FWN/Issue96

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 96 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 96[1] for the week of July 8th through July 14th 2007. The latest issue can always be found here[2] and RSS Feed can be found here[3].

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue96

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/LatestIssue

[3] http://fedoranews.org/cms/FWN/feed

Announcements
In this section, we cover announcements from various projects.

Contributing Writer: ThomasChung

The "new" Fedora Board
MaxSpevack announces in fedora-announce-list[1]

"We've just completed the first Fedora Board[2] succession process, and I wanted to take a moment to share the results with everyone. Staying on for another release cycle are SethVidal, BillNottingham, ChristopherBlizzard, and MattDomsch."

"Joining them are 5 new Board members: KarstenWade, DennisGilmore, ChristopherAillon, JefSpaleta, SteveDickson"

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2007-July/msg00005.html

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board

FESCo Elections -- voting open
BrianPepple announces in fedora-announce-list[1] ,

"Voting is now open for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee elections. All 13 seats are up for election.  The candidates are (in alphabetical order):"

(See the announcement for a list of candidates.)

"For details and some future plans of these fine people see:[2] "

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2007-July/msg00006.html

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SteeringCommittee/Nominations

Planet Fedora
In this section, we cover a highlight of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from world wide Fedora contributors.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Planet

Contributing Writers: ThomasChung

Attn: Content Management Geeks
KarstenWade points out in his blog[1] ,

"Now is the time to weigh in on the next generation of the Fedora Documentation Publishing Platform. JonathanSteffan is running this as his Summer of Code project."

"Our goal is to enable 10x the current number of people to be active publishers of formal Fedora content. Out goal is to make writing, editing, translating, and publishing content for Fedora fun, easy, and profitable. If you have any insights in to how we should define our custom workflow and how we might want to tweak the default workflow in Plone, please join the discussion[2] ."

[1] http://iquaid.livejournal.com/21006.html

[2] http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-docs-list

Fedora 8 themes - Round 1
NicuBuculei points out in his blog[1] ,

"Later today, 11 July, is the end date of the Round 1 in the 3 round process to create a new theme[2] for the next release, Fedora 8. The focus in the first round was to gather ideas, concepts, metaphors, which would be refined in the next two rounds. Here is what we got so far:"

(See a list of proposed themes in his blog)

[1] http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2007/07/fedora-8-themes-round-1.html

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F8Themes

RMLL07 : Alan Cox on fedora-fr booth
MaximeCarron points out in his blog[1] ,

"First and little post from RMLL[2] (Free Software World Meetings). It's a really great pleasure to have AlanCox on our booth."

(See two event photo from his blog)

[1] http://blog.fedora-fr.org/pingoomax/post/RMLL07-%3A-Alan-Cox-on-fedora-fr-booth

[2] http://www.rmll.info/

Editor's Note: More complete event photos are available at[1].

[1] http://carron.maxime.free.fr/fedora/photos/rmll07/

Marketing
In this section, we cover Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: ThomasChung

How’s Fedora 7 Faring?
RahulSundaram reports in fedora-marketing-list[1] ,

"It’s been about one month since the release of Fedora 7 and we thought it was time to give you a few updates."

"We’ve had over 300,000 installations of Fedora 7 in the first month since its release on May 31. That number is thus far pretty in-line with expectations, given that Fedora Core 6 received close to 400,000 installations in its first month, and we expect that people will wait a little while to upgrade their systems. Fedora keeps a statistics page[2] with information about the newest releases if you’d like to learn more."

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2007-July/msg00019.html

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics

Fedora 7 KDE spin and Akademy
RahulSundaram reports in fedora-marketing-list[1] ,

"Rex Dieter from the KDE SIG in Fedora gave a talk[2] about the Fedora 7 KDE spin Akademy, the KDE conference. Apparently, Fedora is the only major distribution planning to include KDE 4 by default in the next version."

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2007-July/msg00017.html

[2] http://akademy.kde.org/conference/talks/07.php

Editor's Note: Here is corrected link of the video[1] of his talk.

