FWN/Issue184

Fedora Weekly News Issue 184

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 184 for the week ending July 12, 2009.

Here are a few highlights from this week's issue. This past week marked the end of life for Fedora 9, and the launch of a new logging tool to help facilitate reporting for Fedora IRC meetings. In news from the Fedora Planet, an overview of the development changes for Fedora 12, and several posts around Mono in light of Microsoft's recent Community Promise. In Ambassador news, coverage of recent Fedora release events in Vancouver, Washington, Malaysia and India. In Translation news, a new Fedora 11 Users' Guide is now available in Bosnian, changes in Transfix, and new members of the Fedora Localization Project. In Design news, details on a new Gallery test instance for development of in-process works by the Art Team. Also some new wallpapers, and more theming discussion around Fedora 12 'Constantine.' The issue rounds out with news from virtualization-related efforts, including news of more device support in virt-manager, announcement of a new list for discussion of "libguestfs/guestfish/virt-inspector discussion/development." These are but a sampling of this week's Fedora Weekly News -- we hope you enjoy it!

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

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project .

Contributing Writer: Max Spevack

Fedora 9 (Sulphur)

Fedora 9 has reached its end-of-life and will no longer receive any updates.

Fedora 10 will continue to receive updates until about 1 month after Fedora 12's release, and Fedora 11 will be updated until about 1 month after Fedora 13.

Meeting Logging

A new tool for IRC meeting management is available for Fedora channels on Freenode. Jon Stanley explained that the tool "was developed by our friends over at Debian, who are using it to record their meetings as well. We would like all Fedora meetings to be recorded using this mechanism, such that there's one format for all of the logs."

Fedora Packaging Committee

There is an open seat on the Fedora Packaging Committee. Those who are interested should contact Tom Callaway.

Resources for packagers

Kevin Fenzi has "setup some machines/virtual instances here to assist maintainers that might not have access to all versions/arches Fedora runs on.". If you want more information, see the appropriate wiki page.

Upcoming Events

Consider attending or volunteering at an event near you!

• North America (NA)
• Central & South America (LATAM)
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
• India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)

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

Karsten Wade presented the position for relicensing the Fedora documentation (wiki, docs.fedoraproject.org, upstream guides at fedorahosted.org) from OPL to Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-Share Alike (BY SA) 3.0.

Paul W. Frields outlined the (shortened) development process and schedule going forward for Fedora 12. The feature freeze (July 28) rapidly approaches!

Steven Fernandez asked "Is Red Hat really an Open Source company?" Steven explained the background behind the post: "This question keeps cropping up every once in a while on different LUG lists where I lurk. It is a fairly established fact now in the FOSS world (or for that matter in the software world) that businesses can be both Open Source as well as commercial (ie: for profit). However, the specifics of the mechanism for doing this is still not well understood."

There was a bit of discussion in the blogosphere around Microsoft's recent decision to apply their Community Promise (covenant not to sue) to the C# language specification and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). Ismael Olea excerpted an excited e-mail from the fedora-mono mailing list. Not everyone was quite so optimistic however.

Michael DeHaan reminded us that only the core language and libraries are covered under the promise, and notably absent are some of the components that would make it useful including Windows Forms and ADO. Michael added "My long held theory is that mono was never to be considered a legal threat, it is a tool to be used in a strategy of erosion … insert a compelling technology, then provide a migration path by adding on proprietary extensions. It erodes Linux and it erodes OSS… and advocacy for it, even in purely legal/ethical ways, using just the free bits, and so forth, help enhance that position and acceptability."

Alex Hudson pointed out that "this is going to have a surprisingly negative effect within the community, however. It validates the arguments of people worried about Mono, and this proposed split of Mono into “Standard bits covered by MCP” and “Other bits not covered by MCP” is actually going to fuel the flames: inevitably, people will assume the non-MCP bits are a total patent mine-field, no matter what is actually in that area. Parts that people are quite happily shipping right now - such as ASP.net - will be targetted next by people “anti” Mono. And for the parts covered by MCP; well, I expect not much to change: certainly, it’s not likely to convert many people to Mono."

David Woodhouse shared an amusing (true) story about trying to recover the cost of Windows Vista, from a brand new laptop.

Michael DeHaan trialed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a netbook and found a number of areas where Fedora may be able to improve its user experience.

Vincent Danen discussed the idea of "responsible disclosure" in response to rumors of a mysterious OpenSSH 0-day exploit floating around the internet.

Mohd Izhar Firdaus Ismail posted an event report (and photos!) from a Fedora 11 Release Event held by the Fedora Malaysia team.

