FWN/Issue197

Fedora Weekly News Issue 197

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 197 for the week ending October 11, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Starting off with announcements, which includes general, development and event announcements, word that the Docs team will be switching to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA), an update on Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) leadership, and updates on Fedora 12 milestones. In news from the Fedora Planet, selected posts from the Fedora contributor community that includes discussion on "What is Fedora?", mockups for the fedoraproject.org redesign, and discussion on virt-top. In Ambassador news, detail on the Utah Open Source Conference. Translation brings us notification of new members to the Fedora Localization Project, coverage of some discussion around docs.fedoraproject.org issues, and other issues. In Design Team news, a request for more font packagers, discussion around reuse of Fedora Remix logos, and acceptable use cases. There are a few Fedora 10 and 11 security updates in the Security Advisories beat, and the issue rounds out with virtualization news, including more detail on the new virt-top release, and limiting VNC access to a single guest. Read on, and enjoy!

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

The Fedora News team is collaborating with Marketing and Docs to come up with a new exciting platform for disseminating news and views on Fedora, called Fedora Insight. We plan to have the next issue of Fedora Weekly News in Fedora Insight, next week. We welcome your feedback as we migrate FWN to this new content platform!

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 ANNOUNCE LIST

Docs preparing to convert to Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Unported license

Ian Weller announced, "Today, the Docs team finalized the conversion of the licensing of our documentation and project content from the Open Publication License (OPL) to a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License(CC-BY-SA). Docs originally reached a consensus to change the license in June 2009, and after answering questions raised by the community, the Docs team decided to go ahead with the transition."

Additional information can be found at the wiki

"We'd like to thank Tom 'spot' Callaway, Fedora's legal ninja, and Richard Fontana of Red Hat Legal for their help with the conversion." said Ianweller while talking about continue working with the community and share their documentation freely.

Resignation of Josh Boyer from FESCo

Jon Stanley regretly announced the resignation of Josh Boyer from the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo).

Jon said, "It's important to note that the reason for this resignation is that Josh believes that community leaders should be actively leading in the community. With his other commitments, Josh simply could not make the time for both FESCo and maintaining a leadership role within the community. This is not the fault of Josh, FESCo in general, or any member of FESCo in particular. Instead, it represents that Josh is upholding the values that we hold dear in Fedora - openness, honesty, transparency, and meritocracy."

"Replacing Josh on FESCo, per the succession policy , will be David Woodhouse, as he was the next highest runner-up in the recent elections ."

FEDORA DEVELOPMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Fedora 12 Final Release Date Rescheduled to 2009-11-17

John Poelstra updated and rescheduled Fedora 12 Final Release Date.

John announced, "The deadline affecting the data center move which was putting a final release date if 2009-11-17 into question has been extended. As a result we are now able to go forward with the original decision from the 2009-10-05 Release Engineering meeting to move the final release date of Fedora 12 to 2009-11-17." All of the schedules have been updated to reflect these changes. Key milestones:

Detailed team schedules and ics (calendar) files:

Fedora 12 Beta Release Rescheduled to 2009-10-20

John Poelstra announced that the Fedora 12 Beta Release rescheduled to October 20th,2009.

He said,"At the Release Engineering meeting todayit was noted that we still do not have a beta RC composed because a few blocker bugs remain. The decision was made to move the Fedora 12 Beta Release date to 2009-10-20 instead of its scheduled date of 2009-10-13 (one week from Tuesday). The original intention was also to move the final release date of Fedora 12 to 2009-11-17, but that decision has been deferred until Thursday while the Infrastructure team researches some issues related to an upcoming data center move. The next meeting to determine the final release date for Fedora 12 will be this Thursday, 2009-10-08 at 18:00 UTC (2 PM EDT) in #fedora-meeting. After that meeting all of the detailed Fedora 12 team schedules will be fully updated to reflect the plan of record. REMINDER: we are in and will remain in FINAL FREEZE for Fedora 12. This is not a new opportunity for more time to continue development work or squeeze more bug fixes into Fedora 12. A new branch is already open where this work can continue for Fedora 13."

Heads-up: rb_libtorrent bump (Rawhide), rebuilds required

Peter Gordon said, "I just pushed an update to rb_libtorrent 0.14.16 in rawhide (F13+), which bumps the library soname from "libtorrent-rasterbar.so.3" to "libtorrent-rasterbar.so.5".

Because of this change, applications which use this library will need to be rebuilt. According to repoquery, these are qbittorrent and springlobby (maintainers CC-ed). I've successfully rebuilt these two packages locally (from their CVS devel/ branches) with this update earlier today and did not see any problems, so I don't expect any issues in updating.

Packages such as Deluge and Miro which use rb_libtorrent through its Python bindings remain unaffected by this change.

Please let me know if there are any related problems or questions as they arise."

FEDORA EVENTS

Fedora events are the 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

• 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

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

Richard W.M. Jones added another tool to the virt-* arsenal of tools, virt-top to replace xentop. Also it works in Japenese. Richard also explained some of the difficulties that make Virtual Machine conversions difficult.

Michael Tiemann noted the London Stock Exchange's "about-face in IT policy" in which they are switching to a Linux-based solution.

