FWN/Issue174

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 174 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 174 for the week ending May 3rd, 2009.

This week Announcements suggests reading the release notes for "Fedora 11 (Leonidas)". PlanetFedora highlights some choice posts from Fedora blogs including one on the relevance of PPC as a primary architecture. Ambassadors reports that "Fedora stars at Flisol Caracas". QualityAssurance is packed with information on "Test Days" for SSSD and Virtualization. Developments warns of a "Presto No Go" and shares some "Ext4 fallocate Happiness". Translation reflects a huge amount of activity including "Documentation Decisions for Fedora 12". Artwork wonders if there will be a  plugin for. The Weekly Webcomic peeks and pokes at some color preferences! Virtualization includes a look at a new  release and other salient developments.

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com deals with unconfined domains and users.

Tom Callaway explained a few intricacies relating to trademarks. He also explained how he worked with a Fedora rebuild to ensure that Fedora's trademarks were protected.

Adam Williamson summarized "The Great Mixer Debate" (see also FWN173) together with nice screenshots. Without going into too many details, the volume control systems in Fedora 11 have been changed and a great debate ensued.

Harish Pillay attended a Microsoft Interoperability event in which the topic of software patents was discussed.

Heherson Pagcaliwagan showed off some photos from a Geek Camp in Batangas City, Philippines.

Richard W.M. Jones wrote a tutorial explaining how to extend.

James Antill found an interesting way of searching for all "the BugZilla tickets which I've looked at 'recently'" (other than archiving all of the bugzilla mails into a giant folder).

Jeremy Katz questioned the relevance of PPC as a primary architecture for Fedora.

Lubomir Rintel released, a tool to allow   to short-circuit already completed parts of a build, instead of starting from scratch every time.

Luis Villa shared his thoughts on the pending lawsuit between RealNetworks and the MPAA regarding the legality of Real's  software.

In a later (unrelated) post, Luis Villa posted a response to a recent controversy resulting from potentially offensive slides being presented at a conference.

John Poelstra described Test Days, their usefulness and recent successes in the run up to Fedora 11.

John Palmier reached out for donations to the GNOME Foundation in order to continue developments and retain their new Executive Director.

on 2009-04-28 whenever he visited a particular webpage. Subsequent confirmation from other testers led to a bugzilla report. It intially appeared to be a soft lock according to some comments on the bug which reported the ability to move the mouse cursor and play music.

Some very helpful contributions from Adam Jackson suggested that the problem was due to a ridiculously large blit exposing mis-handling of video memory mapping by the kernel. Adam laid the blame squarely on the mis-coding of the web-page. He added that this was not actually a lock-up, just agonizingly slow rendering. RichardKörber requested further help in debugging this and similar problems and that request led to a nice, succinct recipe for generating  backtraces.

, the near miraculous bandwidth saving  plugin, will not be an official part of   due to infrastructure issues cited by Paul W. Frields. This is contrary to what we reported in FWN#172.

and : "previously, translations were merged by intltool from .po files into schemas files and then copied by gconftool from the schemas file into the database.  Now, translations are kept in .po files, and intltool only copies the gettext domain into the schemas, and further into the GConf database.  The only tool that ever uses these translations, gconf-editor, knows how to get them from the message catalogs.  The big advantage of this change is that schemas shrink radically, which should help a lot with the 'slow updates due to GConf' problem. It also reduces the redundancy of storing the schema translations in three places, which should help with live cd size."

It seemed that all GConf-using applications will be rebuilt before  ships but that there is no immediate rush to do so.

filesystem. (See FWN#170 for previous coverage.) Eric provided a concise, informative description of what preallocation is and how it can be used: "One big feature that has already been brought up on the list[1] is file preallocation, which allows an application to pre-allocate blocks it knows that it will eventually write into, thereby making sure it won't run out of space, and also generally getting a more efficient/contiguous file layout. Only a few applications are taking advantage of this so far, in part because it's new.[2]  The transmission bittorrent client is using it, but only if you tweak a configfile in (IMHO) non-obvious ways."

A list of possible starting points to get more applications using preallocation was also provided.

