FWN/Beats/Announcements

Announcements

Fedora Announcements are the place where you can find the major coverage from the Fedora Project including general announcements, development announcements and Fedora Events.

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Cooperative Bug Isolation for Fedora 16

Ben Liblit announced:

"The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project (CBI) is now available for Fedora 16. 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 at http://research.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/downloads/. Or just download and install to automatically configure your system 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 16, we'll be ready for you. Until then, your participation remains valuable even on older distributions.

-- Dr. Ben, the CBI guy"

Announcing Ask Fedora: Community Knowledge Base and Support Forum

Rahul Sundaram announced:

"Hi

As part of the release of Fedora 16 (Verne) today, I am proud to announce the launch of Ask Fedora. Ask Fedora is a community knowledge base and support forum for the Fedora community. You can ask any questions related to Fedora and you do not need to a separate id to post questions or answer them.

You can use any openid to login including Google or Wordpress. You can use your Fedora identity as well (fasname.id.fedoraproject.org). Refer to for more details.

Ask Fedora is powered by Askbot, a Django based web application and upstream developers, especially Evgeny Fadeev, Adolfo Fitoria, NoahY and several others have very helpful and deserve special credit for being very responsive, collaborating with us regularly by fixing bugs, adding features and reviewing changes.

The goal of Ask Fedora is to be the best place for community support in Fedora and integrate tightly with the rest of the Fedora infrastructure. Refer to and get involved. If you are a Python/ Django programmer, we would love to have your participation. Join us!

Thanks to everyone who helped out including Prasad.J.Pandit (PJP), Kevin Fenzi, Toshio Ernie Kuratomi, Matthias Runge, Praveen Kumar, Arun SAG, Ratnadeep Debnath, Lakshmi Narasimhan, Jitesh Shah, Sayan Chowdhury, Raghu Udiyar, Jishnu, Hrishi and Rag Sagar for helping in packaging, fixing bugs and implementing new features and setting up the infrastructure. We couldn't have done without your enthusiastic participation.

Rahul"

Announcing the release of Fedora 16

Robyn Bergeron announced:

"The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 16 ("Verne").

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. Fedora 16 brings exciting new features for desktop users, for system administrators, and for developers. Highlights of these features can be found below. If the mere mention of Fedora 16 is all you need, download options can be found at: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

For detailed information, see the release notes: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Release_Notes/

Dedication

During the preparation of Fedora 16, the computing world lost one of its great contributors: Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie co-invented Unix and the C language. He also co-authored The C Programming Language, a book that taught many programmers just at the time personal computing was exploding. Without Ritchie computing would be nothing like it is today.

A humble man, not well-known outside his field, Dennis will always be remembered by those of us who practice the craft. Thank you, Dennis.

What's New in Fedora 16?

For desktop users: a journey to the center of the desktop...

• GNOME 3.2, the latest update to the most popular desktop environment,

brings new features, including:

    o System Settings gains an "Online Accounts" panel, which provides 

a central point for managing online accounts like Google, Facebook, etc.

    o A new contact management application is integrated with Empathy, 

Evolution and the new "Online Accounts" settings panel

    o A new document management application provides a simpler 

alternative to traditional file management for both local and "in-cloud" documents.

• KDE 4.7, the most recent version of this feature-rich desktop

environment, brings substantial updates, including:

    o DigiKam 2.0 adds face detection and recognition, geotagging and more.
    o An updated Plasma Workspaces window manager (KWin) makes KDE 

better suited for mobile devices, and also adds improvements for desktop users.

    o A new shutdown dialog allows users with multiple operating 

systems to select the OS to boot next.

For developers: Twenty thousand lines in C...

• Perl 5.14, a new version of Perl, brings many enhancements, including

Unicode 6.0 support.

• GCC Python Plugins extend GCC with Python 2 and 3, without dealing

with the C internals of GCC.

• D2: Fedora 16 is the first Linux distribution to include the newest

version of 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.

For system administrators: around the world in eighty columns...

• GRUB2: This leap forward allows better configuration options and

better support for non-x86 architectures.

• New system account ID numbering: Fedora 16 starts user IDs at 1000,

providing more room for system accounts and making it easier for administrators not have services run as root. This improves interoperability with other Linux distributions that start user IDs at 1000.

• Chrony: Chrony provides network time protocol (NTP) client and server

pieces which are more tolerant of unstable clocks and Internet connections which are not always on.

