FWN/Issue255

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 255 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 255 for the week ending December 8, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Our issue starts off with two announcements, including a reminder about Fedora 12's end of life, and a survey for Fedora Weekly News readers, requesting feedback on FWN as it transitions to the Drupal-based Fedora Insight. In Marketing team news, more discussion around the FWN survey, and coverage of the latest Marketing team meeting. Two more articles about Fedora "In the News" this week around packaging Unity for Fedora. Ambassadors reports eight new Fedora Ambassadors from eight different countries this week, along with the very helpful summaries of discussion from both the Ambassadors and FAmSCo lists. Quality Assurance reports on several work items, including a call for test cases of automated storage testing in Anaconda, blocker bug and update tracking process improvements, and development of a critical path test case creation process. In Design news, lots of activity around the FUDCon 2011 Tempe t-shirt design, and the announcement of a new Design team blog to better communicate the team's activities. Our issue comes to a completion with updates on the latest security-related package releases over this past week for Fedora 12, 13 and 14. Enjoy! As a personal note, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to provide feedback in the FWN survey so far. It is much appreciated, and will provide direction for an improved FWN to meet your information needs about the Fedora Project.

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: Pascal Calarco

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

Fedora Weekly News Reader Survey: feedback requested!
Pascal Calarco solicited feedback on Fedora Weekly News via a survey, open to all readers:

"Fedora Weekly News (FWN) is the weekly newsletter for the Fedora Project, reporting on activities, developments and news about Fedora. FWN is planning to transition to a new Drupal-based platform for workflow, editing, publishing and dissemination, and, in advance of this, we would like your feedback on how you, the reader, uses FWN and solicit ideas for improving the quality and service of FWN to meet your needs!

We invite you to provide us feedback on Fedora Weekly News via an anonymous survey, below. This will be valuable as we integrate FWN into our new Drupal-based news and information portal, Fedora Insight. The survey shouldn't take more than about 5-10 minutes of your time. Thanks again!

http://fwnsurvey.limequery.org/85767/lang-en

Yours in Fedora,

Fedora Weekly News Team:

Adam Batkin Runa Bhattacharjee Nicu Buculei Pascal Calarco Neville A. Cross Rashadul Islam Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay Adam Williamson"

Fedora 12 End of Life
Kevin Fenzi announced :

"This announcement is a reminder that as of 2010-12-02, Fedora 12 has reached its end of life for updates and support. No further updates, including security updates, will be available for Fedora 12.

Fedora 13 will continue to receive updates until approximately one month after the release of Fedora 15. The maintenance schedule of Fedora releases is documented on the Fedora Project wiki:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Life_Cycle#Maintenance_Schedule

Please see for more information on upgrading to a supported release.

kevin"

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

There were no Development announcements in the past week aside from the Fedora 12 EOL notice, above.

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 (Dec 2010 - Feb 2011)

 * North America (NA)
 * Central & South America (LATAM): none
 * 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.

Marketing
In this section, we cover the happenings for Fedora Marketing Project from 2010-12-01 to 2010-12-07.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

On the idea of make a Fedora Weekly News Readers survey, Jesus Franco offered a couple of options. Pascal Calarco drafted a survey and asked for feedback. Neville Cross pointed that spreading the survey may also help to spread the Fedora Weekly News. Mel Chua said that this makes sense from budget perspective and offered to pay for the use of Lime Survey services. Robyn Bergeron gave valuable feed back to make the survey more easy to fill out. She also declared herself a fan of Limesurvey. Pascal posted the final version of the survey.

As any other Tuesday, Marketing meeting took place and minutes are available to the public

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

Unity Desktop Possibly Coming to Fedora (Phoronix)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded a posting on the Unity Desktop possibly coming to Fedora:

"Adam Williamson has shared that he's looking at packaging Canonical's Unity desktop for Fedora. "Why? Well, a few reasons. Mainly, Unity’s an interesting project. I want to look at it and compare it to GNOME Shell and I think quite a few others do too, so it seems nice to package it so you can run both on Fedora. I don’t really want to maintain an Ubuntu install just to test Unity (can’t do it in a KVM VM as it requires compositing support). Also, though, I think it’ll do a bit to help keep everyone honest: if other projects show interest in providing Unity as an option for people to use, it increases the motivation for Unity's developers to make sure it can be easily built without non-upstreamed changes. Hopefully it also increases the motivation for upstream projects to work with the Unity developers to get their changes merged. It's the same for any project, really – if you have a wide base of users of a project across many distributions, it gives everyone involved a reason to work to make sure it's easy to maintain the project across distributions."

The full article is available.

Fedora Moving to Unity Too! (Ostatic)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded another posting regarding this:

"Despite all the negative reaction to Ubuntu's move to Unity, is it possible that another popular distribution is going to walk in its footsteps? Do they want to experience the backlash and exodus of users? Do they want to be subjected to a barrage of criticism? Well, no, not really. But Adam Williamson is working on making some Fedora packages for those that might want to test and run it.

In a blog post today Williamson announced that he's going to give it the ole college try. But according to him, it's going to be quite the undertaking. He said, "I'm just started at the bottom of the dependency pile and seeing how far I can get. So far, I have review requests in for libindicator and dee. I need to do nux, and after libindicator goes in, the actual indicators. The remaining dependencies are a bit trickier."

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 a couple of new members joining.

Nunor5 from Portugal mentored by Robert Scheck

Tosin Oduwole from Nigeria mentored by Robert Scheck

Eslam Shapsough from Jordan mentored by Bert Desmet

Lucas Augusto Brito de Oliveira from Brazil

Dimitris Glaros from Greece mentored by Robert Scheck

Mohd Fazli Azran from Malayasia mentored by Gerard Braad

Vinzenz Vietzke from Germany mentored by Robert Scheck

Antonio Trande from Italy mentored by Robert Scheck

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list
Buddhika Chandradeepa Kurera announced that the Polo T Shirt for Ambassadors was finalized and requested that the form to be filled up to enable orders to be placed.

