FWN/Issue240

Fedora Weekly News Issue 240

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 240 for the week ending August 25, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This issue begins with announcements from the Project, including details on the availability of Fedora 14 alpha, some orphaned packages in Fedora 14, and news of various outages. In news from the Fedora Planet, work on a proof-of-concept Fedora "app store", a retrospective piece from the last month from Fedora Project leader Jared Smith, and a call for Java gurus to help with Java packaging for Fedora. In Marketing team news, detailed discussion on release slogan procedures and the decision to drop a slogan for F14 and an invitation to write a feature profile for Fedora 14. Fedora In the News brings two pieces on Fedora 14 alpha from The H and InternetNews.com. In Ambassador news, announcement of new members, and a nice summary of the active discussions on the Ambassador list. In Quality Assurance news, details on the next Test Day on OpenSCAP, and next week's Test Day on preupgrade, results on Fedora 14 testing and other F14 activity. In Design news, discussion on improving the Plymouth boot theme in F14, a roll call for Design team members attending FUDCon Zurich, and voting on F14 supplemental wallpapers. Our issue finishes out with the latest security advisories for Fedora 12, 13 and 14. Enjoy!

The audio version of FWN - FAWN - is back! You can listen to existing issues 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. 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, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

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 Alpha!!

Dennis Gilmore on Tue Aug 24 14:15:34 UTC 2010 announced,"The Fedora 14 "Laughlin" Alpha release is available!".

He also mentioned, "This release offers a preview of some of the best free and open source technology currently under development. Catch a glimpse of the future: http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

What is the Alpha release?

The Alpha release contains all the features of Fedora 14 in a form that anyone can help test. This testing, guided by the Fedora QA team, helps us target and identify bugs. When these bugs are fixed, we make a Beta release available. A Beta release is code-complete, and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. The final release of Fedora 14 is due in November.

We need your help to make Fedora 14 the best release yet, so please take a moment of your time to download and try out the Alpha and make sure the things that are important to you are working. If you find a bug, please report it-- every bug you uncover is a chance to improve the experience for millions of Fedora users worldwide. Together, we can make Fedora a rock-solid distribution. (Read down to the end of the announcement for more information on how to help.)

Fedora 14 is named in honor of distinguished physicist Robert B. Laughlin, whose fields of research have included, among other things, the topic of emergence. Emergence is the process by which a group of individual components interact to produce a system that is more complex than the sum of its parts - a perfect description of an open source community.

Features

This release of Fedora includes a variety of features both over and under the hood that show off the power and flexibility of the advancing state of free software. Examples include:

• System and session management. Fedora 14 introduces systemd, a smarter, more efficient way of starting up and managing the background daemons that services we all use every day - such as NetworkManager & PulseAudio - rely on.
• Desktop virtualization. High-quality access to QEMU virtual machines moves a step closer with the introduction of Spice, a complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktops.
• Faster JPEG compression/decompression. The replacement of libjpeg with libjpeg-turbo brings speed improvements to a wide range of applications when handling images in JPEG format, including photo managers, video editors and PDF readers.
• New and updated programming languages. Fedora 14 sees the introduction of D, a systems programming language combining power and high performance with programmer productivity, as well as updates to Python, Erlang, and Perl.
• Better tools for developers. Simpler, faster debugging with gdb indexing and new commands for finding and fixing memory leaks, as well as new versions of NetBeans and Eclipse.
• The latest desktop environments. KDE 4.5 introduces window tiling and better notification features, along with many stability improvements. Sugar 0.90 features major usability improvements and support for 3G networks.
• Improved netbook experience with MeeGo™. The MeeGo™ Netbook UX 1.0 provides a user interface tailored specifically for netbooks, building on the foundations laid by Moblin in previous Fedora releases.
• Fedora on the cloud. From Fedora 14 onward images for EC2 will be provided for each new release, allowing users of Amazon's on-demand cloud computing platform to use the latest Fedora.
• IPMI server management made simple. New to Fedora 14 is ipmiutil, an easy-to-use, fully-featured IPMI server management utility that allows a wide range of management functions to be performed with just a few commands.
• Support for SCAP. Fedora 14 introduces an open source framework for the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), allowing users to automatically scan their system to check whether it complies with a defined security configuration.
• Perl 6 support with Rakudo. Fedora 14 comes with Rakudo Perl, an implementation of the Perl 6 specification based on the Parrot virtual machine, which enables developers to write new applications or port existing ones to Perl 6.
• More powerful data analysis. Given that Fedora 14 is named after one of the giants of modern theoretical physics, it seems appropriate that Laughlin sees the introduction to Fedora of ROOT, an obejct-oriented, open-source platform for data acquisition, simulation and data analysis developed by CERN. Support for the increasingly popular R statistical programming language is also broadened with a range of new addons.