• ext4 driver mounts ext2 and ext3: Fedora 16 uses the ext4 driver to

mount ext2 and ext3 file systems, reducing the size of the kernel code.

• Improved virtualization tools:

    o Fedora 16 provides improvements to virtual networking, making 

large deployments easier.

    o Virt-manager guest inspection is a unique-to-Fedora tool allowing 

read-only access to guest file systems, applications, and Windows registry.

    o Fedora 16 provides locking of virtual disks to prevent a disk 

being used by multiple virtual machines simultaneously.

• Cloud goodies galore:

    o Aeolus, a cross-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) 

platform, which consists of a web-based user interface and tools for managing cloud instances across heterogenous clouds.

    o OpenStack, another IaaS platform, which takes form as a 

collection of services for setting up and running a cloud compute and storage infrastructure.

    o Pacemaker-cloud, which provides application service high 

availability for cloud environments.

    o HekaFS, a cloud-ready version of GlusterFS, which extends the 

filesystem to be suitable for deployment by a cloud provider by adding in stronger authentication and authorization, encryption, and multi-tenancy.

This is only a taste of what is included in Fedora 16. A more detailed list can be found at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/FeatureList

Download and Upgrade

Fedora 16 is not science fiction. It is here right now: http://get.fedoraproject.org

To launch Fedora 16 instances in the cloud, refer to: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud_images

If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading

Fedora 16 full release notes and guides for several languages are available at: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/

Fedora 16 common bugs are documented at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F16_bugs

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

Contributing

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!

Contact information

Journalists and reporters can find additional information at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Press

Reminder: Fedora 14 end of life on 2011-12-08

Dennis Gilmore announced:

"Greetings.

This is a reminder email about the end of life process for Fedora 14.

Fedora 14 will reach end of life on 2011-12-08, and no further updates will be pushed out after that time. Additionally, with the recent release of Fedora 16, no new packages will be added to the Fedora 14 collection.

Please see for more information on upgrading from Fedora 14 to a newer release.

Dennis"

Nomination period for Fedora Board, FESCo, and FAmSCo elections closes Nov. 5

Robyn Bergeron announced:

"Greetings and salutations,

It is time for yet another edition of.... "Robyn's Fedora Public Service Announcements" :)

I'd like to give you a friendly reminder that the nomination period for the upcoming Fedora elections will be closing promptly TOMORROW, Saturday, November 5, 2011, at 23:59:59 UTC (US 19:59:59 EDT, 16:59:59 PDT).

Full information about the elections, including the elections schedule, and links to where one may nominate, can be seen here

This election cycle will fill the following seats for a one-year period:

• Fedora Board: 2 elected seats, as well as 2 appointed seats
• FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee): 4 elected seats
• FAmSCo (Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee): 7 elected seats

Running concurrently with the nomination period (and, hence, closing at the end of the nomination period), the elections questionnaire is also open for adding questions which will be posed to candidates. Following the closing of the questionnaire, candidates will be asked to answer questions relevant to the position for which they are seeking election.

Questions may be added here, and, again, will also close on Saturday, November 5, 2011.

If you are planning on seeking election to one of these bodies, please remember to complete your self-nomination *prior* to the deadline. Additionally, if you have a fellow contributor who had indicated interest and has not yet self-nominated, be a Friend and remind them to act promptly.

Thanks!

-Robyn"

Fedora Development News

The Development Announcement list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

Acceptable Types of Announcements

• Policy or process changes that affect developers.
• Infrastructure changes that affect developers.
• Tools changes that affect developers.
• Schedule changes
• Freeze reminders

Unacceptable Types of Announcements

• Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule)
• Discussion
• Anything else not mentioned above

Code of Conduct policies marked official

Toshio Kuratomi announced:

"Greetings all,

As one of its tasks the Community Working Group wrote a Code of Conduct policy for Fedora that tries to give some expectations of how Fedora Contributors should behave to be able to communicate in ways that make each other happier and more productive rather than less. These documents were approved by the Fedora Board on May 10 of this year but through an oversight on our (the Board's) part, we failed to move the pages out of draft status and also failed to clearly announce their official status.

We've now rectified this and invite everyone to read the short Code of Conduct document if they haven't already.

-Toshio Kuratomi"

Fedora 16 Final Release Declared GOLD!

Robyn Bergeron announced:

"At the Fedora 16 Final Go/No-Go meeting today, the Fedora 16 Final Release was declared GOLD and ready for release on November 8, 2011.

