FWN/Issue276

Fedora Weekly News Issue 276

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 276 for the week ending May 25, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

We begin this issue with news from the Fedora Project, including details on the official release of Fedora 15 (Lovelock), and some events happening around Fedora board elections. In development news, details on an outage this past week. Fedora In the News brings coverage of Fedora articles and posts in the trade press and blogosphere, mostly around Fedora 15 this week. In Ambassador news, awesome details on the list traffic for both Ambassadors and FAmSCo this past week. In Quality Assurance news, detail on Fedora 15 final preparations and housekeeping, and our issue wraps up with the latest Fedora security-related package releases. Enjoy FWN 276!

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 Announcements

Fedora Board Town Hall - 30 May 2011

David Nalley announced:

"Just announcing that there'll be an IRC town hall with the Board election candidates on Monday May 30th, at 1900UTC (3pm US/Eastern.)

You can join #fedora-townhall-public to ask questions of the moderators, which will be posed and answered by the candidates in #fedora-townhall.

More information is available here

A summary and the irc log will be posted and linked from the wiki after the discussion, if you're unable to watch it live.

Thanks,

David Nalley"

Announcing the release of Fedora 15 (Lovelock)

Jared K. Smith announced,

"Let the celebrations begin! Fedora 15 is officially here!

Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. We bring to you the latest and greatest release of Fedora ever, Fedora 15! Join us and share the joy of Free software and the community with friends and family. We have several major new features with special focus on desktops, developers, virtualization, security and system administration.

For desktop users

A universe of new features for end users:

• GNOME 3 desktop environment -- GNOME 3 is the next generation of

GNOME with a brand new user interface. It provides a completely new and modern desktop that has been designed for today's users and technologies. Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive upstream participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers, and GNOME 3 is tightly integrated in Fedora 15. GNOME Shell, the new user interface of GNOME 3, is polished, robust and extensible, and several GNOME Shell extensions and the GNOME tweak tool are available in the Fedora software repository. Thanks to the Fedora desktop team developers and community volunteers.

• Btrfs filesystem -- Btrfs, the next generation filesystem is being

developed with upstream participation of Red Hat developers, Oracle and many others. Btrfs is now available as a menu item in the installer (only for non-live images. live images support just Ext4) and does not require passing a special option to the installer as in the previous releases. Btrfs availability has moved up a notch as a incremental step towards the goal of Btrfs as the default filesystem in the next release of Fedora. The btrfsck program for performing filesystem checks is under active development upstream with participation from Fedora but the one included in this release is still limited and hence users are highly recommended to maintain backups when using this filesystem (backups are a good idea anyway!). Thanks to Josef Bacik, Red Hat Btrfs developer, for his upstream participation and integration of this feature in Fedora including a yum plugin (yum-plugin-fs-snapshot) that enables users to rollback updates if necessary, taking advantage of Btrfs snapshots.

• Indic typing booster -- Indic typing booster is a predictive input

method for the ibus platform. It suggests complete words based on partial input, and users can simply select a word from the suggestion list and improve their typing speed and accuracy. Thanks to the development led by Pravin Satpute and Naveen Kumar, Red Hat I18N team engineers in Pune, India.

• Better crash reporting -- ABRT, a crash reporting tool in Fedora,

can now perform a part of crash processing remotely, on a Fedora Project server. Remote coredump retracing avoids users having to download a large amount of debug information and leads to better quality reports. The retrace server can generate good backtraces with a much higher success rate than local retracing.

• Redesigned SELinux troubleshooter -- SELinux troubleshooter is a

graphical tool that watches and analyses log files and automatically provides solutions to common issues. In this release, this tool has been redesigned to be simpler but provide more solutions at the same time. Thanks to Dan Walsh, SELinux developer at Red Hat, for leading the development of this functionality.

• Higher compression in live images -- Live images in this release

use XZ compression instead of gzip as in older releases, making them smaller (about 10%) to download or providing more space for applications to be made available by default. Thanks to Bruno Wolff III, Fedora community volunteer, for integrating this functionality in Fedora Live CD tools. Thanks to Phillip Lougher for his work on squashfs and Lasse Collin for getting XZ squashfs support in the upstream Linux kernel.

