FWN/Issue212

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 212 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 212 for the week ending February 7, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In this week's issue, a few outage notices and notice of last week's Fedora Board IRC meeting kick us off. In the Fedora Planet beat, details on setting up an automatically imaged and administered computer lab with Fedora and CentOs, more Inkscape @ Boston middle schools, musings on the continuing need for password security, and details on The Open Source Way. In news from the Quality Assurance team, coverage of this past week's Test Day on he introduction of NFSv4 by default in Fedora 13, much detail on the QA weekly meeting activities, an update on the driver availability for Nouveau 3D, and details on the first Fedora 13 bug blocker review meeting. In news from the Translation/Localization team, a brief update on the Transifex 0.7 upgrade for translate.fedoraproject.org, and announcement of new members on the localization teams for Ukranian, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Hungarian. The Security Advisories beat lists security patches for Fedora 11 and 12 last week, and our issue rounds out with tasty details from the KDE SIG, including KDE SC 4.4 hitting rawhide and kde-redhat/unstable repos last week, upcoming virtuoso changes in kde-redhat, and the availability of KDE SC 4.4rc2 live images available for testing. That rounds out FWN 212 -- read on!

We're also pleased to note the availability of Fedora Audio Weekly News (FAWN), an audio version in Ogg Vorbis format for a few past FWN issues that one of our contributors has begun. Find it on the Internet Archive and have a listen!

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

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

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Reminder: Fedora Board IRC meeting 1700 UTC 2010-02-04
Paul W. Frields, Fedora Project Leader, announced that the Board was holding its monthly public meeting on Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 1700 UTC on IRC Freenode. While inviting everyone at the IRC Channel #fedora-board-meeting (to see the Board's conversation) and #fedora-board-questions (to discuss topics and post questions: this channel read/write for everyone.), Paul mentioned that the moderator will voice people from the queue, one at a time, in the #fedora-board-meeting channel.

Paul also briefed, "We'll limit time per voice as needed to give everyone in the queue a chance to be heard. The Board may reserve some time at the top of the hour to cover any agenda items as appropriate.  We look forward to seeing you at the meeting!"

Reminder: Fedora 13 Feature Freeze in Six Days (2010-02-09)
John Poelstra announced, "A friendly reminder that this coming Tuesday, February 9, 2010, is FEATURE FREEZE.". While letting everyone know about the Feature Freeze, he mentioned that Feature Freeze means that all accepted feature for the release are significantly "feature complete", ready for testing, and have a current status.

If you have any questions about what this means, please ask now.

Features which are not significantly feature complete at Feature Freeze will be accepted on an exception basis by FESCo or deferred to Fedora 14.

p.s. If you have questions about our release processes or milestones please reply to this email or contact me directly and I will be glad to assist. A summary of the Fedora 13 milestones and exception process is here: "

Outage Notification - 2010-02-04 23:00 UTC
Mike McGrath announced, "There will be an outage starting at 2010-02-04 23:00 UTC, which will last approximately 1 hour.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at

or run: date -d '2010-02-04 23:00 UTC'

Affected Services:
 * Bodhi
 * Buildsystem
 * CVS / Source Control
 * Database
 * Fedora Account System
 * Fedora Community
 * Fedora Hosted
 * Fedora Package Database
 * Mail
 * Mirror System
 * Translation Services
 * Websites

Unaffected Services:
 * DNS
 * Fedora People
 * Fedora Talk
 * Torrent

Ticket Link:

Reason for Outage: Network team is working on stuff in PHX2. This is a "there may be an outage" type deal so it's quite possible this will have no impact on us.

Contact Information: Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage."

Outage Notification - 2010-02-10 17:00 UTC
Stephen John Smoogen announced, "There will be an outage starting at 2010-02-10 17:00 UTC, which will last approximately X hours. Outages will be small but noticble forsmall segments as systems are updated and rebooted.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at

How to or run: date -d '2010-02-10 17:00 UTC'

Affected Services:

All systems will be rebooted, but services should only be impacted in small increments as we take down things in a loop.

