Fedora Weekly News Issue 266

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 266^[1] for the week ending March 9, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In announcements from the Project, nominations for the Fedora 16 release name are now open! Will it be "Beefy Miracle" or some other name related to Lovelock? Enter your ideas today! This week also saw the release of Fedora 15 alpha, with lots of detail around that, and an update from Jared Smith, Fedora Project leader, on upcoming FUDCons over the next year. There are also several development announcements related to Fedora 15, and some upcoming changes to Fedora translation workflow. Fedora In the News brings blogs and trade press coverage of Fedora, with five articles for this week, covering Fedora 15 alpha and other topics. In Ambassador news, coverage of the list discussion on the Ambassador and FAmSCo lists. Quality Assurance reports on the myriad latest Test Days this past week and forthcoming, including Xfce 4.8, Graphics Test Week, several internationalization test days, and next week's preupgrade Test Day. Our issue this week rounds out with all of the latest and greatest security packages released this past week, including the first Fedora 15 patches! Read on!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues^[2] 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^[3]. 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^[1], development announcements^[2] and Events^[3].

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Fedora Announcement News

The announcement list is always exclusive for the Fedora Community. Please, visit the past announcements at^[1]

↑ https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

Fedora 16 Naming: Nominations are now open. Submit your suggestion!

Robyn Bergeron on Thu Mar 3 16:34:02 UTC 2011 announced^[1]

"Hear ye, hear ye! Attention, all Fedora fans and release naming enthusiasts:

The time has come once again to choose the name for the next release of Fedora. Potential names will be accepted for consideration beginning March 3rd (in other words, NOW) through March 10.

^[2]

Please note that you *must* follow the instructions and guidelines at the page listed above if you want your name to be considered. For instance, there must be an "is-a" link between the name Lovelock (from Fedora 15) and the name you suggest. That link must be different than previous links for Fedora release names. Also, we ask that you please conduct the required searches for brand and trademark names that might cause us problems.

Read the full guidelines at that page, where you can also find full schedule details for the release naming process.

For those of you interested in reviewing the history of Fedora release names, there is an appropriately named wiki page for doing so:

^[3]

Be fun. Be creative. Help pick out an awesome name for Fedora 16! I am looking forward to your suggestions."

Announcing the release of Fedora 15 Alpha!!

Dennis Gilmore on Tue Mar 8 15:00:56 UTC 2011 announced^[1],

"The Fedora 15 "Lovelock" Alpha release is available! This release offers a preview of some of the best free and open source technology currently under development. Catch a glimpse of the future:

^[2]

What is the Alpha release?

The Alpha release contains all the beefy features of Fedora 15 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 15 is due in May.

We need your help to make Fedora 15 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.)

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:

Updated Desktop Environments. Fedora 15 will ship with GNOME 3, the

next major version of the GNOME desktop. If you're interested in other experiences, KDE and Xfce will also be showcasing the latest and greatest in desktop technology from their respective projects.

System and session management. Previously available as a technology

preview in F14, systemd makes its full-fledged debut in Fedora 15. systemd is a smarter, more efficient way of starting up and managing the background daemons relied on by services we all use every day - such as NetworkManager and PulseAudio.

Cloud. Looking to create appliances for use in the Cloud? BoxGrinder

creates appliances (virtual machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, EC2) from simple plain text appliance definition files for various virtual platforms.

Updated programming languages and tools. Fedora 15 features new

versions of Rails, OCaml, and Python. GDB and GCC have also been updated. (Fedora 15 was built with GCC 4.6.0, too!)

Productivity Applications. LibreOffice is filled with tools for

everyday use, including word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications.

Consistent Network Device Naming. Server management just got even

easier. Fedora 15 uses BIOS-provided, non-arbitrarily given names for network ports, taking the burden off of system administrators.

