FWN/Issue272

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 272 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 272 for the week ending April 20, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

We start this issue off with details on the Fedora 15 beta, followed by details on a couple planned service outages. Eleven more articles from the trade press and blogosphere in this week's Fedora In the News, around Gnome 3, Fedora 15, YouTube's decision to go with WebM, and more. In Ambassador news this week, a new Ambassador for Brazil, and a very helpful summary of traffic on the Ambassador and FAmSCo lists. Quality Assurance this week reports on the latest Test Day on virtualization and the next Test Days on Gnome 3 and cloud integration, as well as details on Fedora 15 beta prep and Sugar build testing. This issue rounds out with security advisories for Fedora 13, 14 and 15 this past week. Read on!

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: Rashadul Islam

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

Announcing the release of Fedora 15 Beta!!
Dennis Gilmore on Tue Apr 19 14:50:03 UTC 2011 announced ,

"The clock is ticking. The days are counting down. The release of Fedora 15, codenamed "Lovelock," is scheduled for release in late May. Fedora is the leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to users worldwide, with a new release every six months.

We are delighted to announce the availability of the Beta release of Fedora 15.

"I beta one American dollar that you will love this release!"

Come see why we love Fedora so much. We are betting you will, too. Download it now:

What is the Beta Release?
The beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 15. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading to the general release of Fedora 15 in May. We invite you to join us in making Fedora 15 a solid release by downloading, testing, and providing your valuable feedback.

Of course, this is a beta release, meaning that some problems may still be lurking. A list of the problems we already know about can be seen on the Common F15 bugs page, at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F15_bugs.

If you find a bug that's not found on that page, be sure it gets fixed before release by reporting your discovery at Thank you!

Features
Desktop enthusiasts and end users of all sorts can look forward to:

version of the Gnome desktop. After many years of a largely unchanged Gnome 2.x experience, GNOME 3 brings a fresh look and feel with GNOME Shell.
 * Gnome Shell and the Gnome 3 desktop. Gnome 3 is the next major

OpenOffice, with the support of the OpenOffice.org community. All of the applications you know and love are still there, including apps for spreadsheets, document creation, and presentations.
 * LibreOffice Productivity Suite. LibreOffice is a fork of

been updated, and the Fedora Spins SIG has other offerings tailored to a wide variety of user needs.
 * Desktop environments a-plenty. The Xfce and LXDE spins have

Sysadmins will love features such as:

machines) from simple plain text appliance definition files for various virtual platforms, and is great for building appliances for use in a Cloud environment.
 * Appliance building. BoxGrinder creates appliances (virtual

possible to change firewall settings without the need to restart the firewall and to make persistent connections possible.
 * Dynamic Firewall. The dynamic firewall mode aims to make it

Coders have lots of new development tools to try out, including:

OCaml 3.12 are all included in Fedora 15.
 * Updates to popular languages. Python 3.2, Rails 3.0.3, and

comprehension, and build system tool.
 * Project tooling. Maven 3 is a Java project management, project

4.6 is included. (Fedora 15 has also been rebuilt using GCC 4.6!)
 * Compiling and debugging. GDB gets an update to 7.3, and GCC

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list and details of all the new features in Fedora 15 is available here:

We have nightly composes of alternate spins available here:

Contributing
For more information on common and known bugs, tips on how to report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the release notes at.

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit today!"

Fedora Development News
The Development Announcement 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

Outage: Fedora Account System (fas01) - 2011-04-21 20:00 UTC
Kevin Fenzi on Mon Apr 18 22:59:42 UTC 2011 announced ,

"There will be an outage starting at 2011-04-21 20:00 UTC, which will last approximately 1 hour.

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

date -d '2011-04-21 20:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:
The fas01 account system machine will be moving to new hardware. This outage may only affect small parts of the Account system as backup servers should handle the load.

Affected Services:
Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/

Unaffected Services:

 * Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
 * Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
 * BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
 * DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
 * Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
 * Email system
 * Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
 * Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/
 * Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.org/
 * Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/
 * Fedora Talk - http://talk.fedoraproject.org/
 * GIT / Source Control - pkgs.fedoraproject.org
 * Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/
 * Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/
 * Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/
 * Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/
 * Smolt - http://smolts.org/
 * Spins - http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
 * Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
 * Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
 * Translation Services - http://translate.fedoraproject.org/
 * Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Contact Information:
Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the ticket for this outage above."

