FWN/Beats/Announcements

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, including general announcements, selected announcements to the Fedora user list, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora Announcement News

Fedora 13 Released

Our top announcement this week was yesterday's release of Fedora 13, which is looking like a very strong release indeed. Paul W. Frields announced:

"I'm proud to announce the release of Fedora 13, the latest innovative Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat.

If you can't wait to get the distribution, simply visit

If you want a quick tour of highlights in this release, check out

You can also find this announcement text at

Or read on for loads of information about the new release and all the leading edge technologies we've packed into it. More links are available at the end of this message, too. Enjoy!

• * *

Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. We bring to you the latest and greatest release of Fedora ever, Fedora 13! Join us and share the joy of Free software and the community with friends and family. We have several major new features with special focus on desktops, netbooks, virtualization and system administration.

What's New in Fedora 13?

For desktop users

A universe of new features for end users:

• Streamlined Installer. The user interface of Anaconda, the Fedora

 installer, has changed to handle storage devices and partitioning in
 an easy and streamlined manner, with helpful hints in the right
 places. Thanks to Chris Lumens and others on the Anaconda team, and
 Máirín Duffy, Fedora Design team lead, for her user interface
 review.

• Automatic print driver installation. We're using RPM and PackageKit

 for automatic installation of printer drivers, so when you plug in a
 printer, Fedora will automatically offer to install drivers for it
 if needed. Thanks to Tim Waugh and Richard Hughes.

• New desktop applications and enhancements. The Shotwell photo

 manager, Deja-dup backup software, Pino Identi.ca/Twitter client,
 and Simple Scan scanning utility are all delivered by default to
 provide an enhanced desktop experience out of the box. Palimpsest,
 the desktop utility for handling storage devices, can now manage LVM
 and RAID disks easily. As with the past several releases, Fedora 13
 includes enhanced webcam support. Hans de Goede from Red Hat has
 specially focussed on better support for dual mode camera's for this
 release.

• NetworkManager improvements include better Mobile Broadband,

 Bluetooth, and new CLI abilities. NetworkManager was introduced in
 Fedora 7 and has become the de facto network configuration solution
 for distributions everywhere. NetworkManager is now a one-stop shop
 for all of your networking needs in Fedora, be it dial-up,
 broadband, wifi, or even Bluetooth. In Fedora 13 NetworkManager adds
 mobile broadband enhancements to show signal strength; support for
 old-style dial-up networking (DUN) over Bluetooth; and command line
 support in addition to the improved graphical user interface. Thanks
 to Dan Williams of Red Hat for his extensive work on these features
 upstream and within Fedora.

• Color management. Do you like your printouts to look the same as

 they do on screen - or your scanner output to look the same as what
 you just scanned? Color Management allows you to better set and
 control your colors for displays, printers, and scanners, through
 the gnome-color-manager package. Thanks to Richard Hughes from Red
 Hat for his involvement upstream and in Fedora.

• Enhanced iPod functionality. Newer Apple iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone

 models are supported by some of your favorite photo management
 software and music library applications such as Rhythmbox. The
 devices are automatically attached using the libimobiledevice
 library, so you can work with your content more easily.

• Enhanced streaming and buffering support in Totem. Totem's Movie

 Player and web browser plugins are now better at handling large
 streaming media, such as HD movies and Podcasts, thanks to the new
 disk-buffering support in GStreamer.

• 3D support for ATI cards (R600 and R700) via Radeon driver. In

 Fedora 13, 3D support for many ATI cards has moved out of
 experimental status and is enabled by default. 2D support for the
 latest generation (R800) is integrated as well in this
 release. Thanks to Red Hat's Dave Airlie and many others for
 involvement upstream and in Fedora.

• Experimental 3D graphics support extended to free Nouveau driver for

 NVidia cards. This release also adds experimental 3D support to a
 wide range of NVidia cards, adding them to the list of liberated
 video capabilities. Install the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental
 package to try out the work in progress. Thanks to Red Hat's Ben
 Skeggs for involvement upstream and in Fedora.

• KDE improvements. KDE in Fedora continues to provide tight

 integration with the latest technologies in Fedora. In this release,
 we have improved integration with PulseAudio via Phonon and the
 volume control KMix, which controls per-application volumes and
 moves application sounds between hardware devices, as well as with
 the latest PolicyKit authorization framework. We have also
 integrated new major versions, based on the KDE Development Platform
 4, of the KOffice office suite, the K3b CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning
 application and, for developers, the KDevelop IDE, which provide
 better integration with the KDE 4 Plasma Desktop and no longer
 require the KDE 3 compatibility libraries. Thanks to the work of a
 growing community of KDE contributors in Fedora.

• DisplayPort support improvements. Fedora 12 added initial support

 for the new DisplayPort display connector for Intel graphics
 chips. Support for Nvidia and ATI systems has now been added in this
 release. Thanks to Red Hat's Xorg team.