Dynamic Firewall. Fedora 15 adds support for the optional firewall

daemon, that provides a dynamic firewall management with a D-Bus interface.

eCryptfs in Authconfig. Fedora 15 brings in improved support for

eCryptfs, a stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux. Starting with Fedora 15, authconfig can be used to automatically mount a private encrypted part of the home directory when a user logs in.

DNSSEC for workstations. NetworkManager now uses the BIND nameserver

as a DNSSEC resolver. All received DNS responses are proved to be correct. If particular domain is signed and failed to validate then resolver returns SERFVAIL instead of invalidated response, which means something is wrong.

Go Green. Power Management improvements include the PowerTOP tool,

which identifies the software components that make your computer use more energy than necessary while idle. Automatic tuning of power consumption and performance helps conserve on laptop battery usage, too!

Business Management tools. Tryton is a three-tier high-level general

purpose application platform, providing solutions for accounting, invoicing, sale management, purchase management, analytic accounting, and inventory management.

New Package Suite Groups. The Graphics suite group has been renamed

to the Design group, and the Robotics SIG has created the Robotics Package Suite, a collection of software that provides an out-of-the-box usable robotic simulation environment featuring a linear demo to introduce new users.

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: ^[3]

We have nightly composes of alternate spins available here: ^[4]

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: ^[5]

A shorter list of common bugs can be found here: ^[6]

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."

Update on FUDCons in 2011

Jared K. Smith, Fedora Project Leader on Wed Mar 9 18:53:00 UTC 2011 announced^[1],

"I want to take this opportunity to bring your attention to a few important matters regarding FUDCon events in 2011.

Travel subsidy deadline for FUDCon Panama 2011 on March 14th

Planning is in full swing for FUDCon Panama in May, and it's time for the FUDCon planning team to begin evaluating subsidy requests. The deadline for the first round of travel subsidies is the end of the day (UTC time) on March 14th, and the FUDCon planning team will be meeting on March 15th to evaluate those requests. Any subsidy requests made after that time will be handled in a future subsidy meeting. I encourage anyone interested in attending FUDCon Panama and requiring travel assistance to refer to the instructions at ^[2] to learn about the subsidy process and open a Trac ticket with their details. We'll be giving priority to those travelers in Latin America who actively contribute to Fedora in meaningful ways.

Bids for FUDCon EMEA 2011 due March 15th.

I'm happy to see several bids starting to come in for FUDCon EMEA 2011. This is a reminder that any bids for FUDCon EMEA 2011 are due by the end of the day (UTC time) on March 15th. If you're interested in submitting a bid, please create a wiki page with the details and send an email to the fudcon-planning list letting us know about your bid. Refer to ^[3] for more details, or ^[4] for an example of a very thorough bid page.

Bids for FUDCon North America 2011/2012

I'd also like to formally open up bidding for FUDCon North America for the December 2011/January 2012 time frame. Bids will be due by the end of the day (UTC time) on April 8th. Again, please refer to ^[5] for more details.

If you have any questions, please ask for help on the fudcon-planning mailing list or in the #fudcon-planning channel on IRC."

Fedora Development News

The Development Announcement^[1] 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

↑ https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce

Fedora 15 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting Wednesday, March 2, 2011 @ 22:00 UTC

Robyn Bergeron on Wed Mar 2 16:20:15 UTC 2011 announced^[1],

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

Wednesday, March 2, 2011 @22:00 UTC (17:00 EST/14:00 PST)

"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: ^[2]

In the meantime, keep an eye on the Fedora 15 Alpha Blocker list:

^[3]

Talk to you today (sorry for the late notice; I think I've touched base with it on most folks about it for this week, though. I'm officially ill.)"

Fedora 15 Alpha declared GOLD!

Robyn Bergeron on Wed Mar 2 22:42:25 UTC 2011 announced^[1],

"At the F15 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting that just occurred, the Fedora 15 Alpha release was declared GOLD.

Thanks to all of those who helped out to make this happen!

