FWN/Issue192

Fedora Weekly News Issue 192

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 192 for the week ending September 6, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Our issue kicks off with announcements, including news that major segments of fedoraproject.org and the Fedora Project infrastructure now support IPv6, and details of a new licensing policy for apps developed by the Fedora infrastructure team. News from Planet Fedora is back in this issue, covering interesting posts and commentary from the Fedora blogosphere. In marketing news, coverage of the major marketing deliverables for releases, and how Fedora Ambassadors can assist with F12 marketing, along with an exciting proposal for a Fedora special issue of Linux Pro Magazine that is being considered. In Ambassador news, details on the upcoming Utah Open Source Conference and a report from a free software workshop at KLN Madurai. In Quality Assurance news, updates from recent Test Days and Fit and Finish test days, along with all the week's news of team meetings. The Translation beat provides us with various Transifex-related updates coming soon. In Design news, a request for a logo for a Fedora Chilean event. Our issue completes with a variety of virtualization-related news, including new Fedora 12 features, and future developments to the Xen dom0 kernels. Enjoy FWN 192!

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: Rashadul Islam

Fedora 12 (Constantine)

The Fedora Project and IPv6

The top news of the week was the Fedora Project and IPv6 by Fedora Infrastructure Lead and project coordinator Mike McGrath. Mike had announced that as part of the constant effort toward supporting current and future standards, major segments of fedoraproject.org and the Fedora Project infrastructure now support IPv6. He also mentioned, "our self-hosted websites have already been converted, and we plan to include IPv6 GeoIP support in MirrorManager soon."

Mike extended special thanks to Matt Domsch from Dell and our friends at ibiblio.org for their invaluable assistance on behalf of the Fedora Project.

Licensing policy for apps developed by Fedora Infrastructure now in effect

Toshio Kuratomi on Development-Announcement announced, "Over the past few months, Fedora Infrastructure has been discussing having a consistent set of licenses for applications and scripts we create for Fedora." On his specific details, he informed everyone about the the goals of doing this, the basics, the uses of GPLv2 or later.

"The one other thing for Infrastructure developers and System Admins to note in the Policy is the section on handling AGPLv3 applications. During the discussions about whether to use AGPLv3+ for our web applications we found and delimited many issues that need to be addressed when deploying AGPLv3+ licensed code. The aGPL portion of the policy is our first attempt at keeping us compliant with any code that is under this license.", highlighted by Toshio.

Upcoming Events

Mark your agenda with the following events. Please, 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

It has been about four weeks since the last installment of Planet Fedora here, so we'll be presenting a mix of interesting topics covering that time period. Normal weekly coverage should resume next week.

Nicu Buceli expressed concern about The Great Panda Debate. "Already Panda iz in ur computer, developing Fedora".

Máirín Duffy did a few sets of UI mockups for Fedora. The first mockup was of a new look for the Fedora Spins site. The other was for a new set of screens for handling advanced storage device configuration in Anaconda.

Colin Walters showed off mockups of the new Gnome 3 shell, which radically changes the way that applications are launched and managed.

Andrew Overholt mentioned that a new version of the Eclipse Linux Tools (0.3.0) has been released. Eye candy included.

Jef Spaleta analyzed the productivity of Fedora packagers and the rate that the number of Fedora packages and Fedora packagers has changed over the last few releases.

Máirín Duffy looked at the "Getting Fedora" survey results. Also, further discussion.

Mark J Cox examined the security vulnerabilities affecting RHEL between release 5.3 and (the just-released) 5.4.

Tim Waugh described how printing has improved and is more flexible in Fedora, now that PolicyKit has been integrated with CUPS.

Michael DeHaan presented a vision for fedorahosted.org.

Luis Villa asked if "there a state of the art for free software project bounties?"

Mathieu Bridon continued developing a git-aware BASH prompt.

Mel Chua explained "How the zikula-based test instance of FI was put up, part 1". (Zikula is the new CMS that is being deployed for a number of Fedora sites)

Nicu Buceli posted photos from FLOSSCamp 2009.

Richard Hughes stumbled upon an interesting bug in gnome-power-manager, where the screen will suddenly blank, even though the system is in active use.

Richard W.M. Jones answered the question "How does mount load the right kernel module?"

Kamil Páral introduced zsync, a tool that can efficiently synchronize binary files over a network. "It allows you to download a file from a remote server, where you have a copy of an older version of the file on your computer already. zsync downloads only the new parts of the file."

