FWN/Issue188

Fedora Weekly News Issue 188

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 188 for the week ending August 9, 2009.

This week's issue begins with some detail on the recent Fedora Classroom events, and updates on Fedora 12 alpha. In news from the Fedora Planet, a multi-part series on OCaml internals, a few proposals for a new Fedora website design, and coverage of a session on Sanskrit and usage in computing. We're pleased to bring news from the Fedora Marketing team back to you with a new beat member, Mel Chua. In Marketing news, pointers to the latest team meeting log, details about Fedora Insight, and a transition of leadership on the Marketing Team. In Quality Assurance news, details of the upcoming Test Day on NetworkManager, many updates on the weekly meetings and availability of a new Xfce spin for testing. In Translation news, many updates on the progress to Fedora 12 Alpha translation items, a proposal to translate some more pages from docs.fedoraproject.org and the landing of Transifex v0.7, a tool used by the localization teams. This week's issue rounds out with news from the Art/Design team, with more progress on Fedora 12 wallpapers for the F12 Alpha release, and coverage of a discussion about a Design Spin on the Art Team discussion list. These are just a few highlights of this week's FWN. Enjoy!

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 .

Contributing Writer: Max Spevack

If anyone is interested in taking over this beat, please contact the Fedora News team.

General

Luke Macken announced an update to the Fedora Community codebase. The changes make Fedora Community able to process information from EPEL, and also provide a variety of other bugfixes and enhancements.

Kevin Fenzi summarized the recent Fedora Classroom sessions that have taken place. The classes have included introductions to rsync, to Koji (Fedora's build system), XFCE, and PreUpgrade. Fedora Classroom continues to be a wonderful source of information, and we encourage all Fedora users and contributors to either attend or teach a class.

Fedora 12 (Constantine)

Jesse Keating announced the Fedora 12 Alpha freeze on August 4th.

John Poelstra continued the public announcements related to the finalizing of Fedora 12 features. This week, feature pages that had not been updated were flagged for review and potential dropping from the release. If you are a Fedora 12 feature owner, you should check to make sure that your features are up to date.

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

Richard W.M. Jones posted the first five parts to a series "A beginners guide to OCaml internals. Topics covered include all kinds of internal details such as the different heaps and garbage collection.

Luis Villa asked "how do busy people deal with identica/twitter?"

Michael DeHaan shared a humorous "Tech Support Conversation With Parents".

Luca Botti wrote a tutorial on installing Sun's Java on Fedora, without breaking RPM.

Jeroen van Meeuwen wondered about possible solutions to the space constraints for Fedora Live CDs. Could document or additional locales be dropped? Should Live CDs be dropped altogether (leaving Live DVDs)?

Venkatesh Hariharan republished an article originally from the August 2009 edition of Network Computing's India edition, titled "The Power of Open Source Development".

Peter Hutterer made the case for ZSH (ed: Agreed, ZSH rocks!) while Mathieu Bridon scripted bash (easily translatable to ZSH) to make the shell prompt git aware.

Máirín Duffy proposed a few ideas for a new Fedora website design.

Ujjwol Lamichhane presented (at BarCamp Kathmandu 2009) all about संस्कृत (Sanskrit) and its relation to (and usage in) computing.

Marketing

In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Mel Chua

Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-07-04

Meeting logs and notes for the 2009-07-04 Fedora Marketing Meeting were made available. All Marketing meetings and notes are open to the public.

Marketing F12 schedule

The schedule of Marketing milestones for F12 has been finalized. Tasks for these milestones are now being tracked in a Marketing trac ; any work requests for the Marketing team should also be submitted here.

Fedora Insight

As preparations towards F12 Alpha continue, the Marketing Team has started work on Fedora Insight , a platform for disseminating outward-facing materials and news about the Fedora community. This cross-team effort welcomes help.

Marketing leadership transition

The Marketing team bid a hearty thank-you and a warm farewell to Jack Aboutboul, who passed the torch to Mel Chua at the end of July. We wish Jack the best of luck in his future adventures.

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

New Module RHEL-comps Added to translate.fedoraproject.org

Piotr Drag announced the inclusion of the RHEL-comps module to translate.fedoraproject.org.

