FWN/Issue251

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 251 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 251 for the week ending November 10, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In Announcements, new Fedora Ambassador mentors have been named for the APAC and EMEA regions, and a reminder about Fedora 12 end of life. The Fedora Planet has been abuzz with coverage of Fedora 14 related posts, including a rare post from Red Hat's President and CEO commending both Fedora 14 and the shiny new Fedora Project website redesign. Fedora In the News brings us two more articles from the trade press coverage of Fedora 14, including a Dutch language article and a posting from DesktopLinux.com. In Ambassador news, a very useful roundup of traffic from the Ambassador and FAmSCO lists. In Design team news, work has begun on a t-shirt design for the next North American FUDCon in Tempe, AZ in January 2011. This issue wraps up with the latest security advisories for F12 - F14. Enjoy FWN 251!

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
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, including general announcements, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam or Pascal Calarco

Fedora Announcement News
The announcement list is always exclusive for the Fedora Community. Please, visit the past announcements at

New regional Ambassador Mentors
Joerg Simon on Fri Nov 5 22:12:24 UTC 2010 announced ,

"Dear Fellows,

it is my pleasure to announce that FAmSCo approved the following Contributors as Regional Ambassador Mentors ,

for the APAC Region - to consider the growth in China:


 * Caius 'kaio' Chance -
 * Gerard Braad -

for the EMEA Region - two contributors who already mentored new Ambassadors together with existing Mentors and Membership Administration:


 * Bert Desmet -
 * Pierros Papadeas - "

From APAC region, Gerard BraadGerard on Sat Nov 6 01:51:21 UTC 2010 thanked and congratulated to Kaio and the other chosen mentors of Fedora with is delighted expressions.

Meanwhile,From EMEA region, Pierros Papadeas on Sat Nov 6 02:00:14 UTC 2010also thanked FAmSCo and everyone for letting him contribute more to Fedora through mentorship of new Ambassadors :) and he would make sure that they would keep up with the excellent job mentors had have done already!"

Fedora Development News
The development 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

Reminder: Fedora 12 end of life on 2010-12-02
Kevin Fenzi on Wed Nov 10 21:24:09 UTC 2010 announced ,

"This is a reminder email about the end of life process for Fedora 12.

Fedora 12 will reach end of life on 2010-12-02, and no further updates will be pushed out after that time. Additionally, with the recent release of Fedora 14, no new packages will be added to the Fedora 12 collection.

Please see for more information on upgrading from Fedora 12 to a newer release."

Fedora Events
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 (Sept 2010 - November 2010)

 * 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.

Planet Fedora
In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General
With the release of Fedora 14, the blogosphere is abuzz with talk about its release, and after a quick trip to http://planet.fedoraproject.org/ you will discover dozens of posts covering the release.

Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat commended Fedora 14, it's amazing new features, and the new Fedora Project website design. "The release of Fedora 14 is more than just a collection of bits and bytes on a DVD – it shows that the “open source way” is alive and well. Fedora is a large and thriving community, and I’d like to take the opportunity to recognize the individuals that put time and effort into making Fedora what it is today. Fedora is not just programmers — Fedora literally has an army of developers, packagers, designers, marketers, ambassadors, translators, testers and writers from all walks of life that come together to build a new release approximately every six months."

The Red Hat Press office outlined some of the new features available in Fedora 14, including new debugging-related capabilities and ways to use Fedora 14 "in the cloud" on Amazon EC2.

The Fedora Documentation Project enumerated all of the different pieces of documentation that are available for Fedora 14 from the Amateur Radio Guide to the Musicians’ Guide and the Storage Administration Guide.

In "This Week in Anaconda" parts 2 and 3, Chris Lumens continued sharing some of the recent developments. One of the more notable changes is the dropping of support for multi-disc install media sets. In Part 4, Chris explained how pieces of functionality that can be found in external libraries (such as libarchive's cpio support) are being used instead of duplicating that functionality within Anaconda.

Richard Hughes adapted PackageKit to Debian's debconf, potentially bringing PackageKit to a larger audience. The next change was an addition to PackageKit, allowing it to work with the preupgrade system for upgrading between major Fedora versions.

Will Woods' improvements to depcheck continued, with discussion of handling file conflicts, and integration with the rest of the Fedora QA infrastructure.

Richard W.M. Jones showed how to produce a minimal, compressed filesystem with the new virt-builder tool.

As you may have noticed, Fedora 14 wasn't the only head-covering Linux distribution with a recent release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was also released, sporting libguestfs-1.2.7-1.24.el6, but RHEL 6.1 should have libguestfs 1.6.

Pavol Rusnak thinks that "pkg-config the best thing since sliced bread". "More and more projects are using pkg-config already, but there is still a very high number of projects that don’t. This post tries to describe why using pkg-config is a good idea."

Gerard Braad described how to dual-boot Meego 1.1 on Nokia's N900 handset.

Máirín Duffy taught a Digital Media class to Girl Scouts in the Boston area.

Jesse Keating is stepping down from the role of lead release engineer for Fedora. "I will be taking the knowledge and lessons learned from our migration of CVS to git and applying it internally at Red Hat to migrate our internal package source control to git as well." Fear now however, Dennis Gilmore will be filling the role to lead the Fedora release engineering team.

Máirín Duffy summarized the Fedora Board meeting on November 8, 2010, post-Fedora 14 release.

Richard W.M. Jones listed all of the possible things (off the top of the head) that can affect what a Linux process can and can't do.

And finally...It may be a little late for this Halloween, but Brian Lane created a Fedora Pumpkin. We should aspire to such great accomplishments.