Outage: BuildSystem: Bodhi, Koji, Pkgs - 2011-04-20 20:00 UTC
Kevin Fenzi on Tue Apr 19 02:57:51 UTC 2011 announced ,

"There will be an outage starting at 2011-04-20 20:00 UTC, which will last approximately 2 hours.

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

date -d '2011-04-20 20:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:
Several of the build related system instances are going to be moved to new hardware. This includes db03 (the koji database), nfs01 (frontend nfs for rel-eng and koji), and pkgs01 (fedora packagers git repositories). Additionally, db03 is going to be upgraded to a RHEL6 instance.

Affected Services:

 * Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
 * Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
 * GIT / Source Control - pkgs.fedoraproject.org

Unaffected Services:

 * BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
 * DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
 * Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
 * Email system
 * Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
 * Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
 * Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/
 * Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.org/
 * Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/
 * Fedora Talk - http://talk.fedoraproject.org/
 * Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/
 * Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/
 * Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/
 * Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/
 * Smolt - http://smolts.org/
 * Spins - http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
 * Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
 * Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
 * Translation Services - http://translate.fedoraproject.org/
 * Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Contact Information:
Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the ticket for this outage above. "

Fedora Events
The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning. Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding. In plain words, 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 (March - May 2011)

 * 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.

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

Mmm mmm good - YouTube videos now served in WebM
Rahul Sundaram forwarded a posting about YouTube's move to WebM, an open content media format:

With Firefox 4 as the default web browser in Fedora 15, users will now be able to access a wide variety of content in YouTube without any need for a third party plugin or patent encumbered codecs.

"To that end, all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term. As we work to transcode more videos into WebM, we hope to reduce the technical incompatibilities that prevent you from accessing video while improving the overall online video landscape.

Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we’re also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM."

The full article is available.

Fedora and GNOME branding drama: Missing the big picture (dissociatedpress.net)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article about the Gnome 3 and Fedora branding discussions:

"I’m not saying this to belittle Fedora — but to put this whole thing into perspective. Arguing over branding here is /just plain silly/. Depending on which side you’re on, it may validate your “team” (GNOME vs. Fedora, I guess) but it’s /utterly irrelevant/ when it comes to having an impact on Fedora adoption. At best it’s a distraction from actually increasing the market share of Linux — and at worst it’s a validation of the argument that community driven projects fail due to infighting."

The full article is available.

Sanity saver: Fedora 15 answers Ubuntu's Unity (The Register UK)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article about Fedora 15's Gnome 3 feature set:

"Fedora 15 has slipped into its new GNOME 3 dress with aplomb. If you don't like GNOME 3 that's one thing, but it's hard to fault Fedora's integration of it.

GNOME 3 may be the biggest news in this beta, but Fedora 15 does manages to slip in another major change. Fedora 15 now uses systemd as the default system and session manager. Systemd was in Fedora 14, but not enabled by default. The result of the completed transition will be faster boot and shutdown times, especially on SSDs."

While Fedora 15 is definitely still a beta and not recommended for everyday use, it's leaps and bounds beyond Ubuntu's first beta release. If you want to test out GNOME 3, the Fedora 15 beta makes an excellent way to use it."

The full article is available.

Seven Alternatives to GNOME 3 (The Register UK)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article on Gnome 3 and alternatives:

"The first thing you should do is make sure that you are not just reacting against the fact that you are facing a new desktop. The fact that many people – the exact percentage is uncertain -- like or tolerate GNOME 3 should be proof enough that you should be wary of snap judgments. Persist with GNOME 3 for a week, and you may find it more endurable than you originally imagined, especially if you learn how to change the default settings.

But if you are determined to avoid GNOME 3, what are the odds that you will find something to your liking? Probably, you will have to endure some differences. But assuming what you want is a desktop that resembles GNOME 2 as closely as possible, here are some possibilities to consider."

The full article is available.

Fedora's Lovelock Linux is beta ready (The Register UK)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article about the release of Fedora 15 beta:

"The beta for Fedora 15, announced on Tuesday and codenamed Lovelock, becomes the first major Linux distro to include GNOME 3, which was released earlier this month. Fedora 15 will jettison GNOME 2.