These and many other improvements provide a wide and solid base for future releases, further increasing the range of possibilities for developers and helping to maintain Fedora's position at the leading edge of free and open source technology.

A more complete list and details of each new cited feature is available here:

We have nightly composes of alternate spins available here:

Issues and Details

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

ATI/AMD Radeon|In particular, if a blank screen is presented during installation, especially with ATI/AMD Radeon video, please review

Contributing

Bug reports are helpful, especially for Alpha. If you encounter any issues please report them and help make this release of Fedora the best ever.

Thank you, and we hope to see you in the Fedora project!"

Fedora Development News

Fedora 14 Alpha Declared GOLD

John Poelstra on Thu Aug 19 00:38:24 UTC 2010 announed, "At the Go/No-Go meeting a few minutes ago the Fedora 14 Alpha release was declared GOLD. Thank you to everyone who contributed to making it happen!

All the details of the meeting can be found here:

Minutes: Minutes (text): Log: "

Orphaning packages

Eric "Sparks" Christensen on Sun Aug 22 16:00:01 UTC 2010 announced, "Opps, that list was incorrect.

Orphaning the following packages: fedora-security-guide-en-US -- A Guide to Securing Fedora Linux

zikula-module-MultiHook -- MultiHook is a simple replacement for the old AutoLinks module for Zikula

zikula-module-Polls -- Simple voting system for Zikula

zikula-module-advanced_polls -- Advanced voting system for Zikula

zikula-module-crpTag -- Simple Zikula component for tagging items, based on hooks

zikula-module-menutree -- Menutree allows to create multilevel,hierarchical (tree like) menu for Zikula

zikula-module-scribite -- Integration of several JavaScript text editors with Zikula"

Reminder: Build F-14 collection packages for all language translators

noriko on Mon Aug 23 05:15:19 UTC 2010 announced,

"Fedora collection packages maintainers

Please pick up latest translation and build your package with it for translators by 26-Aug. On 27-Aug, Release Engineering team will compose the image for software translation review in UI. Then all language translators will be able to review and correct their translation in UI until the deadline.

Notice that this build request is for translators' review in UI, and different from the rebuild planned between 2010-09-07 to 2010-09-14. Thank you so much for your help."

Outage: fedorahosted - 2010-08-23 17:57 UTC

Mike McGrath on Mon Aug 23 18:26:06 UTC 2010 announced,

"There was an unexpected outage starting at 2010-08-23 17:57 UTC, which lasted about 20 minutes

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

date -d '2010-08-23 17:57 UTC'

Reason for outage

hosted01 died. Root cause still unknown.

Affected Services

Fedora Hosted -

Unaffected Services

• BFO -
• Bodhi -
• Buildsystem -
• CVS / Source Control
• DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
• Docs -
• Email system
• Fedora Account System -
• Fedora Community -
• Fedora People -
• Fedora Talk -
• Main Website -
• Mirror List -
• Mirror Manager -
• Package Database -
• Smolt -
• Spins -
• Start -
• Torrent -
• Translation Services -
• Wiki -

Contact Information

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

dist-f14-updates-testing tag/untag koji notices

Rex Diete on Tue Aug 24 18:08:50 UTC 2010 announced

"You may have noticed notices landing in your mailbox today similar to:

foo-1.0-2.fc14 successfully untagged from dist-f14-updates-testing by rdieter

You should be able to safely ignore all those, as the mess I caused trying to clean up some koji tags got sorted out. My apologies."

Fedora 14 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting

Fedora 14 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting August 19, 2010 @ 12:00 AM UTC

John Poelstra on Tue Aug 17 23:59:56 UTC 2010 announced,

Where

"Join us on irc.freenode.net #fedora-meeting for this important meeting.

