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Fedora Weekly News Issue 257

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 257[1] for the past three weeks ending January 5, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In announcements from the Fedora Project, a call for board gaming during FUDCon Tempe later this month, release of the unofficial Fedora 14 FAQ, and appointment of David Nalley to the Fedora Board. In news from the Planet Fedora, running OS/2 Warp 4 in VirtualBox, news on btrfs in Fedora, and how to tune Fedora on SSD. Fedora In the News brings three articles from the trade press covering Fedora 14 and 15. In Ambassador news, announcement of seven new Ambassadors from around the world, a summary of discussion on the Ambassador and FAmSCo lists, and Fedora events reported by Ambassadors. In Quality Assurance news, word on the latest Test Days schedule development of a package-specific and critical path test case process for Fedora 15, and an update on the AutoQA process effort. In Translation news, details on a new Transifex upgrade, a move of the IMsettings module to github, and new members of the Fedora Localization Project.Our issue rounds out with security advisories released for Fedora 13 and 14 since mid-December. Enjoy!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues[2] on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[3]. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

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 Announcement News

The announcement list is always exclusive for the Fedora Community. Please, visit the past announcements at[1]

FUDCon Tempe: Gaming!

Tom Callaway[1] announced[2] on Mon Jan 3 20:59:15 UTC 2011,

"Apologies for the wide (and somewhat offtopic) distribution, but I knew of no better way to get the word out.

FUDCon Tempe is almost here (Jan 29-31, 2011), and I am organizing two nights of gaming for the event. This is an opportunity for FUDCon attendees to meet your fellow Fedorans and enjoy some of the geekiest board games we can find (or at least, what spot brings along from his collection). We'll setup in the Hospitality Suite, first come, first serve sort of thing, on Friday and Sunday nights (Saturday is our FUDPub party, so we'll all be there instead.)

If you want to bring a game, please, feel free, but to avoid unnecessary duplication, please add entries to the list on the wiki: [3]

Apologies to folks who aren't able to join us for the fun at FUDCon, but perhaps it will inspire you to organize something similar for regional FUDCons or other Fedora events.

Thanks,"

Unofficial Fedora FAQ Updated for Fedora 14!

Max Kanat-Alexander[1] announced[2] on Tue Jan 4 19:43:02 UTC 2011,

"Hey there Fedora land! I've updated the Unofficial Fedora FAQ for Fedora 14:

[3]

As usual, the FAQ contains useful information on playing MP3s, watching DVDs, installing proprietary 3d drivers, and handling common problems. There is a lot of other useful information in the FAQ, too, and it's all in an easy-to-read step-by-step instruction format that almost anybody should be able to follow.

The Fedora 13 FAQ is preserved as:

[4]

If you find any inaccuracies in the FAQ, or if you have new suggested questions for the FAQ, please let me know by emailing me! Also, I'm always happy to have new translations.

Enjoy!"

Working together on Fedora Remixes

Rahul Sundaram[1] announced[2] on Fri Dec 31 08:22:59 UTC 2010,

"Happy new year to everyone in advance. Nearing the end of 2008, Fedora Project introduced a new initiative and a secondary brand, Fedora Remix for unofficial community variants of Fedora and there has been a explosion of growth in Fedora Remixes ever since. Fedora has provided the tools and made it very easy for anyone in the community to rebrand Fedora and share it with the rest of the world. Some of the remixes have over time become official Fedora Spins as well. If you are looking for help on creating a new Fedora Remix or hoping to work together with maintainers of other Fedora Remixes, there is a new mailing list for you!

Do sign up and say hi at [3]"

Appointment to the Fedora Board

Jared K. Smith[1] announced[2] on Fri Dec 17 14:23:28 UTC 2010,

"The Fedora Board consists of five elected seats and four appointed seats. As part of the normal Board succession process[1], one Board appointment is made before elections and the other is made after the election cycle. I'm announcing this second appointment for the post-F14 cycle at this time.

I'm happy to announce that David Nalley has agreed to serve on the Fedora Board. I've known David for a number of years, and have do doubt that he will do a fantastic job. He's proven himself as an outstanding Fedora Ambassador and mentor, and shown his ability to be effective and tactful in his communications. He has also shown tremendous dedication and loyalty to the Fedora community.

David will will fill seat A2 (see the Board History[2] for a list of the seats), which has been held by Christopher Aillon. I'd also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Christoper for the work he's done on behalf of the Fedora Board.

Please join with me in thanking Christopher Aillon for his hard work, and in welcoming David Nalley to the Fedora Board."