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

Fedora 14 biedt vooral ontwikkelaar nieuwe tools - (Tweakers.net - NL)
Bert Desmet forwarded a Dutch article on Fedora 14 from Tweakers.net, the largest Dutch technology site:

"De Fedora-ontwikkelgemeenschap heeft de release van Fedora 14, ook bekend als Laughlin, aangekondigd. In de gebruikersinterface zijn slechts kleine wijzigingen doorgevoerd, maar de tools voor ontwikkelaars zijn flink verbeterd."

Roughly translated in English the title is "Fedora 14 mainly offers new tools for developers."

The full article is available

Fedora 14 final released with Amazon EC2 support (Desktop Linux.com)
Kara Schiltz forwarded another review of Fedora 14:

"The Fedora Project announced the Fedora 14 final release, adding Amazon EC2 support. Fedora also features faster boot-times and JPEG downloads, the MeeGo for Netbooks UI stack, improved debugging, and a new "Spice" virtualization desktop framework, says the project.

Released in beta form at the end of September, Fedora 14 ("Laughlin") is now available in final form. This community-driven open source distro is a techie-focused upstream contributor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The community has also upgraded its Fedoraproject.org site with the Fedora 14 release."

The full article is available

Ambassadors
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

Welcome New Ambassadors
This week the Fedora Ambassadors Project had no new member joining.

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list
Zoltan Hopper asked about a F14 lightscribe template and later informed that it was found

David Ramsey reminded everyone about nominations for Fedora Board and FAmSCo

Nilesh Vaghela posted a report about a Linux|Fedora|OpenSource workshop at CIT Aburoad, Rajasthan

John Poelstra published upcoming F14 tasks specifically pertaining to regional coordination with marketing for release events

Daniel Bruno proposed Igor Soares as a candidate for the FAmSCo elections. The thread has Igor's consent to be a candidate

With Fedora 14 through the door, Ankur Sinha put forth a plan about the need to work on the list of online vendors

Pierros Papadeas announced his self nomination as a candidate at the FAmSCo elections.

Max Spevack provided the link to the updated letter for Customs required while shipping Fedora media.

Larry Cafiero posted the minutes from the FAmNA meeting

David Ramsey informed about the Fedora Scholarship with special emphasis on the timeline.

Joerg Simon informed the Ambassadors about the new regional Ambassador mentors. The thread includes some discussion about the process of mentor selection and approval. Marcus Moeller proposed a new model of mentoring.

Susmit Shannigrahi informed the Ambassadors that it was time to frame questions for the candidates in the FAmSCo elections.

Xavier Naldo reported on the Fedora Release Party at the Laredo Linux LUG.

Ville-Pekka Vainio informed about receiving a community developer ticket to the OpenMind 2010 conference at Helsinki.

Sascha Thomas Spreitzer announced the intention of "going passive" by "taking the logical step of stopping all my active contributions to this project." The thread has further discussions about issues regarding Fedora governance, etc.

Pierros Papadeas requested for volunteers from Ambassadors in EMEA for functioning as primary distribution points for media shipment.

Buddhika Kurera reported about the first FOSS related magazine from Sri Lanka and requested those interested in joining up to get in touch.

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list
David Nalley talked about changing the role of FAmSCo setting the context in light of a mail to the advisory-board list. He proposed that FAmSCo, in addition to its current duties, also deal with the management of FUDCon and FADs etc. The thread has additional discussions around how this can happen.

Joerg Simon requested that FAmSCo ticket #93 requires a reimbursement of expenses

Joerg Simon urged FAmSCo members to vote for new mentors  for the EMEA region. To read more about the votes please read the thread

Joerg Simon urged FAmSCo members to vote for new mentors  for the EMEA region. To read more about the votes please read the thread

David Nalley sent in his regrets about being unable to attend the FAmSCo meeting on 2010-11-08 as he would be traveling.

Joerg Simon announced that the FAmSCo meeting for 2010-11-08 would be adjourned due to prior tasks.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

FUDCon T-shirt
Jef van Schendel took over this week and posted on his blog a new Fedora Design Bounty "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design the official FUDCon Tempe T-shirt!" and Daniel Drummond accepted it, asked on the list for instructions and provided a first concept "It is a modified version of the flag of Arizona, replacing the star with the Fedora logo."

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 14 Security Advisories

 * gnome-xcf-thumbnailer-1.0-4.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050542.html
 * pootle-2.1.2-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050534.html
 * monotone-0.48.1-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050484.html
 * pam-1.1.1-6.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050475.html
 * horde-3.3.9-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050455.html
 * luci-0.22.4-2.0.b9faf868074git.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050309.html
 * cvs-1.11.23-11.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050287.html
 * gnucash-2.3.15-2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050269.html
 * xpdf-3.02-16.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050268.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * gnome-xcf-thumbnailer-1.0-4.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050562.html
 * pootle-2.1.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050540.html
 * monotone-0.48.1-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050468.html
 * glpi-0.72.4-3.svn11497.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050428.html
 * horde-3.3.9-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050423.html
 * xpdf-3.02-16.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050285.html
 * pam-1.1.1-6.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050260.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * pootle-2.1.2-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050597.html
 * gnome-xcf-thumbnailer-1.0-4.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050526.html
 * glpi-0.72.4-3.svn11497.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050415.html
 * nss-3.12.8-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050411.html
 * nss-softokn-3.12.8-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050412.html
 * nss-util-3.12.8-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050410.html
 * horde-3.3.9-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050408.html
 * xpdf-3.02-16.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050390.html
 * pyftpdlib-0.5.2-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/050257.html