[1] http://home.kde.org/~akademy07/videos/1-20-Fedora_7_KDE_spin.ogg

Developments
In this section, we cover the problems/solutions, people/personalities, and ups/downs of the endless discussions on Fedora Developments.

http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

Contributing Writer: RahulSundaram

(Our regular contributor OisinFeeley is not available for this week. RahulSundaram is contributing for this week. If you follow fedora-devel-list closely and would like to contribute for next week, please contact ThomasChung. )

Video and Keymap Quirks
RichardHughes reports in fedora-devel-list[0] ,

"You might have heard about the HAL quirk site [1] for suspend and resume quirks before, but now we are collecting keymap quirks to make the special buttons such as multimedia keys and Fn function keys do the right thing."

"I've blogged about this yesterday[2], but I am asking for patches from the fedora development community. In this way we can make laptop special keys "just work" for Fedora 8."

"With a little help, we can make F8 on a laptop seriously rock [3] ."

[0] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-July/msg00541.html

[1] http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/

[2] http://hughsient.livejournal.com/29730.html

[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureLaptopImprovements

OLPC software: our first release and beyond
WalterBender reports in LWN[1] ,

"OLPC[2] software efforts have been, from Day 1, a community effort. The extent to which the community has risen to the occasion at every level—from firmware to application and content development—is an inspiration. As we approach our final series of trial software releases this summer and our first release this fall, it is appropriate to reflect on what we have achieved and where we are heading."

"Our choice of Fedora—we are almost transitioned to the newly-released Fedora Core 7—as our distribution has also contributed to controversy within the Linux community. There are any number of small-footprint distributions that may well have served our purposes, but Fedora met and continues to meet our needs; and the dedication of the Red Hat team at every level has been extraordinary. Without the likes of MarceloTosatti and DavidWoodhouse, we would be far short of our goals. Red Hat shares our uncompromising dedication to free and open-source solutions and continues to go the extra mile to ensure that neither quality or principles are sacrificed."

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/240536/

[2] http://laptop.org/

Maintainers
In this section, we cover Fedora Maintainers, the group of people who maintain the software packages in Fedora.

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers

Contributing Writer: MichaelLarabel

The Weekly EPEL Report
With this past week's EPEL report[1], the most important happenings has been enacting a policy for branching packages for EPEL if the Fedora maintainer doesn't react and a target date for an official EPEL announcement. On July 19 is the date for the EPEL announcement and all broken dependencies need to be fixed before hand. This announcement was later delayed to July 26 [2].

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2007-July/msg00075.html

[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2007-July/msg00141.html

Fever Hits Fedora
Fever, a way to check upstream version changes, was previously for Fedora Extras, but thanks to Koji and work done by Michael Bentkowski, it can now be used against all Fedora packages[1].

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2007-July/msg00080.html

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

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject

Contributing Writer: JonathanRoberts

Current Status of Man/Info GSoC Project
RiaDas writes to the list to provide an update on the current status of his Google Summer of Code project[1]. The current status is regularly updated on his SoC wiki page[2] ; the total project plan can also be found on the wiki[3].

As it stands, man pages are being converted to HTML using man2html, but he is struggling to find a similar tool for info pages. The other question currently being struggled with is whether to display the diff for man pages across releases based on HTML files, or on the ROFF files.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2007-July/msg00034.html

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RiaDas/SoC

[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SummerOfCode/2007/RiaDas

Help Define Docs Workflow
KarstenWade posted[1] to the list following a conversation with JonathanSteffan about his current development work, creating the next generation publishing system for the DocsProject. It is intended that this new system will make it much easier to write, edit and publish using everyone's favorite tools. Included in the mail is a number of questions JonathanSteffan had, and would like feedback from anybody who has experience with the workflow fo the DocsProject; as always, if you can help drop a note to the fedora-docs-list[2].

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2007-July/msg00052.html

[2] http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-docs-list

Translation
This section, we cover the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N

Contributing Writer: JasonMatthewTaylor

Translation Website
The http://translate.fedoraproject.org website is nearly ready after a lot of work from Dimitris Glezos and others. This should be a big help in the future with organization of the group and tracking of tasks and progress.

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

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure

Contributing Writer: JasonMatthewTaylor

Fedorapeople.org
SethVidal and MikeMcGrath attempted to clear up[1] how fedorapeople.org can be access and/or used by developers and the Fedora users.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2007-July/msg00078.html

Outage Info
MikeMcGrath posted[1] about the new outage information page which can be used by the admins or just information for the curious user(s). The page can be found at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/SOP/Outage

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2007-July/msg00081.html

DB Upgrade
This week saw the DB upgrade/migration completed[1], both Postgres and MySQL were upgraded and multiple DB's were migrated to a new box (at least for the short term).

