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Fedora Weekly News Issue 202

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 202[1] for the week ending November 15, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In Announcements, the always-popular name selection process for the next Fedora release is underway, and nominations are open for December's Fedora elections. Planet Fedora contributes a look at the new Fedora Community site, some benchmarks of improbably large filesystems and a guide to using the Sugar desktop on Fedora. From Quality Assurance we hear about some more AutoQA improvements and the last stretch of the Fedora 12 release process. The Design team has been working on media art and website banners for the Fedora 12 release. Security Advisories summarizes the security patches released for Fedora 10 and 11 over the past week. In Virtualization, we discuss creating network bridges for virtual machines when using NetworkManager, and a new release of libguestfs. There's also news on the state of Xen support in Fedora 12. Finally, the KDE section brings us up to date on some new backends for the Nepomuk semantic desktop system, and the replacement of gtk-qt-engine with kcm-gtk for Fedora 12. Enjoy the read!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[2]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, including general announcements[1], development announcements[2] and Events[3].

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

FEDORA ANNOUNCE LIST

F13 Naming: Leonidas -> Constantine -> <New Name>?

John Rose, the Central US Regional Ambassador for North America, announced the beginning of the naming process for Fedora 13[1] F13 Naming: Leonidas -> Constantine -> <New Name>? The full announcement:

"With Fedora 12 just a few days from release it is time to begin the naming process for the next Fedora release.

Contributors can make suggestions for the name for Fedora 13 by visiting [2] and following the instructions.

Remember there needs to be an "is-a" link between the name Constantine and the name you suggest and this link must be different than all previous links used to connect Fedora release names.

Full details of the release naming schedule are available on the above link but please note than the period for gathering suggestions begins now and runs through November 16.

So there isn't a lot of time, think up some good names, and get them added to the wiki."

Nominations now open for December Fedora Elections

John Rose announced that the nominations now open for December Fedora Elections[1]. Here is the announcement, "It is time to begin the process of nominating candidates for the open seats in the following bodies:

  • Fedora Project Board
  • Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee (FAmSCo)
  • Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo)

General Election Schedule:

  • November 10-16: Nominations are open.
  • November 17-23: Candidate questionnaires.
  • November 27 - December 3: IRC Town Hall-style discussions with candidates for the various elected positions will be arranged.
  • December 8-15: The elections will take place.

Nominations

You may self-nominate. If you wish to nominate someone else, please consult with that person ahead of time. Wiki nomination pages [2] carry additional details about the nominee which the nominee is expected to write. Simply update the respective wiki page with your nomination information.

Please thoughtfully consider how you can best contribute to Fedora by serving on one of these important committees or by encouraging someone you know who you think can make a difference to serve."

FEDORA DEVELOPMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Fedora 12 staged for mirrors, Rawhide moving on soon

Jesse Keating announced that the Fedora 12 staged for mirrors, Rawhide moving on soon[1]. Here is the full announcement: "I have just staged Fedora 12 for our mirrors. We're doing something a little different this time around. The releases/12/Everything/ tree will be open to the public as it gets staged. This will allow us to give people who have "Fedora 12" installed now access to the "fedora" repo. We will then be able to move rawhide along to Fedora 13. The Fedora/ and Live/ trees will remain locked until our release date.

On this Saturday or Sunday rawhide will have Fedora 13 content. Users of rawhide right now do not need to do anything to keep on Fedora 12. Unless you have modified your /etc/yum.repos.d/ files, you will stay on Fedora 12 as we transition. Those of you that wish to move along to Fedora 13 rawhide will need to modify your fedora rawhide.repo file and keep it enabled, while disabling fedora and fedora-updates repos.

Thanks again to all of you who have helped make Fedora 12 the great release it is about to be!"

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)[1]
  • Central & South America (LATAM) [2]
  • Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)[3]
  • India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)[4]

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events[1]

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora[1] - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

This week is an amalgamation of posts from the past two weeks. Two for the price of one!

General

Andrew Vermilya Jamison took a look[1] at the new Fedora Community[2] (Beta) site. "This is a great hub for communication in the distribution and promises to add new features that will make it more useful to other non Package contributing groups in Fedora...I can very well see this becoming a portal for the average Fedora user to: Check forum replies to topic you create, Reporting bugs using the Bugzilla API (would make it far easier to report a bug), Search the Smolt DB for hardware that works on Fedora, Tracking Wiki discussions and pages you might be involved with. All that and so much more, this site has great potential."

