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Fedora Weekly News Issue 196

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 196 for the week ending October 4, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Starting off with announcements, which includes general, development and event announcements, notice that minutes from last week's Fedora Board open meeting are now available, an update on Fedora 12 milestones, and an upcoming change in NFS. From the Fedora Planet, news and views from Fedora contributors. In Quality Assurance news, review of the latest Test Day on Anaconda's storage system, and detail from the team's weekly meetings, and several other activities. In Design news, details of the Art Team's work for the F12 beta release, an update on additional wallpapers, and discussion of a new notification theme on the list. The Security Advisory beat is back this week, with updates for the past few weeks for Fedora 10 and 11. The Virtualization list offers goodness on Fedora virtualization developments including new virt-rescue and virt-edit tools, and reorganization of the Xen git tree for the dom0 kernel. Our issue wraps up with news from the KDE SIG, including details on the expected feature set for Fedora 12 KDE spin and a new version of Amarok, "Sunjammer. We hope you enjoy this week's FWN!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

The Fedora News team is collaborating with Marketing and Docs to come up with a new exciting platform for disseminating news and views on Fedora, called Fedora Insight. If you are interested, please join the list and let us know how you would like to assist with this effort.

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: Rashadul Islam

FEDORA ANNOUNCE LIST

Reminder: Fedora Board IRC meeting 1600 UTC 2009-10-01

Paul W. Frields announced,"The Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Thursday, October 1, 2009, at 1600 UTC on IRC Freenode."

FEDORA DEVELOPMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Final Review of Incomplete Fedora 12 Features

John Poelstra announced,

"With the passing of Beta Freeze we are now at the point in our release process where we expect all features to be at 100% completion. After requesting status updates, including direct email to the feature owners, the following feature pages do not have a current status.

In accordance with our recorded policy of requiring that all features be at 100% at Beta Freeze, I am proposing these features for your review to determine what their disposition should be. "

Buyer Beware: A Major Change in NFS is about to happen

Steve Dickson announced on the fedora-devel-list an upcoming change to NFS in Fedora,

As part of the NFSv4 Default feature, I am one commit away from changing the default protocol version NFS will be using (or at least trying to use).

What does this means to you? Hopefully nothing! In theory this should be a very seamless transition but with all new technology there will be (and are) some rough spots.

Why are we making the change? See the NFSv4Default section on the wiki (noted above) for details, but in a nutshell: 1) better performance and 2) firewall friendly. Finally it enables us to use upcoming minor releases of the the protocol: NFS version 4.1 and pNFS.

FYI, V4 was introduced in Fedora Core 2 so it has been around for a while. I personally have been using it for my home directory for a few years now. For more detail see

That's the good news... Here is the bad....

Because the mount command will try NFS v4 first, if mounting to older Linux servers will start failing. This is due to a defect in the Linux server exporting code, which is fixed in F12, *but* there are a number of workarounds that Steve suggested in the message.

Fedora 12 Freeze at 0600~ 2009-09-30 UTC

Jesse Keating briefly announced, "Just a reminder that the Fedora 12 freeze will be happening tonight at 0600 2009-09-30 UTC, just prior to the rawhide compose tonight. The rawhide for 20090930 will be built from frozen content. You do not need to send tag requests until after that."

Re: CVS Outage Notification - 2009-09-29 04:25 UTC

"It was pointed out to me that many of the packages starting with "a" were not properly branched. I've restarted the branch run for the "a" packages, however this time email will go out for the branch events, and this won't incur another outage. The branching of "a" packages should be done in 10 or 15 minutes. ", replied Jesse Keating.

FEDORA EVENTS

Mark your agenda with the following events. Please, consider attending or volunteering at an event near you!

Upcoming Events

• 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

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

Josh Bressers noted that Coverity has scanned a number of Open Source projects for vulnerabilities for a third year running, and they are claiming "that there is a 16 percent reduction is flaws found". Josh noted that it is too early to draw conclusions on what this actually means for OSS.

Michael Tiemann spoke "at Open World Forum in Paris on the subject of open source and the digital (economic) recovery".

James Morris posted a roundup from the SELinux Developers Summit (which immediately preceded LinuxCon and the Linux Plumbers Conference) in Portland, Oregon. Mmm, donuts. Daniel Walsh presented on "how sandbox -X works" at the conference. Daniel also mentioned that Fedora 12 will include a command-line interface to polgengui (which "is a template based policy framework, that ask the user a few questions, and then generate initial policy files to allow the policy writer to get started").

Richard W.M. Jones continued, adding tools that can introspect virtual machines from a host system, this time a graphical df (virt-df), virt-uname, virt-update and virt-ping.

Rahul Sundaram talked about the problems, dangers, and potential preventions for dependency breakage (you know, when you run "yum update" and it tells you that it can't continue because 1 out of the 146 packages that need to be updated doesn't have all of its dependencies satisfied).

According to Matt Domsch, MirrorManager now has the ability to automatically select a local Fedora mirror by netblock, ASN and a number of other factors.

Mel Chua is working on a scholarship/fellowship program for middle to high school students and wants your input.

Separately, Mel also asked "How can we make it easier for people to send patches?"

Konstantin Ryabitsev scripted NetworkManager and Postfix to automatically select a different relay SMTP server, depending on what network the system has connected to.

Peter Hutterer announced that "MPX has been released as part of XI2 in the new X Server 1.7". I suppose this would be the first step in letting desktop Linux act like the iPhone UI.

Greg DeKoenigsberg says: "If you live in the United States, go find your two senators and tell them that you support the Open College Textbook Act of 2009."

Tom Callaway was interviewed about "some of the intricacies of licensing and ensuring that a software package included in Fedora and Red Hat is actually verified to be open source." (Video)