When

Thursday, August 19, 2010, @ 12:00 AM UTC ( *20:00 EDT/17:00 PDT--Wednesday, August 18, 2010* )

Details

"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:

Fedora 14 Alpha Blocker list

In the meantime keep an eye on the Fedora 14 Alpha Blocker list (which is currently EMPTY!) "

Fedora 14 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting: 2010-08-12 @ 12:00 UTC Recap

Adam Williamson on Thu Aug 12 02:10:41 UTC 2010 announced,

"The first Fedora 14 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting was held 2010-08-12 at 12:00 UTC (so evening of 2010-08-11 in North America). The outcome of the meeting was a decision to slip the Alpha release by one week due to one bug agreed to be a definite blocker:

"xdriver=vesa is not honored"

and one bug that is potentially a blocker, pending more data:

"hang at start of X11 on fresh install from DVD"

All other bugs considered were agreed not to be release blockers and removed from the list.

A slip announcement will be sent with more details on the slip specifically. We aim to build an RC4 tomorrow afternoon American time (2010-08-12) with the fix for 623129 (and possibly fixes for a couple of other bugs we decided were not blockers but would be nice to fix), and continue to research 596985 to decide if it is a blocker. If we decide it is, an RC5 build will be required.

The automated summary of the meeting can be found here:

The full log of the meeting can be found here:

Thanks to all for attending and providing input."

Want to help pick the F14 Release Slogan?

Robyn Bergeron Robyn on Wed Aug 11 20:40:12 UTC 2010 announced,

"We need a slogan for the F14 release. A release slogan is a short call-to-action that fits the artwork theme from Design, found at . (F13's slogan was "Rock it.")

If you are interested in suggesting ideas for the release slogan, please take a look at the Release Slogan SOP, and the criteria for selection, at . The slogan must be:

• short (1-3 words)
• a call to action
• positive

It should reinforce that Fedora helps the user achieve something great. It should also reflect some of ideas and themes found in the release artwork, and, if possible, also touch upon the Four Foundations ().

Please put your slogan ideas here:

The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, August 17, at 21:00 UTC, which is our next Marketing meeting(). We'll be discussing submissions there, and then the FPL, Mo Duffy, and the Marketing team lead (that's me!) will take that input and select the final slogan on Wednesday, August 18.

Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns -- and let the wiki table know if you have any ideas!"

One week slip of Fedora 14 schedule

Jared K. Smith on Thu Aug 12 01:57:40 UTC 2010 announced,

"Today we held our readiness meeting for the Alpha release of Fedora 14. As you may know, this is a meeting with representatives from the Development, Release Engineering, and Quality Assurance teams. In these meetings, we evaluate the list of blocker bugs and give a "go" or "no go" signal on the state of the Fedora release.

You can read the minutes of the meeting here, but in short the decision was made that the release has not passed its release criteria. When this happens, the entire release schedule is slipped by a week, and we work to get things in better shape for the next meeting. We'll get the schedule updated in the next day or so, but in general this means that our general availability date for Fedora 14 has now gone from October 26th to November 2nd.

During composition of any further release candidates, the Fedora Release Engineering and Quality Assurance teams plan to be quite conservative in the updates they pull into the release candidates, so that we don't inadvertently create more blocker bugs. I'd also like to thank those who have really pushed hard to try to get the Alpha into shape. In particular, the Release Engineering team put in a lot of extra hours to compose our release candidates, and the QA team did a fantastic job of testing the release candidates and knocking out as many blocker bugs as possible.

While I regret the fact that the schedule has slipped, I'm confident it was the right decision to ensure that Fedora 14 is a rock-solid release."

155 more python packages need to be rebuilt for Python 2.7

Nils Philippsen on Wed Aug 11 19:26:56 UTC 2010 announced,

"a lot of packages were rebuilt for Python 2.7 recently, but unfortunately they've turned out to be not all that needed rebuilding. Essentially, all packages that contain .py files that aren't below /usr/lib(64)/python need to be rebuilt so that their respective pre-built .pyc/.pyo files are built with the new Python version.

If the packages aren't rebuilt, python will either attempt to rebuild the .pyc/.pyo files (and fail due to SELinux policy) during runtime (if run as root) or the program will take longer to startup because the python interpreter needs to parse the .py files everytime (and can't just use the respective .pyc/.pyo files since they're invalid).

The reason why this hasn't been noticed/why those packages haven't been covered in the mass rebuild is because they don't require "python(abi)" (which was used to find out which packages to rebuild) even though the contained .pyc/.pyo files clearly do. This is because the pythondeps.sh used by rpmbuild only adds that dependency to packages which have modules in the standard paths.