In response to some skepticism from Tom Lane further explanation of which sorts of applications might benefit from preallocation was shared by Eric: "You wouldn't want to use it for every little file you write, either. But for some cases it can be a big win.  Torrent downloading?  This is sort of the quintessential case where it can help.  Databases?  yes.  Rsyncing large files?  yep.  Creating virtual images? yep.  Helping samba cope with weird windows client behavior?  yep Basically anything that is filled in over time, or filled in sparsely, could potentially benefit." Further questioning by Michael Cronenworth on the value of using  as opposed to   yielded further interesting details.

It seemed that the  developers had already jumped at the opportunity thanks to a patch provided by Amit Shah.

.

DanWilliams explained that this was a logical result of  writing either "ONBOOT=no" if the install was not over a network or else "ONBOOT=yes" if the install was over a network. Dan explained that this was in part a security policy decision.

Later Dan suggested using  to correctly /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* for both wired and wireless connections.

could be considered a derivative of Fedora. Matthew's conclusion was that most of the packages were "[...] identical to the Fedora package or is a simple mechanical transformation of a Fedora package[.]" A significant number of the patches were mostly derived from Fedora or SuSE also.

as a system service rather than a user service: "I want to run it under the Users UID and under with the users context. Then I can have it watch for creation of files in the users home directory and be the equivalent of running restorecon ~/ by the user."

Steve Grubb was worried that this would disrupt the audit trail and suggested a  session module instead. Bruno Wolff III also was disturbed by the idea: "This seems to increase the risk of hostile apps being able to get executables relabelled to something they couldn't do directly."

may be one way to change the relative volume of individual applications (as per a question posed my Matthew Woehlke and echoed by Paul W. Frields. Lennart Poettering stated, however, that  should be removed.

tool.
 * This can tell you at a high level what is on a virtual machine, such as how its filesystems are mounted, what OS and version it is running, what kernel, drivers and apps are installed.


 * New 'lvremove', 'vgremove', 'pvremove' commands.
 * Add really working support for NTFS and FAT.
 * Add really working support for CD-ROMs and DVDs.
 * Add  option for read-only mounts in guestfish.
 * New 'set-e2uuid', 'get-e2uuid', 'set-e2label', 'get-e2label' commands for setting ext2/3/4 UUIDs and labels.
 * New 'debug' command for debugging daemon internals.
 * Guestfish recipes.
 * Many bugs fixed (note: including a data corruptor that affected FileOut transfers, so upgrading is recommended).

Version 1.0.10 was announced just last week (FWN#173 ). Also see Richard's many blog posts on.

does, although  is doing nothing more than automating what you could do by hand." Richard then quickly added a   feature to  ,and demonstrated how to use it.

Richard noted the minimum target is Fedora 11. "There's no chance of  for Fedora 10, because the qemu maintainers aren't interested in pulling back vmchannel support into that old qemu 0.9 package in F-10."

to create a similar guest, then export and modify the XML definition of that guest, and finally ' ' it.

Another option was by posted by Daniel Berrange. It's a perl script that can be used to create an XML definition from the set of  command line arguments used to create the guest.

Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Fedora stars at Flisol Caracas
As reported by event organizer Maria Leandro, Flisol Caracas was held recently, with an estimated attendance of 1,700 people, including 100 installers, 15 protocol and 15 sponsors. The Fedora team had a hard day with eight conferences and 12 workshops; as well as the first National tournament of UrbanTerror (a freeware game) and a gpg key sign fest. At the closing, players had the StarWars Club (Darth Vader and one StormTrooper) hovering around with the guys.

Fedora Venezuela installed a lot of machines and gave out 300 LiveDVDs, 50 bubble stickers and 50 vinyl stickers; and the users were really happy with this. Pablo Hernandez (paceh) gave a workshop about Fedora-USB installations and I gave a Conference about the Fedora Community in Venezuela, and found a lot of new users.

Maria also want to say that we had two major interviews, one on national radio and another on national TV (Globovision) and in both of them, Fedora was the center of attention.

Next year Maria will be the National Organizer and she hopes to set up the first Fedora Venezuela General Meeting with all the Fedora users in the country. In the mean time, the Fedoristas have some workshops at several universities, some stands at national conferences (3 stands) and a special "B-day" for our community.

These are some of the photos... but I'm still waiting for more, and the video of the TV appearance:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tatadbb/sets/72157615817707690/

Got Ambassador News?
Any Ambassador news tips from around the Fedora community can be submitted to me by e-mailing lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org and I'd be glad to put it in this weekly report.