Ticket Link:

Reason for Outage: Monthly updates and security updates.

Contact Information: Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage. Note that the Fedora Infrastructure team does not run bugzilla.redhat.com, though."

FEDORA EVENTS
Fedora events are the 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 2009 to February 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. This edition covers highlights from the past three weeks.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General
William Jon McCann has been working to unify the various "micro-forks" of libnotify and notification-daemon by developing a single specification that everyone can work against: "Everyone on the planet that was shipping libnotify and notification-daemon shipped them with a different set of patches. This meant we had lots of different micro-forks of both the implementation and specification.  We even had a hard time agreeing on the version numbers for the specification.  Version 0.10 happened after version 1.0 was published."

Richard W.M. Jones mentioned that libguestfs can now write to Windows Registry files and rename LVs and VGs, and there now exist C# bindings as well as new Indian translations.

Máirín Duffy's Inkscape course at a Boston-area middle school continued with Days 5 and 6.

Jonathan Dieter described how to set up a netboot server using Fedora and CentOS to automatically image and administer a computer lab.

Nicu Buceli signed the Public Domain Manifesto. "As skeptical as I am about such a document being ever officially accepted (there are so many interests and such powerful lobbyists...) I couldn't stop promoting it further. The Open Clip Art Library is an excellent use case for PD, the manifesto is all about we are doing there."

Jan Wildeboer responded to some recent news about Android's Linux Kernel patches being removed. "Now adding new features to the kernel is quite OK. If the changes are sound, stable and help Linux in general, the kernel community will gladly accept such changes upstream. I was sure Google was well aware of this process and according to their promises, I was also sure that they clearly understood that Upstream Is King. This seems to be wrong. It is up to Google to fix this problem. Google hackers should make sure this situation is solved for the best of upstream ASAP."

Josh Bressers reminded everyone that password security should be on everyone's mind, especially in the wake of a number of Twitter account compromises. "If you're like most people, and use a couple of passwords everywhere, please stop doing that. Find a good password generating tool, and either use a piece of paper or something like password safe to store them. The other big advantage to using not your brain to store passwords, is that it's much easier to change them. How many of you have been using the same password for five years, because it's too annoying to think up a new good password? Lots of us do that, it's hard to change."

Karsten Wade introduced a book about community, written by a community. "This is a handbook for creating and nurturing communities of contributors. It was originally thought of as a cookbook to provide recipes for enacting community the open source way." The book is called The Open Source Way.

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
Last week's Test Day was on the introduction of NFSv4 by default in Fedora 13. The NFS maintainer, Steve Dickson, was kind enough to provide several automated test suites, and a good turnout of testers ran them on a variety of NFS configurations, providing valuable results.

No Test Day is currently planned for this week. If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Weekly meetings
The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2010-02-01. The full logs are available. James Laska reported that Christopher Beland had added links to the Bugzilla common_bugs queries to the Fedora 13 common bugs page.

Kevin Fenzi promised to look at updating the QA IRC bot, zodbot, to monitor the Fedora 13 blocker bugs instead of the Fedora 12 ones.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral reported that they had not yet discussed design ideas for the proposed AutoQA results database. Kamil felt that more people should be involved as the project would become important to several groups, if implemented. James Laska suggested a micro-FAD. Kamil mentioned that Luke Macken had suggested looking at his Kobo project for inspiration. Jesse Keating felt it might be over-engineered for the purposes of AutoQA. Will and Kamil agreed to organize a meeting during the week to begin designing the system.

Adam Williamson reported that he had moved the privilege escalation policy discussion to the development mailing list, and would go through the same feedback/revision cycle there as he had on the test list before finally escalating the draft policy to FESco.

