FWN/Issue279

Fedora Weekly News Issue 279

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 279 for the two weeks ending June 22, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In Development announcements, a reminder of end of life for Fedora 13, details on a few outages and infrastructure updates, and details on FESCo and Fedora Board elections. Fedora In The News brings six articles about Fedora 15 and 16 and the Fedora student scholarship program. Quality Assurance reports on the latest Test Day on World IPv6, Security spin testing, and lots of other projects ongoing with Fedora 15 and 16. Security Advisories brings us current with the latest security-related package releases in the last two weeks, and Fedora LATAM is back with a brief tutorial on bash-completion. Enjoy!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! 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: Pascal Calarco

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

Reminder: Fedora 13 end of life on 2011-06-24

Kevin Fenzi announced:

"Greetings.

This is a reminder email about the end of life process for Fedora 13.

Fedora 13 will reach end of life on 2011-06-24, and no further updates will be pushed out after that time. Additionally, with the recent release of Fedora 15, no new packages will be added to the Fedora 13 collection.

Please see for more information on upgrading from Fedora 13 to a newer release.

kevin"

Outage: Mediawiki Upgrade - 2011-06-13 18:00 UTC

Ricky Zhou announced:

"There will be an outage starting at 2011-06-13 18:00 UTC, which will last approximately 1 hour.

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

date -d '2011-06-13 18:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

We are updating our mediawiki instance to version 1.16.5. For those that are interested in testing this in advance, we have already updated our staging wiki.

Affected Services:

• Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Unaffected Services:

• BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
• Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
• Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
• GIT / Source Control
• DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
• Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
• Email system
• Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
• Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
• Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/
• Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.org/
• Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/
• Fedora Talk - http://talk.fedoraproject.org/
• Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/
• Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/
• Smolt - http://smolts.org/
• Spins - http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
• Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
• Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
• Translation Services - http://translate.fedoraproject.org/

Ticket Link:

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/2563

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the ticket for this outage above. "

Bodhi v0.8 in production

Luke Macken announced:

"https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates

Frontend Web/Client Changes

• Buildroot Override Management
• Make update notes mandatory (fesco#457)
• Gracefully handle invalid update template values (#597)
• Fixed a bug that would prevent people from editing updates

Backend Changes

• Support blacklisting certain users from receiving bodhi emails (for autoqa)
• More robust handling of 'pending' koji tags (#594)
• More configurable for non-Fedora deployments
• Added more metrics to our report generator

  * # of updates that reach the stable karma threshold
  * # of updates that spent the minimum time in testing
  * # of proventester karma types
  * output

API Changes

• Optimize our 'list' API when querying updates by bug number (#610)
• Support adding comments without triggering email notifications (to prevent AutoQA spamming)"

Election Results for FESCo and Fedora Board seats

Jared K. Smith announced:

"I'm happy to announce the results of our recent round of elections for at-large seats on the Fedora Board and FESCo, and FAmSCo. The results are as follows:

FESCo

There were five FESCo seats up for election this cycle. A total of 200 ballots were cast in the FESCo election. Each of the eight candidates could receive up to 1600 votes (200 ballots multiplied by 8 candidates).

Votes | Candidate
----------------------
1120  | Kevin Fenzi (nirik)
1020  | Bill Nottingham (notting)
 764  | Tomáš Mráz (t8m)
 699  | Peter Jones (pjones)
 567  | Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh)
------------
 535  | Kyle McMartin (kylem)
 480  | Justin Forbes (jforbes)
 398  | Iain Arnell (iarnell)

The top five candidates were Kevin, Bill, Tomáš, Peter, and Stephen. Each will server a full two-term position on the Fedora Engineering Steering committee.

• * * * *

Fedora Board

There were three open seats on the Fedora Board this election cycle. A total of 204 ballots were cast. Due to the system of range voting that we use in Fedora elections, this means that each of the six candidates could receive up to 224 votes (204 ballots multiplied by 6 candidates).

Votes | Candidate
----------------------
 833  | Rex Dieter (rdieter)
 608  | Jon Stanley (jds2001)
 607  | Peter Robinson (pbrobinson)
------------
 421  | Robert 'Bob' Jensen (EvilBob)
 367  | Andrea Veri (averi)
 274  | Zach Oglesby (zoglesby)

I'm pleased to have Rex and Jon return as members of the Board, and welcome Peter to the Fedora Board as well. All three of these individuals will serve full two-term positions on the Fedora Board.

Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader"

Outage: Server Updates/Reboots - 2011-06-14 21:00 UTC

Kevin Fenzi announced:

"Outage: Server Updates/Reboots - 2011-06-14 21:00 UTC

There will be an outage starting at 2011-06-14 21:00 UTC, which will last
approximately 1 hour.

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

date -d '2011-06-14 21:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

Another round of server updates and reboots. Note that these reboots will
affect contributors/maintainers, but not end users.

Affected Services:

• Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
• GIT / Source Control

Unaffected Services:

• BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
• Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
• DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
• Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
• Email system
• Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
• Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
• Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/
• Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.org/
• Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/
• Fedora Talk - http://talk.fedoraproject.org/
• Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/
• Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/
• Smolt - http://smolts.org/
• Spins - http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
• Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
• Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
• Translation Services - http://translate.fedoraproject.org/
• Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Ticket Link: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/2823

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the
ticket for this outage above."

IPv6 Test Day tomorrow (World IPv6 Day)

Adam Williamson announced:

"Sorry for the late notice, though I did trail this a bit last week. Tomorrow we're having a special Test Day, out of the usual Test Day cycle (which will open for F16 in a few weeks), for World IPv6 Day. Special thanks to Linda Wang for getting the ball rolling on this. You can find the event page at:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Day:2011-06-08_IPv6

with full instructions on testing, including getting IPv6 set up, either natively or through various tunnel providers. You don't need Rawhide for testing, Fedora 15 is fine. I know IPv6 is scary to many (including me), but look at this as an opportunity to help Fedora's IPv6 readiness while learning about IPv6 from people who know what they're talking about! I know that's what I'll be doing. The Test Day is in #fedora-test-day on Freenode, all day long. Fedora QA and Linda's team will be there to help with testing. Thanks everyone! -- Adam Williamson, Fedora QA Community Monkey

IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org

http://www.happyassassin.net"

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 (June - August 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.

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 15 offers a lot to tempt enterprises away from Windows (Computing UK)

Jonathan Nalley forwarded a review of Fedora 15 in Computing UK:

"Although there is a town in Nevada called Lovelock, I’m assuming the Fedora Project named the latest version after James Lovelock, inventor of the microwave and originator of the Gaia Theory of how planet earth is a self-regulating organism able to adjust various parameters to maintain some sort of biological and geological balance....Once I had Fedora installed and running, it became clear that the earlier rumours of something afoot in Fedora 15 were true. Fedora has a new look and feel, courtesy of the Gnome 3 interface. Fedora 15 was easy to use, and apps such as the office productivity easy to install; in fact, I wrote this column using LibreOffice’s Writer package."

The full post is available.

Linux kernel to fully support Xen: Too little too late? (Techtarget.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article on upcoming Xen integration with the Linux kernel:

"Core to KVM’s rapid success is the fact that it’s included in the kernel. In contrast, Xen has always worked well on Linux platforms, but since 2007 users have needed to apply a significant kernel patch and do some configuration not included in the core Linux distributions to make it work. That’s a headache and a support issue for OSS vendors and IT staff. By contrast, since KVM’s inclusion in the kernel and declared support from the major distributions such as Red Hat and Ubuntu, getting a KVM environment going is easier and also encouraged by the distributors."

"The Xen community has been trying to get Xen introduced into the Linux kernel for years, but the need for multiple kernel binaries was always a sticking point with Linux kernel maintainers. In 2009, Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote that "Xen really is horribly badly separated out. It gets way more incestuous with other systems than it should. It's entirely possible that this is very fundamental to both paravirtualization and to hypervisor behavior, but it doesn't matter -- it just means that I can well see that Xen is a f---ing pain to merge."

The full post is available.

Fedora 16 with Btrfs as standard file system (The H Online)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded details on a recent FESCo affirmation for Fedora 16 to use Btrfs:

"At its IRC meeting on Wednesday, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) resolved to use Btrfs as the standard file system in Fedora 16 "Verne". Btrfs was called the "Next Generation File System for Linux" by numerous major kernel developers two years ago and is still labelled as experimental. For Fedora 16 there will be a "simple switch" from Ext4 to the new file system; therefore Fedora's installation program will not force Btrfs' RAID- and LVM-like capabilities onto users."

The full posting is available.