Fedora Development News

The development list[1] 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

Outage: Fedora related services down 2010-12-15 22:00 UTC

Nick Bebout[1] announced[2] on Thu Dec 16 00:47:24 UTC 2010,

"Due to problems with some NFS in our PHX2 facility we are experiencing diminished capacity to several of our services. We are working with our provider and engineers on how to deal with this issue soon.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at[3] or run:

date -d '2010-12-15 22:00 UTC'

Reason for outage

NFS operations with filer are peaking below expected rates causing hangs on NFS clients.

Affected Services:
  • BFO - [4]
  • Buildsystem - [5]
  • CVS / Source Control
  • Main Website - [6]
  • Mirror List - [7]
  • Mirror Manager - [8]
  • Package Database - [9]


Unaffected Services:
  • Bodhi - [10]
  • DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
  • Docs - [11]
  • Email system
  • Fedora Account System - [12]
  • Fedora Community - [13]
  • Fedora Hosted - [14]
  • Fedora People - [15]
  • Fedora Talk - [16]
  • Smolt - [17]
  • Spins - [18]
  • Start - [19]
  • Torrent - [20]
  • Translation Services - [21]
  • Wiki - [22]


Ticket Link:

[23]

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage."

gtkhtml3 soname bump in Rawhide

Milan Crha[1] announced[2] on Mon Dec 20 15:42:57 UTC 2010,

"just finished gtkhtml3 update to 3.91.4 has a soname bump, due to changes in its API as was discovered in[3]. It has it since 3.91.3 release, somehow, only the soname wasn't changed.

I know this is kinda late notice, but the bug was discovered just before the release.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience caused by this."

Update of gitolite (ACL system) on pkgs.fedoraproject.org

Jesse Keating[1] announced[2] on Tue Dec 21 21:31:25 UTC 2010,

"I've just updated the gitolite package on pkgs.fedoraproject.org. This package is what does ACL enforcement.

This update brings us upstream support for the configuration we're using, and better error reporting when trying to clone a repo that doesn't exist yet.

It also enables https authenticated support which we could look into for those that cannot use ssh.

I tested this update quite a bit in our staging environment, but something can always go wrong, so if you notice anything weird when interacting with pkgs.fedoraproject.org please don't hesitate to email me, the infrastructure list, or find me on IRC to discuss it.

Thanks!"

Outage: blogs.fedoraproject.org - 2010-12-21 00:00 UTC

Ricky Zhou[1] announced[2] on Wed Dec 22 00:29:15 UTC 2010,

"Outage: blogs.fedoraproject.org - 2010-12-21 00:00 UTC

There will be an outage starting at 2010-12-21 00:00 UTC.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at[3] or run:

date -d '2010-12-21 00:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

We are preemptively taking Fedora Blogs down due to known security issues in our current version of wordpress, but there is no evidence that it has has actually been exploited.

Affected Services:

Fedora Blogs - [4]

Unaffected Services:
  • BFO - [5]
  • Bodhi - [6]
  • Buildsystem - [7]
  • CVS / Source Control
  • DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
  • Docs - [8]
  • Email system
  • Fedora Account System - [9]
  • Fedora Community - [10]
  • Hosted - [11]
  • Fedora People - [12]
  • Fedora Talk - [13]
  • Main Website - [14]
  • Mirror List - [15]
  • Mirror Manager - [16]
  • Package Database - [17]
  • Smolt - [18]
  • Spins - [19]
  • Start - [20]
  • Torrent - [21]
  • Translation Services - [22]
  • Wiki - [23]
Ticket Link:

[24]

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage."


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 (Dec 2010 - Feb 2011)

  • 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]

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.

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

General

Starting us off this week is a blast from the past: Jesus Rodriguez running[1] OS/2 Warp 4 (in VirtualBox).

As part of the process to review Anaconda's user experience, Máirín Duffy noted[2] that the "REINITIALIZING WILL CAUSE ALL DATA TO BE LOST!" dialog is both unnecessarily scary and complicated. And this week in Anaconda (#7), Chris Lumens also discussed[3] the storage component, specifically how it is tested and using hard disks with different sector sizes. In Part #8[4], Chris introduced "Lorax", a new project to rebuild the scripts that build an installation image.

While on the topic of disks, Rahul Sundaram outlined[5] where btrfs is going (hint: one day you will likely see it as the default filesystem in Fedora). And the days of naming ethernet interfaces ethX may be coming to an end[6]. "Starting in Fedora 15, Ethernet ports on servers will have a new naming scheme corresponding to physical locations, rather than ethX."

Tom Callaway posted[7] a set of notes about tuning Fedora for use on an SSD.

Will Woods continued[8] describing how the Fedora infrastructure goes about building and testing packages before they arrive on a user's system.

Have you been wondering what the "Network Control Panel" will look like in Gnome 3? Wonder no more, as Richard Hughes posted[9] a bunch of potential screenshots.