Thanks to Kalev Lember who wrote a script identifying the affected packages. Using its output, Dave Malcolm has just mass-filed bugs against the packages which we could identify and he's looking to get these rebuilt en-masse as well. Owners or comaintainers still would need to file update requests so the packages actually end up where the users can get them ;-). For this purpose, I've attached two lists to this mail: one listing the affected packages and their owners and comaintainers, the other listing the affected packages each person owns or comaintains.

Please file updates when your packages have been rebuilt and nag us if they don't get rebuilt in time, whatever that means.

Thanks for your help"

New bodhi release in production

Luke Macken on Thu Aug 12 21:57:28 UTC 2010 announced,

"A new version of bodhi has just hit production. This release contains a number of bugfixes and improvements, along with some important process changes.

ChangeLog

• Package update acceptance criteria compliance

      - Disable direct-to-stable pushes()

      - Minimum time-in-testing requirements

          - Every day bodhi will look for updates that have been in testing for N days (fedora: N=7, epel: N=14), and will add a comment notifying the maintainer that the update is now able to be pushed to stable.

          - When someone tries to push an update to stable, bodhi will look to see if it has the appropriate karma, or if it has been in testing for more than N days.

• Critical path update changes

  - Hide obsolete updates in our critpath view()

  - Disabled strict critical path procedures for EPEL
      - EPEL is back to the same process that it has always had

  - Add a new nagmail message for unapproved critical path updates

• RSS feed & grid of unapproved critical path updates
• RSS feed & grid of user-specific comments()

• Package-specific RSS feeds of updates()

• Add more links to the package-specific page

• Show 7 days worth of entries in our RSS feeds, as opposed to 20 entries ()
• Bodhi command-line client fixes

  - Output now goes to stdout, instead of stderr ()
    (Thanks to Till Maas)

  - Duplicate logging issue resolved()

  - Support using --critpath and --type with --testable

• Link to the submitter and release on the home page & testing list (Thanks to Till Maas)
• Made the suggest_reboot flag actually configurable

   ()

• Notify the security team when an update is edited and turned into a security update ()
• Only verify the autokarma thresholds if it is enabled (Thanks to Till Maas)
• Only touch bugs under the Fedora/EPEL Bugzilla products

   ()

• Prevent the masher from pushing obsolete updates
• Prevent obsolete updates from getting auto-promoted to stable
• Obsolete updates upon deletion, as opposed to destroying them.
• Added more unit tests (up to 122)
• Link up bug numbers and other URLs in the text of comments
• Document the newpackage update type in the bodhi-client commands

  ()

• Set bugs to MODIFIED upon submission

  ()

• Added a bodhi --push-request={stable,testing} command to improve our releng updates push workflow
• A new /updates/releases JSON API and python-fedora BodhiClient.get_releases() method for AutoQA
• Have the build auto-completion widget query candidate builds from koji, as opposed to looking in /mnt/koji/packages

   ()

Bugs & RFEs

Please file and bug reports or enhancement requests here:"

Outage: PHX2 network outage - 2010-08-15 01:00 UTC

Mike McGrath on Fri Aug 13 00:12:20 UTC 2010 announced,

"There will be an outage starting at 2010-08-15 01:00 UTC, which will last approximately 4 hours.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at or run: date -d '2010-08-15 01:00 UTC'

Reason for outage

Network work is being done in our primary hosting facility. Some services may be offline during this time. It is possible nothing will go offline.

Affected Services

• Bodhi -
• Buildsystem -
• CVS / Source Control
• Email system
• Fedora Account System -
• Fedora Community -
• Fedora Hosted -
• Fedora People -
• Fedora Talk -
• Mirror Manager -
• Package Database -
• Smolt -
• Translation Services -
• Wiki -

Unaffected Services

• BFO -
• DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org</ref>
• Docs -
• Main Website -
• Mirror List -
• Spins -
• Start -
• Torrent -

Ticket Link

The link is at

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 (June 2010 - August 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.

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

Seth Vidal created a proof-of-concept for a Fedora "app store", in the form of a yum module.

Paul Whalen postedan update on the status of building Fedora for ARM using Koji.

Matthias Clasen shared a job opening at Red Hat in Boston, working on Gnome.

Máirín Duffy announced that Matt Jadud, a Computer Science professor at Allegheny College teaching a course on interaction design, is "offering up free interaction design for free & open source projects."