Marketing

In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Chaitanya Mehandru

Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-09-01

Meeting logs and notes for the 2009-09-01 Fedora Marketing Meeting were made available. All Marketing meetings and notes are open to the public.

Lot of people turned up for this week's meeting and many topics were covered. Thanks for the interest shown!

Release deliverables

This bread and butter stuff covers feature profiles, talking points, release announcements -things that have to come out every cycle.The complete schedule is available.

For F12 talking points and feature profiles, Mel Chua pointed out the need for recruiting college marketing classes to sprint on mentorship/editing/feedback/reviewing.

Mel identified/updated the needs for the release cycle: release slogans,briefing ambassadors,Fedora Insight Status/Questions, Modules/Packaging Status("Zikula guruhood needed"), press kits, screenshots, F12 tour, Workflow, Skins/Design, "Increasing our Marketing-fu", marketing research, marketing plan to work with RH marketing folks, projects for newcomers, marketing classroom with Sean Daly and later in the pipeline will be: press kits, screenshots, F12 tour.

Briefing Ambassadors about F12

Ambassador can help greatly in bringing out what is marketing doing. Ambassadors/Students/Newcomers interested in some real marketing stuff can add their questions to the queue.

Our search is on for ambassadors/students who would be interested in working on marketing deliverables.

Fedora Insight updates

Three words: "Workflow is settled". Thanks to Robyn Bergeron. The workflow will be posted soon .

Technical Zikula deployment is going very rapidly.

Marketing-fu++

Please add your valuable comments on the marketing plan before Mel goes ahead and discusses it with RedHat folks.

Sugar Labs's Sean Daly will be coming in for a Fedora Classroom session on Marketing for open source projects when he gets back from vacation(expecting him to be back by this week or the next)

Marketing Research

While fedora-centric style of research continues with its own importance, ideas & opinions were expressed on community-style research where the research benefits not only the fedora users but also those developing open-spurce projects in general. An open-source market research repository might also be started to help foster the whole community of OSS.

Fedora print magazine proposed

Linux Pro Magazine has proposed printing a special Fedora issue around the launch of F12. We are trying to explore whether this might be a possibility, and if so, whether it's something that we as a community want to pursue. Conversations on various team mailing lists are ongoing - please join the conversation for the topics you are interested in!

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

Registration opens for Utah Open Source Conference

Registration is now open for Utah Open Source Conference 2009, to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, from Oct. 8-10. This is the third year of this annual event, and Fedora is one of the sponsors.

Fedora will have a booth at the event and those in the area are urged to attend the event and are welcome to help out. For more information on staffing the booth, contact Larry Cafiero at lcafiero-at-fedoraproject-dot-org.

Fedora at free software workshop at KLN Madurai

Arun Sag conducted one day Free software workshop on 29th August, at KLN Madurai for the pre-final year CSE and IT students. The session started with an introduction to free software and philosophy. Fedora 11 was installed in 30+ Lab machines for hands on. The response from the students was excellent. Hospitality was good.

Fedora 11 DVDs were distributed to all the participants.

Arun would like to thank HOD of CSE department, KLN and final year student Dhivakaran for organizing this event successfully.

Pictures of the event

Get on the map

Want to find the nearest ambassador? How about one in Belarus? 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 here and instructions on how to place yourself on the map can be found at here.

Get the word out about your F11 event

Fedora 11 was released recently 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.

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week's main track Test Day was on Sugar on a Stick, the Fedora-derived USB stick distribution which features the Sugar desktop environment that is the default desktop for the OLPC project. Not too many people showed up to test, but we did get a solid set of results, and this was the first test day to experiment with a new result reporting system based on the Semantic MediaWiki plugin.

This coming week is special from a Test Day perspective: it's Video Test Week! There will be not one but three main track Test Days, one for each of the major video adapter manufacturers. Wednesday 2009-09-09 is ATI/AMD Radeon Test Day. Thursday 2009-09-10 is NVIDIA Test Day. And last but not least, Friday 2009-09-11 is Intel graphics Test Day. As always, graphics drivers are one of the most vital parts of the Fedora experience, and the three main drivers have received their usual round of significant changes since the last release, so we encourage everyone to come out on the appropriate Test Day for their hardware and help test. There will be live images available, so you don't need Rawhide - or even Fedora - installed to test: you just need to show up, download a live image, run some simple tests to see how well the graphics work, and report your results. This will help us immensely to make sure Fedora 12 has good support for as much graphics hardware as possible, so please do come along! Each Test Day will run all day and be held in Freenode IRC #fedora-test-day. If you're not sure how to use IRC, see this page.

