FWN/Beats/PlanetFedora

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

General

There is now a new Fedora Updates Policy, says Juan J. Martínez. "I think it’s worth reading because, as the announcement says, it can be improved, clarified and adjusted; but it’s a very good starting point."

And to ensure that updates can be installed smoothly, Will Woods explained how the AutoQA process and depcheck can be used "to be sure that they (Fedora update packages) don't have any unresolved dependencies that would cause yum to reject them (and thus cause everyone to be unable to update their systems and be unhappy with Fedora and the world in general."

...And just in case something goes wrong with your RPM database, Ingvar Hagelund has the answer.

Former Fedora Project Leader Paul W. Frields has been transitioning to a new role at Red Hat, "Operations Manager", but will still maintain an active presence in the Fedora community. "I realized the other day after a couple questions from friends in Fedora that maybe people were interested in what I was doing. I’m always surprised by that, but I’m happy to give some more details here." Tom Callaway outlined some other transitions at Red Hat and the employment opportunities now available. John Poelstra has more details on the new "Fedora Program Manager" role.

John Poelstra also posted the "Fedora 14 Final Release Game Plan". If all goes according to schedule, Fedora 14 will be unleashed in less than one month.

John Palmier released the first Python 3 PyGObject module into Fedora Rawhide.

Lennart Poettering posted part 3 of "systemd for System Administrators" with the topic "How Do I Convert A SysV Init Script Into A systemd Service File?"

Máirín Duffy attended the Fedora Board meetings on 27 Sept and 1 Oct 2010. Among the highlights: "The Board for the past two months or so has been working to put together a solid vision statement for Fedora, to help guide what we do. It hasn’t been an easy road, but this meeting was our deadline to have a draft statement so the task dominated this meeting. We happily came to agreement on the following..."

Peter Hutterer and Ankur Shrivastava shared some updates on input device support in X on Linux. First, Peter met with some folks before the X Developer Conference to discuss multitouch. Next, Ankur explained how to use multiple input devices with X.

Special Virtualization Feature

Richard W.M. Jones was busy writing and posting all about Virtualization under Linux.

First, Richard produced an amazing tool that allows you to visualize reads and writes (and their block-level alignment) of a virtual machine.

Did you know that you can run Xen as a KVM guest? You can.

"So the common question I am asked is: When installing a 32 bit guest, should I choose an i686 or x86-64 (32 or 64 bit) architecture?"

Finally, a guest post described how to convert VMware guest machine images to become libvirt/KVM guests.