GNOME 3 is a major departure from the existing interface: it cleans up the interface and makes it easier to find and fire up applications through juicy new icons."

The full article is available.

Beta version of Fedora 15 includes GNOME 3 and systemd (The H Online)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article on Fedora 15 features:

"Fedora 15 will be the first major Linux distribution to include GNOME 3, which was released two weeks ago. Fedora 15 will not include GNOME 2; the KDE Plasma Desktop will be a member of the 4.6 series. The Fedora Project has also undertaken a major behind the scenes change, so that Fedora 15 will see a switch from Upstart to the sysvinit and Upstart alternative systemd, which was first introduced just under a year ago. The kernel in the beta is based on Linux version 2.6.38. LibreOffice will fill the office suite shoes and the C and C++-Compiler will be the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.6."

The full article is available.

Fedora 16 Release Named (Linux Pro Magazine)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded a short note about the Fedora 16 release name:

"In a Fedora community vote, Fedora 16 release has been named Verne"

The full article is available.

Fedora 15 Beta Available: Feedback Wanted (Linux Pro Magazine)
Kara Schlitz forwarded a brief announcement on Fedora 15 beta availability:

"Announced today on the Fedora announce mailing list, the Fedora 15 (Lovelace) beta is now available for download."

The full article is available.

Video: Introduction to Fedora (trainsignaltraining.com)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded a video introduction to Fedora 14:

"Fedora began in 2003 and the most recent version, 14 is codenamed Laughlin. In this video, we will begin with a brief history of the operating system, including a discussion of some of its unique features. We’ll then review installation options including CD/DVD and USB. In addition, if you’d like to test Fedora before permanently installing it on your hard disk, you can use virtualization software and we’ll cover that in another video.

The video continues with a look at the Fedora desktop and how to navigate and customize it to your liking. We’ll wrap up with a few key resources where you can learn more about the Fedora community."

The full article is available.

Fedora: virt-manager with SPICE support coming in Fedora 15 (montanalinux.org)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded a posting on SPICE and KVM features in Fedora 15:

"I would definitely recommend KVM and SPICE to those with the required hardware to run it over Oracle's VirtualBox or any of the others... unless of course you need accelerated 3D. KVM / SPICE doesn't support accelerated 3D. I've heard a few other products do but I've not actually tried to use it so I don't know how well it works in practice. In any event, KVM / SPICE is definitely a good combination for distro hoppers now! :) Let it be known though, SPICE has not been optimized yet for WAN use but it works great over a LAN."

The full article is available.

Virtual security: release of the first beta Qubes OS (The H Online)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded a posting on Qubes OS and security features in it based on Fedora 14:

"The team led by security expert Joanna Rutkowska has released the first beta version of the Qubes OS Linux distribution. The operating system can also be installed on a USB stick thanks to its new installer. Qubes aims to provide security through virtualisation. It uses a Xen hypervisor to run applications in separate virtual machines based on Fedora 14. As a result, online banking data are not at risk when a game running in its own VM turns out to be a trojan."

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 new member joining.

Hussama Ismail from Brazil mentored by Daniel Bruno

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list
Larry Cafiero reminded about a FAmNA meeting

Christoph Wickert posted a reminder about the EMEA Ambassadors Meeting for 2011-04-06 and followed it up with the Meeting Minutes

Paul Mellors announced that the UK Communities Mailing list was up for subscription to folks interested in tracking what's going on in the UK

Onyeibo Oku announced The Fedora Sound SIG aimed at creating sound themes and making them available via the repositories.

Christoph Wickert responded Kevin Raymond's mail about F15 media production explaining that the Multi-Desktop/Multi-Arch media issues require some conclusion to be arrived at.

David Ramsey announced the Virtualization Test Day

David Ramsey reminded about the APAC Ambassadors meeting on 2011-04-16 and later provided the meeting notes. The next meeting is scheduled for 2011-04-30

Igor Pires Soares reminded potential speakers and hackfest coordinators at FUDCon Panama 2011 to update the wiki with the description and details about the sessions which would help in conversations with the local media.

Igor Pires Soares posted the Meeting Minutes from FAmSCo meeting of 2011-04-16

David Ramsey reminded about the GNOME3 Final Test Day

Summary of events reported on Ambassadors mailing list
No events were reported on the Ambassadors mailing list

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list
Max Spevack let the FAmSCo list know about unavailability.