Chitlesh Goorah announced that the Fedora Electronic Lab will be switching the default desktop from KDE to Gnome.

Scott Williams built a set of RPMs containing drivers for some ATI Radeon HD video cards, from a new experimental branch that contains 3D support. "You will need both the driver and the mesa package to enjoy all the 3d stuffs. Again, experimental – use at your own risk."

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Release event in Vancouver, Washington

Kevin Higgins reports that the Fedora 11 release event in Vancouver, Washington, was the first Fedora event of any kind there, and the first Linux event in Clark County since June 4th, 2005. Matt McKenzie also reports from the event as well

For more on the event, visit http://crossbytes.wordpress.com/ and http://linuxknight.net/

Release event in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

Izhar Firdaus reports that on 4th July 2009, the Fedora Malaysia Team, in collaboration with Saito College held a Fedora 11 Release Event on campus in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Izhar says that they had more than 90 people attend.

For more on the event, visit http://blog.kagesenshi.org/2009/07/eventreport-fedora-11-release-party-at.html

Release event in Pune, India

Nilesh Govande reports that July 5 was a celebration day at Red Hat’s Pune Marigold office — courtesy of the Fedora 11 release. The event was totally informal where the developers and college students had a chance to interact with each other. Attendees asked questions and the answers came from actual contributors of distribution.

For more on the event, visit http://www.linuxforu.com/news/its-party-time-at-the-launch-of-fedora-11/

Get on the map

Want to find the nearest ambassador? How about one in Romania? Now you can.

Susmit Shannigrahi reports that finding out the nearest ambassadors, which was once a tedious task, is now as simple as viewing a map. The map is at https://fedoraproject.org/membership-map and instructions on how to place yourself on the map can be found at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_ambassadors_map

Get the word out about your F11 event

Fedora 11 was released on Tuesday, June 9, and with it a variety of activities around the release will be forthcoming. As such, with the upcoming release of Fedora 11, this is a reminder that posting your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events -- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.

Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project.

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Setroubleshoot translations are inconsistent with original messages

Domingo Becker reported presence of setroubleshoot audit strings in English inspite of complete translation in the particular language. The rapid changes in the module cause the .pot files to be changed frequently. Some of the possible reasons for the inconsistency are: the strings have not been marked for translation or inclusions, the translations have not been merged when the .pot files have been updated. Piotr Drąg also informed that the translations may not have been included with the latest builds of the module.

Bosnian Translations for Fedora 11 Users' Guide is Now Available

Arnes Arnautović has translated the Fedora 11 Users' Guide to Bosnian and the document has been published to the Fedora Docs website by Ruediger Landmann.

New Transifex .po Files Available for Translations

Dimitris Glezos informed the list about the availability of updated .po files for translation of the transifex module.

Transifex Component in Bugzilla Removed

The deprecated 'Transifex' component under the 'Fedora Localization' product has been removed from the Red Hat Bugzilla and all the relevant bugs have been moved to the 'Website' component.

New members in FLP

Aveek Sen (Hindi & Bengali-India), Igor Gorbounov (Russian), Tomek Chrzczonowicz (Polish) joined the Fedora Translation Project recently.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

A Gallery in the Works

Máirín Duffy informed on @design-team about a test instance of a gallery software, something being a wishlist item for a long time, and asked about ways to use it "How do you think we should proceed with it?". Martin Sourada suggested using it for a while "perhaps make it accessible to design team members and start filling it with extra wallpapers and see how it works? And hold a session after some time (perhaps a month) to discuss whether the test instance works as we'd like or not" and [[User:luya|Luya Tshimbalanga] proposed some categories "Could it be used to display past Fedora release wallpapers, contributors wallpaper like Martin mentioned similar to what Fedora Forum used to have until vBulletin upgrade, sketches."

New Wallpapers Coming

María Leandro asked for feedback on @design-team about a few wallpaper concepts, which were received positively, as for example by Máirín Duffy "I think these works are a very good start start; I think the shading and coloring on mosaico2 is very suitable for a background. It's not too high-contrast, or stark, or distracting which is good for a wallpaper" along with a number of improvement ideas from various members of the team, on which Maria based a second iteration, also received positively "This one is great. The lighting is perfect."

María also showed a number of wallpaper proposals she did for the Education SIG, which, as Máirín Duffy observed, didn't comply with the logo usage guidelines "I have a concern here with the logo - we're not supposed to change the Fedora logo like that, it's really really against the guidelines". On a tangent, a sub-logo for the education SIG was created by Máirín.

Continual Brainstorming for Constantine

Máirín Duffy reviewed a stalled conversation about creating a theme linked to the Fedora 12 codename, a good opportunity for Paul Frields and Nicu Buculei to chime-in with their (too long for this report) replies on the issue.