And to clarify: It is a nice, golden, almost... mustard-like color. :)

Thank you to EVERYONE for your sleepless nights, endless testing, prompt bug-fixing, and endless patience through 5 release candidates.

A reminder that the Fedora 16 Release Wide Readiness Meeting will take place Today, pretty much now, at 19:00 UTC (3 PM Eastern/ 12 PM Pacific) at irc.freenode.net #fedora-meeting-1

============================================

1. fedora-meeting: F16 Final Go or No Go Meeting Round Two

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Go_No_Go_Meeting

============================================

Meeting started by rbergeron at 18:00:29 UTC. The full logs are available at http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2011-11-03/f16_final_go_or_no_go_meeting.2011-11-03-18.00.log.html

Meeting summary

---

• Gathering Friends (rbergeron, 18:00:47)

• Why are we here (rbergeron, 18:01:27)

  * Purpose of this meeting is to determine if all the Release Criteria
    have been met, so we can ship this puppy out the door.  (rbergeron,
    18:02:17)
  * LINK:
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_16_Final_Release_Criteria
    (rbergeron, 18:02:36)

• Blocker Bugs (rbergeron, 18:02:53)

  * LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Current_Release_Blockers
    (rbergeron, 18:03:03)
  * Look at his beady, majestic eyes.  (rbergeron, 18:03:35)
  * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=750469 was just
    reopened  (robatino, 18:03:56)
  * LINK:
    https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Installation_Guide/Making_USB_Media-UNIX_Linux.html
    (tflink, 18:17:42)

• Test Matrices and etc. (rbergeron, 18:25:30)

  * AGREED: 750469 needs to be fixed but does not need to delay f16
    release; we can fix by updating l-i-t-d in all extant releases (14,
    15)  (adamw, 18:25:43)
  * absolutely all tests are covered and pass or warn  (rbergeron,
    18:26:13)

• Release Engineering (rbergeron, 18:29:03)

  * LINK: https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/4967#comment:17
    (tflink, 18:31:09)

• Anything else before we Set Sail? (rbergeron, 18:35:01)

• To Go, or Not To Go? (rbergeron, 18:36:49)

  * F16 is declared GOLD! Ship it.  (rbergeron, 18:38:51)
  * AGREED: F16 is declared GOLD! Ship it.  (rbergeron, 18:39:04)
  * Thanks to EVERYONE for your sleepless nights, your hard work, your
    bug fixing.  (rbergeron, 18:39:34)
  * And endless testing, and endless building.  (rbergeron, 18:39:45)
  * There is a readiness meeting in ~20 minutes here in #fedora-meeting.
    (rbergeron, 18:40:04)
  * rbergeron will send out a GOLDEN GOLD MAIL to mailing lists.
    (rbergeron, 18:40:22)
  * in #fedora-meeting-1.  (rbergeron, 18:40:39)
  * Grats to everyone on shipping yet another INCREDIBLY feature-filled
    release.  (rbergeron, 18:41:27)

Meeting ended at 18:42:18 UTC.

Action Items

---

Action Items, by person

---

• **UNASSIGNED**

  * (none)

People Present (lines said)

---

• rbergeron (88)
• adamw (54)
• thedonvaughn (25)
• nirik (20)
• jsmith (10)
• tflink (9)
• N1tr0g3n (9)
• bcl (8)
• zodbot (5)
• dlehman (5)
• kparal1 (2)
• red_alert (2)
• robatino (1)
• hno_ (1)"

Fedora 16 FINAL Go/No-Go Meeting, WEDNESDAY, November 1, 2011 @ 21:00 UTC (17:00 EDT/14:00 PDT)

Robyn Bergeron announced:

"Join us on irc.freenode.net in #fedora-meeting for this important meeting, Wednesday, November 1, 2011, at 21:00 UTC (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT).

"Before each public release Development, QA, and Release Engineering meet to determine if the release criteria are met for a particular release. This meeting is called the: Go/No-Go Meeting."

"Verifying that the Release criteria are met is the responsibility of the QA Team."

For more details about this meeting see:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Go_No_Go_Meeting

And while you wait, keep an eye on the current F16 final blockers, and help fill out the test result matrices:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Current_Release_Blockers
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fedora_16_Final_RC_Test_Results

"

Fedora Events

The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning. Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding. In plain words, 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 (September - December 2011)

• 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.