• Better power management -- Fedora 15 includes a redesigned and

better version of powertop and newer versions of tuned and pm-utils for better power management. The tuned package contains a daemon that tunes system settings dynamically to balance between power consumption and performance. It also performs various kernel tunings according to selected profile. The new version of tuned brings several bug fixes, improvements and profiles updates for better efficiency. Thanks to Jaroslav Škarvada, Red Hat developer, for integrating the newer powertop and pm-utils, as well as performing power measurement and benchmarking. Thanks to Jan Včelák, Red Hat developer, for developing tuned and integrating the newer version in this release.

• LibreOffice productivity suite -- LibreOffice is a community-driven

and developed free and open source personal productivity suite which is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. It is a fork of OpenOffice.org with a diverse community of contributors including developers from Red Hat, Novell and many volunteers. OpenOffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice in this release. Thanks to Caolán McNamara from Red Hat for his upstream participation and for maintaining LibreOffice in Fedora.

• Firefox 4 web browser -- A new major version of this popular browser

from the Mozilla non-profit foundation is part of this release. Firefox 4 features JavaScript execution speeds up to six times faster than the previous version, new capabilities such as Firefox Sync, native support for the patent unencumbered WebM multimedia format, HTML5 technologies and a completely revised user interface. Thanks to Christopher Aillon from Red Hat and others for integrating Firefox 4 in this release.

• KDE plasma workspaces 4.6 and Xfce 4.8 desktop environments --

Fedora 15 includes new major versions of these alternative desktop environments. Fedora also provides dedicated KDE Plasma Workspaces and Xfce installable live images that include these desktop environments by default. Thanks to Red Hat developers and other Fedora community volunteers, part of KDE and Xfce special interest groups.

• Sugar .92 learning platform -- Sugar is a desktop environment

originally designed for the OLPC project which has now evolved into a learning platform developed by the non-profit Sugar Labs foundation. This version provides major usability improvements for the first login screen and the control panel, as well as new features such as support for 3G networks. Thanks to Peter Robinson and Sebastian Dziallas, Fedora community volunteers, for leading the integration of this environment.

For developers

For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:

• Robotics Suite -- Fedora 15 now includes the Robotics Suite, a

collection of packages that provides a usable out-of-the-box robotics development and simulation environment. This ever-growing suite features up-to-date robotics frameworks, simulation environments, utility libraries, and device support, and consolidates them into an easy-to-install package group. Refer to https://rmattes.blogspot.com/2011/05/fedora-15-robotics-suite.html for more details. Thanks to Tim Niemueller and Rich Mattes, Fedora community volunteers for their participation.

• GCC 4.6 -- GCC 4.6 is the system default compiler in Fedora 15 and

all the relevant packages have been rebuilt in Fedora 15 using it. Developers can realize compiled code improvements and use the newly added features, such as improved C++0x support, support for the Go language, REAL*16 support in Fortran and many other improvements. Thanks to Jakub Jelinek from Red Hat for upstream participation and leading the integration in Fedora.

• GDB 7.3 -- This new GDB release 7.3 together with Archer and Fedora

extensions improves the debugging experience on Fedora by making the debugger more powerful. The majority of these features were written by Red Hat engineers, thus benefiting all gdb users. New features for the Fedora 15 release include support for breakpoints at SystemTap markers (probes), support for using labels in the program's source, OpenCL language debugging support, thread debugging of core dumps and Python scripting improvements. Numerous important packages within Fedora are pre-built with SystemTap static markers, and these can now be used as the target for breakpoints in gdb. Thanks to Jan Kratochvil and other GDB developers from Red Hat for their upstream participation and integration of this functionality.

• Programming language updates -- Python 3.2: The system Python 3

stack has been upgraded to 3.2 (the system Python 2 stack remains at 2.7), bringing in hundreds of fixes and tweaks; for a list of changes refer to https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.2.html. OCaml 3.12: OCaml 3.12 is a major revision of the OCaml programming language, the camlp4 macro language, libraries, and CDuce for XML processing. Rails 3.0.5: Rails 3 is a large update to the Ruby on Rails web framework. It brings many new features such as a polished routing API, new activemailer and activerecord APIs, and many more new enhancements. Thanks to Dave Malcolm, Richard W.M. Jones and Mo Morsi, Red Hat developers leading the integration of the respective features in this release.

