Fedora Weekly News Issue 273

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 273^[1] for the week ending April 27, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

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: Pascal Calarco

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

Outage: Wiki, Insight, Smolt, Wordpress, Zarafa database outage - 2011-05-04 20:00 UTC

Kevin Fenzi announced^[1],

"There will be an outage starting at 2011-05-04 20:00UTC, which will last approximately 2 hours.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at ^[2] or run:

date -d '2011-04-21 20:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

The database backend for several services is being moved to new hardware and upgraded. This will result in an outage of services using that database server. Note that some services should move quickly and downtime on them will be small. The wiki should be up reasonably quickly, but smolt may be down for much of the window.

Affected Services:

Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.org/
Smolt - http://smolts.org/
Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/
Fedora Blogs - http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/
Zarafa - http://admin.fedoraproject.org/zarafa

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 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/
Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
Translation Services - http://translate.fedoraproject.org/

Ticket Link: ^[3]

Contact Information:

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

Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

Tom Callaway announced^[1],

"Here are the latest changes to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

---

A new set of guidelines have been written for handling systemd in packages:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines:Systemd https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets#Systemd

---

A new set of guidelines have been written for packaging Octave packages: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Octave

---

Some clarification was added to the Guidelines section on Macros. Previously, it said:

"Use macros instead of hard-coded directory names (see Packaging:RPMMacros )."

Now, that line has been replaced with:

"Packagers are strongly encouraged to use macros instead of hard-coded directory names (see Packaging:RPMMacros ). However, in situations where the macro is longer than the path it represents, or situations where the packager feels it is cleaner to use the actual path, the packager is permitted to use the actual path instead of the macro. There are several caveats to this approach:

The package must be consistent. For any given path, within the same

spec, use either a hard-coded path or a macro, not a combination of the two.

%{_libdir} must always be used for binary libraries due to multi-lib,

you may not substitute a hard-coded path. "

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Macros

---

The Guidelines covering MinGW packaging have been updated for Fedora 16. The previous guidelines still apply for older Fedora releases (Fedora 15 and older) and all RHEL releases.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:MinGW https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:MinGW_Old

---

The Packaging Guidelines have been updated to allow the use of /run and to clarify that directory hierarchies not listed in the FHS are not allowed unless listed in the Packaging Guidelines.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Filesystem_Layout

---

In the past (pre rpm 4.4), it was necessary to have a %defattr section at the beginning of each %files section, but this is now the default and no longer necessary to explicitly include.

The guidelines have been updated in numerous places to remove references to hard-coded %defattr sections.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#File_Permissions

---

The Scriptlets for GSettings have been updated to:

%postun
if [ $1 -eq 0 ] ; then
    glib-compile-schemas %{_datadir}/glib-2.0/schemas &> /dev/null || :
fi

%posttrans
glib-compile-schemas %{_datadir}/glib-2.0/schemas &> /dev/null || :

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets#GSettings_Schema

---

These guidelines (and changes) were approved by the Fedora Packaging Committee (FPC).

Many thanks to Christopher Aillon, Richard W. M. Jones, Erik van Pienbroek, Lennart Poettering, Orion Poplawski, Julian Sikorski, and all of the members of the FPC, for assisting in drafting, refining, and passing these guidelines.

As a reminder: The Fedora Packaging Guidelines are living documents! If you find something missing, incorrect, or in need of revision, you can suggest a draft change. The procedure for this is documented here^[2]

Thanks,

~spot "

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)^[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/

Introducing Your Honey to Linux (Technewsworld.com)

Gianluca Sforna forwarded^[1] a posting about his experience converting his significant other to Fedora:

"A couple years ago, I bought my wife a new Thinkpad," Slashdot blogger Chris Travers recalled. "She made a specific request: 'I don't want to use something weird, like Linux.'" Though the laptop came with Vista, it "never worked right. It had video card issues, power management issues and networking issues." After a few days, Travers' wife asked him to "'do anything you can to make this work or return it,'" he said. "So I installed Fedora Linux."

The full article is available^[2].

From Ubuntu to Fedora – Landing on foreign soil (the good, the bad and the ugly) (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded^[1] an article about switching from Ubuntu to Fedora, from one user's perspective:

"It is the next best thing after Ubuntu. If it wasn’t for the missing Ubuntu Community, Software Center and annoying Yum it would be the Ubuntu killer. While Fedora also has a community it is hardly as badass and big as the Ubuntu one.

