FWN/Issue289

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 289 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 289 for the two weeks ending January 3, 2012. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Happy New Year, Fedora folk! This first issue of 2012 is an abbreviated one, but we we at FWN want to ensure that we have some Fedora content coming to you every week! In this week's issue, we cover one development announcement, a rebuild of rawhide with GCC 4.7. We've also got pointers to the many Fedora events happening over the next few months globally. In Fedora In the News this week, four articles/postings related to Fedora, including an interview with Harish Pillay, Global Community and Technology Architect, Red Hat Inc, a review of Fedora-based Kororaa Linux 16, and two personal reflections on linux distributions in 2011 and Fedora's strength in security. We close the issue with security patches released in the last two weeks for Fedora 15 and 16. Enjoy!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues on the Internet Archive. 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: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements
Fedora Announcements are the place where you can find the major coverage from the Fedora Project including general announcements, development announcements and Fedora Events.

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

There were no general announcements during this issue period.

Fedora Development News
The Development Announcement list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

Acceptable Types of Announcements
 * Policy or process changes that affect developers.
 * Infrastructure changes that affect developers.
 * Tools changes that affect developers.
 * Schedule changes
 * Freeze reminders

Unacceptable Types of Announcements
 * Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule)
 * Discussion
 * Anything else not mentioned above

Rebuild for GCC-4.7
Dennis Gilmore announced :

"[S]tarting immediately there is going to be a mass rebuild of rawhide for gcc-4.7 that landed yesterday.

as approved by FESCo (https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/739) packagers will have just over a week, until Thursday Jan 12 to build packages themselves. After that date releng will kick off an automated mass rebuild of everything else.

So please get building as Fedora 17 branching is less than 5 weeks away. we need all built by then

Thanks

Releng"

Fedora Events
The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning. Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding. In plain words, Fedora events are the exclusive and 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 (December 2011 - May 2012)

 * 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.

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

Three greatest successes in Linux world 2011
Rahul Sundaram posted :

"Fedora produced two released this year, same as OpenSuSE and Ubuntu And both of them were lovely from my point of view. Fedora 15 was the first distribution to feature GNOME3 as default desktop environment. And it was already awesome, even though not without a glitch. Fedora 16 became even better. What is about Fedora KDE? As I have written, Fedora 15 KDE was very good, and Fedora 16 KDE was even better."

The full discussion thread is available.

4 security features in Fedora 16
Rahul Sundaram posted :

"The security features in Fedora make it one of my favorite Linux distributions. And that is partly why it is in my list of the top 6 KDE distributions of 2011, even though it takes some tweaking to get it to the it just works state. I will take the security advantages of an operating system over any user-friendliness weaknesses, provided those user-friendliness weaknesses are not show stoppers."

The full post is available.

Interview: Harish Pillay, Global Community and Technology Architect, Red Hat Inc
Rahul Sundaram posted :

"When you design something or build something with security in mind, you are always cognizant of the fact that you can have ten measures and if everything works fine, that's great. But on the other side, the other person needs to succeed just once! Whatever ten things you have that is successful, is done away with this one failure. Well that is the story in the proprietary perspective. In the open source perspective, everything that we build is completely transparent. Everybody knows what we are building."

The full post is available.

Kororaa Linux 16 - A Fedora++ Distribution
Rahul Sundaram posted :

"To get a better overview of Kororaa Linux, the ideas behind it, what it includes and why, check their web page. My take on it is this - if you have looked at Fedora before, and you didn't want to use it because of the difficulty and tedium of getting a lot of common non-FOSS packages installed, then you should take a look at Kororaa. Of course, if you are a FOSS-purist, you are likely to think that Kororaa is an abomination."

The full article is available.

Security Advisories
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce for the period December 21, 2011 - January 3, 2012.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 16 Security Advisories

 * glibc-2.14.90-24.fc16.4 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071482.html
 * jasper-1.900.1-18.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071458.html
 * kernel-3.1.6-1.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071332.html
 * thunderbird-9.0-4.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071323.html
 * firefox-9.0-3.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071322.html
 * xulrunner-9.0-2.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071326.html
 * thunderbird-lightning-1.1-0.1.rc1.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071321.html
 * nss-3.13.1-9.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071325.html
 * nss-util-3.13.1-3.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071320.html
 * nss-softokn-3.13.1-14.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071324.html
 * icu-4.6-3.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071318.html
 * openstack-nova-2011.3-13.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071306.html
 * clearsilver-0.10.5-15.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071278.html
 * cacti-0.8.7i-2.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071210.html
 * moodle-2.0.6-1.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071200.html
 * perl-PAR-Packer-1.010-3.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071099.html
 * perl-PAR-1.002-5.fc16 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071098.html

Fedora 15 Security Advisories

 * icu-4.4.2-9.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071316.html
 * cacti-0.8.7i-2.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071225.html
 * clearsilver-0.10.5-15.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071213.html
 * moodle-1.9.15-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071193.html
 * perl-PAR-Packer-1.008-4.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071091.html
 * perl-PAR-1.002-4.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-December/071092.html