Igor Pires Soares informed about the FAmSCo report draft being available

Neville A. Cross posted about an idea around "dead drops"

Rahul Sundaram requested that the FAmSCo approve a pending Ambassador request Joerg Simon suggested re-opening the existing ticket and approving it.

Pierros Papadeas posted about initiating a discussion about actions for Regional Meetings for March/April 2011. The thread had inputs from FAmSCo members. Neville A. Cross also informed about the Librebus/FreedomBus project

Pierros Papadeas proposed some changes for the F15 Schedule for Ambassadors

Summary of traffic on Campus Ambassadors mailing list
The mailing list did not have any traffic this week.

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

Test Days
Thursday 2011-04-14 was virtualization Test Day, hosted by our awesome virtualization team. A decent turnout of nine testers were able to run through all the test cases, and identify several bugs for the team to work on.

Thursday 2011-04-21 is the last of three GNOME 3 Test Days, where we will be testing out the final GNOME 3.0 release and making sure it is well integrated into Fedora 15, and identifying any remaining bugs that can be fixed up before Fedora 15's release. Live images are already available on the Test Day page to aid in testing, and it's very easy to join in and run through as many or as few test cases as you like. Please join us in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC for this key Test Day!

Thursday 2011-04-28 is scheduled to be cloud Test Day, where the cloud SIG will be guiding testers in running Fedora 15 on Amazon's EC2 cloud, and testing out the Fedora 15 features BoxGrinder (a tool designed to make it simple to rapidly create Fedora-based appliances and deploy them to various virtual platforms) and CloudFS (a cloud-ready distributed filesystem). If you're interested in the cutting (bleeding?) edge of cloud development with Fedora, come and dive in!

Fedora 15 Beta preparation
Fedora 15 Beta RC2 arrived on 2011-04-09 and the group got down to testing it, filling out the installation and desktop test matrices and delving into various issues on the mailing list, particularly to do with GNOME 3. At the go/no-go meeting of 2011-04-13 the QA group was able to confidently declare RC2 had met all the release requirements, thanks to this diligent testing, and the RC2 images were declared gold. Rest is for the weak, though, so on 2011-04-15 the group followed up with the first blocker bug review meeting for Fedora 15 final, a mere four hour sprint at which 58 potential blocker bugs were reviewed.

Sugar testing
Thomas Gilliard provided a detailed test report on a roughly Beta-equivalent Sugar nightly live image, with much valuable information. Adam Williamson thanked him for his work and Peter Robinson promised to look into the issues.

Security Advisories
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce from the past week.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 15 Security Advisories

 * ikiwiki-3.20110328-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058403.html
 * fail2ban-0.8.4-27.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058401.html
 * python-feedparser-5.0.1-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058309.html
 * dhcp-4.2.1-4.P1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058279.html
 * proftpd-1.3.4-0.8.rc2.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058262.html
 * seamonkey-2.0.13-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058233.html
 * krb5-1.9-7.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058181.html
 * libvirt-0.8.8-4.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058093.html
 * quagga-0.99.18-2.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058042.html
 * xorg-x11-server-utils-7.5-5.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/057977.html
 * perl-5.12.3-156.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/057971.html
 * tmux-1.4-4.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058548.html

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

 * libmodplug-0.8.8.2-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058368.html
 * tmux-1.4-3.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058367.html
 * seamonkey-2.0.13-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058349.html
 * proftpd-1.3.3e-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058344.html
 * xorg-x11-server-utils-7.5-5.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/057928.html
 * perl-5.12.3-143.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/057891.html
 * libtiff-3.9.5-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058478.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * libvirt-0.8.2-6.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058464.html
 * seamonkey-2.0.13-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058457.html
 * dhcp-4.1.2-4.ESV.R2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058455.html
 * tmux-1.4-3.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058452.html
 * proftpd-1.3.3e-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058356.html
 * gdm-2.30.2-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/057931.html
 * libxml2-2.7.7-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/057926.html
 * nss-3.12.9-9.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/057916.html
 * kdenetwork-4.5.5-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058580.html
 * kdelibs-4.5.5-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-April/058486.html