Ujjwol Lamichhane examined[3] the Sugar desktop. "Most of you, Linux users have always been lim­ited to the two big desk­top names in Linux. GNOME and KDE today rep­re­sent the Linux desk­top. But there exist other desk­top envi­ron­ment along with these two; XFCE, LDE etc. All these desk­top environment was made with a nor­mal desk­top or lap­top in mind but one desk­top was made with small screen and chil­dren in mind. Yes, the Sugar; the XO’s desk­top from Sugar Labs...Though named as child's desk­top envi­ron­ment, I found Sugar as easy as GNOME, as plas­mic as KDE and as light­weight as XFCE."

Richard Hughes' GNOME Color Manager progressed[4] further with a website[5] and mailing list[6]. Feature-wise, the calibration process is now easier, and and there is initial scanner support[7].

Richard W.M. Jones performed a bunch of benchmarks using guestfish's new sparse disk file creation capability. First was a terabyte[8], but apparently that wasn't good enough. Next up was a Petabyte and an Exabyte[9]. Next up was an analysis[10] of the metadata overhead of various filesystems, then of the mkfs times[11]. And if you are "baffled by the 269 calls that libguestfs provides" check out the libguestfs API overview[12].

This past week, the new Fedora Planet Meme was apparently using[13] Fedora[14] 12[15] with[16] a[17] tablet[18].

Eric Christensen announced[19] that the Fedora Docs project material will all be licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA.

Dave Jones tried to clear[20] up a common misconception about how Linux handles announcing its hyper-threading status in /proc/cpuinfo.

Máirín Duffy and others have created[21] a set of media sleeves and labels for Fedora 12, as well as a one-page Fedora 12 Release Notes PDF[22].

And in preparation for Fedora 12, Charles Brej posted[23] detailed instructions for making Fedora icing. That you can actually eat. It's that awesome.

Harish Pillay pointed out[24] this week's Patent Stupidity, with Microsoft's new patent on what can only be described as the ancient and ubiquitous "sudo" command.

  1. http://blogs.andyjamison.com/andy/linux-trials/fedora-community-beta-looks-sweet/
  2. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
  3. http://ujjwol.com.np/sugar-the-cooler-desktop/
  4. http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/11/02/gnome-color-manager-progress/
  5. http://projects.gnome.org/gnome-color-manager/
  6. http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-color-manager-list
  7. http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/11/05/gnome-color-manager-and-scanners/
  8. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/terabyte-virtual-disks/
  9. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/petabytes-exabytes-why-not/
  10. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/filesystem-metadata-overhead/
  11. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/mkfs-compared-on-different-filesystems/
  12. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/easy-introduction-to-the-libguestfs-api/
  13. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/fedora-12-rocks-on-tablets/
  14. http://thefinalzone.blogspot.com/2009/11/fun-with-tablet.html
  15. http://www.braincache.de/wp/2009/11/13/kindergarden-drawing/
  16. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/friday-fun-with-tablets/
  17. http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2009/11/kindergarden-drawing.html
  18. http://tatica.org/2009/11/13/dibujando-como-en-kindergarden/
  19. http://fedora-sparks.blogspot.com/2009/11/docs-going-to-cc-by-sa.html
  20. http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/2009/11/10/common-hyperthreading-misconception/
  21. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/getting-ready-for-f12-media-sleeves-and-labels/
  22. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/fedora-12-one-page-release-notes-pdf/
  23. http://brej.org/blog/?p=103
  24. http://harishpillay.livejournal.com/167485.html

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

There have been no Test Days for the last two weeks, due to the pressures of the Fedora 12 release.

No Test Day is currently planned for this week. If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac[1].

Weekly meetings

As the QA beat was unfortunately not present for Fedora Weekly News #201, we will cover two weeks' worth of events below.

QA group weekly meetings[1] were held on 2009-11-02 and 2009-11-09. The full logs are available[2], [3].

During the meeting of 2009-11-02, Adam Williamson reported that Milos Jakubicek had not yet followed up on his idea regarding an event to work on FTBFS problems. Jóhann Guðmundsson was also not present to report on his work on creating a test case for keyboard layout issues[4]. Will Woods was making good progress on the action items for AutoQA from the previous meeting.

The group reviewed the status of the Fedora 12 code base with regards to the then-impeding release candidate phase. It was generally agreed that the status was promising and it should be possible to make the release candidate phase on time, based on a review of the blocker bug list.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. Will had been working on revising the AutoQA code to provide a Python library interface[5]. He had been moving all shared or potentially shareable code from all current AutoQA tests into the library. He hoped to have it merged into the master branch by the end of the week. He also noted that a newer version of autotest was currently being packaged and implemented into the AutoQA system, which may cause strange results if any bugs emerged.