With Fedora you are getting GNOME 3. No GNOME 2 anymore. With the introduction of GNOME 3 comes a whole new UX needs some getting used to. However after using it for 2 or 3 days its hard to go back to a GNOME 2 environment. Its a solid distro. I experienced no crashes or hick-ups. With some googling and help from Fedora users and developers I managed to install everything I needed."

The full article is available^[2].

Fusion Linux 14 Thorium - Fedora Plus Plus (dedoimedo.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded^[1] an article about Fusion Linux, based on Fedora 14:

"Comparing to Fedora, Fusion Linux is a clear winner, as it only builds upon the existing without taking away. The only visible downside is the increased memory consumption, but it's nothing drastic. However, if you pit Fusion against other leading distros, there's a bit of a problem. While they offer similar or longer-term support, they have none of the crashes and instability packaged into Fusion. This could deter potential users."

The full article is available^[2].

Fedora 15 Beta Has GNOME 3 (softpedia.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded^[1] another article on Gnome 3 in Fedora 15:

"This make Fedora 15 an ideal computing platform for anyone who wants to use their computer productively. Whether you're a student, a parent, an office worker, a programmer, an artist, an engineer, a writer -- Fedora has what you need to do the things you care about!"

The full article is available^[2].

Fedora 15 beta released as GNOME 3 backlash grows (Desktoplinux.com)

Kara Schiltz forwarded^[1] an article about the release of Fedora 15 beta:

"The Fedora Project announced the beta release of Fedora 15 "Lovelock," featuring the new GNOME 3 desktop^[2], the Systemd initialization system, and a new dynamic firewall feature. Meanwhile, GNOME 3 has received mixed reviews, with many claiming the project went too far in simplifying the interface.

The new beta version of Fedora 15 follows an alpha that _arrived in early March^[3]. The final is expected in late May. Sponsored by Red Hat, the community-based Fedora is aligned with the commercial _Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)^[4] release, with Fedora largely used as an upstream, exploratory sandbox for Red Hat."

The full article is available^[5].

Ambassadors

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

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

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

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

Jon Robbins from the USA mentored by Ben Williams

Jamie Williams from the USA mentored by Ben Williams

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list

Max Spevack asked about ^[1] SELF organization and planning especially around pre-SELF IRC meetings. Robyn Bergeron responded ^[2] to this idea asking about a possible meeting time. Larry Cafiero pointed ^[3] to the NA Ambassador meeting agenda ^[4]

Danishka Navin reported ^[5] about a Calendar of Open Source Software Events by sf.net ^[6] and wondered if a Fedora calendar could be added to the site. Kevin Raymond ^[7] pointed to a Calendar for French related events ^[8]

Larry Cafiero informed ^[9] about the FAmNA meeting for 2011-04-19 ^[10] Robyn Bergeron followed up ^[11] with the Meeting Minutes ^[12]

Christoph Wickert reminded ^[13] about the EMEA Ambassadors Meeting for 2011-04-20 ^[14] and later posted ^[15] the Meeting Minutes ^[16]

David Ramsey put out a Call for Participation ^[17] for Drupalistas towards Fedora Insight ^[18]

David Ramsey also informed ^[19] about the Fedora 15 Ambassadors Schedule ^[20]

Robyn Bergeron requested ^[21] NA Ambassadors planning to attend the Red Hat Summit to join the summit-planning list ^[22]

Igor Pires Soares informed ^[23] about the availability of the FAmSCo Report for March 2011 ^[24]

Kevin Raymond provided plans ^[25] about a Fedora 15 Release Party to be held in Paris ^[26] between the 4th and 5th of June 2011

Christoph Wickert reminded ^[27] Ambassadors about the deadline for proposing Fedora 15 Release Events ^[28] Additionally there was a request to clear up the confusion around the updated status of the schedule ^[29] Pierros Papadeas indicated ^[30] that items 10 to 13 in the schedule ^[31] would be required to be slipped by 2 weeks. In the same thread Gianluca Sforna asked ^[32] about availability of media in EMEA as it would help in selecting the date for the event.