Meeting notes can be found here: Minutes: ^[2] Full Log: ^[3]

Cheers! And onwards we go to Beta :)"

ACTION REQUIRED: Important changes to Fedora translation workflow

Jared K. Smith on Thu Mar 3 15:46:28 UTC 2011 announced^[1],

"Quick Summary --- The Fedora translation workflow has changed. If you are a developer of a package being translated by the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project, you must change your workflow slightly if you want translated strings to appear in your software package. Tools and assistance are available to make this workflow as simple as possible for developers. Read below for details.

Details --- Over the past couple of weeks, we've made some improvements and infrastructure changes to the Fedora translation system. We've moved from a self-hosted version 0.7 instance of the Transifex software to a hosted version of the 1.1-dev version at Transifex.net. The upgrade from version 0.7 to version 1.0 (and beyond) introduces a number of important changes for developers and packagers. Please pay close attention to this email, particularly if your software package uses translations provided by the Fedora Translation team. While the changes aren't terribly complicated, they do have a bigger impact on the developer than they do on the translation team.

The most visible change is that Transifex’s native integration with source code management systems has been replaced by a mechanism for automatic updates. Transifex now watches an HTTP view of a repository for change notifications. In addition, there is now a more secure command-line tool for project maintainers and translators. This new command-line tool has been packaged for Fedora in the "transifex-client" package. It is currently available in Rawhide (pre-F16), and in the "updates-testing" repositories for Fedora 13, 14, and 15, and EPEL 5 and 6.

Here's the new workflow:

This series of steps only needs to be run once for a project.

The developer installs the "transifex-client" package:

yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install transifex-client

The developer runs the "tx init" command in the top level folder of

the project.

The developer runs the "tx set" command according to the

transifex-client user guide found at

^[2]. This creates a small config file, .tx/config, which can be committed in the repository for re-use, if desired.

This series of steps are run on as as-needed basis:

The developer updates and commits his or her POT file to the

project's repository at string-freeze time or as needed.

Transifex watches an HTTP link to that POT file and auto-updates its

English strings regularly, *OR* the developer can also push the POT file to Transifex (either manually or as part of a build script) by using the "tx push" command.

Translators work inside Transifex. Translated strings are stored

inside of Transifex, and are *not* pushed automatically to the developer's repo.

Before rolling a release, the developer runs 'tx pull' (either

manually or from a build script) to fetch the latest translation files from Transifex. Translation files do not need to live in the repo, although the developer may commit and store copies if desired.

For more details on the features of the new version of Transifex and more help on using the transifex client, please refer to either ^[3] or the Fedora-specific wiki page at ^[4]. If you have technical questions, feel free to ask questions in the #fedora-l10n or #transifex IRC channels or on the devel mailing list."

poppler soname bump in F15 and rawhide

Marek Kasik on Fri Mar 4 14:30:33 UTC 2011 announced^[1],

"I plan to rebase poppler in Fedora 15 and rawhide to poppler-0.16.3. There is one API change (in PreScanOutputDev.h) and 1 soname bump (libpoppler.so.12 to libpoppler.so.13). You can test it against your package with this scratch-build: ^[2] I'll do chain-build of poppler and packages requiring it next Thursday (10th of March)."

xerces-c soname bump in Rawhide

Kalev Lember on Wed Mar 9 22:35:22 UTC 2011 announced^[1],

"Jonathan Robie and I are planning to update xerces-c from 3.0.1 to 3.1.1 in Rawhide, which includes a soname bump; F-15 will stay on 3.0.1.

I will handle the rebuilds of affected packages:

blahtexml-0.8-2.fc15
cegui-0.7.5-5.fc15
enigma-1.01-12
frepple-0.8.1-3.fc15
gdal-1.7.3-2.fc15
glest-3.2.2-7.fc15
libdigidocpp-0.3.0-3.fc15
opensaml-2.3-3.fc15
ovaldi-5.6.4-1.fc14
qpid-cpp-0.8-6.fc16
xalan-c-1.10.0-8.fc15
xmlcopyeditor-1.2.0.2-4.fc15
xml-security-c-1.5.1-4.fc15
xmltooling-1.3.3-2.fc15
xqilla-2.2.3-8.fc14
xsd-3.3.0-4.fc15"

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2011-March/000765.html

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 (Dec 2010 - Feb 2011)

North America (NA)^[1]
Central & South America (LATAM): ^[2]
Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)^[3]
India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)^[4]

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events^[1]

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/PastEvents

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^[1].