• Experimental user management interface. The user account tool has

 been completely redesigned, and the accountsdialog and
 accountsservice test packages are available to make it easy to
 configure personal information, make a personal profile picture or
 icon, generate a strong passphrase, and set up login options for
 your Fedora system. Try out the work in progress. Thanks to Matthias
 Clasen from Red Hat's Desktop team and others.

For developers

For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:

• SystemTap static probes. SystemTap now has expanded capabilities to

 monitor higher-level language runtimes like Java, Python, and Tcl,
 and also user space applications, starting with PostgreSQL. In the
 future, Fedora will add support for even more user space
 applications, greatly increasing the scope and power of monitoring
 for application developers. Thanks to Mark Wielaard from Red Hat.

• Easier Python debugging. We've added new support that allows

 developers working with mixed libraries (Python and C/C++) in Fedora
 to get more complete information when debugging with gdb, making
 Fedora an exceptional platform for powerful, rapid application
 development. Thanks to David Malcolm from Red Hat.

• Parallel-installable Python 3 stack. The parallel-installable Python

 3 stack will help programmers write and test code for use in both
 Python 2.6 and Python 3 environments, so you can future-proof your
 applications now using Fedora. Thanks to David Malcolm from Red Hat.

• NetBeans Java EE 6 support. The NetBeans 6.8 integrated development

 environment is the first IDE to offer complete support for the
 entire Java EE 6 specification. Thanks to Victor G. Vasilyev from
 Sun/Oracle for his maintenance and support of NetBeans in
 collaboration with Fedora.

• IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, Java IDE. Along with Eclipse and

 NetBeans already provided by Fedora, IDEA is a popular Java-based
 development environment newly introduced in this release. It comes
 with an intuitive GUI, integration with Ant and Maven, extensive
 language support, version control systems and test tools integration
 and compatibility with Eclipse projects. Thanks to Lubomir Rintel
 and Michal Ingeli, Fedora community volunteers, for packaging and
 integration of this feature.

For system administrators

And don't think we forgot the system administrators:

• boot.fedoraproject.org (BFO). BFO allows users to download a single,

 tiny image (could fit on a floppy) and install current and future
 versions of Fedora without having to download additional
 images. Thanks to Mike McGrath, Fedora Infrastructure lead.

• System Security Services Daemon (SSSD). SSSD provides expanded

 features for logging into managed domains, including caching for
 offline authentication. Now users on laptops can still login when
 disconnected from the company's managed network. The authentication
 configuration tool in Fedora has already been updated to support
 SSSD, and work is underway to make it even more attractive and
 functional. Thanks to Stephen Gallagher from Red Hat.

• Pioneering NFS features. Fedora offers the latest version 4 of the

 NFS protocol for better performance, and, in conjunction with recent
 kernel modifications, includes IPv6 support for NFS as well. Thanks
 to Steve Dickson from Red Hat.

• Zarafa Open Source edition Groupware. Zarafa Open Source edition is

 a complete, 100% free and open source groupware suite that can be
 used as a drop-in Microsoft Exchange replacement for Web-based mail,
 calendaring, collaboration, and tasks. Features include IMAP/POP and
 iCal/CalDAV capabilities, native mobile phone support, the ability
 to integrate with existing Linux mail servers, a full set of
 programming interfaces, and a comfortable look and feel using modern
 Ajax technologies. Thanks to Robert Scheck, Fedora community
 volunteer, for packaging and integration of this feature.

• Btrfs snapshots integration. Btrfs is capable of creating

 lightweight, copy-on-write filesystem snapshots that can be mounted
 (and booted into) selectively. Automated snapshots allow system
 owners to easily revert to a filesystem from the previous day, or
 from before a yum update using the yum-plugin-fs-snapshot
 plugin. Btrfs is still an experimental filesystem in this release
 and requires a "btrfs" installation option to enable support for
 it. (This option is only available for non-live images.) Upcoming
 releases will integrate the snapshot functionality into the desktop
 while working on stabilization of the filesystem in parallel. Thanks
 to Josef Bacik, Btrfs filesystem developer at Red Hat, for
 filesystem work and the new yum plugin and Chris Ball from OLPC team
 for leading this effort.

• LVM Snapshots merging support. Recent LVM (and device-mapper)

 snapshot advances included in Fedora 13 allow system owners to merge
 an LVM snapshot back into the origin. In the process you can
 rollback the origin LV to the state it was in before the system
 upgrade. As noted earlier, the yum-snapshot-fs-plugin can work with
 both Btrfs and LVM volumes exposing this functionality and making it
 easier to use. This feature was developed and merged upstream by Red
 Hat's storage team.