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2007-July/msg00086.html

Common Problems Solved?
The Infrastructure group has a page, http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/CommonProblems that addresses some frequently seen issues that users/volunteers can/will be faced with. The initial post can be seen here[1].

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2007-July/msg00091.html

Artwork
In this section, we cover Fedora Artwork Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork

Contributing Writer: JonathanRoberts

More Theme Proposals
MartinSourada sent a message[1] to the list announcing his new theme proposal, Floating Cubes[2], using ideas taken from linear algebra.

MolaPahnadayan also sent a message[3] to the list, announcing another proposed theme, entitled Thunder[4].

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2007-July/msg00081.html

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F8Themes/FloatingCubes

[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2007-July/msg00083.html

[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2007-July/msg00083.html

Nodoka Theme Engine
Work on the Nodoka GTK+ and Metacity theme is now progressing rapidly, with a modified version of the Murrine theme engine having been created to allow greater flexibility and to make it easier to achieve the final look the team desire[1]. The theme engine has now been packaged, along with the Metacity theme, and are available on the wiki[2]. These packages are set to be sent for review, with the hope that they will make an appearance in the repositories of Fedora 8 Test 1 or Test 2; on the advice of MatthiasClasen they were repackaged to reflect new standards for artwork packaging[3].

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2007-July/msg00095.html

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/NodokaTheme

[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2007-July/msg00109.html

Security Week
In this section, we highlight the security stories from the week in Fedora.

Contributing Writer: JoshBressers

Flash Player Security Update
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb07-12.html

Adobe released a new version of flash player last week. The update in itself isn't terribly significant, but this brings up a great opportunity to stress the importance of not running Flash Player as a standalone plugin. Firefox currently has the ability to magically install Flash Player if you visit a site that requires it, and you don't have it installed. The problem with this installation method is that you will never get security updates for your local copy. Fedora users should install flash from mplug.org here: http://macromedia.mplug.org/

This is a great service WarrenTogami provides. As long as you rely on this yum repository for Flash Player, you should receive the necessary updates to keep your browser secure.

Updated

Unknown at the time of writing, the flash packages should not be retrieved directly from Adobe. There is a statement on the mplug.org site:

"This site used to host RPM and yum/apt repositories of Adobe Flash Player. Adobe has since taken over the job of RPM packaging and providing a yum repository. Get the adobe-release package from Adobe[1]  to install their yum config and GPG key."

[1] http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer

Security and Accountability
http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2007/07/10/security-issue-in-url-protocol-handling-on-windows/

Last week a security flaw was found in the way Internet Explorer passes a URL to Firefox. This done via a special protocol handler that Firefox registers when installed on a windows system. Microsoft claims this isn't their problem, Mozilla claims it is. Luckily this flaw is going to be fixed in Firefox. It's admirable that the Firefox developers are willing to do what's best for their users.

The moral of this story is that there are significant advantages to the current Linux distribution model. If a similar flaw was found in Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there is nobody to bicker with. It's not uncommon for vendors to spend more time pointing fingers at each other when something goes wrong. There can certainly be an advantage to getting all your bits from one place.

Daily Package
In this section, we recap the packages that have been highlighted as a Fedora Daily Package.

http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/

Contributing Writer: ChrisTyler

Paquet Fedora du jour
The Fedora Daily Package is now being translated into French at Paquet Fedora du jour[1], thanks to the efforts of Jean-François Martin (Lokthare).

[1] http://blog.fedora-fr.org/paquet-fedora-du-jour/

ooo2txt - OpenOffice.org documents to Text
Productive Mondays highlight a timesaving tool. This Monday[1] we covered ooo2txt[2] :

"Sometimes it's desirable to deal with the contents of OpenOffice.org text documents as plain text. The ooo2txt program makes this easy: give it an .odt filename and it will send the text to standard output. You can redirect the output to a file or pipe it into other tools (such as grep or sed)."