Máirín Duffy continued the mockups for the fedoraproject.org website redesign. In particular, Máirín wants to "bling your spin". "We’ve come up with a new spins.fedoraproject.org design. This is part of an overall effort commissioned by the Fedora Project Board to improve the Fedora download experience. The initial design includes individual spin details pages." So don't forget to send in your spin information.

Paul W. Frields explained some of the changes that may be taking place due to the Fedora 12 beta being pushed back, and how you can help.

Jeremy Katz took a look at a number of deployment systems. "Given that this seemed like a pretty typical problem, I figured I’d take a look and see what open source projects exist out there to see if any of them were suitable or could be at least close to a good fit for what we need and want. Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed..."

Mike McGrath asked, (mostly answered) the question "What is Fedora?" continuing a discussion from the Fedora Advisory Board list. Michael DeHaan also chimed in, as did Stephen Smoogen.

Ben Skeggs debunked some of the bad reporting around the Nouveau driver. "Nouveau development is progressing quite nicely, and is far from dead!"

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Utah Open Source Conference

Last week saw the annual Utah Open Source Conference, the U.S. Mountain West region's biggest and best Linux festival, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, from Oct. 8-10. This is the third year of this annual event, and Fedora is one of the sponsors.

Fedora had a booth at the event where much media, stickers and assistance from the Fedora Ambassador community was provided to attendees.

See posts on the Fedora Planet for reviews and thoughts on the meeting.

Get on the map

Want to find the nearest ambassador? How about one in Belarus? Now you can.

Susmit Shannigrahi reports that finding out the nearest ambassadors, which was once a tedious task, is now as simple as viewing a map. The map is at here and instructions on how to place yourself on the map can be found at here.

Fedora 12 is coming

While you may still be promoting Fedora 11 in your areas, you can make plans for Fedora 12 events to promote and celebrate the release of our next version.

As such, with the upcoming release of Fedora 12, 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.

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Issues with docs.fedoraproject.org

Post the redesign of the docs.fedoraproject.org main page, Domingo Becker informed about some errors being displayed in the Installation Guide and Installation Quick Start Guide for Fedora 11. Ruediger Landmann explained that this error was often caused due to complicated format in which .po files needed to be merged and then divided back to suit the requirement of documentation compilation tool, publican. Additionally, he also mentioned that errors such as these can be filed as bugs in bugzilla.redhat.com.

Meanwhile, John J. McDonough has been running automatic updates for the Fedora 12 Release Notes. Translation errors (if any) affecting the build are reported directly to the fedora-trans mailing list.

LiveUSB Creator Translations Not Being Used

Domingo Becker from the Spanish translation team, reported that the translations for liveusb-creator were not currently being used.

Translator Metrics

As a follow-up of a discussion on the gnome-i18n mailing list, Rui Gouveia raised the possibility of adding a feature to gather translator related metrics related to Fedora, through Transifex.

Proof-reading system-config-*-docs

Ankit Patel put together general instructions regarding the process to compile and proof-read the documents that are part of the various system-config packages.

Translation Request from Fedora Freemedia

A request to the FLP was put forward by Frank Murphy from the Fedora Freemedia Project, to translate some Freemedia communication. The Chinese (Traditional), Thai and Spanish translations have been submitted so far.

New Members in FLP

Martin Stefanov (Bulgarian) and Alexey Matveichev (Russian) joined the FLP last week.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Outreach to Font Authors

Máirín Duffy reported on @fedora-fonts about her progress in treeing some fonts "I've contacted a few font authors whose fonts either don't have an explicit license or have an ambiguous/custom license about considering choosing a Fedora-compatible font license". She also wrote a blog post calling for more font packagers "To inspire folks to get involved in packaging, specifically font packaging. Shameless begging font package requests via blog have worked in the past."

Fedora Remix Logos

Peter Robinson asked on @fedora-design about the use of the Fedora Remix logo "And whether someone can package them up into a fedora-remix-logos package to make them easier to use for things like Plymouth boot screens", Nicu Buculei replied saying due to trademark restriction only rendered PNG, not source SVG can pa packaged and Máirín Duffy inquired about the particular use case "Wouldn't you want the Moblin brand to have more weight than the Fedora remix brand? Or are you looking for just a generic 'Fedora Remix' theme without any reference to the particular remix?"

Security Advisories

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

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

• deltarpm-3.4-17.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00277.html
• sunbird-1.0-0.7.20090715hg.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00204.html
• thunderbird-3.0-2.7.b4.fc11 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00203.html

Fedora 10 Security Advisories

• deltarpm-3.4-11.fc10.1 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00298.html
• aria2-1.3.1-2.fc10 - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-October/msg00282.html

Virtualization

In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @fedora-virt list.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Fedora Virtualization List

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.

New Release virt-top 1.0.4

Richard Jones announced a new release of virt-top. "Virt-top looks and acts like the familiar top(1) command, displays virtual machines, and uses libvirt so it works with just about every virtualization system out there. It also has cool features for sysadmins, like you can use it to log stats into a database or spreadsheet."

Limit VNC Access to a Single Guest

Dennis asked if it was possible to limit a user to a single guest console rather than the all guests in a virt-manager instance.

Richard Jones answered that virt-manager doesn't support that level of authorization yet, but each guest console can be given a static VNC port number which can be secured with a firewall or ssh port forwarding.