Richard W.M. Jones explained[10] how you can use libguestfs, guestfish and its toolset to easily move files between host and guest systems.

Adam Williamson reported[11] that you may soon be able to install Unity on Fedora. "Why? Well, a few reasons. Mainly, Unity’s an interesting project. I want to look at it and compare it to GNOME Shell and I think quite a few others do too, so it seems nice to package it so you can run both on Fedora..." Adam followed-up[12] with some more technical details.

Bryan Clark mentioned[13] that there is now an experimental Thunderbird extension that can display conversations in a similar way to Gmail.

Jon Masters suggested[14] that perhaps the Fedora Project needs a Technical Architect. "FESCo should appoint a person as their technical representative who speaks for overall system architecture concerns. The person in this role should actively seek out compatibility or integration problems but should also be a “go to” person for concerns that arise in the interests of distribution cohesion."

Máirín Duffy mentioned[15] that the Fedora Board now has its very own blog where the December 13th meeting minutes have already been posted[16].

Fedora In the News

In this section, we cover news from the trade press and elsewhere that is re-posted to the Fedora Marketing list[1]. This beat covers the period December 16, 2010 - January 5, 2011.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 14 Linux review

Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1] a recent blog review of Fedora 14:

"I recommend Fedora 14 for intermediate and advanced Linux users. Beginners can certainly install it, but it’s just a tad bit less desktop-friendly for them than Linux Mint, generic Ubuntu and some of the other desktop distros out there. Above all , Fedora 14 rocks !…"

The full article is available[2]

Fedora 15 “LoveLock” To Get MySQL 5.5 & PostGreSQL 9 (digitizor.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1] an article on Fedora 15's plans for MySQL and PostGreSQL:

"Fedora has always kept it’s promise of bringing cutting-edge computer technology to it’s users. It has now been confirmed that Fedora 15, codenamed LoveLock will ship two database packages: MySQL 5.5 and PostGreSQL 9. Fedora 15 Lovelock will have a couple of other advanced features too like Wayland & Systemd about which we have already told you earlier."

The full article is available[2]

Fedora 14 KDE review (DesktopLinuxReviews.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1] a review of the Fedora 14 KDE spin:

"Fedora 14 KDE is well suited for experienced users who prefer the KDE desktop environment. The Fedora developers have done a good job blending Fedora’s tools and features with KDE. So there’s a lot of value here if you are a KDE user"

The full article is available[2].

Ambassadors

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Ambassadors Project[1].

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

Welcome New Ambassadors

This week the Fedora Ambassadors Project had a couple of new members joining.

Vittorio Memmo from Italy mentored by Robert Scheck

Ivelin Krasimirov Dzhantov from Bulgaria mentored by Robert Scheck

Alberto Bonacina from Italy mentored by Pierros Papadeas

Bogomil "Bogo" Shopov from Bulgaria mentored by Pierros Papadeas

Jyri Kochnev from Russia mentored by Robert Scheck

Cleiton Lima from Brazil mentored by Daniel Bruno

Tim Casey from Australia mentored by Caius Chance

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list

Pierros Papadeas posted [1] about FOSDEM 2011 and the need to organize the presence at the event. Max Spevack proposed [2] a few categories/topics which could lend themselves to Fedora-related talks

David Ramsey posted [3] Meeting Notes for APAC meeting on 2010-12-18

Onyeibo Oku posted [4] about how OEMs partition laptop HDDs especially the recovery partition and, asked about how Ambassadors objectively advocate for Fedora and Free Software

Pierros Papadeas proposed [5] usage of tags on the list in order to specify region-specific affairs/reminders etc. The thread [6] refers to a discussion amongst Ambassadors with diverse views on this matter including whether the intended objective would be achieved via tag usage

Gerold forwarded [7] the Call for Talks for the Configuration Management DevRoom at FOSDEM 2011

Bert Desmet rejoiced [8] at the availability of a booth at FOSDEM 2011

Gent Thaci asked [9] for help regarding a visit to Brussels

Danishka Navin posted [10] a news item around Russia opting to install Linux on computers

David Ramsey posted [11] Meeting Notes for APAC meeting on 2011-01-01 and wished the Ambassadors a Happy New Year [12]

Mustafa Qasim asked [13] if anyone maintains the Meeting Schedule Calendar on Google Calendar and if it was possible to share it

Pascal Calarco informed [14] about the inaugural Indiana Linux Festival [15] to be held from 25th till 27th March 2011 and requested that Fedora Ambassadors get together to organize an EventBox and a presence [16]. Max Spevack requested [17] Ambassadors at NA to look at sponsorship levels and propose their preference.