Review: Red Hat Fedora 15 (Computing UK)

Kara Schiltz forwarded a review of Fedora 15 in UK's Computing:

"Version 15 of Red Hat's community project Linux distribution Fedora showed great stability, and it was simple to add applications onto the platform. We had no problem with hardware drivers and the new GNOME 3 GUI was easy to use, even though initially we did seem to be blundering about. Fedora would suit corporate road warriors who would like a combined Fedora-Windows dual-boot system (in case of OS failure), or anybody interested enough to see how far Linux has advanced compared to Windows and Mac OS X operating systems."

The full article is available.

Fedora 15 Adds Cloud Deployment Builder, GNOME 3 Desktop, Robotics Suite (Campus Technology)

Kara Schiltz forwarded a brief article highlighting robotics development tools, GNOME 3 and cloud deployment features in Fedora 15:

"The Fedora Project has released an update to its flagship Linux-based operating system, Fedora 15, incorporating a fully revamped desktop environment, new robotics development tools, and an appliance creator for building virtual machines and disk images for desktop and cloud deployment.

Fedora is a widely distributed free and open source desktop operating system suite that includes a core OS (based on the Linux kernel) and a comprehensive suite of open source components, including productivity software and a GNOME graphical user interface. Fedora is sponsored by open source developer Red Hat.

Version 15, which formally launched last week, rolls in a range of major enhancements for end users, admins, and developers alike."

The full posting is available

The Fedora Project Recognizes Student Contributor with Fedora Scholarship

Kara Schiltz forwarded an article on the recent Fedora Scholarship recipient, Ricky Elrod:

"RALEIGH, N.C.--The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that Ricky Elrod is the recipient of the 2011 Fedora Scholarship, a program now in its fourth year. The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. Elrod has spent significant time working within Fedora's Infrastructure Team, a group of volunteers that manage the servers and applications that run Fedora. He was selected from an impressive applicant pool and plans to continue his education at the University of Akron this fall and major in Computer Science*.*

Fedora is built by a worldwide community of people and is inclusive for anyone to join and contribute across multiple functions from content writers, designers and marketers to translators, web developers and system administrators. Fedora and Red Hat are committed to fostering the talent of young contributors and aim to encourage students to gain hands-on experience with open source software and lead in the creation and spread of free code and content.

"We are very pleased to be awarding the Fedora Scholarship to Ricky this year," said Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat. "His contributions to the Fedora Infrastructure Team have made a positive impact to help everything from our project website and wiki to the package builder and update manager run smoothly. We thank Ricky for his numerous contributions and look forward to his continued work with Fedora as he attends university and pursues his degree."

Fedora Scholarship applicants are evaluated on criteria including the quality of contributions made to Fedora and other free software projects, references provided by Fedora community members, the amount of time the applicant has been contributing to Fedora and the overall quality of the application. Recipients are awarded a scholarship to be applied toward tuition for the student's college or university education. Fedora Scholarship winners also receive funding for travel and lodging at the Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon) nearest to their location for each year of the scholarship.

"I would like to say a huge 'thank you' to the Fedora Infrastructure team and the Fedora Project as a whole, for showing me, and many people like me, that open source software is easy to contribute to from any level of experience," said Elrod. "Thank you to all who make Fedora the great project that it is, and the great project that it will continue to be.

The 2012 application window will open in fall 2011. For more information, visit ."

The full article is available.

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

A special Test Day was held on Wednesday 2011-06-08 for World IPv6 Day, thanks to Linda Wang. Despite the complexity involved in implementing an IPv6 setup for testing, a good group of testers were able to run through the various tests and identify some bugs which have already received developer attention.

The Fedora 15 Test Day track is now finished, and the main Fedora 16 Test Day track has not yet started. If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 16 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Security spin testing

Athmane Madjoudj announced some testing he had done on the Fedora 15 security spin. Adam Williamson thanked him and asked if he had contacted the security spin authors about it, and Athmane replied that he would. Later, Athmane announced that he had added some more tests, and Adam suggested writing them up as test cases. Athmane did this, and then continued to add more test cases regularly. In the course of this work, Athmane noticed and helped to address some problems with the rendering of tags and templates in the wiki .

Release criteria revisions

Adam Williamson continued with revisions of the release criteria. He announced that the wording 'release-blocking desktops' to describe the desktops that are capable of blocking release had been generally well received, so he had updated the criteria to use this wording.