• Maven 3 -- Maven 3.0 offers better stability and performance

compared to previous versions and a lot of work under the hood to simplify writing Maven plugins and further improve performance by building projects in parallel. Refer to https://maven.apache.org/docs/3.0/release-notes.html for more information. Fedora still provides maven2 package to support backward compatibility where needed. Thanks to Red Hat developer, Stanislav Ochotnický for the work in this feature.

For system administrators

And don't think we forgot the system administrators:

• systemd system and session manager -- systemd is a system and

session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements a powerful transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit. A related change is /var/run and /var/lock are mounted from tmpfs and results in a simpler, more faster and robust boot-up scheme and aligns to the default configuration of several other distributions. Thanks to Lennart Poettering, Rahul Sundaram. Michal Schmidt, Bill Nottingham and others from Red Hat for leading development and integration of systemd as the default init system in this release and many Fedora community volunteers for their extensive testing and feedback.

• Dynamic firewall -- Dynamic firewall makes it possible to change

firewall settings without the need to restart the firewall and makes persistent connections possible. This is for example very useful for services, that need to add additional firewall rules including virtualization (libvirtd) and VPN(openvpn). With the static firewall model these rules are lost if the firewall gets modified or restarted. The firewall daemon (firewalld) holds the current configuration internally and is able to modify the firewall without the need to recreate the complete firewall configuration; it is also able to restore the configuration in a service restart and reload case. Another use case for the dynamic firewall mode is printer discovery. For this the discovery program will be started locally that sends out a broadcast message. It will most likely get an answer from an unknown address (the new printer). This answer will be filtered by the firewall, because the answer is not related to the broadcast and the port of the program that was sending out the message is dynamic and therefore a fixed rule can not be created for this. It also has a D-BUS interface to allow clients or services to request firewall changes. firewall-cmd (part of firewalld package) is a very simple yet powerful user space alternative to the iptables command: for instance, firewall-cmd --enable --service=samba --timeout=10 opens the appropriate ports for Samba for only ten seconds. Since the current implementation is a proof of concept, in this release, it is available in the Fedora software repository but not installed by default. The plan is to make it the default firewall solution in the next release. Thanks to Thomas Woerner from Red Hat for developing this feature.

• BoxGrinder appliance creator -- BoxGrinder is a set of free and

open source tools used for building appliances (images/virtual machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2). BoxGrinder creates appliances from simple plain text appliance definition files. Thanks to Marek Goldmann and others from Red Hat for upstream participation and bringing this feature into Fedora.

• Spice integration in Virt Manager -- With Fedora 15, virt-manager

has been updated to support Spice, the complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktops. It is now possible to create a virtual machine with Spice support without touching the command line, easily taking advantage of all the Spice enhancements directly from virt-manager. Spice provides better performance and additional functionality (such as copy/paste between guest and host) compared to using VNC. Thanks to the spice-gtk library, a new client can be developed in Python or C, or with gobject-introspection bindings. Thanks to Marc-André Lureau, Red Hat developer, for leading development of this feature.

• Consistent network device naming -- Servers often have multiple

Ethernet ports, either embedded on the motherboard, or on add-in PCI cards. Linux has traditionally named these ports ethX, but there has been no correlation of the ethX names to the chassis labels - the ethX names are non-deterministic. Starting in Fedora 15, Ethernet ports will have a new naming scheme corresponding to physical locations, rather than ethX. By changing the naming convention, system administrators will no longer have to guess at the ethX to physical port mapping, or invoke workarounds on each system to rename them into some "sane" order. This feature is enabled on all physical systems that expose network port naming information in SMBIOS 2.6 or later. Thanks to Jordan Hargrave, Matt Domsch and several other engineers from Dell for their long term upstream participation and collaboration with Fedora in integration of this feature.

• Setuid removal -- Fedora 15 removes setuid in several applications

and instead specifically assigns the capabilities required by each application to improve security by reducing the impact of any potential vulnerabilities in these applications. Thanks to Daniel Walsh from Red Hat for leading the integration of this feature.

• Improved support for encrypted home directory -- Fedora 15 brings

in improved support for eCryptfs, a stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux. Starting from Fedora 15, authconfig can be used to automatically mount a private encrypted part of the home directory when a user logs in. Thanks to Paolo Bonzini from Red Hat for integration of this feature.

• RPM 4.9.0 package manager -- RPM 4.9.0 brings a number of immediate

benefits to Fedora including the pluggable dependency generator, built-in filtering of generated dependencies, additional package ordering hinting mechanism, performance improvements and many bugfixes. More details at https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0, Thanks to Panu Matilainen from Red Hat and other RPM developers for their participation and help in integration of this feature in this release.

