FWN/Issue219

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 219 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 219 for the week ending March 30, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

As there were no announcements during the past week, we kick this issue off with news from the Fedora Planet, including news on a new virtualization tool for resizing VM disks, details on a new Fedora Mini, to discuss Fedora on platforms such as Sugar, Moblin and Maeon (MeeGo), and thoughts on how to use Wikipedia better in the classroom. Ambassadors news brings us an event report from Open Fest 2010 in Athens, Greece. In Quality Assurance, details on this past week's Test Day on printing, and this week's two test days on SSSD implementation and ABRT, the automated bug report tool, as well as the first test compose for Fedora 13 beta, as well as many other great tidbits! In Artwork/Design Team news, details on a Fedora 13 countdown banner, details on preparing beta artwork, and a new icon set submission for F13. This week's issue wraps up with security advisories for Fedora 11, 12 and 13 released over the past week. Enjoy FWN!

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

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
Jan Wildeboer pointed out that "IBM has chosen KVM via Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to run their IBM Cloud", though it supports both RHEL and SuSE as guests.

Richard W.M. Jones released a new tool, virt-resize to resize virtual machine disks and asked "what features would you like to see?" for version 2.0? Rich also explained how some of libguestfs and guestfish works.

Sebastian Dziallas announced that there is now a Fedora Mini mailing list to discuss Fedora on platforms such as Sugar and MeeGo.

The Red Hat JBoss team posted an update on the status of JBoss Enterprise Middleware releases.

Justin O'Brien mentioned that Paul W. Frields will be stepping down as Fedora Project Leader and that the election process will be coming up soon.

Luis Villa stepped in to the mess of software patents and and their applicability to h264 and Ogg. "Let this be a friendly public service announcement: patent law says that anyone who uses a patent, not just the manufacturer or licensor of the patent-infringing good, can potentially be dragged into court on a charge of patent infringement." Luis followed-up with some clarifications. "More patent lessons- first on submarine patents (basics!) and then on how patent pools are licensed. I don’t really want to continue this series, but the past few days have been a good reminder that there is a lot of misinformation out there around patents."

Casey Dahlin suggested that instead of using talloc (see FWN Issue 218), libnih might be an even better alternative.

Karsten Wade wrote about better ways to use Wikipedia in the classroom. "Where Wikipedia is a useful information source and starting place for deeper exploration beyond it’s reference-focused world, there is so much more that can be done with it to help teach the open source way. In fact, you can teach all of the basics of joining a collaborative free and open source software community without ever getting more technical than how to get an account and edit a wiki page."

Ambassadors
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Fedora at Open Fest 2010
Pierros Papadeas reports that last weekend Fedora attended Open Fest 2010 in Athens with a great booth and many people in attendance.

Fedora attracted many newcomers, especially with the Translation Marathon for Fedora 13 during the event.

On the wiki page you can find some blogposts-reports on the event and this nice gallery of photos from Fedora's presence there.

"We had a dual-projector setup with many swag, mostly produced by us, and some nice little ideas, like 'Try me!' signs," Pierros reported.

Pierros thanks all the Greek fellows, that helped Fedora be its best one more time.

Campus Ambassadors up and running
The Fedora Project's Campus Ambassadors program is up and running, and is looking for participants. If you're a high school or college student who wants to help promote Fedora on your campus, this is the place for you.

For more information, visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Campus_Ambassadors

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.

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team. This week, we are trying out a new topic-focused layout, without the topic-by-topic weekly meeting recaps. Please let me know if you particularly like or dislike the new layout!

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
Last week's Test Day was on printing, including the implementation of automatic print driver installation in Fedora 13. There was a disappointingly low turnout, despite Tim Waugh's extensive efforts to organize and promote the event. We theorize that printing works so well for most people that they didn't think it was necessary to turn up! Nevertheless, thanks to those who did come out to test, and reported five bugs for Tim to work on.

This week sees two Test Days. The first, on Tuesday 2010-03-30, will have passed by the time you read this; it will have been on the implementation of SSSD by default. This feature is very useful to those who use accounts on a remote server which may not always be accessible from their system. We'll bring you a report on this event next week.

The second will be on ABRT, the automated bug report tool which has been included with Fedora by default since the release of Fedora 12. We'll be testing Fedora 13 enhancements to ABRT and making sure the system is working correctly for the upcoming Fedora 13 release. ABRT is important to all Fedora users and developers, so if you have a few minutes, please come along and help test! As usual, you can test with an installed Fedora 13 or Rawhide system, or a live image which is available on the Test Day page. Zdenek Prikryl, Jiri Moskovc and Adam Williamson will be on hand during the event, which will run all day on Thursday 2010-04-01 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

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.

Fedora 13 testing
The first test compose for Fedora 13 Beta was announced by Rui He on 2010-03-23. The group helped to fill out the planned installation and desktop test matrices. Rui He provided a summary of the TC test results. Shortly after the test compose, the first release candidate build followed on 2010-03-26. Andre Robatino provided delta ISOs between TC1 and RC1. Again, the group quickly filled out the desktop and install matrices. The testers found several blocker issues.

The third blocker bug review meeting for Fedora 13 Beta was held on 2010-03-26. All outstanding Beta blocker bugs were reviewed, and developers were consulted on the remaining open bugs to ensure fixes should be available in time for the release candidate process to begin the following week.

