FWN/Issue170

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 170 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 170 for the week ending April 5, 2009.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue170

In this week's issue, we're proud to include the Fedora Weekly webcomic by Nicu Buculei, who has been producing this regularly for some time. We think you will enjoy Nicu's art and humor. Other selected content includes:


 * Detailed coverage in the announcements and infrastructure sections on the August 2008 Fedora security intrusion, and updates on the upcoming FUDCon Berlin.
 * News from the Fedora Planet includes updates on the fourth grade math project for Sugar/OLPC, reviews of Songbird and Flock, amongst other birds of a feather.
 * In the Developments beat, the mysteries of Fedora & OpenSolaris dual-boot is revealed.
 * Translation: updates on F11 release note translations, and new members of the Fedora Localization Project
 * An interview with three members of the Art Team in this week's Art Beat
 * April Fools and the Conflicker worm, in this week's Security Week beat
 * Security updates for Fedora 9 and 10 over the past week
 * Updates on the state of virtualization in Fedora, with a view towards F11 feature rollup

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com implementation of The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) on Fedora using Python.

Greg DeKoenigsberg provided an updated on the Fourth Grade Math project for the Sugar Project.

Ankur Sinha posted a bunch of photos from a Linux Open Week event.

Joseph Smidt discussed some thoughts on Intellectual Property in "Open Source Is The Pinnacle Of The Free Market".

Adam John Miller gave a talk about Fedora Infrastructure and posted the key points as well as the slides.

John Poelstra announced Fedora 12! Not really. But he did announce that the Features process for Fedora 12 has been started and a draft schedule posted.

Bryan Clark tested Right-to-Left localization in Thunderbird, and now you can too!

Scott Williams reviewed Songbird (media player using the Mozilla core technologies) and Flock, a socially-enabled web browser based on Firefox.

Eelko Berkenpies announced that KDE 4.2.2 is now available in the Testing repository for Fedora 10, but also provided information on how to easily install it early if you like to live on the edge.

Paul W. Frields discussed some of what the Fedora Infrastructure project does, and included a link to a presentation from PyCon 2009 on the topic.

James Antill posted "Why trusted third party repos. will always be a bad idea".

package as noarch. The complication was that it contained a  file.

Several helpful responses, such as Michael Schwendt's one, suggested installing  files into   instead of one of the   directories. Toshio Kuratomi thought that the problem was that the package did not use the new noarch-subpackage feature but instead tried to be a regular noarch package.

Ville Skyttä ran the  check and confirmed that it warned exactly of this misuse of a   macro.

In response to a subsidiary question Jesse Keating explained that the  packages merely appeared to be present in each of the different architecture trees because they were hard-linked.

formatted partition seemed to be causing a  installation failure there was a quick response. Eric Sandeen noted that a patch had already been produced by Dave Lehman to merely log the problem instead of raising an error. The bugzilla entry suggested that the root problem was due to  failing to recognize   properly.

filesystem in  and suggested that in order to use its preallocation features more efficiently it would be useful to patch applications. This could help avoid the current "double write" penalty currently incurred by preallocation in which the reserved space is first filled with nulls. James wondered whether there was a better interface to do this than 's   which first attempts the allocation and then falls "[...] back to writing nulls to fill up the requested range if fallocate fails."

Eric Sandeen suggested using  which is present in the   version in rawhide and provided a test program to investigate how well this would work.

for  was failing.

Rawhide Reports resumed on 2009-04-04.

; ;  ; lvm-related packages; and.

Jon Stanley also noted that he was going to shoulder the burden of providing his excellent summaries of FESCo meetings.

developers are working hard on a suite of regression tests for. It would be hugely helpful if people could run on their own machines to try and catch as many  issues as possible." Mark also provided a howto.

does its work by directly modifying the 'native' configuration files of the host it is running on; this avoids a whole class of problems caused by similar approaches that do network configuration behind the back of the native mechanisms. The API allows listing of configured interfaces, defining the configuration of an interface, retrieving the same (regardless of whether the interface was initially configured with netcf or not), and bringing interfaces up and down. This functionality is needed both by and, so it seemed only logical to move their common needs into a separate library."

Laine Stump is already working on patches to add the  calls in the   API.

Read the announcement for more information such as the new mailing list for development discussion and where to find the test builds for Fedora 10.