• Tryton ERP system -- Tryton is a three-tier general-purpose

application platform and basis for an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. Currently, the main modules available for Tryton cover accounting, invoicing, sale management, purchase management, analytic accounting and inventory management Thanks to Dan Horák, Fedora community volunteer for integration of this feature.

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list with details of all the new features on board Fedora 15 is available at:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/15/FeatureList?anF15

Download and upgrading

OK, go get it. You know you can't wait.

• https://get.fedoraproject.org/?anF15

If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading?anF15

For a quick tour of features in Fedora 15 and pictures of many friends of Fedora, check out our "short-form" release notes:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F15_one_page_release_notes?anF15

Fedora 15 full release and technical notes and guides for several languages are available at:

• https://docs.fedoraproject.org/?anF15

Fedora 15 common bugs are documented at:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F15_bugs?anF15

Fedora spins

Fedora spins are alternate versions of Fedora tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations. Fedora spins include those providing alternative desktop environments like KDE, Xfce and LXDE by default but also more specialized ones such as Fedora Security Lab, Fedora Electronics Lab and Fedora Design Suite. More information on these spins and much more is available at

• https://spins.fedoraproject.org/?anF15

Looking forward to Fedora 16 (Verne)

Our next release, Fedora 16 codename is named after and to honor, Jules Verne. Jules Verne is considered a father of science-fiction. He was a science-fiction writer and futurist, best known for novels such as "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". More information at

• https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Jules_Verne

Fedora's awesome design team is already busy at work creating artwork based on this concept and you are welcome to join the team

• https://mairin.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/design-team-imageboard-test-server-and-we-need-fedora-16-theme-artists/

Even as we continue to provide updates with enhancements and bug fixes to improve the Fedora 15 experience, our next release, Fedora 16, is already being developed in parallel, and has been open for active development for several months already. We have an early schedule for an end of Oct 2011 release:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/Schedule?anF15

Features planned for Fedora 16 include the default use of Btrfs as the next generation filesystem, GRUB 2 bootloader by default, further enhancements to systemd system and session manager, dynamic firewall by default and much much more. Watch the feature list page for updates.

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/FeatureList?anF15

Join us today and help improve free and open source software and lead the future of Linux.

We need your help!

Our rapid release cycle and innovative features are a direct result of development of thousands of upstream projects and collaboration by a large distributed and diverse community with many volunteers and organizations across the globe, participating in the free and open source software community and within Fedora. Fedora strives to bring these thousands of upstream projects together and serves as a integration point for them and for our users and contributors. Red Hat, the leading provider of open source solutions is a partner in our community and major sponsor of the Fedora project. To continue to advance and bring you the best of free software quickly and robustly. we are always looking for more people to join us in the Fedora community. You don't have to be a dazzling software programmer to participate and join us in developing Fedora although if you are one, you are welcome too! There are many ways to contribute beyond programming. You can report bugs, help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, design and do artwork, perform system administration on our infrastructure, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide and more. Whether you are a Linux kernel hacker or just a newcomer, there is always something for everyone to pitch in.

To get started, visit https://join.fedoraproject.org today!

Contact information

If you are a journalist or reporter, you can find additional information at

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Press?anF15 "

Cooperative Bug Isolation for Fedora 15

Ben Liblit announced:

"The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project (CBI) is now available for Fedora 14. CBI is an ongoing research effort to find and fix bugs in the real world. We distribute specially modified versions of popular open source software packages. These special versions monitor their own behavior while they run, and report back how they work (or how they fail to work) in the hands of real users like you. Even if you've never written a line of code in your life, you can help make things better for everyone simply by using our special bug-hunting packages.

We currently offer instrumented versions of Evolution, The GIMP, GNOME Panel, Gnumeric, Liferea, Nautilus, Pidgin, Rhythmbox, and SPIM. Download at. Or just download and install to automatically configure your system to use the CBI repository.

It's that easy! Tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! The more of you there are, the more bugs we can find.

We still offer CBI packages for earlier releases as well, going all the way back to Fedora 1. When and if you decide to upgrade to Fedora 15, we'll be ready for you. Until then, your participation remains valuable even on older distributions.