On the same 'Constantine' concept Samuele Storari explored a column "maybe we can work on the Roman Art Style and not only havin focus on the mosaic, there're the basrelief or the Monumental sketch or the Bas-relief decoreting the Constantine Column" and Angella Inzinga with a coin "I've been toying with a coin-imagery based idea of the campgate. [...] I'm hoping to have something up to post soon."

Virtualization

In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list, @fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list lists.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Enterprise Management Tools List

This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list

More Device Support in virt-manager

Cole Robinson patched virt-manager to implement adding of virtual video devices in the 'Add Hardware' wizard. Cole also implemented attaching serial and parallel devices.

Both these features were added to virt-install. Serial ports can be directed to sockets listening on remote hosts. For example: --serial udp,host=192.168.10.20:4444. That may come in handy for the F12 Hostinfo feature.

Xen, Windows, and ACPI

Guido Günther noted that virt-install disables ACPI and APIC for Windows XP guests. Adding, that it seems "that Windows XP is working fine with acpi/apic enabled which has the immediate advantage that poweroff via ACPI works as expected. So does it make sense to handle winxp the same win2k3?". Windows 2003 guests have ACPI enabled.

Pasi Kärkkäinen went to the xen-devel list and confirmed and relayed "Keir Fraser replied that ACPI with Windows has been working properly at least since Xen 3.1.0 days". Pasi then updated the Xen wiki page.

Fedora Virtualization List

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.

Fedora Virt Status Update

Mark McLoughlin posted another Fedora Virt Status Update reminding that Fedora 12 is quickly approaching with the Feature Freeze on 2009-07-28.

Also mentioned were:

• Details of a fix for "a dramatic slowdown in virtio-blk performance in F-11 guests"
• Note on Xen Dom0 support.
• New wiki pages created.
• Detailed run-down of current virt bugs.

New Mailing List and New Releases of libguestfs

Richard Jones announced the creation of a new list dedicated to "libguestfs/guestfish/virt-inspector discussion/development".

The current release is now 1.0.57, but Richard is so fast that may change by the time you read this.

Recent new features:

• virt-df - like 'df' for virtual machines
• New Perl library called Sys::Guestfs::Lib
• Now available for EPEL
• Tab completion in guestfish now completes files and devices
• Big change to the code generator
• Lots more regression tests
• guestfish commands: time, glob, more, less
• new commands: readdir, mknod*, umask, du, df*, head*, tail*, wc*, mkdtemp, scrub, sh, sh-lines.
• Debian native (debootstrap, debirf) support

See previous release announcement for 1.0.14 in FWN#179 and be sure to see the project homepage for extensive usage examples.

USB Passthrough to Virtual Machines

Mark McLoughlin posted instructions for attaching a USB device to a guest using virt-manager in Fedora 11. This could previously (FWN#165) be accomplished only on the command line.

Unfortunately, those wishing to manage their iPhone or newer iPods in a guest (yours truly included), KVM does not yet support the required USB 2.

Libvirt List

This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.

New Release libvirt 0.6.5

Daniel Veillard announced a new libvirt release, version 0.6.5. "This is mostly a bug fix release, though it includes some serious improvements for storage/NPIV and on the OpenNebula driver."

New features:

• create storage columes on disk backend (Henrik Persson)
• drop of capabilities based on libcap-ng when possible (Daniel Berrange)

Improvements:

• create and destroy NPIV support (David Allan)
• networking in UML driver (Daniel Berrange)
• HAL driver restart thread safety (Daniel Berrange)
• capabilities and nodeinfo APIs for LXC (Daniel Berrange)
• iNUMA API for VBox (Daniel Berrange)
• dynamically search and use kvm-img qemu-img or qcow-create (Doug Goldstein)
• fix qemu and kvm version parsing (Mark McLoughlin)
• serial number for HAL storage (Dave Allan)
• improve error reporting for virConnectOpen URIs (Daniel Berrange)
• include OS driver name in device XML (Daniel Berrange)
• fix qemu command flags fetching (Cole Robinson)
• check that qemu support -drive format= (Cole Robinson)
• improve emulator detection (Cole Robinson)
• changes to config parser to accomodate VMX syntax (Matthias Bolte)
• update network schemas and driver for missing elements (Satoru SATOH)
• avoid changing file context if not needed (Tim Waugh)
• skip labelling if no src path (Cole Robinson)
• add arm emulation if qemu-system-arm is present (C.J. Adams-Collier)

libvirt 0.6.4 was released on May 29. Daniel Veillard is "shooting for a slightly smaller development cycle, in order to be able to push the next version in time for Fedora 12 Beta, this means a new release at the end of July, so only a bit more than a couple of weeks for pushing the changes, I really hope we will be able to include a first version of the ESX driver and Power Hyprvisor, if it's the case I think it will be worth bumping the release name to 0.7.0."

libvirt Repositories Mirrored on Gitorious

Development of libvirt recently moved to git as the source control management system. Daniel Berrange announced "I have created a libvirt project on gitorious which has a mirror of the master branch of the libvirt.git repository. This mirror is *readonly* and updated automatically every 15 minutes. The purpose of this mirror is to allow people to easily publish their personal libvirt working repos to the world. The master upstream repository for libvirt does not change".

