FWN/Beats/PlanetFedora

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

Máirín Duffy has been working on improving the Anaconda and syslinux User Experience. It's the first thing that anyone sees when they try to install Fedora or boot from live media. But don't worry, you can help too. "I wrote up some instructions on how you can try this prototype out on your own. It’s really, really easy."

In "This Week in Anaconda #6", Chris Lumens updated us on some other happenings in the Anaconda world. Probably the most interesting discussion was over the possibility of updating Anaconda after a release. "The basic problem is that after a Fedora release, anaconda never gets updated though various other tools that anaconda does use do get updated. This isn't a problem on most installation media because we never remake the media. It is, however, a problem for people doing livecd respins. What'll happen is that anaconda will assume a particular library call for NetworkManager (just to pick on a component at random) that exists when the release happens, but changes in an update."

Lennart Poettering summarized a number of the recent improvements to systemd. If you aren't so sure what systemd is, in part 4 of "systemd for Adminstrators", Lennart explained how killing of system daemons works.

If you have been having trouble getting Fedora 14 to boot as LiveUSB media, Marc Ferguson has the answer.

Richard Hughes created mockups of new gnome-control-center power management configuration pages.

If you are interested in helping TeX Live in Fedora, Tom Callaway offered ways that you can help. "One of the remaining big ticket items for legal audit in Fedora is TeX Live. A few years ago, we got a version of TeX Live into Fedora, and after the fact, we discovered that the licensing on much of it was confusing or non-free."

Alex Hudson analyzed an interesting legal case that is currently unfolding, SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Limited. "The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. For those who don’t know, SAS is a statistical package which is both popular and influential, and to a large extent can be thought of as a programming development environment. WPL, the defendants, wrote software which could interpret SAS programs...If nothing else, this highlights that no law is truly ever settled, and possibly portents to more movement in this area in the future: I’ve described before how the UK Government is making noises about revisiting intellectual property laws..."

Mark J Cox published an updated piece on "Vulnerability and threat mitigation features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

Richard W.M. Jones wondered about a potential new feature for git, automating dependency analysis of patches:

"The half-baked idea is whether we can write an automatic tool which can untangle these dependencies from the raw git commits? (Or whether such a tool exists already, I cannot find one)

There would be one important practical use for such a tool. When cherry picking commits for the stable branch, I would like to know which previous commits that the commit I’m trying to apply depends on. This gives me extra information: I can decide that applying this commit is too disruptive — perhaps it depends on an earlier feature which I don’t want to add. I can decide to go back and apply the older commits, or that a manual backport is the best way."