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/

Kororaa GNU/Linux is back (ITWire)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded^[1] a posting about Kororaa GNU/Linux from Australia, but also what one user appreciates about Fedora:

"Always having been a bit of a distro-hopper, I went back to Debian, then to Ubuntu, but I was never happy. I have always been drawn to Fedora because of many reasons, but primarily their freedom drivers (promoting free culture and free software over proprietary solutions), but also because they stick to upstream and improve it there for the benefit of everyone, rather than doing their own thing.

Fedora is responsible for many of the great desktop enhancements we take for granted today, like AIGLX (Accelerated Indirect GLX), D-Bus, DeviceKit, HAL, NetworkManager, Ogg Theora, and PolicyKit."

The full article is available^[2].

Linux Leaders, Part II: Fedora and Red Hat Derivative Distros (IT Management)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded^[3] an article from the blog IT Management surveying the linux landscape and focusing on Red Hat-based distributions, including Fedora:

"In many of its releases, it is among the most innovative distros, releasing new software developed in co-operation with upstream projects. Development is more or less continuous within its Rawhide repository, with stable releases produced every six months.

The main derivative of Fedora is RHEL. RHEL is essentially a snapshot of Fedora, with extra testing for stability and quality control, and the addition of backports of some applications released by Fedora after the snapshot"

The full article is available^[4].

Alpha version of Fedora 15 released (H Online)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded^[1] an article in The H Online about the Fedora 15 alpha release:

"an overview of which can be found in the release notes and feature list. The distribution will now use LibreOffice as its office suite – Fedora was one of the first distributions to make the switch to the OpenOffice.org alternative back in October last year. The alpha includes a Linux 2.6.38 release candidate as its kernel and uses a pre-release version of GCC 4.6. Responsibility for booting is taken up by Systemd, an alternative to SysVinit and Upstart. Systemd was in the running for use in both Fedora 14 and openSUSE 11.4, but was eventually dropped from both.

The most striking change in Lovelock and one which is sure to fuel plenty of discussion is the switch to GNOME 3, which breaks with many of the concepts that GNOME users, and computer users in general, have become used to over many years"

The full post is available^[2].

Fedora 15 Linux hits first alpha, debuts BoxGrinder for cloud (InternetNews.com)

Kara Schiltz forwarded^[1] another article highlighting the Fedora 15 alpha release from the InternetNews.com blog:

"Fedora 15, codenamed 'Lovelock' now has its first alpha milestone available^[2]. This is a BIG release for Fedora in that it's the first Fedora of the post Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 era, and oh yeah first with GNOME 3, SystemD and BoxGrinder.

GNOME 3, including GNOME Shell mark the evolution of the Linux desktop and Fedora is likely to be the first big Linux distro to full integrate it. When it comes to systemd, that's been a long time coming, but in Fedora 15, it's finally fully baked making it easier and faster to manage and startup background daemons.

BoxGrinder is another story and is a very exciting technology. Red Hat first starting talking about BoxGrinder a year ago^[3] as a new way to build virtual software appliances (think SUSE Studio from rival Novell)."

The full article is available^[4]

Debian takes security very seriously… but how?

Rahul Sundaram forwarded^[1] a blog posting about Bugzilla security patches and linux distro comparisons vis-a-vis security:

"And people often come on IRC asking us for help, because their Bugzilla package provided with their Linux distro is broken or behaves in a weird way (typically a broken configuration or customization). And guess what? Most of the time, they use the Debian package. Yes, very seriously! For comparison, Fedora updated their Bugzilla packages the day after we released 3.6.4, and Mandriva the week after! It looks like they take security a bit more seriously."

