FWN/Issue169

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 169 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 169 for the week ending March 29th, 2009.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue169

This week in "What Happened Last Summer?" Developments conveys an announcement on the Fedora intrusion of 2008. Announcements reels-off a list of interesting "Upcoming Events". PlanetFedora selects choice blog posts including Richard W.M. Jones' RPM-dependency visualizer. Marketing reports that "Fedora has the Most New Features". Ambassadors reports that "Fedora is on the move in Italy". QualityAssurance shares the results of "Test Days" for the nouveau driver and other outstanding work. Translation catches-up on problems with Persian l10n and more. Artwork asks is it too late for "A Lion for Leonidas?". Security warns of a "Firefox Emergency". Virtualization concludes that "KVM and QEMU Merge Feature Stays in Fedora 11" and on "Web Based libvirt Management" and a comprehensive "Fedora Virtualization Status Report".

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com that allows for access to various log files through an SQL-like interface. It supports aggregates and can handle Apache access logs,  and   and various others using backends from Augeas for configuration files like.

Paul W. Frields explained how to convert virtual disk images between various formats using utilities from.

Rakesh Pandit wrote a "Report for National Institute of Technology Hamirpur Software Activity Workshop" describing an event where students were trained in software development using Free and Open Source Software.

Nicu Buculei announced that the Open Clipart Library has reached its goal of 10,000 images.

Richard W.M. Jones posted a visualization of RPM dependencies by size, as part of his quest to build a minimal Fedora installation. A later followup noted that very different results occur depending on how the dependencies are traversed (in this case, breadth-first traversal versus depth-first). He then released a tool, to allow users to generate their own dependency visualizations.

James Morris described some security subsystem changes going into the 2.6.29 kernel.

Jef Spaleta continued writing about "the NSF workshop on software sustainability for cyberinfrastructure" and the mismatch that often occurs between the length of grant funding and expected software lifetimes and lifecycles. Chitlesh Goorah followed-up with the abstract of the Fedora Electronic Lab position paper from the workshop. Chitlesh later posted some information on FEL's place in the open source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) world.

Luis Villa wrote about "deliberative nirvana and software design myopia". He cited the White House's Open For Questions site, built using tools like Google Moderator and App Engine, allowing it to scale on a technological level without any realistic limitations but with results that may not perfectly reflect the United States due to social/demographic limitations of the technology.

systems administrator used a pass-phraseless SSH key. This was copied from the administrator's machine and used to gain access to Fedora infrastructure. Subsequently trojaned versions of  and   were built and deployed on Fedora infrastructure. The investigation concludes that these packages were detected and removed before any  were built with them or distributed to Fedora users. The full, detailed communication includes a time-line.

release notes to advise users of significant changes. A thread started by Gerry Reno to question the disabling of Ctrl-Alt-Backspace as a key combination to kill the X server shows that these beta release notes are an important means to notify prospective users of new features of the operating system. Gerry was among many contributors to the thread that preferred to keep the traditional functionality enabled. This change was an upstream Xorg decision apparently taken to prevent users from accidentally killing their X servers. Although there had previously been extensive discussion (reported in FWN#162 ) and a nice, hot flamewar on the upstream lists the change seemed to take many by surprise. This prompted accusations that "[...] big changes like this need to be advertised extensively instead of just quietly slipped in."

Roland McGrath suggested ways in which  could be changed using a   post-scriptlet but preferred that such choices would be pushed into the users' "keyboard shortcut" preferences. Gerry raised the issue of the use of the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace combination being essential to virtual machine management.

Another dissatisfied user was Arthur Pemberton. He requested discussion of why such large changes as disabling Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, removing  in favor of auto-detection, and others had been made without what he considered to be enough discussion. Response to this line of questioning suggested variously that the change had been made "secretly" upstream in order to appease an emacs-using cabal, and that Fedora had adopted the changes solely because Ubuntu had done so. This latter accusation was disputed by Matthew Garrett. The  angle seems to come from the fact that the   key-combinations "Ctrl-Alt-End" and "Ctrl-Alt-\" are, with certain keyboard layouts, a danger to fumble-fingered users. Arthur pointed to an added complication in a use case in which booting with the monitor powered off requires restarting the X server.

Felix Miata mentioned that OpenSuSE's solution was to require that the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace sequence be struck twice before it took effect. This was also suggested by Gerry during a thread in which Matthew Garrett and Matthias Clasen explained that the  symbol could be bound to any desired key-binding through   maps.

Ahmed Kamal suggested : "To anyone wanting to kill X when it hangs, why not login through a VC and `pkill X' .. Just like any process, why do we have to have magic keys!" Similarly Adam Jackson challenged the assertion that it would be possible to use the key combination to deal with faulty drivers.

filesystem to take snapshots of the system and provide a safe, stable way to upgrade. Seth Vidal seemed sanguine that this would be relatively easy with a -based system.

Everything Seth Vidal posted that there was a fix available in rawhide but it had not got into  yet. Konstantin Ryabitsev (Icon) built the updated packages and Josh Boyer posted that they would be available very shortly.

for  and. He detailed the advantages of this backwards-compatible update and suggested that maintainers of -based packages do some quick checks to ensure that there would be no snags.

package's source is a fork of the  source, but   regularily re-bases to the latest   source and merging of   support into the   code base is actively under-way."

dom0 support. Pasi Kärkkäinen was happy to report success getting a "custom Xen  dom0   working with   and/or  on Fedora 10".

"I was able to run the following on Fedora 10 32bit PAE pv_ops dom0:"
 * CentOS 5.3 32bit PAE PV domU
 * Fedora 10 32bit PAE PV domU (using  and custom kickstart to force PAE kernel installation to avoid the anaconda BUG )

Pasi was successful by using:
 * pv_ops dom0 kernel (2.6.29-rc8 or newer) "Compile with  since it seems to be broken still"
 * 0.6.1 and related packages from Fedora 10 updates-testing
 * 3.3.1-9 packages from rawhide/F11 rebuilt for F10
 * LVM volumes for domU disks ( is not yet supported by   dom0 kernel)

he's experimenting with.

,.

New features:
 * Fix network create API, and UUID lookups
 * Implement storage pool, storage vol, node device, security model, domain events and event loop APIs
 * Improve way constants are exposed to Perl layer
 * Fix horrible memory leak in methods returning a hash
 * Fix integer overflow in APIs using 64-bit ints (aka 'long long')
 * Minimum required libvirt C library for building is 0.6.1

(FWN #164 ).

Now Laine Stump has posted "a first attempt at the public API that will hook up to  on the   side."

command. Radik sought advice on picking from a list of approaches.

Daniel Berrange picked door number two, which is to create a libvirt-aware Zend extension in C. "A few people have expressed interest in this idea in the past, but unforatuntely I'm not aware of anyone having written any code for this yet. We'd very much like to see a PHP binding for libvirt developed & happy to give advice/support to anyone attempting this."

Russell Haering mentioned a Django (python) WebApp he's working on, called virtadmin. To bridge the stateless to stateful gap, the "system consists of a  daemon used for actual   interaction and a separate   web interface that interacts with the daemon via   over https."

Although more of an appliance, it is also worth mentioning. "oVirt is a small host image that provides libvirt service and hosts virtual machines and a web-based virtual machine management console."