Adam Williamson reviewed upcoming events. The release candidate date was Wednesday 2009-11-04 and the go/no-go date Monday 2009-11-09. Jesse Keating clarified that for an RC build to be done, the blocker bug list must be clear, but new issues that emerged during RC compose and testing could be resolved up until the date of the go/no-go meeting. James Laska promised to co-ordinate with the anaconda team to ensure there were no remaining blocker issues in installation.

The meeting of 2009-11-09 was held during the final run-up to the Fedora 12 go/no-go meeting, so there was some last-minute blocker bug discussion. Jóhann Guðmundsson had not yet been able to work on creating a test case for keyboard layout issues[6]. James Laska had followed up with the anaconda team and verified no blocker bugs remained in the installation process. Adam Williamson noted that one of the anaconda bugs that definitely wasn't left had been fixed the previous day.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. Kamil had added a check to rpmguard for the case where an old version of rpmdiff is installed. Will had the new python library ready but wanted more testing before merging it into master. The new Koji watcher (for running AutoQA tests on new builds as they hit Koji) was now functional.

James Laska pointed out that Matthias Clasen had asked the group to test Fedora 12 0-day updates by enabling the Fedora 12 updates and possibly updates-testing repositories and updating their systems. James thought it would be a good idea to create a test case for testing the update repositories for a release before they were generally enabled.

A Bugzappers group weekly meeting[7] was held on 2009-11-03. No meeting was held on 2009-11-10. The full log is available[8]. Richard June reported that he was continuing to work on kernel triage. He had not been in touch with Jeff Hann regarding his volunteering to help out yet, but would attempt to co-ordinate via the mailing list.

Adam Williamson asked if anyone had concerns about unaddressed issues for the Fedora 12 release, and no-one did. Adam asked Matej Cepl how he was coping with X.org triage while François Cami was mostly unable to help, and he said it was difficult to stay on top of the large number of bugs. Adam promised to continue to try and manage the nouveau driver bugs, and Thomas Janssen volunteered to help out with others. Matej said he would work with Thomas to bring him up to speed on X triaging.

Edward Kirk reported that he had worked on outstanding Fedora 10 bugs, and managed to update some and close others. He also reported that the maintainer warning email for the upcoming Fedora 12 housekeeping Bugzilla changes had been sent out. John Poelstra was ready to do the Rawhide bug rebase (moving open Rawhide bugs to Fedora 12) and Fedora 10 bug end-of-life warning operations.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-11-16 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-11-17 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 12 release

Much of the group activity in the last two weeks was centred around Fedora 12 release testing and validation. James Laska posted a recap[1] of the final blocker bug review meeting for Fedora 12. James, Adam Williamson and Will Woods worked with the release engineering team throughout the final week before release to continuously monitor blocker bug status, test fixes, and monitor for newly identified blocker bugs and regressions.

Four release candidate builds were produced by the release engineering group with the help of testing and feedback from QA. Liam Li co-ordinated the planned installation testing through the test compose and release candidate process[2] [3], and maintained the test results matrix[4]. He also sent a post mortem on the testing process[5]. Many members of the group contributed valuable test reports to the matrix. Several group members, including Gianluca Cecchi, Gene Czarcinski and others posted test installation reports which helped identify important issues that were fixed or documented during the release process.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team[1].

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Fedora 12 Media Art

After Luya Tshimbalanga started last week working on media art, he figured out[1] the sleeves do not list the minimum system requirements, so added this information[2]. However, Nicu Buculei noticed[3] the info from Release Notes[4] is obsolete "I am not sure we still support '200 MHz Pentium-class or better'" and Bill Nottingham chimed in[5] with the correct data [6]. As a last step, Máirín Duffy added final polishing to the design[7]: "I took 4 hours today to finalize the sleeve and label designs since I've been asked by a number of people where they are, and that they need them yesterday," and also announced it in a blog post[8].

Large Website Banner

Máirín Duffy posted[1] a couple of polished designs for the large website banner, one featuring the Fedora 12 release slogan "Unite"[2] and another without any text. Paul Frields objected to a banner with English-only text "Any reason for us not to use the 'notext' version, that you know of?", and looked for ways to translate it[3] - "maybe we should see if we can get localized text out of the translations for the 'Unite' wording on the website".

Security Advisories

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

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 11 Security Advisories

Fedora 10 Security Advisories

Virtualization

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

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Fedora Virtualization List

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

Guest Bridge Configuration with libvirt and netcf

Andrés García thought[1] he read somewhere that "with Fedora 12 there was going to be a way to configure virtual network bridges automagically," but was only aware of the manual[2] means of configuration.

It is possible in to configure bridges using virsh thanks to the Network Interface Management[3] feature and Package-x-generic-16.pngnetcf[4]. However, the process is manual and not in the GUI. Dale Bewley blogged[5] about how to manually create a bridge in Fedora 12 using virsh.