Danishka Navin posted a report about all regions and nearly all municipalities in Norway using Open Source

Bert Desmet announced a Fedora 14 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Release event at Antwerp, Belgium

Joerg Simon posted the FAmSCo Final Report 2010

Mahay Alam Khan informed about producing Fedora 14 (32 bit) installation DVD for Ambassadors in Bangladesh and requested their postal addresses to facilitate sending a bulk amount of DVD by courier.

Ankur Sinha posted what prospective ambassadors could do aside from holding Linux events after reading a post on community support

Jared Smith announced the Election Results from FAmSCo, FESCo and Fedora Board

Max Spevack asked about budget requirements around FOSDEM 2011

Buddhika Kurera suggested asking each Ambassador to have a responsibility to organize at least one event a year to spread Fedora in the community. Max Spevack agreed about the need to Hall Monitor the thread

Heherson Pagcaliwagan posted LinuxConf Australia 2011 and FAD Brisbane planning

Harish Pillay reported about a Fedora 14 launch at Singapore

Zoltan Hoppar wrote about a plan to create new T-shirts but want to know the slogan for Fedora 14

Edwind Richzendy Contreras Soto reported on the Fedora 14 launch at Venezuela

Ilyes Gouta reported about the Fedora presence at the SIB Expo

Neville A. Cross posted about the after party of Fedora 14 Launch Party at Managua, Nicaragua

Zied Fakhfakh informed about a Fedora Talk at ISET'Com on 2010-12-08

Pierros Papadeas wrote about helping with the Brisbane FAD

Buddhika Kurera posted about a FAD in Sri Lanka during 2011

Tian Shixiong posted a self introduction to the list

Caius 'kaio' Chance informed about the renaming of the au-users list to anz

Ashiqur Rahman Angel reported on the Fedora 14 Release Party, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Neville A. Cross posted about a Barcamp in San Pedro Sula, Honduras

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list
Joerg Simon posted a request asking a review of the FAmSCo Report 2010 Susmit Shannigrahi pointed out a few corrections and asked about the need to do a Publican report which he subsequently posted. Max Spevack informed about updating the budget page

Joerg Simon informed about the onset of the FAmSCo election period expressed hope about helping the new team with the transition. Paul W Frields took time to thank the current FAmSCo and noted the exceptional impact it continues to make on the community

Joerg Simon set up the process to decommission the former FAmSCo

Paul W Frields mentioned that being no longer the Fedora Project Leader, the new FAmSCo should feel free to consider removing him from the FAmSCo list

Joerg Simon responded to a sponsorship request around FOSDEM'11 and provided his opinions on the FAmSCo list

Pierros Papadeas posted the agenda for the FAmSCo meeting on 2010-12-11. The thread has discussions about other items as suggested by members of the new FAmSCo

Max Spevack requested that Harish Pillay be provided view access to the tickets on the FAmSCo trac instance as he is the primary point of contact for budget stuff in the APAC region. Joerg Simon informed about it being done

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Call for Anaconda test cases
Chris Lumens posted a call for test cases for automated storage testing in Anaconda, the Fedora system installer. Several people followed up with suggestions for tests.

Blocker bug tracking process improvements
Following some discussion on possible improvements to monitoring blocker bug trackers, Bruno Wolff provided some prefab Bugzilla queries for finding blocker bugs which have been closed but not verified , to help ensure that blocker bugs do not drop off the radar if they are improperly closed.

Update testing process improvements
Kevin Fenzi posted a call for ideas and comments on potential improvements and adjustments to the update testing processes. An extensive discussion followed, and the various ideas presented and discussed will feed into FESCo's consideration of the topic.

Critical path test case creation process
Adam Williamson announced that he had opened a trac ticket to track the creation of a framework for package-specific test cases to aid the critical path package update testing process. Several recent discussions within both the development and QA groups had reinforced the need for specific test cases for critical path package updates, and he planned to create a framework to aid the creation of these tests and their integration into Bodhi, fedora-easy-karma and similar tools.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

FUDCon T-shirt
Emily Dirsh proposed a T-shirt design for the Tempe FUDCon "It's inspired by the art of the Hohokam who once lived in the area" and after an initial warm receive from Máirín Duffy "Wow that is **gorgeous**, I love it! I would love a shirt with that design in it!" she followed with a couple of variations "Ooh, I love the idea of a navy shirt! Yeah, the advantage to a single-color design is it's very easy to adjust the color." Jef van Schendel also proposed a few remixes "Here's a few quick and dirty stabs at a dark shirt version".

Design Team Blog
Máirín Duffy announced a new communication channel for the team "Thanks to Sijis we now have a team blog!! (Yay!!)" and she invited authors to join "Some members of the design team we couldn't add to the blog because their accounts weren't in the Fedora blogs system. If you'd like to be added, please log in to Fedora blogs to create your account, and let me know you've done it so I can request your account be added."

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

 * kernel-2.6.35.9-64.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051853.html
 * java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-49.1.9.2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051711.html
 * bareftp-0.3.7-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051921.html
 * clamav-0.96.5-1400.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051905.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * udev-153-5.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051755.html
 * bareftp-0.3.7-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051936.html
 * dnsperf-1.0.1.0-19.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051914.html
 * bind-dyndb-ldap-0.1.0-0.10.a1.20091210git.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051911.html
 * bind-9.7.2-1.P3.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051910.html
 * kernel-2.6.34.7-63.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051902.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * kernel-2.6.32.26-175.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-December/051749.html