FWN/Issue211

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 211 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 211 for the week ending January 31, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Our issue kicks off with a couple development announcements related to the Fedora 13 Feature Freeze last week for Feature and Spin submissions. In news from the Fedora Planet, several posts about opensource.com, coverage of a "State of the Union" from Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst, progress on Máirín Duffy's Inkspace course to a Boston area middle school, coverage of a discussion around Fedora's goals from several Fedora Project leaders, and enthusiasm for Gource, "an amazing program for visualizing commit history in a git-based code project." In Ambassador news, an event report for the Cerea Fair contributed by several people from Italy that drew 20,000, including blog postings and photos. In news from the Design team, details on preparation for Fedora 13 Alpha, with upcoming decisions this week on Fedora 13 wallpaper, and coverage of some ideas for Fedora 13 overall designs. The Security Advisories beat brings us current with last week's Fedora 11 and 12 security patches. We hope you enjoy FWN 211!

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

Outage Notification - 2010-01-28 16:40:00 UTC
Mike McGrath announced that there had been an outage starting at 2010-01-28 16:40:00 UTC, which was ongoing. Resolution time was not yet known. He also mentioned, "

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

or run: date -d '2010-01-28 16:40:00 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, Torrent, Fedora Talk, Fedora People,

Ticket Link:

Reason for Outage: We are seeing a 25% packet loss to PHX2. This also is impacting non-fedora systems like bugzilla and RHN.

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

Purging the F13 orphans
Jesse Keating announced, ""It's that time of the release cycle again, to purge the orphans before we get to feature freeze. Any unblocked orphans will be purged by the feature freeze. A list of unblocked orphans and the broken deps they would cause is at the end of this email.

Taking ownership of an orphan on the devel collection will prevent them from being blocked. Remember, it is OK to let software die. Don't view this as a list of things that somebody should pick up if they have the spare time. Things should only be revived if there are actual users in need of the software.

The list of orphan's are:

The script that generated this page can be found at. There you can also report bugs and RFEs.

Fedora 13 Milestone Reached: Feature and Spin Submission Deadlines
John Poelstra announced, "A friendly reminder that yesterday, January 26, 2010, we reached the Feature and Spin submission deadline. Any new features or spins submitted after yesterday will be targeted for Fedora 14.

A summary of the Fedora 13 milestones and exception process is here:

The next significant schedule milestone is Feature Freeze on February 9,2010. At Feature Freeze it is expected that all features are *significantly* "feature complete" and ready for testing. .

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

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

 * 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

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
The big news these days was the debut of opensource.com/. As Jan Wildeboer described it: "Finally. A place to discuss, learn, promote everything open...We started this community to allow people from all across the world, regardless of job and skills, to communicate and foster more Open. Let’s look (far) beyond software. Lets talk about the Open Everything that this world so desperately needs."

Karsten Wade followed-up on what opensource.com is and isn't. "I’ve been watching some of the discussion around it and have some comments about a bit of confusion some folks are having. Please pass this along."

Jim Whitehurst delivered a "State of the Union at Red Hat", reflecting on the past year.

Daniel Berrange wrote a post on "Using GObject Introspection + Gjs to provide a JavaScript plugin engine".

Máirín Duffy continued writing-up and posting notes (part 2, 3 , 4 ) to an Inkscape course. Máirín is teaching the class at a Boston-area middle school.

Daniel Walsh explained why SELinux does not give the full path to files in error messages, but provided a good workaround.

Jan Wildeboer gave a talk at FOSDEM 2010 about SystemTap.

James Antill explained why Yum now emits the message "Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum." and how to handle it.

Craig Muzilla (Red Hat Vice President, Middleware Business Unit) wrote about "Oracle's Java Opportunity" now that the EU has approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun.

Greg DeKoenigsberg posted about Fedora's Goals. "I’m glad to see a lot of thoughtful discussion around the topic of Fedora’s larger goals, and I’m particularly glad to see some new blood driving the discussion. Fedora’s ability to attract outstanding new talent to the party is one of the things that makes it such a remarkable project."

Paul W. Frields added some additional points about Fedora's goals. "The ability of any Fedora contributor to scratch his or her own itch is one of the strengths of our community. It has yielded many exceptional contributors, brought volunteer leadership to many of our project teams, and produced a steady enough stream of young contributors to merit an annual scholarship recognizing their achievements."

Michael DeHaan was amazed by Gource, "an amazing program for visualizing commit history in a git-based code project. What I like about it is that it can also show what areas of the project are active in an easy to understand way, to show whether there is community around a whole project or just aspects of it."

If you have ever tried to work with CVS and struggled with the fact that the output from "cvs status" is mostly useless, particularly with large projects, Till Maas has the answer. "I quickly wrote a simple MIT-licensed python script that creates an output like modern scms do."

Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

More than 20,000 attend Cerea Fair in Italy
Luca Foppiano reports that the Cerea Fair in Italy was a success for the Fedora team. He describes it as an impressive event.

Detailed reports can be found here:

Alexjan Carraturo (in Italian): http://axjslack.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/fiera-di-cerea-una-ottima-esperienza-per-il-team-di-fedora/

Lorenzo Villani (in English): http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/lvillani/2010/01/20/cerea-fair-january-2010/

Luca Foppiano (in English): http://blog.foppiano.org/2010/01/20/cerea-fair-report-jan-2010/

Photos can be found here:

Lorenzo Villani: http://share.ovi.com/album/lvillani.CereaFair2010

Luca Foppiano: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lfoppiano/sets/72157623247389422/

Fedora 12 is here
With Fedora 12 Constantine now here, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events -- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Preparing for Alpha
After John Poelstra reminded about the upcoming scheduled tasks for the team, Paul Frields proposed a set of dates for the Fedora 13 Alpha milestone "Use the week of Feb 1-7 to make some decisions about what design to pursue for the Alpha wallpaper. * Use the week of Feb 8-15 to solicit and prepare the candidate wallpaper for the Alpha release."

Designs for Fedora 13
Onyeibo Oku proposed a 3D style space image for the Fedora 13 artwork "What if its an outer space scene with stars (having animated twinkles ... for the boot-up background image)?", something which was considered not very usable by Brad Fanella "we should go with a nice, simple, clean look". Máirín Duffy continued to play with rockets and trails "I spent some time this weekend working on another iteration of the Fedora rocket lines idea".

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

 * bltk-1.0.9-7.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034477.html
 * samba-3.4.5-55.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034470.html
 * zabbix-1.6.8-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034413.html
 * ncpfs-2.2.6-13.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034403.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * samba-3.4.5-0.47.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034444.html
 * zabbix-1.6.8-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034425.html
 * ncpfs-2.2.6-12.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-January/034422.html