[1] http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/index.php?/archives/91-Productive-Monday-ooo2txt-OpenOffice.org-documents-to-Text.html

[2] http://ooo2txt.fr.st/

Ardour - Digital Audio Workstation
Artsy Tuesdays highlight a graphics, video, or sound application. This Tuesday[1] Ardour[2]  was featured:

"Ardour is a digital audio workstation with a long list of features. You can use it as a multichannel hard disk recorder or a mixer with unlimited busses, tracks, and plugins, and you can control it from your keyboard/mouse or a MIDI Machine Control board."

[1] http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/index.php?/archives/93-Artsy-Tuesday-Ardour-Digital-Audio-Workstation.html

[2] http://ardour.org/

Menus
The Wednesday Why article[1] was on the Fedora desktop application menus:

"Fedora's application menus include many different programs from different packages. Fedora supports multiple desktop environments, including GNOME, KDE, and Xfce, and each of these has a different menu structure, which may include or exclude certain proograms, such as the control panels for each environment. Each menu title and menu entry can be be presented in multiple languages. Furthermore, the menu layout has changed between Fedora releases, even though some of the packages have not changed. How does this all work?"

[1] http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/index.php?/archives/94-Wednesday-Why-Menus.html

System-config-lvm - LVM GUI tool
GUI Thursdays highlight a software that provides, enhances, or effectively uses a GUI interface. This Thursday[1], system-config-lvm[2] was discussed:

"System-config-lvm provides a graphical interface to the LVM tools (and related utilities, including fsck and resize2fs) which is good for non-emergency storage administration."

[1] http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/index.php?/archives/92-GUI-Thursday-System-config-lvm-LVM-GUI-tool.html

[2] http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-5-manual/Deployment_Guide-en-US/s1-system-config-lvm.html

Stellarium - Software planetarium
Friday Fun highlights fun, interesting, and amusing programs. This Friday[1], we took a look Stellarium[2] :

"Stellarium provides an amazing, interactive planetarium experience on your Fedora system. Combining a catalog of more than 100,000 stars with landscape imagery, atmospheric effects, a lot of math, and OpenGL, Stellarium renders the sky in real time, with sufficient quality that it is used in some planetariums."

[1] http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com/index.php?/archives/95-Friday-Fun-Stellarium-Software-planetarium.html

[2] http://stellarium.org/

Advisories and Updates
In this section, we cover Secuirity Advisories and Package Updates from fedora-package-announce.

Contributing Writer: ThomasChung

Fedora 7 Security Advisories

 * [SECURITY] flac123-0.0.11-1.fc7 - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FSA/F7/FEDORA-2007-1045
 * [SECURITY] gimp-2.2.16-2.fc7 - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FSA/F7/FEDORA-2007-1044
 * [SECURITY] phpPgAdmin-4.1.3-1.fc7 - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FSA/F7/FEDORA-2007-1013
 * [SECURITY] wireshark-0.99.6-1.fc7 - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FSA/F7/FEDORA-2007-0982

Fedora Core 6 Security Advisories

 * [SECURITY] httpd-2.2.4-2.1.fc6 - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FSA/FC6/FEDORA-2007-615
 * [SECURITY] wireshark-0.99.6-1.fc6 - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FSA/FC6/FEDORA-2007-628

Events and Meetings
In this section, we cover event reports and meeting summaries from various projects.

Contributing Writer: ThomasChung

Fedora Board Meeting Minutes 2007-07-10

 * https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2007-July/msg00004.html

Fedora Documentation Steering Committee 2007-MM-DD

 * Not Reported

Fedora Engineering Steering Committee Meeting 2007-07-12

 * https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-July/msg00774.html

Fedora Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Meeting 2007-07-11

 * https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-July/msg00087.html

Fedora Infrastructure Meeting (Log) 2007-MM-DD

 * Not Reported

Fedora Packaging Committee Meeting 2007-07-10

 * https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2007-July/msg00127.html

Fedora Release Engineering Meeting 2007-07-09

 * https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-July/msg00530.html

Fedora Translation Project Meeting 2007-07-10

 * https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2007-July/msg00033.html

Feedback
This document is maintained by the Fedora News Team[1]. Please feel free to contact us to give your feedback. If you'd like to contribute to a future issue of the Fedora Weekly News, please see the Join[2] page to find out how to help.

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join