FLP Representation in F-12 Alpha Release Readiness Meeting

FLSCo member Noriko Mizumoto would be attending the Fedora 12 Alpha Release Readiness Meeting, on behalf of the Fedora Localization Project. The meeting would be held on Wednesday 12th August via a conference call.

Priority of Fedora Documentation for Translation

A request was made by the FLP to the Fedora Documentation team to suggest a priority order for the translation of the numerous Guides/Documentation. Eric Christensen suggested an initial order for assessment by the Fedora Documentation and Fedora Localization teams. Ruediger Landmann proposed the Installation Quick Start Guide to be elevated above the Installation Guide, since much of the translations from the first book can be reused into the latter. Additionally, he also highlighted the requirement for translation of the Publican common content and docbook-locales as these provide essential components used during the compilation of the books.

Proposal for Translation of docs.fedoraproject.org

On behalf of the Spanish team, Daniel Cabrera put forward a proposal to add a few pages from docs.feforaproject.org for translation on translate.fedoraproject.org. The pages form the primary traversal route for users to reach the documentation pages from the fedoraproject.org wiki start page in their language. Dimitris Glezos suggested adding the links in the 'Getting Help' page or translating the docs.fedoraproject.org pages.

Transifex v0.7 to be Available Soon

The imminent arrival of Transifex v0.7 was announced by Diego Búrigo Zacarão. Transifex is the tool currently in use by the FLP Infrastructure. Diego also made a call for the updation of Transifex translations for this upcoming release.

Translation of Multimedia menus for Fedora Studio

Orcan Ogetbill put forward a request for the translation of the categorized Multilmedia-menu that would be available within the desktop menu in F-12. This menu would be made available via the optional package that would be part of the FedoraStudio feature. Currently, Orcan is being guided by FLP for converting the source content into a translation-ready format.

Missing Translations for Policycoreutils-gui in Fedora 11

Runa Bhattacharjee reported missing translations for multiple languages in the policycoreutils-gui package available with Fedora-11.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

Fedora 12 Wallpapers

Martin Sourada prepared and initial set of packages with wallpapers for the alpha release "I've just put together initial packages containing the Constantine wallpapers I consider (based on the feedback we received) to be 'worth' putting in for Alpha. There is constantine-backgrounds package which contains tatica's mocaico and Mo's and Nicu's underwater mosaic, both as slide-show (switching between those two once twice per hour) and separately. Next there is constantine-backgrounds-extras package which contains Samuele's 4flowers and 4horses, Jayme's Constantine Statue, Charlie's bird mosaic and tatica's pruebas and freedom" as a base for selecting the best default and after a round of the preliminary feedback, one was moved from extras-proposals to default-proposals "there seems to be non-ignorable amount of people who want it in default so I moved it to default for now."

With the process of evolving the wallpapers being continuous, Máirín Duffy considered the feedback from Paul Frields and proposed an improved version for one of the concepts "As per Paul's suggestion to try to modify the perspective of María's mosaico designs to make it vibrate a little less with icons on the desktop, I did some experimentation today in Inkscape with perspective."

Martin called for a decisional meeting for wallpapers "I suggest that people raise their reasons for and against choosing one or another in this thread and we hold a (hopefully) short IRC session next Monday (2009-08-10) to make the final decision. Would 16:00 UTC be a good time for everyone?"

A Design Spin?

With the uproar about the announcement made by Matthias Clasen on the Desktop list about the removal of GIMP from the Desktop spin, Martin Sourada asked about the status of an old project of the Design Team "What has happened to the Art Studio spin (or whatever it was called) we were trying to make? I've just seen a message on desktop-list proposing dropping gimp from Desktop Spin (the infamous size issues), so it would probably make sense to resurrect the idea of having a spin for (not only) Fedora designers with all the apps we use, like gimp, inkscape, blender, scribus, etc." and Nicu Buculei bitterly replied about the inactivity in that area "As far as I know, the spin is on hold, waiting for someone to take the lead". However, indirect talks on IRC and blog comments indicate a good level of interest for the project.

Constantine Banners

In anticipation of the Alpha release, several banner proposals were advanced: a generic one for the Alpha release by Paolo Leoni, a final release banner proposal from Maria Leandro, another from Charlie Brej and finally Paolo's remade banner.