Fedora Weekly News Issue 269

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 269^[1] for the week ending March 30, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues^[2] 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^[3]. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

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^[1].

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/

Red Hat Proves That Open Source Is Good for Business (PC World)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded^[1] a posting on btrfs and its relation to ext4 in RHEL and Fedora:

"Critics of free and open source software are fond of making the argument that software must be locked up, patented and jealously guarded if it is to serve as the basis for a successful business. Well, Red Hat just refuted such claims in a big way this week with its fourth quarter earnings report, which blew away analysts' expectations and placed the company well on track for billion-dollar revenues in the upcoming year."

Based in North Carolina, Red Hat is the company behind both the Fedora and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Linux distributions. Fedora is the free, community version of the software, while RHEL is sold as acommercial product with support and services."

The full article is available^[2].

Ambassadors

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Ambassadors Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors

Welcome New Ambassadors

This week the Fedora Ambassadors Project had a couple of new members joining.

Everton Cardoso from Brazil mentored by Daniel Bruno

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list

Christoph Wickert raised ^[1] some questions regarding the budget ^[2] Max Spevack provided ^[3] actual figures from the expenses. David Nalley mentioned ^[4] that some of the issues raised in the mail were also part of the Board IRC meeting and, discussions were ongoing as the same was an agenda item in the upcoming Board meeting.

Onyeibo Oku asked ^[5] if there was an existing print-ready, A5 sized booklet covering the basics of Fedora for handing out at events. Zoltan Hopper responded ^[6] about a scratch document available at the Marketing Page. There was further discussion around the difference between a Quick-Start and a Handbook ^[7] and the possibility of building a Quick Start Guide ^[8] based upon the SXSW Materials ^[9]

Christoph Wickert posted ^[10] Minutes of EMEA Ambassadors Meeting ^[11] The thread ^[12] had additional discussion around allocation of funds under budget line items and, expense planning based on projected needs. The decision making process within FAmSCo was also discussed.

David Ramsey posted ^[13] meeting notes ^[14] from the APAC Ambassadors meeting on 2011-03-19

David Ramsey informed ^[15] about an upcoming Power Management Test Day ^[16] and subsequently posted ^[17] about the Printing and ABRT Retrace Server Test Days

Máirín Duffy asked ^[18] if there was a group photograph from a recent event with the aim of updating the FUDCon Zurich group phot that is on fedoraproject.org page

Christoph Wickert posted ^[19] a 'Last Call for Orders" for F14 media for any event at EMEA and added a link to the Inventory ^[20] for helping to search for the nearest anchor point

Pierros Papadeas posted ^[21] Meeting Minutes for FAmSCo meeting of 2011-03-26

Buddhika Kurera requested help ^[22] in finding a co-speaker for CLT2011

Paul Mellors posted ^[23] about an idea for a documentary ^[24] similar to "Revolution OS"

Adam Miller put out a last call for funding for Texas Linux Fest 2011 ^[25]

Summary of events reported on Ambassadors mailing list

Christoph Wickert reported ^[1] on the Chemnitzer Linuxtage event with more details about undertaking similar tasks using different distributions.

Fabian Affolter summarized ^[2] all the CLT2011 reports

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list

Pierros Papadeas posted ^[1] the Agenda for the FAmSCo meeting of 2011-03-26 ^[2]

Joerg Simon, as the Fedora Ambassador Membership Administrator, informed FAmSCo ^[3] about existing continuous violations of Fedora Ambassador Conduct ^[4] Follow-up discussions happened on the ticket and the thread ^[5]

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team^[1]. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page^[2].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Thursday 2011-03-24 was power management Test Day^[1]. The event produced a great turnout of testers who provided results on a wide range of hardware, and the developers are already looking at the bugs filed. Thanks to everyone who came out to help.

This Tuesday, 2011-03-29, was printing Test Day^[2]. The turnout was a little smaller than we hoped, but the testers who did come managed to find lots of bugs, and Fedora's printing maintainer, Tim Waugh, was very happy with all the results.

This Thursday, 2011-03-31, will be ABRT Test Day^[3]. As well as checking that ABRT (Fedora's automated crash report tool) is working as expected for Fedora 15, we'll be testing out a big new feature, the retrace server^[4]. This allows you to submit crash reports to a remote server which will generate the backtrace - avoiding the need for you to download and install often large debuginfo packages in order to submit reports. Please come along and help us test this exciting new feature!

There is currently no Test Day planned for next Thursday, 2011-04-07. Take the day off!

Anaconda testing

James Laska requested testing of an installer image which included updated versions of anaconda and lorax that needed testing before being approved as stable updates^[1]. Several testers responded, and the updates were soon approved.

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-March/098018.html

GNOME Tweak Tool testing

Michel Salim announced that GNOME Tweak Tool, an application for tweaking various advanced settings in GNOME 3, was now available for testing^[1]. Several group members thanked Michel for the announcement and provided feedback on the tool.

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-March/098107.html

Fedora 15 Beta preparation

The third Beta blocker/nice-to-have review meeting took place on 2011-03-25^[1], and the team worked through the full list of proposed Beta blocker and nice-to-have bugs. The first test compose was scheduled for Tuesday 2011-03-22, but could not be completed on that day due to various outstanding bugs and the lack of the planned NetworkManager 0.9 packages. At a special release schedule meeting on Wednesday 2011-03-23^[2], the QA and release engineering teams, and the Fedora Project Leader, agreed that the late arrival of NetworkManager 0.9 justified a one week slip in the release schedule. The first test compose was then set for Tuesday 2011-03-29.

Improving pre-release download page

Tim Flink passed on some feedback^[1] he had received from a new tester who had downloaded a pre-release and asked some questions in the #fedora IRC channel, which does not handle pre-release issues. He suggested that it would be a good idea to add some text to the pre-release download page^[2] explaining the right places to go to post feedback and get help with pre-release issues. Jóhann Guðmundsson and Adam Williamson both suggested filing a request with the websites team, and Tim reported^[3] that he had filed a ticket^[4].

Security Advisories

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

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