The full post is available^[2].

Ambassadors

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Ambassadors Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors

Welcome New Ambassadors

This week the Fedora Ambassadors Project had no new members joining.

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list

Tom Callaway posted ^[1] a note ^[2] about giving away Fedora stickers and case badges for community members who send in a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE)

David Ramsey informed ^[3] that the APAC meeting would be on 2011-03-05 with the agenda ^[4]. He later posted ^[5] meeting notes ^[6]

Adam Miller updated ^[7] the wiki page for Texas Linux Fest 2011 ^[8] and requested feedback. John Rose pointed out ^[9] the Event Attendee Sponsorship page ^[10] which sets the expectations from sponsored attendees

Pascal Calarco informed ^[11] about the itemized budget for Indiana Linux Fest ^[12]

Caius Chance posted ^[13] Minutes of FAmSCo meeting from 2011-03-05 ^[14]

Joerg Simon informed ^[15] about the bid for FUDCon Budapest 2011 ^[16]

Moniruzzaman Monir informed ^[17] about an upcoming workshop on Fedora 14 desktop at DIU Auditorium, Dhaka, Bangladesh ^[18]

David Ramsey reminded ^[19] Ambassadors that name suggestions for Fedora 16 are open till 2011-03-10 ^[20]

David Ramsey also reminded ^[21] about the two Fedora 15 Test Days ^[22]

Summary of events reported on Ambassadors mailing list

No event reports were posted to the Ambassadors mailing list.

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list

Pierros Papadeas expressed regret and inability to attend the FAmSCo meeting ^[1] and thereafter planned to meet ^[2] Larry Cafiero

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team^[1]. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page^[2].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Thursday 2011-02-17 was Xfce 4.8^[1] Test Day^[2]. The event was well organized by the Xfce team, and a dedicated group of testers was able to expose some important bugs to be fixed.

The week of 2011-02-21 saw the traditional Graphics Test Week. Adam Williamson posted a full recap of the event to the mailing list^[3]. He noted that participation was up again compared to the Fedora 14 events and that some important testing had been carried out, but also noted a worrying trend in status of bugs from previous events, with many bugs reported during the Fedora 13 and 14 events remaining unfixed. He promised to investigate the causes of this.

Last week and this Tuesday saw three Test Days under the internationalization and localization Test Week banner: the Anaconda i18n and l10n Test Day on 2011-03-01^[4], the desktop i18n Test Day on 2011-03-03^[5] and the desktop l10n Test Day on 2011-03-08^[6]. These events were expertly organized and run by Igor Pires Soares, Rui He and Aman Alam, and were great successes with good turnouts and a lot of useful testing. Igor posted a recap^[7] to the list, thanking all those who came to test.

Thursday 2011-03-10 is the second of three planned GNOME 3 Test Days^[8], where we are continuing to work with the GNOME team to test GNOME 3.0 and its integration with Fedora 15 as rigorously as we can before the final release of both.

Next Thursday, 2011-03-17, will be preupgrade Test Day^[9], where we will be testing this important mechanism for upgrading to Fedora 15. Upgrading is always one of the thorniest areas of a Fedora release, so if it's important to you and you can come along and help test, please do - the more testing we can get early on, the better the final result will be.

Official Fedora hosting of DeltaISO images

Andre Robatino has been building and hosting DeltaISO images for Fedora releases and pre-releases for some time now, assisting users with limited bandwidth to install and test Fedora. At the weekly meeting of 2011-03-07^[1], it was announced that thanks to help from the Infrastructure team, from now on these images will be hosted within the Fedora project, making them much easier to access. They can now be found on the serverbeach1 site^[2].

Installation test updates

Kamil Paral and Rui He were engaged in reviewing the installation test matrix and test cases and suggesting fixes and improvements: clarifying when results have been transferred from previous test runs^[1], updating a test case for the systemd switch^[2] and obsoleting some tests^[3].

Security Advisories

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

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