'John H' reported that the test candidate build failed to install correctly to an Intel X25-M SSD. James Laska suggested he file a bug report on the issue.

Kamil Paral, Joachim Backes and others found a bug which prevented the boot process from completing successfully with the Plymouth graphical boot system enabled. The bug was later tracked down and resolved in a build which will be brought into the second Beta release candidate.

Update acceptance testing
During the weekly QA meeting, the group discussed the status of the various proposed changes and policies regarding updates. Adam Williamson summarized that "we need: a policy/sop for the 'proventesters' group, and a guide to providing updates-testing feedback for a) branched and b) stable releases, explaining what actually should be tested and how feedback should be given". Adam Miller provided a second draft of the proventesters SOP proposal, and Adam Williamson posted a discussion of testing procedure which posited that a policy for testing updates was impossible within the current Bodhi system, and the best way forward would be to revise the way Bodhi works. Mathieu Bridon pointed out that Williamson's proposal was very similar to Doug Ledford's earlier proposal, and explained that the infrastructure team was already working Doug's ideas into their plans for 'Bodhi 2', the next major revision of Bodhi.

Target bug trackers
Following on from discussion the previous week, Adam Williamson posted a proposal on the use of the Target bug trackers, suggesting either discontinuing their use or repurposing them to track bugs which did not constitute release blockers, but for which fixes would be accepted through release freezes. The thread turned into quite a wide-ranging discussion about freeze procedures and update acceptance. Later, Adam summarized by suggesting the key issue to decide is 'whether we want to have a time-defined stage' where only fixes for blockers and certain specifically chosen bugs would be accepted, and if a tracker bug is the most sensible way to keep track of those bugs.

Bugzapping in the classroom
Vedran Miletić asked the group for advice and support on teaching Bugzapping in a university environment. Christopher Beland applauded the idea, and suggested Firefox, Evolution, Nautilus and Rhythmbox as good components for a class group to work on. Adam Williamson offered to provide support and assistance.

rsync for test builds
Andre Robatino asked if it would be possible to set up rsync access for the server on which test builds are stored, to make it easier to convert a DVD build into a multi-CD build for testing purposes. He then suggested that zsync would serve the purpose even better. Adam Williamson pointed out that zsync was still not packaged in Fedora due to a problem with bundled libraries.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Counting Down to Fedora 13
Alexander Smirnov created a complex and elaborate count-down banner for the upcoming Fedora 13 release "I upload sample image to wiki and concept in the form of animation to my fedorapeople space" and Máirín Duffy offered a number of improvements in the text "f you have the rocket launching, maybe you don't need to say 'launched in', you can just say 'X days' so translators only need to translate 'days' and you don't have to worry about running out of space for the translation as much."

Preparing Beta Artwork
As John Poelstra reminded about the upcoming schedule and deadlines, Nicu Buculei noticed the team is behind it, and proposed to use the Alpha artwork in the Beta release "Considering we are way pas the deadline for finalizing the Beta wallpaper and very close to its package deadline, I propose that if we nobody propose an improvement in the next 24 hours, we go for Beta (and most likely final version) with Rocket Trails 2 that was already used for Alpha". Martin Sourada agreed "I should like to add that the Alpha wallpaper is awesome albeit rather lowish resolution and is missing dual screen versions" and offered to package it "I'm ready to do the packaging work as soon as I have the necessary sources" while Paul Frields talked possible future enhancements "If we want to take another stab at the wallpaper for post-Beta/GA, I know that Mairin Duffy had collected some constructive critiques." Kris Thomsen showed availability to work on splashes, which are derivatives of the wallpaper "I can try to do the firstboot/anaconda banners".

New Mist Icons
Máirín Duffy submitted an addition to the default Fedora icon theme "Lapo has created some new Mist icons very recently and was wondering if we could get them into F13" and Matthias Clasen pointed to a small packaging problem "Mairin, these look indeed great. But we'll need at least the folder icons in the same sizes that they are present in the gnome icon theme, or things will look bad at different zoom levels in nautilus" which was quickly corrected

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 13 Security Advisories

 * xulrunner-1.9.2.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037972.html
 * firefox-3.6.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037974.html
 * mozvoikko-1.0-9.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037971.html
 * perl-Gtk2-MozEmbed-0.08-6.fc13.12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037973.html
 * gnome-python2-extras-2.25.3-16.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037969.html
 * Miro-2.5.4-3.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037970.html
 * galeon-2.0.7-25.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/037968.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * trac-0.11.7-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038240.html
 * fcron-3.0.5-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038150.html
 * moodle-1.9.8-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038138.html
 * krb5-1.7.1-6.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038129.html
 * libpng-1.2.43-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038123.html
 * maniadrive-1.2-21.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038059.html
 * php-5.3.2-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038060.html

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

 * php-5.2.13-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038276.html
 * maniadrive-1.2-18.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038277.html
 * trac-0.11.7-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038232.html
 * openssh-5.2p1-6.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038214.html
 * tar-1.22-5.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038149.html
 * cpio-2.9.90-8.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038134.html
 * moodle-1.9.8-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038127.html
 * libpng-1.2.43-1.fc11 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-March/038120.html