Jared Smith wrote a retrospective of the past month as fearless leader of the Fedora Project. "I’m new to Red Hat as well — so in some way, it feels like I’m starting at two new jobs at the same time. Since so many people have asked me how things are going, I thought I’d share a bit about my thoughts so far."

David Cantrell was excitedto hear that the ISC have merged the longstanding LDAP patch into their DHCP server. So now anyone wanting LDAP support for their DHCP server's database will shortly be able to use the vanilla ISC DHCP sources, instead of having to add the patch manually.

Do you miss programming in Logo? Cătălin Feştilă found PythonTurtle!

Alexander Kurtakov is looking for a few Java gurus who want to get involved with Fedora. "There are only a few active Java packagers in Fedora. And if one of them stops doing packaging we are in big problem."

Lennart Poettering wrote all about systemd (the new startup daemon/init replacement for Fedora), its highlights, features and status.

Marketing

In this section, we cover the happenings for Fedora Marketing Project from 2010-08-18 to 2010-08-24.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

Paul Frields introduced among the release slogan procedures to contact legal department.

Robyn Bergeron gave us a release slogan update, as it was approved by legal department. Then Robyn hold that for further discussion. She make a question to us all, about if we want a slogan that is similar to other company recently launched slogan. Jared Smith commented that plan B was not ready, at it was not subbimetd for approval to leag department.

Paul Frield reconsidered if we need to came up with a release slogan, skip this release or drop it definitely. Neville Cross commented that FUDCon Tempe may be a good opportunity to discus if we gant to drop slogan releases permanently.

Robyn started a second round for slogan: "Rise Up", "Be everywhere" and "Soar". Stephen Smoogen added "Vector In", "Ansantz", "Starting Point" and "SuperSolid". After some other ideas on the list, Larry Cafierro brought back the idea of skiping the release slogan. Stephen Smoogen seconded the idea. Jared Smith wanted confirmation if the proposal was not having a slogan for F14, or not having a slogan at all, or both? Paul is concerned that we may be more productive looking at long-term messages. Finally release slogan was skipped for Fedora 14, the decision was made at marketing meeting

Sebastian Dziallas put a summary of new features coming on Sugar. Paul Frield suggested that it was needed a little twits to show what user can do with those new features.

Henrik Heigl

If you like one of the new features in Fedora 14, you can help writing a Feature profile. Robyn was extending an invite to help on this.

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

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 14 alpha gets ROOT (InternetNews.com)

Kara Schiltz forwarded a brief post on Fedora 14 from InternetNews.com

"The first alpha of Red Hat's Fedora 14 Linux is now avail, and it sure has a very long list of new features. There are improvements to security, performance and virtualization as well as some interesting new analysis technology."

The full post is available.

First pre-release version of Fedora 14 (The H)

Kara Schiltz forwarded an article discussing innovations in Fedora 14 alpha:

"The Fedora Project has released the first and only alpha version of its Fedora 14 Linux distribution, code named "Laughlin". . . The most profound change is a behind the scenes switch to systemd, an alternative to sysvinit and upstart released in May. Lately Fedora has been using upstart to launch the system and services, but has continued to use sysvinit scripts. The current state of systemd development and background information on the state of integration into Fedora is summarised by Lennart Poettering, the main developer behind systemd, in a post on his blog . In discussions on systemd on LWN-net, he has stated that faster booting is just one of many objectives for systemd – some systems boot significantly faster with systemd, whereas others see little difference."

The full post is also available.

Ambassadors

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

Welcome New Ambassadors

The Fedora Ambassadors Project saw a couple of new Ambassadors joining in after undergoing to mentoring process.

Jason Wickard joined the Ambassador Project from the USA, mentored by Ben Williams

José Eduardo Rodríguez Esquivel joined the Ambassador Project from Costa Rica mentored by Neville A. Cross

Joshua Livesay joined the Ambassador Project from the USA mentored by Larry Cafiero

Robert Beatty joined the Ambassador Project from the USA mentored by Larry Cafiero

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list

Based on a suggestion from Felix Kaechele, Máirín Duffy created a static HTML mock-up and asked for feedback

Wolnei Junior provided information about proyectofedora.org being the Latin America website

Ivan Pacheco pointed out that Mexico appears under North America for the Fedora Ambassadors Membership Verification and that requires a correction.

In response, Neville A. Cross suggested that the issue be put forward before the FAmSCo.

Joerg Simon explained that the Membership Page is built using a script that uses GeoIP Plugin data and that such data is provided as per continent. He asked for improvements to the script and enhance FAmA's work.

