FWN/Issue195

Fedora Weekly News Issue 195

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 195 for the week ending September 27, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Kicking off this week's issue in announcements, a new IRC channel for Fedora Activity Days, launched in time for the next upcoming FAD in Germany, and updates on feature freeze for Fedora 12 beta this week, along with other related updates. From the Fedora Planet, postings and views from Fedora contributors worldwide, and a collection of FAD EMEA related links. In marketing news, Fedora 12 talking points, Fedora Insight status and other current activities. In ambassadors, details of the upcoming Utah Open Source Conference, and activities Ambassadors can do for Fedora 12. The Quality Assurance beat this week brings up up-to-date on weekly meeting and Test Day activities, as well as Fedora 12 beta related work. This issue rounds out with news from the Art/Design team, providing detail on the mosaic polish for the Fedora 12 theme. That rounds out this week's issue of Fedora Weekly News, which we hope you enjoy!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

The Fedora News team is collaborating with Marketing and Docs to come up with a new exciting platform for disseminating news and views on Fedora, called Fedora Insight. If you are interested, please join the list and let us know how you would like to assist with this effort.

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project .

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

THE BREAKING news (Fedora 12 (Constantine) related) are as follows:

New channel on freenode called #fedora-fad

Gerold Kassube announced the new IRC-Channel #fedora-fad which is opened right now for everybody to attend a FAD (== Fedora Activity Day) online. Gerold mentioned, “I created that channel, because of some people asked (also in the past) about who cann't attend a FAD. The next FAD in EMEA takes place (again and by tradition) in Rheinfelden, Germany on the next weekend . ”

All Features Need to be 100% by Beta Freeze (2009-09-29)

John Poelstra had explicitly announced that All Features Need to be 100% by Beta Freeze by Tuesday, September 29th, 2009.

Beta Freeze means that all features and their associated feature pages must be at 100% completion by this date. The following features are currently not 100% complete and need to be by Tuesday, September 29, 2009. In many cases it appears they are just 1% away.

Poel also mentioned, “I will raise feature pages not at 100% at FESCo's meeting on October 2, 2009. Hopefully my job will be easy and there there won't be any.”

GraphicsMagick-1.3.x for F-11 (ABI change)

Rex Dieter announced, “Heads up, I'm working on a GM-1.3.7 update to F-11 which includes an ABI break. I'll be taking care of building/fixing dependent packages (including dvdauthor, koffice).”

Announcing Fedora 12 Snapshot 3

“Fedora 12 Snapshot 3 is now available for testing. These snapshots consist of live images only. These were composed yesterday, and made available today.” announced Jesse Keating Jesse requested to report issues in bugzilla.

Updating libchamplain to 0.4.0

Debarshi Ray included , “I am going to build libchamplain-0.4.0 for Rawhide in a few hours and this involves a change in the soname that will affect: + eog-plugins + empathy”

Fedora 12 Mass Branching coming soon

Jesse Keating announced, “Per the Fedora 12 Schedule , mass branching for Fedora 12 will happen on the 28th of September, which is this coming Monday. There will be a short CVS outage associated with this event. The exact timing of this outage has not been decided yet, but we will send the outage notification when it has been decided.”

RHCE Conference in New York City

On Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009 from 9am-1pm, Red Hat will hold a free, informal conference for RHCEs, offering information sharing on a variety of topics at the Rubin Museum in New York City. Details are available.

Upcoming Events

Mark your agenda with the following events. Please, consider attending or volunteering at an event near you!

• North America (NA)
• Central & South America (LATAM)
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
• India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)

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

This past week, Richard W.M. Jones posted a number of tidbits on interesting ways of manipulating virtual machines using Fedora. First, there is virt-rescue, which "lets you get a rescue shell on your virtual machine" but running on the host machine. The virt-edit tool allows you to edit files from the host environment. Lastly, virt-ifconfig can list the IP addresses of network interfaces on virtual machine guests.

After Mark Shuttleworth's recent keynote at LinuxCon, Chris Ball questioned a potentially sexist remark that Shuttleworth made. Adam Williamson used the opportunity to "consider the wider issues around the topic."

