FWN/Beats/Announcements

Announcements

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora Announcement News

The announcement list is always exclusive for the Fedora Community. Please, visit the past announcements at

Announcing the release of Fedora 14

Fedora Project leader [User:jared|Jared K. Smith] announced the release of Fedora 14:

"It's here! It's here! It's really here! Fedora 14 has been officially released! Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release approximately every six months.

Fedora 14, codename Laughlin, is now available for download. Join us and share the joy of free software and the community with friends and family.

We know you can't wait to get started with Fedora 14, so simply follow this link to download it today:

 http://get.fedoraproject.org?anF14

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

 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_14_Talking_Points?anF14

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

You can also find this announcement text

What's New in Fedora 14?

For desktop users

A universe of new features for end users:

• libjpeg-turbo: Users can load and save images faster in Fedora 14 than in previous releases.
• Spice: Spice (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) provides users with an enhanced remote desktop experience. Currently, it provides the rudimentary foundation to take advantage of things like Accelerated 2D graphics, encryption, and hardware cursor support.

For developers

For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:

• D: Fedora 14 introduces support for D, a systems programming language combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python.
• Python 2 upgrade: The system python 2 stack has been upgraded to 2.7.
• GNUStep: A GUI framework based of the Objective-C programming language which is part of the gcc.
• Memory Debugging Tools: The new "gdb-heap" package adds a new "heap" command to /usr/bin/gdb which allows you to get a breakdown of how a process is using dynamic memory.
• Rakudo Star: An implementation of Perl version 6, based on the Parrot VM.
• Support for Milkymist: Developers can enjoy developing for Milkymist, an open hardware embedded board, on Fedora 14. Thanks to the Fedora Electronic Lab for their work in this regard.

For system administrators

And don't think we forgot about the system administrators:

• Fedora is now available for users of the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud service, released concurrently with the traditional release.
• virt-v2v assists in the easy migration of Xen virtual machines to KVM virtual machines.
• A Virtualization Technology Preview Repo allows users to test the very latest developments in virtualization related packages.
• Varnish has been updated and includes improved scalability and a new log function.
• Apache has been updated and includes a number of module and security fixes.

And that's only the beginning. Updated versions of many packages, as usual, will be available in Fedora 14. A more complete list with more details of the new features on board Fedora 14 is available at:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14/FeatureList?anF14

OK, so what are you waiting for? Go download it! You know you can't wait.

http://get.fedoraproject.org/?anF14

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

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?anF14

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 14.

Fedora 14 full release notes and guides for several languages are available

Fedora 14 common bugs are documented

Fedora Spins

Fedora spins are alternate version of Fedora, tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations. They can be found at http://spins.fedoraproject.org/?anF14

Contributing Back to Fedora

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/?anF14 today!

Fedora 15

Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes to improve the Fedora 14 experience, our next release, Fedora 15, 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 April 2011 release

Contact information

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

Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

ATrpms for Fedora 14; upcoming EOL for Fedora 12

Axel Thimm announced:

"ATrpms is officially launching Fedora 14 support

• The actual download location is http://dl.atrpms.net/. Mirrors are listed

• "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

• F14/i386, F14/x86_64, F13/i386, F13/x86_64, F12/i386, F12/x86_64
• RHEL6beta/i386, RHEL6beta/x86_64, RHEL5/i386, RHEL5/x86_64, RHEL4/i386, RHEL4/x86_64, RHEL3/i386, RHEL3/x86_64

F12 support will be EOL'd once the Fedora Project drops support for it (e.g. in about a month's time).

Installation instructions can be found under

As a quickstart here are common configuration settings for various package resolvers (replace i386 with x86_64 as needed). Installing via the atrpms-repo package method is recommended, though.

• yum

[atrpms] name=Fedora 14 - i386 - ATrpms baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f14-i386/atrpms/stable

• smart

[atrpms] name=Fedora 14 - i386 - ATrpms baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f14-i386/atrpms/stable type=rpm-md

• apt

repomd http://dl.atrpms.net f14-i386/atrpms/stable

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

Enjoy! Axel Thimm"

Cooperative Bug Isolation for Fedora 14

Ben Liblit announced:

"The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project (CBI) is now available for Fedora 14. CBI is an ongoing research effort to find and fix bugs in the real world. We distribute specially modified versions of popular open source software packages. These special versions monitor their own behavior while they run, and report back how they work (or how they fail to work) in the hands of real users like you. Even if you've never written a line of code in your life, you can help make things better for everyone simply by using our special bug-hunting packages.

We currently offer instrumented versions of Evolution, The GIMP, GNOME Panel, Gnumeric, Liferea, Nautilus, Pidgin, Rhythmbox, and SPIM. Download. We support PackageKit, yum, apt, and many other RPM updater tools for customized configuration help for any of our supported distributions and updater tools. Or just download and install to automatically configure most popular RPM updaters to use the CBI repository.

It's that easy! Tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! The more of you there are, the more bugs we can find.

We still offer CBI packages for earlier releases as well, going all the way back to Fedora 1. When and if you decide to upgrade to Fedora 14, we'll be ready for you. Until then, your participation remains valuable even on older distributions.

-- Dr. Ben, the CBI guy"

Fedora 15 Release Name

Fedora Project Leader [User:jsmith|Jared K. Smith] announced:

"The voting has concluded for the Fedora 15 release name, and the results are in! Thank you to the Fedora community members who made name suggestions and participated in the voting.

The Fedora 15 release name is: Lovelock

Voting period: Tuesday 2010-10-26 00:00:00 to Monday 2010-11-01 23:59:59

Number of valid ballots cast: 296

Using the range voting method, each candidate could attain a maximum of (296*5) = 1480 votes.

Results:

Votes :: Name

729 :: Lovelock 701 :: Asturias 673 :: Blarney 633 :: Sturgis 558 :: Pushcart

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

Fedora Events

Fedora events are the exclusive and 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 (Sept 2010 - November 2010)

• 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

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.