Igor Pires Soares suggested including Mexico in the description as " The Latin America region, including Mexico, Centra & South America, is served by the Fedora Ambassadors LATAM group". Máirín Duffy checked it into the repository

Zoltan Hoppar pointed out that the Hungarian Fedora Community would require guidance on setting up the hu.fedoracommunity.org domain.

Máirín Duffy provided a link to the instructions for requesting a fedoracommunity.org domain and suggested mailing the advisory board mailing list

Paul Frields suggested that having a mock-up of a design of the site that requires to be created before contacting the Board is good way to engage in a conversation as it provides a visual representation of what is being proposed to be built.

Joerg Simon responded to a mail from Ferenc Havasi about Software Freedom Day and Free Software Conference at Szeged, Hungary indicating the need to be a Fedora presence

Onyeibo Oku posted about an idea about the need to have a cross-platform application/script to handle dependencies for an off-line installation.

Lars Delhage pointed to a solution which was appreciated

Shakthi Kannan pointed to the fedx script/Makefile to obtain complete Fedora repositories to be used offline

Daniel VanStone posted to the list about looking for a mentor. Joerg Simon responded pointing out the steps that needed to be undertaken while selecting a mentor.

Joerg Simon posted a Call for Papers for the 2011 World Congress on Computer Science and Information Technology hoping to catch the eye of Ambassadors from Egypt. Ahmed M Araby looked into the CfP and wondered about the steps to ensure a presence. The participation fees were unusually high as pointed out by Joerg Simon

Marcus Moeller informed that this year FUDCon EMEA will be hosted by FrOSCamp and solicited feedback about a Fedora booth. Gerold concurred pointing out that being at employed at ETH Zuerich makes Marcus the best choice of being an event owner. Marcus pointed out that being responsible for FUDCon and FrOSCamp makes it difficult for him to be at a both.

John Poelstra posted a list of upcoming Fedora 14 Tasks which included call from FAmSCo and regional teams for preparation of Media/Swag, Ambassador wide meetings preparing for Fedora 14, regional team meetings and select POC for Swag/Media production and submission of funding request for Swag/Media production

Ahmed El Gamil posted more about an idea from http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-August/015398.html Ahmed M Araby around a website in Arabic for Fedora Users. A bit later in the thread Ahmed M Araby pointed out that approval for arabic.fedoracommunity.org is still pending.

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list

This week we take a break from reporting on FAmSCo meetings and instead, post a summary of the traffic on the mailing list.

Andrew Overholt posted to the FAmSCo list pointing out that he does not have the time to be an official Fedora Ambassador but expressed hope that he would have the time to re-join the group in the future

QualityAssurance

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

This week's Test Day on 2010-08-26 will be on OpenSCAP, an open implementation of SCAP, which aims to provide a standardized approach to maintaining the security of systems. This Test Day is most likely to be of interest to those who already have some knowledge of SCAP and are interested in an open source implementation within the Fedora project. As always, the Test Day will run all day in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

Next week's Test Day on 2010-09-02 will be on preupgrade, the Fedora in-place upgrade system. This is always an important test day as we attempt to ensure the upgrade mechanisms for the next release work as expected. As upgrading is a complex process and highly dependent on the installed system, it would help to have as many testers as possible to help track down any bugs we can find. As always, the Test Day will run all day in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel. You will need to have an installed Fedora 13 system you don't mind hurting in order to help out with the testing - but remember, testing in a virtual machine is easy and non-destructive!

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 14 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Fedora 14 Alpha testing

As always, the QA team was very active in testing the latest pre-release, Fedora 14 Alpha, conducting desktop and installation validation testing (with the valued help of the desktop SIGs) for each build as we worked through the test candidate, RC1, RC2, RC3 and RC4. At the initial go/no-go meeting on 2010-08-12, the QA representative Adam Williamson had to propose a slip due to a remaining blocker issue. This issue was resolved in RC4. A second potential blocker lingered, but extensive feedback from many QA group members to Adam's request for testing was instrumental in identifying it as not blocking the release, and at the second go/no-go meeting, QA along with the development and release engineering groups agreed to go ahead with the Alpha release.

Release criteria update

The blocker review process for Fedora 14 Alpha made it clear that there were several areas where the coverage of the release criteria was incomplete, so Adam Williamson proposed several new criteria in two mailing list threads , to cover booting to a console and the 'basic graphics mode' of the installer. The proposals were generally positively received, so Adam went ahead and added them to the criteria.

