FWN/Issue162

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 162 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 162 for the week ending February 8th, 2009.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue162

This week we're happy to announce the return of several beats: Marketing reports on following Fedora activity via Twitter; Ambassadors tantalizes with some Fedora polo shirts and the news that "North American Ambassadors Take Reins of XO Program"; Infrastructure notes a possible "Public Calendaring System" for the community; SecurityWeek shares an xkcd comic in "Encryption Security". Announcements highlights the K12Linux Fedora 10 Live Server in "Technical Announcements", PlanetFedora rounds up a lot of must-read blogs, Developments clarifies that "Fedora 11 Will Support i586 Instruction Set", Translation links to the "L10n Infrastructure Roadmap Proposal", Artwork suggests some "Context Free Art", SecurityAdvisories lists packages you really, really want, Virtualization defies summary and should be read, and finally we have another AskFedora concerning the possibility of a "Standardized Package Format".

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join

Announcements
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project.

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/

Contributing Writer: Max Spevack

Fedora 11 Alpha
JesseKeating announced the release of. The release is available at http://get.fedoraproject.org and includes  (for Windows cross-compiling), the   filesystem, ,  , and.

Furthermore, James Laska informed the community about a Fedora Test Day focused on.

Technical Announcements
Martin Sourada published the latest issue of Echo Monthly News.

Warren Togami announced "the release of K12Linux F10 Live Server. K12Linux is Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP.org) integrated with Fedora 10, in a convenient LiveUSB or DVD media installer." The release inclues auto-configuration of diskless thin clients, sound forwarding over the network via PulseAudio, and more.

All package maintainers should read the updated package update guidelines, as announced by Mark McLoughlin.

Upcoming Events
Fedora will have a presence at several events in the next few weeks. Feel free to join us,

February 20 - 22: Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE)

Also, people are encouraged to register for Fedora or JBoss.org related speaking slots at LinuxTag 2009.

that can be expected in Fedora 11.

Adrian Likins pondered the availability of "a mailing list summary page. The page would scan the mailing lists, and post the content most likely to need attention." Fedora Weekly News?

Michael DeHaan shared an essay, "Lessons Learned From OSS Software Development".

Tim Waugh described "How I use git" which shows some useful tips and tricks.

Venkatesh Hariharan wrote a draft FOSS manifesto for Indian political parties, which could actually be valuable for any country in the world.

, a development environment for Fedora users who want to save time and duplication of effort by cross-compiling their programs to run on Windows without actually having to use Windows during development.

on 2009-02-05. His beautiful poetry was accompanied by a suggestion to read the Release Notes.

One change which drew extensive commentary on @fedora-test was the default disabling of the  key combination. This traditionally kills the X server and to regain the usual behavior it is necessary to create an  file (these no longer exist by default either) and add the line   to it.

where he built on. Olivier Galibert raised a possible problem with Richard's use of D-Bus itself causing wakeups, but according to Colin Walters a patch existed to fix this problem.

Many of the items suggested in Phil's page for documentation were suggested by Bill Nottingham as desiderata for defaults. While Phil agreed in general he itemized some of the problems. These include problems with network interfaces and hard-disk spindowns which may be approachable as a result of a  daemon on which Phil is working.

An addendum of audio hardware power-saving was made by Eric Sandeen along with a list of bugs which led Phil to wonder if a tracker bug to collate all the information would be useful.

Matthew Garrett expressed some worries that hard-disk power-saving would cause physical wear and the  patches to work around over-aggressive deletion of content in /tmp would continue to be stalled.

The importance of separating out KDE and GNOME dependent features was noted by Kevin Kofler.

, a graphical front-end to  and   a Python wrapper for the Google Chart API.

Richard Hughes suggested that the update to PolicyKit-gnome-0.9.2-1.fc11 might be useful: "If you're having problems with PackageKit and buttons "not working" you need this update."

Some of the x86_64 broken dependencies were due to to  being pushed to rawhide which led David Nielsen to suggest that a heads up would have been useful. Alex Lancaster requested that API/ABI breakage would be announced on @fedora-devel-announce instead of on the high-traffic @fedora-devel.

was pushed to  by Jon Masters in order to speed up boot time significantly. The files,   and   will have binary versions which are used in preference to their old text versions. Jon asked if the need to run  after upgrades to   would upset anyone. There seemed to be general approbation of his changes and they should land soon for Fedora 9 also.

bootloader to identify other distributions. One such was that there should be an agreement among distributions to use a shared metadata standard on boot partitions.

being broken.

Thorsten Leemhuis provided a list of packages and owners sorted by owner which was generally appreciated. He pointed out: "Finding all your packages in such a long list gets really hard as soon as you maintain 10 or 15 packages."

Problems reported due to a mismatch between the  headers requirement of   and  's default use of   led Jakub to whip up some fixes. He requested that  were not altered in   files.

. When Josh Boyer responded that it was because one human (Jesse Keating) had to sign the packages and he had been also busy getting  released, Daniel P. Berrange suggested adding more humans to help. Jesse Keating suggested that anyone who wished to help could take some of the load off the release-engineering team so that they had more time for package signing.

is filling with messages" on the number of disk operations. After a day the log had grown to 100MB.

Daniel P. Berrange accepted on behalf of and Cole Robinson described how to turn of disk polling in.

to wait 120 minutes while installing a Windows guest. After some discussion it was decided it should wait indefinitely instead.

problem casues some guest installs on an F11 Alpha host to  during heavy network activity
 * Work has begun on Fedora 11 virtualization release notes.
 * The 0.6.0 release of was not completely without problems.
 * All Fedora 11 virtualization features can be found all together.
 * The /  merge project has settled on a naming scheme.
 * PCI device assignment continues to have issues. The "core of the problem is that devices must be reset before being assigned if they have been previously used in the host."
 * The addition of  loading support to the   hypervisor is enabling users to build test Dom0 kernels.
 * A detailed of accounting reveals the bug count going from 191 to 192.

.

compressed dom0 kernels. Xen previously only supported compressed kernels. This development was one of the preqequisite work items for the Xen pvops Dom0 feature.

This good news was tempered by the fact that there is still no dom0 capable in Rawhide. However, such a  can be built for testing. Gerd Hoffmann reports success doing just that. Such kernels are not yet stable enough for use.

RPM. It's suitable only for testing; "use it very much at your own risk".

would hang. 

patches for. "James patch, allows  to read the   context out of the xml database and execute  with the context.  The second componant [sic] is to pass the context of the image(s) and allow   to not only set the image, but also update the default labels on disk, so a relabel will not change the context." Daniel J Walsh started working on this second component and wondered if they were acceptable for committing to  yet.

Daniel P. Berrange expressed satisfaction with how the patches integrate with  adding "If yourself & James are happy with what they're doing from a SELinux / security model point of view, then there's no reason they shouldn't be posted for final merge now."

, not ."

,, and Klik (  and   also enabling user-level package installation) -- but these have not gain widespread support.

The second advantage to a standard package format is a reduction in the duplication of labour by each distribution, especially if packaging information (such as a basic RPM  file) is provided by the upstream software source. However, packaging standards, security configuration (such as  policy), and naming conventions vary so significantly between distributions that extensive customization of the package is usually required, greatly reducing the value of distributing standard package information.

The existence of multiple  distributions fuels a productive competitiveness which spurs innovation. As long as multiple distributions thrive, multiple package formats are likely to remain in use. Freedesktop.org provides a cross distribution forum which many distributions have been using to discuss and collaborate on common issues. The  also prefers to work closely with upstream software as a matter of principle to minimize differences.