FWN/Issue254

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 254 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 254 for the week ending December 1, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

We begin this week's issue with announcements from the Fedora Project, including election Results for FAmSCo, FESCo, and Fedora Board seats and several development announcement updates to rawhide. In news from the Planet Fedora, work on improving the Anaconda and syslinux User Experience, "This Week in Anaconda #6", recent improvements to systemd, and an invitation to help get TeX Live into Fedora. In Marketing team news, a query about survey tools availability for the Fedora Project, improving our schedule by changing reminders of task into actionable items, and Marketing Meeting Minutes from this past week. Fedora In the News this week offers two articles on Fedora from the trade press in the UK and Germany. In Translation team news, troubles with the Transiflex instance on translate.fedoraproject.org, and updated Fedora Localization Project (FLP) FAQ, and news members of the FLP for Russian, Kazakh and Spanish. In Design team news, a fresh take on redesigning start.fedoraproject.org and discussion around the mockups. We finish off with a review of security-related packages released over the past week for Fedora 14, 13 and 12.

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FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

I'm pleased to welcome Joerg Simon and Jaroslav Reznik to serve full two-term positions on the Fedora Board.

FESCo
There were four FESCo seats up for election this cycle. A total of 240 ballots were cast in the FESCo election. Each of the eight candidates could receive up to 1920 votes (240 ballots multiplied by 8 candidates).

The top four candidates are Christoph Wickert, Adam Jackson, Matthew Garrett, and Marcela Mašláňová. They will each serve a full two-term position in FESCo.

FAmSCo
All seven seats on FAmSCo were up for re-election this cycle. There were a total of 125 ballots cast in the FAmSCo election. Each of the twelve candidates could receive up to 1500 votes (125 ballots multiplied by 12 candidates).

I welcome Neville A. Cross, Larry Cafiero, Rahul Sundaram, Gerard Braad, Igor Soares, Pierros Papadeas, and Caius Chance to serve for two terms on FAmSCo.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have previously served on the Fedora Board or FAmSCo or FESCo for their hard work and dedication to Fedora. I'd also like to thank all the candidates and volunteers who participated in this round of elections.

Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

"

libsigsegv-2.9 update, abi bump
Rex Dieter announced

"I'm planning a libsigsegv-2.9 (rawhide) update relatively soon which includes an abi change. According to repquery, only the following packages should be affected:


 * clisp
 * gnu-smalltalk

(I'll help take care of these requisite rebuilds)

-- Rex"

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.

Planet Fedora
In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General
Máirín Duffy has been working on improving the Anaconda and syslinux User Experience. It's the first thing that anyone sees when they try to install Fedora or boot from live media. But don't worry, you can help too. "I wrote up some instructions on how you can try this prototype out on your own. It’s really, really easy."

In "This Week in Anaconda #6", Chris Lumens updated us on some other happenings in the Anaconda world. Probably the most interesting discussion was over the possibility of updating Anaconda after a release. "The basic problem is that after a Fedora release, anaconda never gets updated though various other tools that anaconda does use do get updated. This isn't a problem on most installation media because we never remake the media. It is, however, a problem for people doing livecd respins. What'll happen is that anaconda will assume a particular library call for NetworkManager (just to pick on a component at random) that exists when the release happens, but changes in an update."

Lennart Poettering summarized a number of the recent improvements to systemd. If you aren't so sure what systemd is, in part 4 of "systemd for Adminstrators", Lennart explained how killing of system daemons works.

If you have been having trouble getting Fedora 14 to boot as LiveUSB media, Marc Ferguson has the answer.

Richard Hughes created mockups of new gnome-control-center power management configuration pages.

If you are interested in helping TeX Live in Fedora, Tom Callaway offered ways that you can help. "One of the remaining big ticket items for legal audit in Fedora is TeX Live. A few years ago, we got a version of TeX Live into Fedora, and after the fact, we discovered that the licensing on much of it was confusing or non-free."

