Fedora 13 "Is anyone interested in designing a release party poster for F13?" and provided samples from past releases and María Leandro started playing with mockups. Máirín proposed one derivative version as final.

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

 * dvipng-1.13-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041592.html
 * postgresql-8.4.4-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041559.html
 * texlive-2007-51.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041556.html
 * quake3-1.36-7.svn1783.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041470.html
 * qt-4.6.2-17.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041436.html
 * php-ZendFramework-1.10.4-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041375.html
 * mysql-5.1.46-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041322.html
 * xar-1.5.2-6.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041298.html
 * lighttpd-1.4.26-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041296.html
 * boa-0.94.14-0.15.rc21.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041285.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * kernel-2.6.32.12-115.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041594.html
 * dvipng-1.13-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041581.html
 * postgresql-8.4.4-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041579.html
 * texlive-2007-48.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041567.html
 * quake3-1.36-7.svn1783.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041396.html
 * qt-4.6.2-17.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041383.html
 * mysql-5.1.46-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041367.html
 * php-ZendFramework-1.10.4-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041344.html
 * mod_auth_shadow-2.2-8.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041340.html
 * lighttpd-1.4.26-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041307.html
 * xar-1.5.2-6.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041276.html
 * boa-0.94.14-0.15.rc21.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041271.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * postgresql-8.3.11-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041591.html
 * dvipng-1.13-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041587.html
 * texlive-2007-47.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041573.html
 * qt-4.6.2-17.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041432.html
 * php-ZendFramework-1.10.4-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041342.html
 * mysql-5.1.46-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041334.html
 * mod_auth_shadow-2.2-8.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041326.html
 * xar-1.5.2-6.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041305.html
 * boa-0.94.14-0.15.rc21.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041274.html
 * lighttpd-1.4.26-2.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041264.html