FWN/Issue225

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 225 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 225 for the week ending May 12, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This week's issue kicks off with Fedora In the News, offering coverage of Fedora in the trade press over the past week. Stories include coverage of Fedora 14 naming and Fedora 13 highlights and features. In Ambassador news, coverage of Fedora's participation in a recent FOSS event in Greece. In Quality Assurance news, details on the latest Fedora 13 testing processes and results, and reports on two Test Days on Preupgrade Kit and Xfce. In Translation news, details on a discovered i18n bug in Anaconda, various translation activities for packages and nine new members of the Fedora Localization Project for Brazilian Portuguese, German, Czech, Greek and Slovak languages. In Design team news, updates on Fedora 13 readiness items such as media art and starting the Fedora 14 process. Security Advisories covers security-related patches released in the past week for currently supported versions of Fedora. This week's issue is completed with more great updates on the Fedora Summer Coding project, including upcoming deadlines, new sponsor details, and an updated FAQ. Read on with FWN 225!

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

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

What Will Fedora 14 Linux be Named? (InternetNews.com)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded a post on the process of choosing a name for the next version of Fedora:

"Some Linux distributions are named by benevolent-dictators-for-life (Ubuntu). In the case of Fedora, the choice of distro name is one that is voted on (and suggested) by the community."

The full post is available

Nearing The Release Of Fedora 13 (Phoronix)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article last week from Phoronix:

"The screenshots you see in this article are taken from a Fedora 13 nightly snapshot via compose on 2010-05-06 and represent what the final Fedora 13 "Goddard" experience should look like. Some of our favorite features for Fedora 13 include Btrfs system rollback support, Nouveau's Classic Mesa and Gallium3D drivers being readily available, Anaconda installer improvements, better DisplayPort support for open-source graphics drivers, the GNOME 2.30 desktop (and KDE 4.4 too), many package updates, and NetworkManager improvements.

Going forward, the codename for Fedora 14 will be announced next week and developers will quickly be turning their attention to this next Red Hat release. The final release of Fedora 14 is tentatively scheduled for release on the 26th of October, but we would be surprised if it is not pushed back into early November per the usual Fedora milestone delays. Fedora 14 is likely to ship with GNOME 3.0, KDE 4.5, the Linux 2.6.35/2.6.36 kernel, GCC 4.5, and X.Org Server 1.9."

The full post is available

Fedora 13 to be Released in Two Weeks (BestTechie.net
Rahul Sundaram forwarded

"Among the features that I am looking forward to seeing in the 13.0 release of Fedora is the integration of a feature vastly similar to Apple’s Time-Machine. This implementation will give users the ability to back up their files and operating system onto another partition, and boot into said snapshot if necessary.  This backup system will also give the users the ability to create a snapshot whenever a package is installed via Yum (the package manager used by Fedora), ensuring a much more stable operating system.  Further, I feel that the implementation of this feature suggests that the Fedora distribution, and many other distributions for that matter, are beginning to become more and more user friendly.  This is important because down the road it could lead to a Linux gaining higher market-shares, and potentially being used by a greater number of home users."

The full post is available

Fedora 13 Expands Linux Virtualization
Jonathan Nalley forwarded a post on Fedora 13's virtualization enhancements:

"Virtualization technology has long found a home in Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution. Ever since Fedora 4 emerged in 2005, virtualization technologies have continued to advance in the distro and that remains the case with the upcoming Fedora 13 release set for later this month."

The full article is available.

Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Fedora present in Greece events
Christos Bacharachis reports on Fedora's participation in the recent Fosscomm 2010 event in April in Thessaloniki, Greece. Fosscom is the largest annual FOSS conference in Greece and, according to Christos, the Greek Fedora team was there and had a great time and presence.

This year the Fedora booth was much bigger than in 2009, with seven ambassadors/contributors, one contributor from the marketing team, one female translator "and one beautiful girl who is helping continuously fedora without being registered anywhere," according to Christos. About 500 people attended this year, giving the Fedora team a wonderful chance to inform people about Fedora, our new Greek Fedora forum and how to become a Fedora contributor.

Christos' blog can be found here.

Also, Giannis Konstantinidis reports that he gave a presentation to about 30 attendees at his school in Thessaloniki, Greece. Giannis started with a presentation talking about Fedora, which turned into a small workshop in the school's computer laboratory.

Photos can be found here.

Giannis' blog report, in English, 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
With the release of Fedora 13 Goddard right around the corner, 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 has spent the last two weeks almost entirely engaged in Fedora 13 testing, with the release cycle nearing its end. Testing of the test compose (TC1) began on 2010-04-29, with as usual installation and desktop validation tests.

Thanks to this testing and also more general long-term Fedora 13 use, a large pool of release blocking bugs built up, with over 60 release blocking bugs needing to be addressed before final release could be considered. At the regular blocker bug review meetings, the group - along with the development and release engineering groups - gradually tackled this set of bugs until the list was eventually cleared for the RC1 release on 2010-05-07, only a day behind the planned schedule.

RC1 testing - installation and desktop - was generally positive, but two issues led to the release of a minimally-changed RC2. RC2 installation and desktop testing was again mostly positive, but identified a bug with NFS installation, which at the 2010-05-12 go/no-go meeting was agreed to be potentially significant enough to delay the final release. The slip was announced on 2010-05-12; a RC3 build will now be provided by the release engineering team for QA testing during the next few days and, we hope, validation for release on 2010-05-25.