Alex Hudson analyzed an interesting legal case that is currently unfolding, SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Limited. "The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. For those who don’t know, SAS is a statistical package which is both popular and influential, and to a large extent can be thought of as a programming development environment. WPL, the defendants, wrote software which could interpret SAS programs...If nothing else, this highlights that no law is truly ever settled, and possibly portents to more movement in this area in the future: I’ve described before how the UK Government is making noises about revisiting intellectual property laws..."

Mark J Cox published an updated piece on "Vulnerability and threat mitigation features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

Richard W.M. Jones wondered about a potential new feature for git, automating dependency analysis of patches:

"The half-baked idea is whether we can write an automatic tool which can untangle these dependencies from the raw git commits? (Or whether such a tool exists already, I cannot find one)

There would be one important practical use for such a tool. When cherry picking commits for the stable branch, I would like to know which previous commits that the commit I’m trying to apply depends on. This gives me extra information: I can decide that applying this commit is too disruptive — perhaps it depends on an earlier feature which I don’t want to add. I can decide to go back and apply the older commits, or that a manual backport is the best way."

Marketing
In this section, we cover the happenings for Fedora Marketing Project from 2010-11-24 to 2010-11-30.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

Pascal Calarco pointed some research made by Ubuntu about their weekly news. Something that we can consider doing. He also pointed the efforts to have a survey tool in Fedora's infrastructure.

Paul Frields sugested that we can improve our schedule by changing reminders of task into actionable items. This also looks for a more constant flow of information, rather that everything near release time.

As usual Marketing Meeting Minutes for this week meeting are available for 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

Fedora 12 approaches end of life (The H Online - UK)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded another review of Fedora 14, which sums up their experience with:

"Fedora Project developer Kevin Fenzi has issued a reminder that Fedora 12, code named "Constantine", will reach its end of life (EOL) on Thursday, the 2nd of December, 2010. Originally released in mid-November of last year, Fedora 11 featured the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, version 2.28 of the GNOME desktop environment, KDE 4.3 and a number of software updates. As of the 2nd of December, no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available. The developers strongly advise all Fedora 12 users to upgrade to Fedora 13 or 14 to continue receiving updates."

The full article is available.

Fedora renews committees (Pro Linux - Germany)
Vinzenz Vietzke forwarded a German language brief article in Pro Linux about the recent committee elections:

"Das freie Fedora-Projekt hat neue Mitglieder in seinen Vorstand gewählt sowie weitere Gremien neu- bzw. umgesetzt."

"The free Fedora Project elected new members for it's board and further committees."

The full article is available

Translation
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project.

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Troubles with translate.fedoraproject.org
The woes related to the Transifex instance on translate.fedoraproject.org still continue whereby translators are facing problems accessing and submitting translations. 3 tickets have already been filed on the Fedora-Infrastructure ticketing system to track the various tasks like Transifex upgradation, Cron jobs for translate.fedoraproject.org etc. Translators have been requested to file new tickets if they encounter further problems.

FLP FAQ Updated
Shankar Prasad from the Kannada team has updated the FAQ with the correction method to be used if translations for one language are updated for another.

New Members in FLP
Yuri Khabarov (Russian), Andrey Olykainen (Russian and Kazakh) , Fabian Barrera (Spanish) ,  Nikolay Rysev (Russian) ,  joined the FLP recently.

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Start Page
Vinzenz Vietzke introduced himself as a new contributor and proposed a redesign for the Fedora start page "I reworked 'start.fedoraproject.org' and made some mock-ups which can be seen in the wiki ". Jef van Schendel pointed to his own mockup and prototype "Looking back I don't think I announced any of this on the Websites or Design Team mailing lists, which wasn't smart. After all, if it's not on the list, it didn't happen. ;)" and provided advice for Vinzenz.

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

 * udev-161-7.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051418.html
 * dracut-006-5.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051417.html
 * udunits2-2.1.19-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051405.html
 * openconnect-2.26-4.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051640.html
 * libvpx-0.9.5-2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051629.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * udunits2-2.1.19-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051442.html
 * openconnect-2.26-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051637.html
 * libvpx-0.9.5-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051635.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

 * openconnect-2.26-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051620.html
 * kdenetwork-4.4.5-4.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-November/051692.html