Pierros Papadeas posted ^[33] notes and Meeting Minutes ^[34] from the FAmSCo meeting for 2011-04-23 ^[35]

Paul Mellors announced ^[36] a competition around the design of the banner ^[37] on the Fedora UK site ^[38] Paul, in response to a query ^[39] from Gerold Kassube also informed ^[40] about checking up the issues around using the Fedora trademark.

David Ramsey reminded ^[41] about APAC Ambassador Meeting on 2011-04-30 ^[42]

Mohd. Izhar Firdaus Ismail informed ^[43] about the draft of the budget for FUDCon APAC ^[44]

Robyn Bergeron provided a recap of meeting on 2011-04-19 ^[45] specific to FUDCon NA ^[46] and the next steps around the issue

Max Spevack asked ^[47] about the possibility of a Fedora presence at the Libre Graphics meeting. Pierros Papadeas informed ^[48] about attending the meeting and created a wiki page ^[49] for tracking details around the event. María Leandro informed ^[50] about reaching out to an interested student based out of Canada.

Summary of events reported on Ambassadors mailing list

No events were reported on the Ambassadors mailing list

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list

Larry Cafiero was asked ^[1] by Pierros Papadeas about the progress on the Townhall Meetings in order to incorporate feedback on the draft on media and swag wranglers

Neville A. Cross posted ^[2] the first draft of the Ambassadors Survey ^[3]

Pierros Papadeas reminded ^[4] about the meeting on 2011-04-23 ^[5]

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^[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 2011-04-21 was the last of three GNOME 3 Test Days^[1]. The event went off smoothly with a good turnout of testers finding the GNOME 3 experience mostly polished but still exposing several bugs for the developers to work on. Vitezslav Humpa posted a recap^[2] of the event.

Today, 2011-04-28, is cloud Test Day, where the cloud SIG is guiding testers in running Fedora 15 on Amazon's EC2 cloud, and testing out the Fedora 15 features BoxGrinder^[3] (a tool designed to make it simple to rapidly create Fedora-based appliances and deploy them to various virtual platforms) and CloudFS^[4] (a cloud-ready distributed filesystem). If you're interested in the cutting (bleeding?) edge of cloud development with Fedora, come and dive in to the BoxGrinder^[5] and EC2^[6] events!

The cloud events will likely be the final Test Days of the Fedora 15 cycle, as we move towards final freeze and the focus on stabilizing the release.

Beta testing

Many group members were testing the recently-released Fedora 15 Beta. Sean Darcy was having trouble with preupgrade^[1], while Göran Uddeborg wondered where his system beep had gone^[2]. Per Bothner was having trouble with his NVIDIA adapter^[3], and Andre Robatino filed a bug^[4] on an issue several testers had noted where enabling session saving could cause GNOME Shell to fail to start^[5]. John Morris reported several issues he ran into^[6], prompting responses explaining some of them. Thomas Gilliard continued to test Sugar nightly images^[7] ^[8].

Fedora 15 preparation

The second blocker bug review meeting for Fedora 15 final took place on Thursday 2011-04-21^[1], due to the Good Friday holiday falling in many places on 2011-04-22. The group reviewed the full list of proposed and accepted final release blockers and made good progress. The first Test Compose for Fedora 15 is planned for 2011-05-02.

↑ http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-bugzappers/2011-04-21/f15-blocker-review.2011-04-21-17.00.html

Security Advisories

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

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Search

FWN/Issue273

Contents

Fedora Weekly News Issue 273

Announcements

Fedora Development News

Outage: Wiki, Insight, Smolt, Wordpress, Zarafa database outage - 2011-05-04 20:00 UTC

Reason for outage:

Affected Services:

Unaffected Services:

Contact Information:

Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

Fedora Events

Upcoming Events (March - May 2011)

Past Events

Additional information

Fedora In the News

Introducing Your Honey to Linux (Technewsworld.com)

From Ubuntu to Fedora – Landing on foreign soil (the good, the bad and the ugly) (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Fusion Linux 14 Thorium - Fedora Plus Plus (dedoimedo.com)

Fedora 15 Beta Has GNOME 3 (softpedia.com)

Fedora 15 beta released as GNOME 3 backlash grows (Desktoplinux.com)

Ambassadors

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list

Summary of events reported on Ambassadors mailing list

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list

Summary of traffic on Campus Ambassadors mailing list

QualityAssurance

Test Days

Beta testing

Fedora 15 preparation

Security Advisories

Fedora 15 Security Advisories

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

Fedora 13 Security Advisories