Dr. Ben, the CBI guy"

FESCo and Board Election Questionnaires posted

David Nalley announced:

"Hi folks:

The responses to the questionnaire are now posted:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F16_elections_questionnaire

Responses are divided by elected body and then appear in the order the responses arrived in my inbox.

Please take a moment to look over them to better prepare yourselves for the upcoming elections.

I'd also like to thank the nominees who took the time to answer the questions.

Cheers,

David Nalley"

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

Outage: pkgs.fedoraproject.org - 2011-05-10 17:00 UTC

Kevin Fenzi on Fri May 6 17:20:00 UTC 2011 announced,

"There will be an outage starting at 18:00 UTC on 2011-05-31, which will last approximately 2 hours. During this time there may be very short outages of services as machines are updated and rebooted into new kernels.

Machines will be rebooted in an order that allows for least disruption to services.

In many cases, there will be no noticeable downtime due to redundancy and fail-over.

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

date -d '2011-05-31 18:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

System updates/Reboots.

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

Unaffected Services:

Ticket Link: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/2790

Contact Information:

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

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 (March - May 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

First look: Fedora 15 arrives with GNOME 3.0 and systemd (ArsTechnica)

Kara Schiltz forwarded an ArsTechnica article on the release of Fedora 15:

"The community of open source software developers behind the Fedora Linux distribution announced this week the release of version 15. The update brings an overhauled desktop user interface and a number of noteworthy architectural improvements under the hood.

Fedora is a community-driven Linux distribution that is sponsored by Red Hat. It is released twice a year on a six-month development cycle and typically ships with the latest cutting-edge Linux software. Fedora is known for riding ahead of the curve and is often the first Linux distro to introduce major new features. It also serves as an incubation space for emerging Red Hat technologies, particularly in areas like virtualization. It lacks the usability and robustness of some other distros, but its unique technical advantages and high commitment to open source ideology are appealing to system administrators, software developers, and software freedom advocates.

The most significant user-facing change in Fedora 15 is the inclusion of GNOME 3.0, a major update of the open source GNOME desktop environment. It brings a completely new desktop shell to Fedora that helps to modernize the user experience. The new shell is built with the Clutter toolkit and requires hardware-accelerated rendering in order to operate. Fedora fortunately does a pretty good job of handling it with open source drivers on many hardware configurations."

The full post is available.

Fedora 15: More than just a pretty interface (The Register UK)

Kara Schiltz forwarded a posting on the release of Fedora 15:

"The Red Hat–backed Fedora Project has released the latest version of its Linux-based operating system, Fedora 15, into the wild.

Despite the similarities of the two leading Linux-based PC operating systems, Fedora has long played second fiddle to Ubuntu in the minds of many Linux fans. Now – for the first time – there are actually major differences between the two distros.

For most users, the debate between the two can be distilled down to GNOME 3 versus Unity. But as always, Fedora remains quite a bit different under the surface, as well.

With the Unity Shell making waves – and not always good ones – in the Ubuntu community, Fedora 15 offers something of a refuge for those frustrated with the Unity Shell.

Unfortunately GNOME 3, Fedora's new default desktop, while in much better shape than Ubuntu's Unity, is still very different than any version of GNOME you've used before."

The full posting is available.

How GNOME 3 is besting Ubuntu Unity (Techrepublic.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article on Gnome 3 compared to Unity:

"Takeaway: Jack Wallen was jonsing for GNOME 3 and discovered the best route to this new desktop was Fedora 15 beta. Can you image how surprised Jack was to find out that GNOME 3 blows away Ubuntu Unity? Read on to find out more."

Conclusion: "I’d like to drop some props to the Fedora 15 team, as they’re doing an absolutely incredible job with this bleeding-edge Linux distribution. Fedora 15 and GNOME 3 is a serious win-win from my perspective. Give it a go, and you might find that you agree!"

The full article is available.

Fedora 15 Released; Comes With Gnome 3

Rahul Sundaram forwarded another posting on Fedora 15 and Gnome 3:

"The best features of Fedora 15, which will attract a lot of users is Gnome 3 shell. Fedora 15 will give users a distro which will allow then to explore Gnome 3 with the stability that Fedora 15 offers.

Fedora 15 is also introducing Btrfs as a menu item in the installer (only for non-live images. live images support just Ext4) and does not require passing a special option to the installer as in the previous releases. Btrfs availability has moved up a notch as a incremental step towards the goal of Btrfs as the default filesystem in the next release of Fedora."