Marc Ferguson announced that a new site, FOSS Threads has been launched, where you can buy "designer geekwear. Our shirts are designed to fashionably get attention, start conversations and share your love for free and open source software."

Speaking of eye-candy, the SMonohand font has a "chalkboard-y" look to it, and Máirín Duffy is looking for someone interested in packaging it for Fedora.

Ingvar Hagelund wrote a short shell script that can automatically monitor the service contract expiration of Dell systems.

Kulbir Saini found an interesting plugin for Pidgin for use when people ask questions that could easily be solved with a simple Google search.

FAD EMEA 2009 Links Roundup

The Fedora Ambassador Day EMEA 2009 took place this past weekend in Rheinfelden, Germany. There were lots of interesting posts from Max Spevack,,,, Joerg Simon,, Yaakov Nemoy and Pierros Papadeas.

Marketing

In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Chaitanya Mehandru

Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-09-22

Meeting logs and notes for the 2009-09-22. Fedora Marketing Meeting were made available. All Marketing meetings and notes are open to the public.

Thanks to Robyn Bergeron for running the meeting in Mel’s absence!!

F12 Talking points

Talking points are more or less done and now ambassadors can start using them. Ambassadors can choose from various suggestions on using talking points.

Matchmaking for Feature Profile interviews

With the F12 talking points out already, we need to start doing print or podcast interviews around some of the points /features. We identified the desktop,admin and development users category and selected 4 talking points that should definitely have interviews to go along with them- Next-Gen Ogg, NetworkManager enhancements, Virt improvements, and Systemtap improvements.

The tools / information to start doing interviews are available. If someone is willing to take something on, please add your name to the wiki as the owner so we know that we (a) have an owner, and (b) don't have 12 owners being redundant.

Paul W. Frields has graciously volunteered to do the SystemTap interview and has shared a stub page for the systmetap interview he did in F11. A podcast will be available soon. Thanks Paul!!!

We're still looking to synchronize interviewees and interviewers.

Fedora Insight status

We originally planned to launch Fedora Insight on September 29 (right before infrastructure freeze), but to get a stable platform up and tested, with a contribution workflow we're all happy with, we pushed the launch date out until right after the freeze instead and moved it to Oct 14(when the freeze lifts), and the revised schedule is available. .

Marketing Research

Robyn is working on a list of questions on marketing research to be sent out and will keep plugging away at market research.

Coming up next

In-depth feature profiles are on track and should get finished by 2009-10-06. Help with podcasts is available on a wiki page "How to make a podcast" and provides advises on how to start with making podcasts for best results.

Red Hat Marketing/PR will be helping a during the F12 release cycle and we should have a release video ready for release day. Paul will be recording the video and is currently working to get a couple feature videos ready in the coming weeks.

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Utah Open Source Conference is coming

If you live in the Mountain West region of the U.S. -- and even if you don't -- don't miss the region's biggest and best Linux festival. Registration is still open for Utah Open Source Conference 2009, to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, from Oct. 8-10. This is the third year of this annual event, and Fedora is one of the sponsors.

Fedora will have a booth at the event and those in the area are urged to attend the event and are welcome to help out. For more information on staffing the booth, contact Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-at-fedoraproject-dot-org.

Get on the map

Want to find the nearest ambassador? How about one in Belarus? Now you can.

Susmit Shannigrahi reports that finding out the nearest ambassadors, which was once a tedious task, is now as simple as viewing a map. The map is at here and instructions on how to place yourself on the map can be found at here.

Fedora 12 is coming

While you may still be promoting Fedora 11 in your areas, you can make plans for Fedora 12 events to promote and celebrate the release of our next version.

As such, with the upcoming release of Fedora 12, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events -- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week's Test Day was on Xfce, the popular alternative desktop. including PulseAudio. The always-loyal Xfce enthusiast base turned out to check on the polish of the Xfce desktop for Fedora 12, and filed many useful bug reports. Thanks to everyone who came out.

