FWN/Beats/PlanetFedora

Planet Fedora

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

Michael DeHaan wrote an essay "Recognizing and Avoiding Common Open Source Community Pitfalls" such as that "contributors appear overnight out of the woodwork, that users grow on trees, and that it’s possible to direct community members as if they were employees."

Thorsten Leemhuis asked: "What questions would you like to ask the Fedora Board or FESCo Candidates?" for the upcoming Fedora Board and FESCo elections. "Hence we need to prepare a few good questions that we can send to the candidates once the nomination period ends. And that's where I need *your help*"

Richard W.M. Jones announced the first proper version of virt-inspector, "a command line tool that tells you what’s in a virtual machine. You just point it at a disk image or a libvirt domain" and it can discover a number of pieces of information about the installed VM.

Thomas Canniot posted a How-To about running a successful release event. "Fedora 11 is going to be released at the end of the month and very soon, our massive army of ambassadors will want to spread how proud they are of their Fedora 11 release to the masses."

Jef Spaleta calculated new Fedora usage statistics that combined the Smolt and MirrorManager logs to come up with some very interesting new numbers.

Paul W. Frields responded to the recent discussions about the new fedora-devel moderation policy. "There’s simply no place in free software, and certainly not in Fedora, for that kind of abuse. Of course harsh words aren’t the end of the world. When we let them become the noise that drowns out the signal, though, we’re putting the project at risk. If contributors feel their time in community discussions are wasted, they will either hold them elsewhere, or simply go away."

Jack Aboutboul interviewed Lennart Poettering ("Red Hat Desktop Team Engineer and resident audio guru") about Pulse Audio and audio in Fedora.

Susan Lauber wrote about "how can you - a Fedora contributor - assist in making the wiki more useful for everyone?" For anyone wondering how they can start contributing to Fedora, this is a great way to start, without any long-term commitments.

Nicu Buceli reported from eLiberatica 2009 in Bucharest, Romania.

Jeff Sheltren discussed "Why Students should get Involved in Open Source". Jeff says that "from my experience, open source experience has given our student employees an enormous boost when looking for their first jobs out of college."

Adam Williamson mentioned the Common F11 bugs wiki page, and how you can help: "It’s really easy - everything you need to know to add an issue to the Common Bugs page is right there in the page source, as a comment. If you edit the page you’ll see a few chunks of comments which explain how to add an issue (including a template entry), and what else to do when adding one..." James Laska also suggested that there are still some high priority defects that could use some extra testing in preparation for the imminent Fedora 11 release.

Thorsten Leemhuis explained that "There is one small change in Fedora 11 that I guess will confuse Fedora and RPM Fusion users with x86-32 (aka i386/ix86) systems quite a lot, but afaics did not get enough attention yet: By default, the PAE kernel will be used on 32-bit hardware, where appropriate."