Adam Williamson reported on his and Rui He's progres with documenting installation testing as a QA group activity. They had finalized the draft installation validation testing page and created a draft desktop validation testing page. They had added a paragraph to the Join page which briefly explains the testing and link to the two more detailed pages. James Laska asked if the QA schedule should be altered to refer to 'release validation' rather than 'installation validation', to leave room for non-installation testing, and Adam said he thought this would be a good idea.

James Laska reported that another rawhide acceptance testing event had come around during the previous week. This involves the creation and automated testing of a tree complete with installer. This time the acceptance test suite passed, but the installed system was unbootable due to a bug preventing the creation of the initramfs. Jesse Keating pointed out that this meant the installer was ready for 'last known good' status, but not the package set, and further asked whether the 'last known good' idea is intended to refer only to the installer or also to an associated package tree. There was general agreement that the 'last known good' page should list the tested installer and package tree, and note that the good installer may work with different package trees but could not be guaranteed to. James and Adam Williamson agreed to work on the 'last known good' Wiki page with information provided by Jesse.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral provided an AutoQA update. Will had created a working prototype of the dependency checking test, based on yum, which was 147 lines of code and took around 20 seconds to run. James Laska mentioned that he was hoping to see the rpmfluff tool for generating fake test packages become an official Fedora package soon. Kamil went over some updates to rpmguard; he had made it notice when two packages it is asked to compare are identical, and compare a package only to the previous package from stable or updates (not updates-testing).

James Laska reported that Liam Li had added a dvd_install.py script to the autoqa repo. He encouraged others to follow up with their thoughts on the script.

James Laska had continued working on the packaging plan for gwt and hoped to be able to start packaging soon.

Kamil Paral mentioned that he was working on a package update acceptance test plan, and asked the group to provide any information they had on how other projects have approached this issue. Adam Williamson mentioned the Mandriva policies in the area, and suggested Kamil might talk to Vincent Danen, who had managed the update process for Mandriva before joining Red Hat.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2010-02-02. The full log is available. Adam Williamson admitted he had done nothing on the subject of bugs filed against orphaned packages.

Sergey Rudchenko told the group about a script he had written to clean up abrt backtraces, providing bug 558883 as an example. He was interested in extending the script to compute the similarity of any two given backtraces, and also store multiple backtraces offline for comparison. Adam Williamson and Matej Cepl suggested he talk to the abrt team about integrating his ideas into abrt itself.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2010-02-08 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting. The next Bugzappers weekly meeting will be held on 2010-02-09 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Nouveau 3D acceleration testing
Bruno Wolff noted that experimental 3D acceleration for nouveau was now available in the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package, and asked whether it was yet at a point where the developers would be interested in bug reports. Adam Williamson promised to pass the question along to the nouveau maintainer.

Fedora 13 Alpha blocker bug review meeting
Adam Williamson announced and later recapped the first blocker bug review meeting for Fedora 13. The summary of the meeting is available from meetbot. All current alpha blocker bugs were reviewed at the meeting.

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Transifex v0.7 Upgrade for translate.fedoraproject.org
The priority for the Fedora Infrastructure ticket to track the upgrade of the transifex version used in translate.fedoraproject.org has been changed from 'major' to 'blocker'. All Fedora 13 documents and release notes may be adversely affected if this upgrade is not completed by March 11, 2010. The generation of the nightly .pot files for the Fedora 13 Release Notes are scheduled to be started on that date.

At present, FAS authentication has been activated on the staging server and testing repos have been requested to be set up to test local commits into the modules.

New Members in FLP
Evegen (Ukrainian), Gerd Koenig (German) , Claudio Penasio Junior (Brazilian Portuguese) , Guido Stratmann (German) , and Nikolas Slivka (Hungarian) joined the Fedora Translation Project recently. A new translation team has also been created for Ukrainian on the request from Maxim Dziumanenko.