The Role of libvirtd

Hugh Brock described a client's desire to make "libvirtd be a one-stop shop for everything they need to do on a virtualization host, including things we have traditionally held out-of-scope for libvirt. A partial list of those things would include:"

• In-depth multipath config management
• Hardware lifecycle management (power-off, reboot, etc.)
• HA configuration

Hugh then asked "why *not* expand the scope of libvirtd to be a one-stop shop for managing a node? Is there a really good reason it shouldn't have the remaining capabilities libvirt users want?"

Daniel Berrange replied "This is essentially suggesting that libvirtd become a general purpose RPC layer for all remote management tasks. At which point you have just re-invented QPid/AMQP or CIM or any number of other general purpose message buses. libvirtd has a core well defined goal:"

• Provide a remote proxy for libvirt API calls

"If you want todo anything more than that you should be considering an alternative remote management system. We already have 2 good ones to choose from supported with libvirt"

• QPid/AMQP, with libvirt-qpid agent + your own custom agents
• CIM, with libvirt-CIM + your own custom CIM providers

"Furthermore, adding more plugins to libvirtd means we will never be able to reduce its privileges to an acceptable level, because we'll never know what capabilities the plugins may want."

Hugh countered "given a libvirt-qpid daemon on the node that handles RPC over QMF (for example), is there not some value in having libvirt expose a consistent API for the operations people want to do on a host regardless of whether they have directly to do with managing a virtual machine or not?"

Daniel Berrange didn't "really see any value in that" "You're just putting in another abstraction layer where none need exist. Just have whatever QMF agent you write talk directly to the thing you need to manage."

Hugh "I will note that when I presented the large client with the option of QMF talking to multiple agents on the node but exposing (effectively) a single API and a single connection, they seemed much happier. So perhaps the right way to attack this is with the ovirt-qpid daemon we are currently working on."

Daniel Veillard was "a bit synpathetic to the suggestion though." "I think libvirt API should help run those virtualization nodes, I would not open the gate like completely, but if we could provide all APIs needed to manage the node on a day by day basis then I think this is not really beyond our scope. I think that netcf(FWN#170) is an example of such API where we start to add admin services for the purpose of running virtualization. Things like rebooting or shutting down the node would fit in this, maybe editing a drive partition too."

"Basically if we take the idea of a stripped down Node used only for virtualization, then except for operations which are first time setup options or maintainance, I think we should try to cover the requirements of normal operations of that node. To some extend that means we would step on the toes of CIM, but we would stick to a subset that's sure."

Storage cloning for LVM and Disk backends

Cole Robinson submitted a patch series which "implements cloning for LVM and disk backends. Most of the functionality is already here, it just needed some reorganization to be accessible for every backend."

"I verified the following scenarios produced a bootable image:"

• Clone within a disk pool
• Clone within a logical pool
• Clone a raw file to a disk pool
• Clone a disk pool to a logical pool

Fedora-Xen List

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.

Xen dom0 Forward Ported to Latest Kernel

Previously, Xen dom0 support in Fedora was provided by forward porting the Xensource patches from kernel 2.6.18 to the version found in the Fedora release at the time. This consumed developer resources and led to separate kernel and kernel-xen packages for a time. As of Fedora 9 this practice was deamed untenable, and support for hosting Xen guests was dropped from Fedora.

Work has since focused on creating a paravirt operations dom0 kernel based on the most recent upstream vanilla kernel. This work is incomplete and not expected to be done before F12 or even F13. However, experimental dom0 kernels have been created for the adventurous.

Pasi Kärkkäinen tells us the Xen 2.6.18 patches have now been forward-ported to the current 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernel. "Forward-porting has been done by Novell for OpenSUSE. Novell also has a forward-port to 2.6.27 for SLES11."

The patches can be found here here and here.

Pasi added "These patches are still more stable and mature than the pv_ops dom0 code.. Also, these patches have the full Xen feature set (pv_ops still lacks some features)."

More history is avilable.