The full article is available.

Fedora 15's five best features (ZDNet.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article about Fedora 15's top five features; Rahul writes:

This list doesn't cover major features like systemd and talks about Fedora not including Chrome ignoring the fact that Chrome is a proprietary browser. Chromium is not included for other reasons and quick a search in the wiki documents that. However the list of five is interesting

The full article is available.

Fedora 15 Released, Has GNOME 3, New Search Tool (softpedia)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a listing of features in Fedora 15:

"Highlights of Fedora 15:

· Linux kernel 2.6.38.6; · Btrfs filesystem; · GNOME 3 desktop environment; · Indic typing booster; · Better crash reporting; · Redesigned SELinux troubleshooter; · Gnome Shell user interface; · GTK+ 3.0; · Xorg Server 1.10; · Deja Dup backup software; · LibreOffice 3.3 open source office suite; · Mozilla Firefox 4.0 web browser; · BoxGrinder appliance (virtual machines) builder; · Ledger, double-entry accounting system; · Higher compression in live images; · recoll, full-text search tool; · Dynamic firewall; · IcedTea Java plugin; · RPM 4.9; · Python 3.2; · Rails 3.0.3; · OCaml 3.12; · FreeIPA 2.0; · Maven 3; · GNU Debugger (GDB) 7.3; · GCC 4.6; · Sugar .92 environment; · eCryptfs support in authconfig; · LZMA comperssion for Live images; · Power Management improvements; · Retrace server; · Robotics suite."

The full article is available.

Ambassadors

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

Welcome New Ambassadors

This week the Fedora Ambassadors Project had a couple of new members joining.

Cory J McKee from the USA mentored by Ben Williams

Francesco Frassinelli from Italy mentored by Robert Scheck

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list

Ben Williams posted a reminder about FAmNA meeting on 2011-05-18 at 2100 EDT and later posted the Minutes

Onyeibo Oku informed about an upcoming talk at the Enugu State Chapter of the Nigerian Institute of Architects on "Linux for the Nigerian AEC Industry" . Pierros Papadeas suggested including references to CAD and Management software.

Christoph Wickert reminded about EMEA Ambassadors Meeting for 2011-05-18 and later posted the Meeting Minutes

Jonathan Dieter asked in response to an invitation to work on FUDCon APAC, as to whether Lebanon/Middle East was a part of EMEA or, APAC. Christoph Wickert clarified it as EMEA

Igor Pires Soares posted FAmSCo Report for April 2011 . Christoph Wickert pointed out some discrepancies in the budget numbers for EMEA

Tom Callaway reminded that the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement is required to be signed by 2011-06-17

Robert Beatty wanted to know the steps for ordering the Ambassador Polo Shirt featured for EMEA Ambassadors. Christoph Wickert responded with a step-wise list of things to do. However, Ben Williams indicated the steps for FAmNA as the original request was from an Ambassador in the US.

Buddhika Kurera posted Meeting Minutes from APAC Ambassadors Meeting on 2011-05-18

David Ramsey reminded that the bi-weekly APAC Meeting time would be 2011-05-21 at 0400 UTC and later posted the Meeting Minutes

David Ramsey posted about the Fedora 15 Go/No-Go meeting and release parties for Fedora 15

On behalf of FAmSCo, Neville A. Cross posted a link to the Survey for Fedora Ambassadors around the Fedora Board Goals for 2011. Christoph Wickert requested individual Ambassadors to refrain from responding after completing the survey.

Michael Berger introduced himself on the mailing list

Christoph Wickert informed about preparations for the primary media shipment for Fedora 15 in EMEA. The shipment would consist of around 3000 Multi Desktop DVDs and 3000 Bi-arch Installation DVDs. And, specific anchor points (of contact) would receive larger volumes of media in order to enable further distribution to the local communities.

Gerard Braad posted Minutes of the FAmSCo meeting held on 2011-05-21

Buddhika Kurera informed about a magazine from the Fedora APAC community and discussed ways to arrive at a name for the magazine.

Sebastian Dziallas asked for attendees and participants at OSCON 2011 to help identify logistics issues

Summary of events reported on Ambassadors mailing list

Kevin Raymond reported on the Solutions Linux event in Paris which had over 250 booths and 10,000 visitors

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list

Joerg Simon posted a vacation message (on vacation till 2011-05-29) and suggested that for any urgent Ambassador Group Membership tasks, Robert Scheck be contacted.