Installer validation test revisions

Rui He reported that she had refined the various installation source tests that form part of the installation validation matrix by creating some new tests and renaming and adjusting others. James Laska followed up with some questions and comments, and Rui He continued with further improvements.

Overly similar application names

Vitezslav Humpa started a discussion and made some proposals around the issue of applications with very similar names and icons in the system menus. This resulted in an active and productive debate across several teams about the best way to move forward in addressing the problem. In the end it was agreed that it would be best and fastest to work on a case-by-case basis through the most commonly-encountered name collisions.

Draft btrfs test case

John Dulaney announced that he had been working on a btrfs test case in advance of Fedora 16, where it is likely to be the default filesystem, and that he had a draft available for review. Rui He, Rahul Sundaram and JB replied with comments and suggestions.

Fedora 15 QA retrospective

James Laska announced that he had completed the Fedora 15 QA retrospective wiki page, and drafted a set of recommendations for review by the group. He asked for feedback on the retrospective and the recommendations.

AutoQA

There were two big AutoQA developments since the last newsletter. One was the so-called 'pretty patch', which improved the layout and legibility of AutoQA results, particularly the dependency check test. It was submitted to the mailing list on 2011-06-06 by Kamil Paral and pushed on 2011-06-10. The other was a patch from Tim Flink to reduce the volume of messages sent out by AutoQA, notably by not sending emails to maintainers when the tests are entirely successful. This patch was submitted on 2011-06-06 and merged on 2011-06-09.

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce for the period June 8- June 15, 2011.

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 15 Security Advisories

• pam_ssh-1.97-7.fc15 -http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061633.html
• fetchmail-6.3.20-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061672.html
• gdm-3.0.4-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061264.html
• kernel-2.6.38.7-30.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061236.html

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

• torque-2.4.11-2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061645.html
• pam_ssh-1.97-7.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061684.html
• fetchmail-6.3.20-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061735.html
• pure-ftpd-1.0.32-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061742.html
• tor-0.2.1.30-1400.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061258.html
• unbound-1.4.8-2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061243.html
• mumble-1.2.3-2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061217.html
• gimp-2.6.11-14.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061212.html
• couchdb-1.0.2-4.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061210.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

• fetchmail-6.3.20-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061634.html
• pam_ssh-1.97-7.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061671.html
• kernel-2.6.34.9-69.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061668.html
• gimp-2.6.11-14.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061284.html
• tor-0.2.1.29-1300.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-June/061286.html

LATAM Fedora!

LATAM Fedora is a regular column of Spanish language contributions around open source software. It is our first expansion into incorporating foreign language content into FWN.

This week's contribution is from Guillermo Gómez, an introduction to bash-completion. Enjoy!

bash-completion

Si usted es administrador de sistemas o desarrollador, y si no ha montado este paquete, tal vez llore de felicidad después de unos minutos de su uso. No haré más comentarios, sólo ejemplos.

# yum install bash-completion

service

$ service ht<tab>         

alias

$ unalias <tab><tab>
egrep  fgrep  grep   l.     ll     ls     mc     vi       
which

yum

$ yum install bas<tab><tab>
bashdb.noarch       basket-libs.i686    bastet.x86_64
bash-doc.x86_64     basket-libs.x86_64  
BasiliskII.x86_64   basket.x86_64 

yumdb

$ yumdb rename<tab><tab>
rename        rename-force

pkcon (PackageKit)

$ pkcon re<tab><tab>
refresh         repo-disable    repo-list       resolve 
remove          repo-enable     repo-set-data

svn

$ svn c<tab><tab>
cat         checkout    cl          co          copy
changelist  ci          cleanup     commit      cp

git

$ git cl<tab><tab>
clean   clone

modprobe

$ modprobe co<tab><tab>
cobra          compal-laptop  coretemp       
coda           configfs       

man

$ man ls<tab><tab>
ls           lscgroup     lseek64      lsof         lstat
lsame        lscpu        lset         lsort         
lstat64
lsattr       lsdiff       lsetfilecon  lspci        lsusb
lsblk        lsearch      lshal        lspcmcia     
lsb_release  lseek        lsmod        lssubsys

ssh

$ ssh 10.10.10.<tab><tab>
10.10.10.223  10.10.10.226  10.10.10.50   
10.10.10.225  10.10.10.233  10.10.10.80

Gomix"