Next week's Test Day on 2009-10-01 will be on the installer's (Anaconda) storage system. As always, the Test Day will run all day in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel. The complete rewrite of Anaconda's storage code which first appeared in Fedora 11 continues to be refined, so please come out to the Test Day and help us ensure Anaconda is tested on a wide range of storage hardware and configurations.

No Fit and Finish track Test Day is planned for next week.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2009-09-21. The full log is available. Adam Williamson noted that the zsync issues raised at the previous meeting had been discussed in a development mailing list thread, but no real movement had yet occurred.

Adam Williamson mentioned that the beta release process was getting underway, and the test compose would be happening on 2009-09-23. He also reminded the group that a blocker bug review meeting would be taking place on 2009-09-25. He asked the group to test the test compose, Rawhide itself, and the nightly Rawhide live CDs as much as possible, and particularly to try and test beta blockers bugs that required re-testing.

David Pravec said he had been talking to the Anaconda team and they were unhappy about significant changes being made to components on which Anaconda depends so close to the beta release time. The specific example raised was the major changes made to the nss package in the days before the meeting. The group discussed the problem, and agreed that there needed to be better communication between the Anaconda team and developers responsible for the components on which it relies. Jesse Keating pointed out that such changes sometimes result from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux development process, with Red Hat staff being requested to make changes in Fedora for the ultimate benefit of that product. The group unanimously felt that there should be a process for such changes which ensures that they do not negatively affect the Fedora development process, and that Red Hat Enterprise Linux engineers should be required to be considerate of Fedora deadlines and processes when making changes to Fedora. Jesse said he should be able to raise this issue with the appropriate Red Hat management staff.

Seth Vidal asked the group whether it would be acceptable to submit a new version of yum which includes history support to Rawhide prior to the release of Fedora 12 Beta. After some discussion, the group agreed that it would be an acceptable risk to make this change, as Seth had already performed some good testing on it and had a good plan for backing out the change if it became necessary.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-09-22. The full log is available. Edward Kirk noted there had been no real movement on the triage day improvement topic, but he was hoping to pull something together soon.

Edward Kirk was also looking for a way to improve the tracking of action items from previous meetings, some of which he felt had fallen through the cracks in the past. After some discussion, John5342 suggested using the team's trac instance for this purpose, and the group agreed this was a good idea. Edward Kirk volunteered to transfer any outstanding action items from previous meetings to Trac.

No-one had heard from Brennan Ashton regarding the triage metrics project in the week before the meeting.

Richard June gave an update on the kernel triage project. He was still finding that the wireless tickets he was checking were all well-filed and would not much benefit from triage. He was therefore moving to look at a wider range of kernel bugs to see if this impression held true. He was also planning to get in touch with kernel developers to get some instruction on what kinds of information they would require on particular bugs.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-09-28 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-09-29 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 12 Beta Test compose

Liam Li announced the Fedora 12 Beta test compose, a test build to check for major showstopper bugs that would appear only in the traditional installer physical media builds. Earlier, he had sent a mail detailing the types of testing that would be useful, and the results matrix page for reporting results. Several people reported failures with the test compose images, and Liam later announced an updated test compose which fixed the most significant bug affecting the earlier compose.

Bug resolution discussion

Sergey Rudchenko asked whether triagers could ever close a bug as NEXTRELEASE without reference to the maintainer responsible for the bug. Adam Williamson explained that this was rarely the case, as it would require certain knowledge of the maintainers intentions regarding which releases they intended to fix the bug in. Karel Volny asked why some of what Adam had said did not seem to match the policy documented on the Bugzilla page. Adam explained that the canonical reference for Fedora's bug process is in fact on the Wiki, and explained some wrinkles around distribution versioning, which he promised to explain on the Wiki page.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Mosaic Polish

Máirín Duffy proposed a new 3D way to produce a polished version of the mosaic that will be used for the Fedora 12 theme "I came up with this today, polishing on the original mosaic María did with the blur/focus technique we had discussed trying a while back" inquiring if it is a path worth using. It was positively appreciated, with only a reserve from Martin Sourada about the amount of bokeh used: "It looks really great, although while excellent for anaconda banner, I think the amount of lens flare in the wallpaper is a little too much."