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 12 Security Advisories

 * chrony-1.23-8.20081106gitbe42b4.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034887.html
 * ocsinventory-1.02.3-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034876.html
 * dokuwiki-0-0.4.20091225.c.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034831.html
 * armacycles-ad-0.2.8.3-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034816.html
 * gmime22-2.2.23-8.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034815.html
 * ejabberd-2.1.2-2.fc12- http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034716.html
 * roundcubemail-0.3.1-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034678.html
 * mysql-5.1.42-7.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034642.html
 * fuse-2.8.1-4.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034580.html
 * gzip-1.3.12-14.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034492.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * ocsinventory-1.02.3-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034888.html
 * chrony-1.23-6.20081106gitbe42b4.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034877.html
 * kernel-2.6.30.10-105.2.13.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034830.html
 * dokuwiki-0-0.4.20091225.c.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034729.html
 * ejabberd-2.1.2-2.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034718.html
 * gmime22-2.2.23-8.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034707.html
 * roundcubemail-0.3.1-2.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034685.html
 * mysql-5.1.42-7.fc11- http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034591.html
 * automake-1.11.1-1.fc11.1 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034542.html
 * maniadrive-1.2-17.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034527.html
 * php-5.2.12-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034528.html
 * fuse-2.8.1-2.fc11- http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034518.html
 * gzip-1.3.12-10.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/034495.html

KDE
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora KDE Special Interests Group.

Contributing Writer: Ryan Rix

KDE SC 4.4 in kde-redhat and rawhide
KDE-redhat maintainer Rex Dieter lets us know that KDE SC 4.4 is currently in the kde-redhat/unstable and rawhide repositories for testing. The new iteration of the KDE desktop boasts many new features including a reworked plasma desktop shell designed specifically for netbook devices. The full list of new features, along with the full text of the release announcement can be found here. The KDE SC 4.4.0 release may only be released in the unofficial kde-redhat repositories, and the KDE SIG may elect to ship KDE SC 4.4 in the main Fedora repositories when KDE 4.4.1 is released along with Qt 4.6.2.

Upcoming virtuoso changes in kde-redhat
Those KDE users who have been running KDE releases from KDE-RedHat had the option of configuring the Nepomuk social semantic desktop to use the Virtuoso5 database engine. With the upcoming release of KDE SC 4.4, the Virtuoso5 database is being depreciated in favor of a newer version 6.1 of the Virtuoso database. While this database has performance improvements, it is incompatible with the Virtuoso5 database. Sebastian Trüg has created a converter for the nepomuk data that, when virtuoso is updated, will need to be ran before KDE's nepomuk server will start, which is currently in review for inclusion in Fedora, and in kde-redhat/unstable. Dieter lays out the details of how you can convert the existing Nepomuk storage database.
 * 1) qdbus org.kde.NepomukServer /nepomukserver org.kde.NepomukServer.quit
 * 2) yum update virtuoso-opensource to get the latest version of the database
 * 3) yum install virtuosoconverter to get the converter tool. This will also install compat-virtuoso-opensource, the Virtuoso v5 database engine
 * 4) run virtuosoconverter
 * 5) start nepomukserver

This will update the data, and restart the nepomuk server to use the latest version of Nepomuk. Note that virtuoso-opensource has not yet been updated, and will be receiving updates when the converter tool is in Rawhide. Until then, Nepomuk will happily run with the virtuoso5-based nepomuk server. Future versions of the server may not, however, hence the requirement for this update. Sebastian Trüg has stated that he had never planned to support Virtuoso 5 and that this tool was written for early adopters and developers and may not work. Indeed Dieter has had mixed results with this tool.

KDE SC 4.4rc2 live images available for testing
Ryan Rix writes on his blog that Rex Dieter has composed KDE SC 4.4rc2 live images that are suitable for testing the new desktop without negatively affecting your current setup. These images are available via torrent and are installable to a flash drive using either the liveusb-creator application or the command line livecd-iso-to-disk tool available in the livecd-tools package. Major issues should be reported either on the Fedora-KDE mailing list or the #Fedora-KDE IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Please note that the images are now slightly out of date, with the release of KDE SC 4.4.