• Virtualization enhancements. Fedora continues its leadership in

 virtualization technologies with improvements to KVM such as Stable
 PCI Addresses and Virt Shared Network Interface technologies. Having
 stable PCI addresses will enable virtual guests to retain PCI
 addresses' space on a host machine. The shared network interface
 technology enables virtual machines to use the same physical network
 interface cards (NICs) as the host operating system. Fedora 13 also
 enhances performance of virtualization via VHostNet acceleration of
 KVM networking, Virtx2apic for enhanced guest performance on large
 multi-processor systems, and Virtio-Serial for simple IO between the
 guest and host user spaces. Thanks to the Red Hat virtualization
 team for their ongoing contributions.

• Dogtag Certificate System Dogtag is an enterprise-class open source

 Certificate Authority (CA) supporting all aspects of certificate
 lifecycle management including key archival, OCSP and smart card
 management. Brought into the fold as part of the Red Hat acquisition
 of Netscape technologies, this certificate server is fully free and
 open source and now included in Fedora. Thanks to the PKI team at
 Red Hat.

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list with details of all the new features on board Fedora 13 is available at

OK, go get it. You know you can't wait.

If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to

In particular, Fedora has made preupgrade a more robust solution and pushed several bug fixes to older releases of Fedora to enable an easy upgrade to Fedora 13.

For an quick tour of features in Fedora 13 and pictures of many friends of Fedora, check out our "short-form" release notes

Fedora 13 full release notes and guides for several languages are available at

Fedora 13 common bugs are documented at

Fedora Spins

Fedora spins are alternate version of Fedora tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations. Fedora 13 includes four completely new spins in addition to the several already available, including Fedora Security Lab, Design Suite, Sugar on a Stick and Moblin spin. More information on these spins and much more is available at

Power PC Support

With Apple moving to Intel based machines and Sony PlayStation dropping Linux support, Fedora PowerPC (PPC) usage has dropped considerably. In Fedora 13, PPC is now a secondary architecture and the Fedora release engineering team no longer manages PPC releases. If you would like to participate in the PPC effort or any of the secondary architecture teams, refer to

Contributing

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

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, design and do artwork, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!

Fedora 14

Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes to improve the Fedora 13 experience, our next release, Fedora 14, is already being developed in parallel, and has been open for active development for several months already. We have an early schedule for an end of Oct 2010 release

Contact information

If you are a journalist or reporter, you can find additional information at

Fedora Community Gaming Session 4 - Hedgewars

Bruno Wolff III announced:

"There will be another Fedora Community Gaming session this weekend. We will be playing hedgewars which is semi-realtime game.

We will be starting at: UTC: 1700 Saturday May 29, 2010 EDT: 1pm Saturday May 29, 2010

The game seems like it will be short depending on choices made for the game. I'll be hanging around at least two hours, and can let the server run as long as people want to play.

This game comes recommended by a third party, but I'm still acting as the organizer.

We'll meet pregame in #fedora-games . If any experienced players want to recommend server settings, please speak up in the pre-game meet up. We'll use the in-game chat once we get started and I'll have Fedora Talk set up for those that want to use that in addition.

We need to match versions, so players on F11 or F12 systems will need to install scratch builds.

New players will definitely be welcome as I definitely qualify as one. So expect some teaching to be going on.

A bit more information is at.

ATrpms for Fedora 13; upcoming EOL for Fedora 11

Axel Thimm announced:

"ATrpms is officially launching Fedora 13 support.

       http://ATrpms.net/dist/f13/

o The actual download location is. Mirrors are listed

o "stable", "testing" and "bleeding", the three subrepos per

 distribution are not cumulative inclusive on the server
 side.
 E.g. you need to add "stable" for "testing", and both "stable"
 and "testing" for "bleeding".

ATrpms is a 3rd party general purpose package repository. It currently supports

o F13/i386, F13/x86_64, F12/i386, F12/x86_64, F11/i386,

 F11/x86_64

o RHEL6beta/i386, RHEL6beta/x86_64, RHEL5/i386, RHEL5/x86_64,

 RHEL4/i386, RHEL4/x86_64, RHEL3/i386, RHEL3/x86_64

F11 support will be EOL'd once the Fedora Project drops support for it (e.g. in about a month's time).

Configuration for package resolvers (replace i386 with x86_64 as needed)

o yum [atrpms] name=Fedora 13 - i386 - ATrpms baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f13-i386/atrpms/stable

o smart [atrpms] name=Fedora 13 - i386 - ATrpms baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f13-i386/atrpms/stable type=rpm-md

o apt repomd http://dl.atrpms.net f13-i386/atrpms/stable

you can provide feedback or request support on the ATrpms lists, or the common bug tracker.

Enjoy! -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net

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 (March 2010 to May 2010)

• North America (NA)
• Central & South America (LATAM) ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q4_.28March_2010_-_May_2010.29</ref>
• 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.