FWN/Beats/PlanetFedora

Planet Fedora

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

As you may have noticed, FWN's Planet Fedora beat has been on a vacation for the past few weeks. Well, we're back. This week's coverage will include a number of selections from the past month or so.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

John Poelstra explained how shipping on time can be a feature for Fedora 14. "In the grand scheme of things, two weeks late on a software release is hardly anything, and yet, given a choice, I’d like Fedora to be known as the distribution that always ships on time."

Máirín Duffy decided to start blogging the Fedora Board meetings. So far, posts are up from the July 2, 2010 and July 16 meetings. Highlights include the announcement of a new Fedora Project leader (Jared Smith), a trial change in the board meeting format and information about all Fedora contributors getting ponies.

In a separate series of posts, Máirín updated us on the status of the Fedora websites since "the Fedora Design team and Fedora Websites team along with the Fedora Board have been working towards a completely updated web presence for Fedora over the past couple of releases." Included is a mockup for the front page of the Fedora Project website and potential fedoraproject.org page headers.

Scott Williams experimented with purchasing brand name (and other) laptops, sans Windows.

Richard W.M. Jones suggested a number of ways in which command line tools can be made more script friendly.

Luis Villa added some thoughts about the Bilski Supreme Court patent case.

Peter Hutterer wrote about how input event processing works under X. "The terms Core Pointer, VCP, extension devices, etc. are thrown around much these days. But they either mean very little or just very little to most. Especially because since X server 1.7 and to a lesser part 1.6, the definitions have changed a lot. So here's a bit of a high-level overview of what happens with input events in the server."

Daniel Berrange posted "More than you (or I) ever wanted to know about virtual keyboard handling" and "A summary of scan code & key codes sets used in the PC virtualization stack".

Dave Airlie reposted a message originally sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List about the inclusion of open source 3D drivers for mobile devices in the kernel. It can be summarized as "if you aren't going to create an open userspace driver (either MIT or LGPL) then don't waste time submitting a kernel driver to me."

Karel Zak mentioned a new utility included with util-linux-ng 2.18, findmnt(8). "This new util is a command line interface to the libmount library, the util is able to search in /etc/fstab, /etc/mtab or /proc/self/mountinfo."

David Ramsey announced that "cryptography in the kernel" is a proposed feature for Fedora. With this feature, "the kernel implementation of cryptographic algorithms will be made available to user-space programs, so that user-space programs do not need to handle encryption keys directly."