Test Days
The final two Test Days of the Fedora 13 release cycle were Preupgrade Test Day on Thursday 2010-04-29, followed by Xfce Test Day on Friday 2010-04-30. Rui He provided a recap of the preupgrade Test Day, reporting that "many bugs/problems were found out in different conditions during preupgrading." Only one dedicated Xfce enthusiast - thank you, Nathan! - provided a full set of Xfce test results, but these indicated that everything was working correctly.

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Anaconda bug
Pablo Martin-Gomez informed about an i18n related bug in Anaconda, that prevented the 'Previous/Next' buttons due to overlapping of text. Translators have been requested to check if the bug affects their language and to correct them for the next build of Anaconda.

Fedora Website Translation Issues
Noriko Mizumoto reported about some strings from the Fedora Website pages that were missing from the .PO files. It was discovered that these strings were not marked for translation earlier. Sijis Aviles corrected the error and also fixed some incorrect strings.

System-Config-Printer Branched
A new branch, 1.2.x has been created for the system-config-printer module. This branch would be used for Fedora 13.

Spacewalk Added to translate.fedoraproject.org
The Spacewalk project has now been added to translate.fedoraproject.org. The project contains multiple files that are required to be translated.

SSSD Update
The maintainer of SSSD, Stephen Gallagher announced the upcoming release of SSSD 1.2.0 which would require updates to the translation, due to new and changed strings. The module is available for translation on www.transifex.net.

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.

Updates in the Release Notes
John J. McDonough announced a few changes that have been made to the Fedora 13 Release Notes. This adds a new section and fixes some typos which were breaking some links in the document.

New Members in FLP
Wolfgang Marcos (Brazilian Portuguese), Nelson Marques (Portuguese) , Nikos Vasileiadis(Greek) , Fabio Abreu (Brazilian Portuguese) ,  Julian Weißgerber  (German) , Tomas Hykel (Czech) , Miroslav Suchý (Czech) ,  Xaver Hellauer (German) ,  Jan Ferko (Slovak) joined the Fedora Localization Project recently.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Media Art
Paul Frields inquired about the status of one of the last pieces needed for the Fedora 13 release, media art "Who's got the ball on this one?" a task who was already accomplished by Alexander Smirnov. Clint Savage noticed the wiki is not updated and the design needs more tweaks and Alexander quickly solved the problem.

Starting the Fedora 14 Process
With the work for Fedora 13 almost done, and the codename for Fedora 14 selected, is the time to look forward to the next release and Martin Sourada announced the opening of the concept submission stage "so the codename for F14 has been decided -- Laughlin, so it's the right time to let the F14 Artwork's ball rolling". Onyeibo Oku, Robyn Bergeron , Máirín Duffy , Nelson Marques and Henrik Heigl provided insight about the name meaning, from physics scientists, to Irishmen, to gambling cities to Vikings and more.

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

 * couchdb-0.10.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041255.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * couchdb-0.10.2-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041183.html
 * irssi-0.8.15-1.fc12- http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041054.html
 * amsn-0.98.3-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041046.html
 * sahana-0.6.3-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/040962.html
 * nss_db-2.2-47.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/040881.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * couchdb-0.10.2-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041168.html
 * amsn-0.98.3-2.fc11- http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/041079.html
 * nss_db-2.2-46.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-May/040907.html

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

Contributing Writer: Karsten Wade

Deadlines for ideas and proposals approaching
The schedule for Summer Coding 2010 has two important upcoming deadlines.


 * Mentors must have all ideas in by 13 May.
 * Students must have all proposals in by 20 May.

In addition, the deadline for sponsors to pledge funding is 21 May. This gives the mentors a week to decide which projects to fund based on the sponsor pool available.

Program signs new community sponsors
In an email to the Summer Coding SIG, Karsten Wade wrote, "Indifex (http://indifex.com) / Transifex (http://transifex.net) have signed on as community sponsors. Indifex is a company that was created to initially develop Transifex, the web-based translation management interface.  We use it at http://translate.fedoraproject.org , as do many other projects (Moblin/MeeGo, XFCE, LXDE, and so on.)  Many more projects host on transifex.net.  The initial coding work for Transifex was done by Dimitris Glezos as a Fedora GSoC project in 2007 , further code was developed under later GSoC projects for Fedora (with Dimitris mentoring one), and this year Transifex has GSoC students of their own .  The Indifex team are 2/3rds former GSoC students and now mentors.  I'm proud they are interested in supporting Fedora Summer Coding."

In addition, JBoss.org is another community sponsor. A community sponsor is, "any other FOSS project that lends support to our program," Karsten wrote. For example, as a community sponsor JBoss.org is "growing the breadth and depth of our ideas page, providing mentoring expertise and access to upstream projects, (and) there is also an FSC 2010 banner prominently displayed on the http://jboss.org front page ."

FAQ updated
Over the course of the program so far, the SIG has compiled a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ). These are answers to real questions that have arisen on the mailing list and IRC channel, regarding both the 2010 session and the program overall.

Search for sponsors continues
The search for sponsors continues, as the funding pool directly affects how many proposals can be funded.

Karsten Wade wrote, "If you work for or with an organization, business, foundation, non-profit, etc. that benefits from a better Fedora Project … consider if you have some budget to help fund a student proposal.