FWN/Issue178

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 178 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 178 for the week ending May 31st, 2009.

We have several changes of note this week. Oisin Feeley, who has been on the editorial team for FWN and writer for the Development section, is leaving FWN for an extended time period due to other commitments. We will miss him and hope to have him back at some time. Adam Williamson, who currently also writes the wonderful QA beat, joins the editorial team at FWN -- welcome Adam!

This week's issue starts off with some poetry on next week's expected Fedora 11 release, and much activity on upcoming Fedora activity days, dev cons, and events. In news from the Fedora Planet, we learn about SELinux sandbox, an overview on virtualization features in F11, several musings on aspects of open source projects/communities, and a feature interview with Fedora Project leader Paul W. Frields. The Quality Assurance beat details the QA weekly meeting leading up to F11 next week, F11 FAQ work, and release candidate testing detail. Development asks whether gNaughty is indeed a Hot Babe, detail on getting graphics support working for the Fedora Live USB with the Chrome9 Vx800 GPU, and suggestions on upgrading to F11 via yum. In Translation news, upcoming F11 website translation details and a new member of the Romanian translation team. This issue is rounded out with an overview of the security advisories for Fedora 9 and 10 this past week. Enjoy this issue and get ready for Fedora 11 a week from tomorrow!

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

Sandbox,a "policy that allows users to build scripts to process untrusted content into some output that they could safely use." James Morris elaborated with further points on the SELinux Sandbox and the problems with Ambient Authority.

Jack Aboutboul interviewed Daniel Berrange, Red Hat Virtualization Team Engineer "about the many key upgrades to virt technology in F11 focusing on areas of usability, performance and security."

Dan Williams showed off the new NetworkManager network selector user interface, to replace the old GtkMenu-based interface.

Susan Lauber continued with Part 2 of a series on improving the Fedora Wiki: "Using Special pages to assist with wiki cleanup."

Gary Benson published an excellent introductory article on the history and reasoning behind  and   at java.net. Gary also wrote a tutorial on Instrumenting Zero and Shark.

Jeroen van Meeuwen posted an opinion piece on "Why the Open Source Channel Alliance is bad for Free Software". Jeroen also mentioned that "Starting in July...I'll be mentoring a workshop on Office and Infrastructure IT entirely based on Free Software and Open Source technology..."

Martin Sourada chronicled his preferred desktop applications (including background information on why each program is used) to ensure that he can run a FLOSS desktop using Fedora.

Paul W. Frields was interviewed about Fedora and RHEL by Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte at Twit.tv.

package. Its sole purpose seemed to be downloading pornography. Rahul referenced the  CPU monitor which enjoyed controversy in Debian packaging circles due to its use of female nudity. Rahul wanted to find out "[...] is this allowed in Fedora?"

Amusingly a good deal of the controversy focused on whether the content was freely redistributable, but a predictable moral angle was raised by Muayyad AlSadi who asked for help in producing a spin which removed content deemed objectionable. Muayyad is a Jordanian developer who has been producing an Arabic-localized Fedora spin named "Ojuba" for some time. Muayyad sought a way to make identifying and tagging packages easier to facilitate this spin. Bill Nottingham was skeptical about the chances of tags keeping meaning unless there was some sort of review board. Equally predictable was the reaction typified by Seth Vidal which resisted any attempt to restrict packages according to standards which had nothing to do with licensing or patent issues. Mathieu Bridon thought that the creation of a wiki-page by Muayyad would allow anyone interested in co-ordinating work on "Inappropriate Content" to just go ahead and do it without dragging in bureaucracy.

package for which he had recently become the maintainer. His query was based on the recent filing of RFEs to integrate  with. These suggested to Adam that a large amount of work would be needed due to the lack of any upstream activity for four years and the need to grok.

Following confirmation from Rahul Sundaram and Seth Vidal a decision was made by Adam: "I would honestly rather retire the package than do a WONTFIX, if the project as a whole is going the direction of PolicyKit and upstream is dead then I don't want to keep old and busted cruft around the repositories as Fedora continues to look towards the future." A further suggestion from "Cry" prompted Adam to start filing RFEs against  for any features present in   but missing in. will not be a feature due to its code not yet heading upstream and consequently remaining as  drew a statement of support from Kevin Kofler for reverting the current banning of   should he become a FESCo member. Upon request from Richard W.M. Jones for a dispassionate summary of the reasons to avoid  drew a concise response from Seth Vidal.

Adam Williamson and Matt Domsch (Dell's DKMS mastermind) kicked some ideas back and forth over the advantages of  versus.

Upgrade from Fedora 10 to Rawhide (Fedora 11)
Following a report from Uwe Kiewel that a yum upgrade had spewed all sorts of errors the supported methods for upgrades were re-stated by Adam Williamson: "[I]f you talk to the people most involved in implementing it (Seth) and testing it (Will) they will tell you that doing live upgrades via yum can't really ever be 100% safe for various reasons, but preupgrade can get very close and is useful in all the same cases. So their position is, we support preupgrade, we don't support yum. If yum works, great, if it doesn't, you can bug people to fix whatever it stopping it working, but it's not 'required' by any policy or guideline."

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Fedora Websites test instance
Ricky Zhou set up a preview test instance with the translations for the Fedora web pages, updated for Fedora 11. At present, the Leonidas image banner is not functional and an alternate text in english is displayed. Some configuration related errors caused the translated versions of the pages in a few languages to not preview correctly. These were later fixed by Ricky. Any updates to the translations automatically show up on the test site within one hour.

New members in FLP
Claudia Pascu joined the Romanian translation team this week.

Security Advisories
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce.

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce

Contributing Writer: David Nalley

Fedora 10 Security Advisories

 * kernel-2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01126.html
 * squirrelmail-1.4.19-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01202.html
 * wireshark-1.0.8-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01213.html
 * jetty-5.1.15-3.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01262.html
 * libwmf-0.2.8.4-18.1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01266.html
 * php-Smarty-2.6.25-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01274.html
 * freetype1-1.4-0.8.pre.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01316.html
 * eggdrop-1.6.19-4.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01337.html
 * acpid-1.0.6-11.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01342.html
 * ntp-4.2.4p7-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01414.html
 * opensc-0.11.8-1.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01420.html
 * maniadrive-1.2-13.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01451.html
 * php-5.2.9-2.fc10 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01452.html

Fedora 9 Security Advisories

 * wireshark-1.0.8-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01167.html
 * squirrelmail-1.4.19-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01195.html
 * jetty-5.1.15-3.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01257.html
 * libwmf-0.2.8.4-18.1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01269.html
 * kernel-2.6.27.24-78.2.53.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01271.html
 * php-Smarty-2.6.25-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01283.html
 * eggdrop-1.6.19-4.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01333.html
 * acpid-1.0.6-8.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01365.html
 * opensc-0.11.8-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01432.html
 * ntp-4.2.4p7-1.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01449.html
 * maniadrive-1.2-13.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01465.html
 * php-5.2.9-2.fc9 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-May/msg01468.html