Support for Package-x-generic-16.pngvirt-manager integration is targeted[6] for Fedora 13.

New Release libguestfs 1.0.78

Richard Jones announced[1] version 1.0.78 of Package-x-generic-16.pnglibguestfs[2], the library for accessing and modifying virtual machine filesystems.

New Features:

  • FUSE support so you can mount guest filesystems in the host [3]
  • Support for btrfs, gfs, gfs2, hfs, hfs+, nilfs2, jfs, reiserfs, xfs[4]
  • Support for huge (multi-exabyte) sparse virtual disks[5]
  • New partitioning API, supports GPT and more[6]
  • New tools:
  • Windows Registry support, tools and library[11] [12]
  • OCaml bindings for virt-inspector
  • RELAX NG schema for virt-inspector
  • New APIs: utimens, vfs_type, truncate, truncate_size, lchown, lstatlist, lxattrlist, readlinklist, case_sensitive_path, find0, mkfs_b, mke2journal, and more ...
  • New program: OCaml viewer[13]
  • Allow stdout to be redirected when running guestfish remotely (Matt Booth).
  • Remove requirement for vmchannel support in qemu (horray!) and the tricky main loop code.

Fedora Xen List

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

No Xen dom0 in Fedora 12 Hopefully 13

Zhang Enming was disappointed[1] to learn[2] the pv_ops dom0 support[3] for hosting Xen guests, dropped in Fedora 9, is still not present in Fedora 12. Zhang referenced numerous videos documenting success in creating "a fully working Xen pv-ops dom0 Fedora 11 host operating system."

While there are experimental patches which may be applied[4] [5] to the kernel to enable support for dom0, they are not yet in the upstream kernel which forms the basis the Fedora kernel package.

It was decided[6] two years ago this month that Fedora "simply cannot spend more time forward porting Xen kernels" and "the plan is to re-focus 100% of all Xen kernel efforts onto paravirt_ops." See FWN#137.[7]

Pasi Kärkkäinen noted[8] "pv_ops dom0 kernel has only recently started working for many/most people, so it was too late for F12 release" and "There are still some missing features, most notably missing blktap2 support for tap:aio: file-based images."

Libvirt List

This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.

Keeping Guest Configurations in Sync on Multiple Hosts

Thomas Treutner asked[1] "is there any best-practice how to keep VM definitions in sync across a couple of hosts? Is it reasonable to put /etc/libvirt/qemu/ on a NFS share?"

Matthias Bolte explained[2] "No, it's not safe to share /etc/libvirt/qemu/", but also didn't find it necessary to keep the configs in sync. "A migrated domain stays defined on the source node and is transient on the destination node. A transient domain has no persistent config on its node and is lost when destroyed."

Matthias mentioned a patch[3] to the virDomainMigrate[4] function by Chris Lalancette which will be in Package-x-generic-16.pnglibvirt 0.7.3. The patch adds a new flag which will allow domains to be migrated persistently. Version 0.7.3 is targeted[5] for release on November 20th.

KDE

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora KDE Special Interests Group[1].

Contributing Writer: Ryan Rix

New Soprano Backends coming to Fedora KDE

MaryEllenFoster has been working on packaging the Java based Sesame2 backend for Nepomuk to replace the Redland backend. Unfortunately, Sesame2 is dependent on many other Java packages which must first be packaged for inclusion in Fedora. There are many packages that still need to be packaged for this backend to make it into Fedora[1]. Mary Ellen has been working hard to package many of these dependencies, but this has recently fallen in priorities to personal business. Now that she has more time to put into this packaging,[2] she has realized that many of the packages on her wiki page were either unnecessary or already under review in Fedora.

After Sebastian Trueg wrote[3] on his blog about getting Soprano and Virtuoso to work together, Rex Dieter began work on packaging the virtuoso backend as virtuoso-opensource. The Soprano plugins will not be stable until the release of KDE 4.4; however, Dieter has packaged snapshots with working virtuoso support in the kde-redhat unstable repository[4] as virtuoso-opensource 5.0.12-1 and soprano 2.3.67-0.1.20091102. After installing these packages, follow steps 5-7 outlined on Trueg's blog post[5] and you should be up and running. Please report any issues to the Fedora-KDE mailing list[6]. This is, however, extremely early software, and may have many bugs blocking regular use.

gtk-qt-engine retired, replaced with kcm-gtk

Rex Dieter has decided to orphan the gtk-qt-engine package in favor of replacing it with the kcm-gtk package for Fedora 12+. The packages are for all intents and purposes identical except kcm-gtk doesn't ship the Qt style for gtk. The Qt style has been problematic[1] and, for the most part, unmaintained upstream.