Planet Fedora
In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.
http://planet.fedoraproject.org
Contributing Writer: Max Spevack
Robocup 2008
Tim Niemuller posted on his blog[1] that he is en-route to China for RoboCup 2008[2]:
"I will place some Fedora stickers on the robots and I hope to foster some questions and spawn some interest for the Fedora Robotics SIG. We have put this SIG on our team description poster as a community contribution! Next year we will have that funky robotics LiveCD!"
[1] http://www.niemueller.de/blog/show.php?id=225
[2] http://www.robocup-cn.org/
Fedora TV
Jonathan Roberts discussed[1] the Fedora TV idea, as implemented using Miro.
"What is [Fedora TV]?
A way for our community to easily share video and audio related to Fedora with each other - the mechanism we’ve chosen to do this is an RSS feed that also exists as a channel in Miro.
How do I watch?
You can install Miro and subscribe to the Fedora TV channel. You can also add the RSS feed to any feed reader or suitable podcatching client."
Also, Jef Spaleta talked about[2] the current status of Fedora TV on his blog.
"Fedora TV is up and running a work flow. We have a submission que. We have a delivery channel. So now we need is to start looking at what sort of things make sense as content. We have people looking at doing screencasts, and doing interviews... content of an educational or newsworthy nature. But what we don't have to round out our experimental programming is someone looking into generating artistic or entertainment content."
[1] http://jonrob.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/fedora-tv/
[2] http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/24610.html
OLPC call to action
Greg DeKoenigsberg exhorted[1] the Fedora packaging community to pick up some of the items on OLPC's wish list, and gives a general update of the state of OLPC's relationship with Fedora.
"Did you know that the OLPC project is the largest single "customer" of Fedora in the entire world?
The rumours of OLPC's death have been greatly exaggerated. Despite some unfortunate statements by the project's erstwhile CEO, the OLPC project is still *extremely* focused on succeeding in its noble goal -- the education of the world's children -- with the use of free software as the central component of their software strategy. And they are, in fact, succeeding, even though the open source community has largely turned its collective back on that success. Which is, I think, a shame."
[1] http://gregdek.livejournal.com/31067.html
TurboGears 2 slides & code from FUDCon Boston 2008
TurboGears ninja Luke Macken has posted[1] his slides and code from FUDCon Boston.
"So, for this presentation I wanted to start a new application from scratch to use as an example. Turns out, I ended up implementing something similar to brainstorm.ubuntu.com -- but better. Not only does it allow you to share, rank, and collaborate on ideas, but you can also ask, answer, and rate questions as well. The thing that makes this application really stand out is that once you land on the page, the widgets update themselves in *real-time*. To accomplish this, I created a bunch of ToscaWidgets, which are re-usable bundles of xhtml+css+javascript that I can easily use all over my application. When the widgets are rendered in the clients browser, they open a persistent comet connection back to our Orbited server. From here, our TurboGears application sends events to Orbited as they happen, which then get sent asynchronously back to our clients where jQuery handles rendering the results. "
[1] http://lewk.org/blog/TG2-FUDCon2008.html
Featureful
Paul Frields highlighted some of the early Fedora 10 feature work[1]:
"I was just looking at the proposed Fedora 10 features category on the wiki. There are over a dozen cool features being set up for this next release."
[1] http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1053
Graphical Boot and Live Images
Jeremy Katz wrote in his blog[1]:
"One of the goals for Fedora 10 is to replace the aging rhgb that has been used for graphical boot since Red Hat Linux 8.0. rhgb is implemented using an X server which started in rc.sysinit relatively early during the boot process and then some feedback is provided to the user. With some of the improvements underway for Fedora 10 we should hopefully have kernel modesetting in place at least for some drivers which will let us set a native resolution graphical mode as opposed to requiring either text-mode, an X driver + server or the use of a framebuffer."
Jeremy has also posted a screencast[2] showing this new functionality in action.
[1] http://katzj.livejournal.com/432195.html
[2] http://katzj.livejournal.com/432586.html
Whence world domination?