Igor Pires Soares started a discussion around re-assignment of Budget Wrangler tasks with reference to the resignation of Larry Cafiero

As part of the budget wrangler thread, Caius Chance talked about tickets pending to be funded and being blocked on that.

Gerard Braad posted Minutes of FAmSCo meeting on 2011-05-21

Summary of traffic on Campus Ambassadors mailing list

The mailing list did not have any traffic this week.

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

The Fedora 15 Test Day track is now finished, and the 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.

Fedora 15 validation and preparation

This was a quiet week after the declaration that Fedora 15 was gold on Tuesday, so the group worked on updating the Fedora 15 common bugs page and tried to help with getting the Sugar desktop into a releasable state, and made sure 0-day updates for the release were being properly tested. James Laska worked on and announcedproviding a validation framework for the newly-introduced multi-desktop DVD live image, and along with Andre Robatino and Christoph Wickert, performed the required testing.

Release criteria revisions

Adam Williamson proposed some more release criteria changes. First up was logging. James Laska suggested a refinement, and Adam posted a revised proposal, which was met with general approval. Later, Adam announced that he had created the criteria pages for Fedora 16, and including the new logging criterion, along with some other criteria which had previously been agreed upon but not added to the Fedora 15 criteria. He also re-started the discussion of how to refer to desktops that are considered able to block the release as compared to those that are not, and suggested the term 'release-blocking desktops'. Jóhann Guðmundsson re-raised the question of which desktops should be considered to block the release, and Adam maintained that this was a question that was beyond the authority of the QA group to decide. Finally, Adam also proposed a criterion regarding security issues for discussion by the QA group along with the security and development groups.

Housekeeping tasks

Adam Williamson noted that there are several tasks nominally under the Bugzappers group's remit that had not been happening recently, and suggested running a meeting to ensure they would be looked after. Robyn Bergeron replied that several of the tasks were really her responsibility as program manager, but agreed that it would be a good idea to improve the scheduling and planning of these tasks to make it less likely they would not be completed in future.

QA approval of release candidates

Adam Williamson reported that he had updated the Go/No-Go meeting wiki page to define the parameters for QA's approval or otherwise of release candidate builds, to make it clear that QA's decision in this regard is entirely determined by concrete criteria (whether all necessary validation tests have been completed and no unaddressed accepted release blocker bugs remain), so that there is no subjectivity to the decision and it can be reported to the Go/No-Go meeting by any member of the QA group (or simply inferred by anyone present at the meeting, whether a member of the QA team or not). Jóhann Guðmundsson questioned whether the Go/No-Go meeting was even necessary, given the improved procedures. Adam agreed that this was a reasonable question, but suggested it might be a good idea to preserve the meeting as a 'human in the loop' safeguard against particularly strange and unforeseeable circumstances.

Triage scripts updated (again!)

Following quickly on the heels of last week's 1.0 RC1, Matej Cepl announced the release of version 1.0 of his Firefox extension to aid in bug triage, bugzilla-triage-scripts. He asked all Bugzappers with Firefox 4 to update to it and report back on how it worked.

AutoQA

The AutoQA team updated their progress as usual at the weekly QA meeting of 2011-05-23. Kamil Paral reported that the team had been working on the proposed 'pretty' plaintext logs, with two proposals: one and two. Tim Flink had been working on the proposed 'spam reduction' code, making AutoQA output less overwhelming for developers, and would be pushing it soon. Josef Skladanka had been working on a wiki page giving an overview of the ResultsDB project.

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce for the period May 12-21, 2011.

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 15 Security Advisories

• libmodplug-0.8.8.3-3.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060416.html
• mediawiki-1.16.5-59.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060435.html
• rssh-2.3.3-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060511.html
• tigervnc-1.0.90-4.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060567.html
• syslog-ng-3.2.4-3.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060572.html
• mumble-1.2.3-2.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060747.html

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

• mediawiki-1.16.5-59.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060496.html
• libmodplug-0.8.8.3-3.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060520.html
• xen-4.0.1-11.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060597.html
• feh-1.10.1-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060652.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

• mediawiki-1.16.5-59.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060507.html
• feh-1.10.1-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060721.html