Larry Cafiero posted [18] Meeting Minutes/Log of FAmNA meeting on 2011-01-04

Summary of events reported on Ambassadors mailing list

Kévin Raymond reported [1] on the Fedora 14 lunch in Paris organized on 04-12-2010. A French Radio channel also conducted an interview of Open Source, GNU/Linux and Fedora during the event.

Rene Jr Purcell reported [2] on the S2LQ, Quebec City event [3]

Mahay Alam Khan reported [4] on the Fedora 14 Talk and Media Distribution at Old Dhaka, Bangladesh [5]

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list

Larry Cafiero informed [1] about an agenda item to postpone the FAmSCo meetings on Christmas Day and the New Year's Day. Neville A. Cross and others agreed with this move [2] with the notion that the FAmSCo members would be active and communicating during the holidays

Pierros Papadeas posted [3] Minutes of the Meeting from 2010-12-18 [4]

Joerg Simon copied [5] related to help required around FOSDEM

Igor Pires Soares asked [6] about continuing discussions around the "Regional IRC Sessions" agenda item in the Fedora Schedule which seemed a bit vague. The thread [7] has inputs from others about what could be a plan in the coming period about handling the IRC sessions productively.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1]. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page[2].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

The Fedora 15 Test Day calendar is starting to take shape, and you can see what events are planned so far on the Wiki page[1]. The first Test Day slot is 2011-01-27. If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 15 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac[2].

Refining Bugzilla messages on updated packages

François Cami posted a refined version of his Bodhi patch[1] which improves the messages it posts to Bugzilla when an update is sent to updates-testing and then to stable. The updated patch reflects feedback from other team members at QA meetings.

Package-specific and critical path test case process

Following up on his earlier proposals (see this beat in FWN #255) Adam Williamson announced[1] two draft Wiki pages[2] [3] that would implement a process for creating and categorizing test cases such that they can be identified as related to specific packages and/or related to critical path functionality. Following useful feedback from James Laska[4], Adam revised the proposals, and continues to do so based on further feedback on the mailing lists and the trac ticket[5].

Test case management system proposal and requirements

Rui He has been working on the possibility of implementing a test case management system (TCMS) for Fedora. This is being tracked in a trac ticket[1] and she has now started drafting the requirements any TCMS would have to satisfy to replace the use of the Fedora Wiki to store test cases[2].

AutoQA

Work on AutoQA continues to progress apace - there is much more than I am able to reliably relay in these newsletters, those who are very interested are recommended to follow the mailing list[1]. The anaconda storage tests contributed by Chris Lumens have been reviewed and are ready for merging[2]. Martin Krizek's patch for allowing results to be reported to Bodhi[3] has been reviewed and accepted[4]. Martin and Kamil Paral have been working on implementing a staging server for results, and Will Woods continues to work on dependency check testing. He has now decided to serialize dependency check tests to avoid the complexity involved in supporting parallel tests, having worked out that even at the busiest point, dependency check testing will only be needed, on average, once every 33 minutes.

Consequences of negative karma

Brendan Jones asked about the consequences of negative karma, wondering whether test updates he filed negative karma against should be immediately un-pushed, or prevented from being sent to the stable update repository[1]. Kevin Fenzi[2] and Adam Williamson[3] both explained that negative feedback was considered advisory in nature, and maintainers are able to push updates despite the existence of negative feedback, if they believe it is proper to do so. They both suggested that Brendan could alert FESCo if he felt a packager was ignoring negative feedback inappropriately. Brendan replied that he had asked only for clarification, and did not feel the cases in question were inappropriate[4].

Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project[1].

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Transifex v.0.9 Upgrade Update

A staging server running transifex v.0.9 has been put up at[1]: https://translate.stg.fedoraproject.org/

Domingo Becker of the Spanish translation team has been working closely with the Fedora Infrastructure team[2] and upstream maintainers for Transifex to get the staging server set up. The date for the final migration for use on translate.fedoraproject.org is not yet known and translators still face the much reported problems of file procurement and submission[3].

IMSettings moved to github

The repository for the IMSettings module has been moved to github[1]. Hence, at present submissions for this module cannot be made directly via translate.fedoraproject.org and need to be sent to the maintainer for submission.

New Members in FLP

Valentin Laskov (Bulgarian)[1], András Bögöly (Hungarian)[2], David Young (Chinese)[3], Kevin (Chinese)[4], Nasri Amal (French)[5], Siddharth Waikar (Marathi)[6], Sooraj R (Malayalam)[7], Lyndon (Simplified Chinese)[8], Alick Zhao (Simplified Chinese)[9], Martin Fajcik (Slovak)[10], Mie Yamamoto (Japanese)[11] joined the FLP recently. The Bulgarian translation community now has a new coordinator - Bogomil Shopov[12].

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce, from the period December 16, 2010 - January 5, 2011.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

Fedora 13 Security Advisories