Learning lessons from updates

Kevin Fenzi created a page to track problems caused by updates to stable Fedora releases, and brought it up for discussion during the weekly QA meeting of 2010-08-16. James Laska suggested that issues tracked there should be discussed at the FESCo level, and any issues of concern for QA passed back down to the QA group by FESCo. James also volunteered to adjust the wiki page to track recommendations and results for each issue.

AutoQA

Vojtěch Aschenbrenner created a test case for checking if a new package for a given release would be considered a 'newer' package than the newest version of the same package available in the repositories for later releases, a situation which causes problems with upgrades. Will Woods and Kamil Paral continued to work on the complex dependency check tests, and Will recently posted a summary of the current status and next steps.

Design

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Plymouth Theme

Martin Sourada complained on the @Design-Team about the Plymouth (boot plash) theme quality in Fedora 14 "The throbbing-and-loading-at-the-same-time fedora logo with great amount of rendering glitches is just a sore in the eye and gives a really bad impression to our users. I'm not sure if it's intentional or a bug, but either way, it needs fixing" and proposed a change "Personally I'd prefer switching to spinfinity theme. It's simple and professional looking and it does not have any rendering glitches", Máirín Duffy and others endorsed the change "+1 for spinfinity;it's much nicer" but the devloper, Ray Strode, explained it is a bug going to be solved "It's just a bug. I plan to look at it soon."

FUDCon Roll-Call

Máirín Duffy called the Design Team members who will participate at the following FUDCon "Who's going to be at FUDcon Zurich from the design team?" and invited at a joint-project "it would be cool if all the design team members present ran a workshop". Jef van Schendel, Nicu Buculei, Pierros Papadeas and Jaroslav Reznik confirmed.

Supplemental Wallpapers

Fabian A. Scherschel asked the Design Team to vote for the selection of supplemental wallpapers to be included in Fedora 14 "I just closed the Supplemental Wallpaper Submissions down. Please head to the main page and the older one which also has excellent images and pick the 20 images you like the most. Please submit your vote here or at the IRC meeting on Tuesday when we'll wrap the voting process up and pick the final winners" and Emily Dirsh, Nicu Buculei, Maria Leandro and Catalin Festila submitted their votes by mail. The final selection is due for the next IRC meeting of the team.

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce.

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

• phpMyAdmin-3.3.5.1-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046307.html
• uzbl-0-0.16.20100626gitafc0f873e.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046302.html
• ruby-1.8.7.302-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046296.html
• moodle-1.9.9-2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046058.html
• znc-0.093-2.svn2101.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045724.html
• openconnect-2.25-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045698.html
• drupal-6.19-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045689.html
• freeciv-2.2.2-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045658.html
• clamav-0.96.1-1401.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045613.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

• kernel-2.6.33.8-149.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046051.html
• ruby-1.8.6.399-6.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046044.html
• openldap-2.4.21-10.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046039.html
• maniadrive-1.2-22.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046023.html
• php-5.3.3-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046021.html
• php-eaccelerator-0.9.6.1-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046022.html
• uzbl-0-0.16.20100626gitafc0f873e.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045994.html
• moodle-1.9.9-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045992.html
• phpMyAdmin-3.3.5.1-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045991.html
• DeviceKit-power-0.9.0-2.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045980.html
• dbus-glib-0.86-4.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045979.html
• freeciv-2.2.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045953.html
• thunderbird-3.1.2-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045927.html
• sunbird-1.0-0.27.b2pre.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045926.html

Fedora 12 Security Advisories

• maniadrive-1.2-22.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046048.html
• php-5.3.3-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046046.html
• php-eaccelerator-0.9.6.1-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046047.html
• kernel-2.6.32.19-163.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046029.html
• ruby-1.8.6.399-6.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046013.html
• ModemManager-0.4-5.git20100720.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046009.html
• NetworkManager-0.8.1-3.git20100813.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046010.html
• dbus-glib-0.86-3.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046007.html
• DeviceKit-power-014-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/046008.html
• phpMyAdmin-3.3.5.1-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045997.html
• moodle-1.9.9-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045996.html
• uzbl-0-0.16.20100626gitafc0f873e.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045989.html
• gnupg2-2.0.13-2.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045878.html
• freeciv-2.2.2-1.fc12 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-August/045854.html