Colin Walters muses[1] during GUADEC:
"How do we increase use of GNOME and Free Software in general on the desktop? What's our target audience? What kinds of things can we do? Why haven't we taken over the world yet?"
[1] http://cgwalters.livejournal.com/18327.html
Patented oddness...
Jef Spaleta opined on his blog[1] about ooxml:
"So looking back over the last few months of all the coverage concerning ooxml and how very bad it is... it seems to me that a lot of people have made it a point to question whether the ooxml specification has patented bits. Even in countries where software patents aren't so very important...yet.. the very issue of patents on bits of the ooxml specification made some sort of press.
Compared to the situation we have for patent encumbered audio/video standards..i find such interest in talking about the ooxml patent issue quite out of proportion. Why does the world, the free world, the world where innovation is yet to be shackled by the constraints of enforced software patents care so very much about the patentability of ooxml, but for audio/video format specifications, its barely on anyone's radar at all as something to be up in arms about?"
[1] http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/24410.html
Bug reporting for Planet Fedora
Max Spevack wrote on his blog[1],
"We have received several reports from people who visited parents, relatives, etc. over the 4th of July weekend and saw strange rendering problems with Planet Fedora on various browser/OS combinations.
In response to that, we have set up a test matrix that anyone in our community can use to report either successful or problematic browser/OS combinations.
If you have a Windows box or a Macintosh near you, this is an easy way to do a little bit of testing that will be of benefit to the Fedora community."
[1] http://spevack.livejournal.com/58828.html
A walking little guy
Nicu Buculei made a little animation that your correspondent thought was cute[1].
[1] http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2008/07/walking-little-guy.html
Fedora EMEA Ambassador Meeting Reminder
Fabian Affolter writes on his blog[1],
"The next monthly EMEA Ambassador Meeting will be next week.
Day : Wednesday, July 16, 2008 (16.07.2008)
Time : 20:00 UTC
Channel : #fedora-meeting"
[1] http://fabaff.blogspot.com/2008/07/reminder-emea-ambassador-meeting-next.html
Eth-0 and hacking out in the woods
Yaakov Nemoy writes on his blog[1] about the Eth-0 show in Wieringermeer.
"I think it's really important for people to understand a little bit about how open source in Europe works compared to the US. For many people here it isn't just a development model or a way of guaranteeing some level of code security, but just a matter of life and reality. Many people here, at this event, are pretty involved not only in messing around with fun electronic toys, but also administrating some very complex networks and systems deployments. Being able to apply a certain level of code freedom to playing with complex servers scales equally as well to being able to create new tools for Audio and Video production. In other words, all the cool parties use open source here.
When working with Free Media geeks, having libraries of open media for use in productions is equally as important. It's very common to want to use movies out of pop culture or out of alternative culture (cue obvious cut to a scene from Yellow Submarine for 750 milliseconds.) The sooner most common media, even off-Hollywood films are under licenses like the Creative Commons, the closer artists are able to legally and freely use this media for their performances as well. Open Source and Open Media aren't just philosophical discussions but really affect the things that people her do."
[1] http://loupgaroublond.blogspot.com/2008/07/eth-0-and-hacking-out-in-woods.html
Pushing kernels more aggressively to updates-testing
David Nielsen offers his opinions[1] on how we push kernel updates in Fedora:
"We did the correct thing, to a degree naturally, the update was in relation to a security update something Fedora takes very seriously. As such our users should always feel safe knowing that we will push such updates fast, keeping their systems secure through multiple means including proactive security and rapid updates.
However the problem is that we don’t apply the update to the existing stable kernel, the patch is always applied on top of the progressing kernel, meaning we also end up shipping a lot of other things such as bugfixes, updates to the latest upstream STABLE tree and various other things. This however is confronted with one problem, the kernels in between the current stable and next update are not all being pushed to updates-testing - only selected kernel updates are. In cases where we then have to release a security fix we are forced to ship a bunch of stuff additionally which is not likely to have been tested extensively."
[1] http://davidnielsen.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/pushing-kernels-more-aggressively-to-updates-testing/