FWN/Issue247

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 247 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 247 for the week ending October 13, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

We have a shorter issue this week, as a number of our regular contributors are unusually occupied. Our issue kicks off with news from the Fedora Planet, with discussion of the new Fedora updates policy from several bloggers, Paul W. Frields new roles at Red Hat and the Fedora Project, and   coverage of the latest Fedora Board meeting activities. We also have a special virtualization feature in this week's issue, with much great content from Richard W.M. Jones. In Translation team news, a variety of Fedora 14 work including tasks, Fedora website translation, and a call for volunteers to help with the Software Management Guide translation from Spanish into English. In Design team news, discussion of ideas for a Fedora role-playing game, t-shirt design for students contributing to Fedora, and an update on Fedora 14 graphics tasks. Our issue wraps up with security updates for Fedora 12, 13 and 14 released in the last week. Enjoy FWN 247!

The audio version of FWN - FAWN - is back! 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

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
There is now a new Fedora Updates Policy, says Juan J. Martínez. "I think it’s worth reading because, as the announcement says, it can be improved, clarified and adjusted; but it’s a very good starting point."

And to ensure that updates can be installed smoothly, Will Woods explained how the AutoQA process and depcheck can be used "to be sure that they (Fedora update packages) don't have any unresolved dependencies that would cause yum to reject them (and thus cause everyone to be unable to update their systems and be unhappy with Fedora and the world in general."

...And just in case something goes wrong with your RPM database, Ingvar Hagelund has the answer.

Former Fedora Project Leader Paul W. Frields has been transitioning to a new role at Red Hat, "Operations Manager", but will still maintain an active presence in the Fedora community. "I realized the other day after a couple questions from friends in Fedora that maybe people were interested in what I was doing. I’m always surprised by that, but I’m happy to give some more details here." Tom Callaway outlined some other transitions at Red Hat and the employment opportunities now available. John Poelstra has more details on the new "Fedora Program Manager" role.

John Poelstra also posted the "Fedora 14 Final Release Game Plan". If all goes according to schedule, Fedora 14 will be unleashed in less than one month.

John Palmier released the first Python 3 PyGObject module into Fedora Rawhide.

Lennart Poettering posted part 3 of "systemd for System Administrators" with the topic "How Do I Convert A SysV Init Script Into A systemd Service File?"

Máirín Duffy attended the Fedora Board meetings on 27 Sept and 1 Oct 2010. Among the highlights: "The Board for the past two months or so has been working to put together a solid vision statement for Fedora, to help guide what we do. It hasn’t been an easy road, but this meeting was our deadline to have a draft statement so the task dominated this meeting. We happily came to agreement on the following..."

Peter Hutterer and Ankur Shrivastava shared some updates on input device support in X on Linux. First, Peter met with some folks before the X Developer Conference to discuss multitouch. Next, Ankur explained how to use multiple input devices with X.

Special Virtualization Feature
Richard W.M. Jones was busy writing and posting all about Virtualization under Linux.

First, Richard produced  an amazing tool that allows you to visualize reads and writes (and their alignment at the block-level) of a virtual machine.

Did you know that you can run Xen as a KVM guest? You can.

"So the common question I am asked is: When installing a 32 bit guest, should I choose an i686 or x86-64 (32 or 64 bit) architecture?"

Finally, a guest post described how to convert VMware guest machine images to become libvirt/KVM guests.

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Fedora 14 Tasks
John Poelstra informed in the list about the upcoming tasks for Fedora 14. As per the schedule, translation of Final and GA Release Notes and Website and correction of the guides is currently underway.

New Documents Ready for Translation
Musician's Guide and Readme Burning ISOs has now been added to translate.fedoraproject.org for translation.

Some additions were also made to the Security Guide that is already available for translation.

Fedora Website Translation Starts
After a minor delay (supported by FLP ) the Fedora Website translations for Fedora 14 have gotten underway. The end date for translating the Fedora Website documents is 25th October 2010. A staging server to review the translations is also available.

English Translators Called for Software Management Guide
The Software Management Guide originally written in Spanish needs to be translated to English for Fedora 14. As per an earlier discussion, the English translation can then be used to create POT files and translated into other languages.

Slow Transactions for Installation Guide
Noriko Mizumoto informed the list of a possible snag that is affecting translation submission to the Installation Guide via translate.fedoraproject.org.

Publican 2.2 Released
Version 2.2 of Publican was released last week and can be installed using the package available from koji. The Feedback section that is part of the publican-redhat package has not been updated yet.

New Members and Sponsors in FLP
Hasan Alp iNAN (Turkish) and Simon Yan (Simplified Chinese) joined the FLP recently.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

The Game
The idea of a role playing game was floating for a while inside the Fedora community so after an initial talk on IRC Nicu Buculei sent a first vision "I decided to start the ball rolling by exposing my personal vision about it. I focused only on the 'gameplay', not on the implementation details", Dave Crossland pointed to video on the topic "I recommended this Google Tech Talk on applying game dymanics to programs" and Máirín Duffy tries to assemble a working team "Here's a whenisgood link to figure out when our meeting will be on the RPG, please fill it out - it's quick & painless."

‘Fedora Students Contributing’ T-Shirt'
After Máirín Duffy blogged about a new bi-weekly Design Bounty, "what we need is an awesome T-shirt to commemorate and celebrate the students’ accomplishments, for this past summer and for future Fedora summer programs like this. The shirts will be given out to the students, their mentors, and the sponsors of the program", Christian Brassat was the first to claim the task and provide a design "we came up with the idea of using a flower to symbolize how the students taking part in this project are 'growing'", which was polished in a number of subsequent iterations.

Fedora 14 Graphics
Gearing for the release, the Design Team is closing the last remaining tasks: Alexander Smirnov created a finished version for media art "I ended my DVD/CD label & sleeve artwork (include full color labels)" and Máirín Duffy the 'animated' wallpapers "I just got these finished up and tested them out; I think they are looking good", which are ready for packaging.

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

 * drupal-cck-6.x.2.8-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049231.html
 * freetype-2.4.2-3.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049226.html
 * dnsperf-1.0.1.0-21.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049205.html
 * bind-dyndb-ldap-0.1.0-0.14.b.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049204.html
 * bind-9.7.2-2.P2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049203.html
 * ghostscript-8.71-16.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049193.html
 * gnome-subtitles-1.0-3.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049184.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * drupal-cck-6.x.2.8-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049300.html
 * gnome-subtitles-1.0-3.fc13- http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049288.html
 * ghostscript-8.71-16.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049164.html
 * cgit-0.8.2.1-4.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049092.html
 * openswan-2.6.29-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049073.html
 * seamonkey-2.0.8-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049051.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * gnome-subtitles-1.0-3.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049275.html
 * drupal-cck-6.x.2.8-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049247.html
 * seamonkey-2.0.8-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049116.html
 * openswan-2.6.29-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049053.html
 * cgit-0.8.2.1-4.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-October/049050.html