Next week's Fit and Finish project Test Day will be on sharing - sharing files, printers, music, and even remote desktop functionality. This area is critical to many users but often overlooked, so please come along to help refine it! The Test Day will be held on Tuesday 2009-09-08 in Freenode IRC #fedora-test-day.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2009-08-31. The full log is available. David Pravec reported that he had created the test-announce mailing list for important QA and BugZappers event announcements.

James Laska reported that he had not yet been able to talk to Liam Li about refining the install test plan to be more achievable within the timeframe for each snapshot release. He had improved the Dracut Test Day test cases. He had also spoken to Mike McGrath about the impact of nightly Rawhide images on the resources of alt.fedoraproject.org. Mike had not yet seen or had reported any major problems, but would like to be kept in the loop when new milestones are released. Adam Williamson asked if Infrastructure had any numbers for downloads of the nightly images. James did not know, but would ask.

Jesse Keating reported that he had built the new version of autotest for the AutoQA project to test. James Laska and Will Woods were in progress on testing it, and would report next week.

Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. They had spent the week writing documentation, collected in the AutoQA category on the Wiki. There are pages on how to write hooks and tests for AutoQA, and also pages on how AutoQA and autotest work. Will emphasized that no particular knowledge of how AutoQA itself works is required to write tests and hooks that can be used with it, and it's best to write tests and hooks before worrying about wrapper code to use them in AutoQA. In the coming week, they were planning to work on a method to get data back out of autotest to be used for projects like the israwhidebroken.com site.

James Laska did a Test Day update. He thanked those who had participated in the Dracut Test Day, and promised to send a summary to the mailing list soon. He noted that a sectool Test Day was due the day after the meeting. Adam Williamson suggested some potential improvements to the Wiki page, and James asked him to send them to the mailing list so the Test Day organizer, Eduard Beneš, could update the page. The Sugar on a Stick Test Day was due the Thursday after the meeting, and noted that he and Sebastian Dziallas were working on getting the page ready, using the new Semantic system for reporting results. Finally, Adam Williamson noted that Graphics Test Week was coming the following week, and he was working on getting the pages created. He expected to be able to re-use many test cases from the Fedora 11 Test Days.

Kamil Paral brought up the idea of using zsync to reduce the download weight of nightly Rawhide live images. Jesse Keating and Adam Williamson did not think it would result in much benefit, due to the way Fedora live CDs are implemented (as a single large filesystem image, rather than a set of package files). Will Woods suggested doing some tests to be sure, and Kamil said he would do this.

The group discussed the status of the proposed lower process capabilities feature for Fedora 12. There was general concern that development of this feature was not sufficiently advanced for the current stage of Fedora 12 development. Fenris02 agreed to talk to the feature maintainer to see what could be done to avoid dropping the feature entirely for Fedora 12.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-09-01. The full log is available. Adam Williamson noted that some planned topics could not be discussed, as important people were not present: Brennan Ashton was not available to update on the triage metrics project, and Richard June was not present to update on the kernel triage project.

The group discussed the new test-announce mailing list. Matej Cepl suggested that it be added to Gmane. Adam Williamson promised to do this.

Adam Williamson brought up the topic of Triage Days, which Edward Kirk had put on the agenda with a view to presenting some ideas on improving them. However, Edward was not at the meeting. No-one else had significant ideas on the topic.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-09-07 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-09-08 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Zsync feasibility

As discussed at the meeting, Kamil Paral tested the practicality of using zsync to reduce the size of nightly Rawhide live image downloads. He found that savings of between 30% and 60% were possible when testing the deltas between various nightly images.

Installation testing SOP update

Liam Li announced that he had updated the installation testing SOP draft, with improved instructions on summarizing test results.

Test Day summaries

Test Day summaries for Dracut and Sectool were provided by James Laska and Eduard Beneš respectively.

Mediawiki Semantic plugin testing

Mel Chua announced that he had built a working Mediawiki test instance with the Semantic extension installed, for the purpose of implementing an improved test result reporting system. He linked to a meeting log which documented the implementation. He noted that the upstream project were interested in having Fedora's use of the Semantic system documented, and asked if anyone would be willing to work on this.

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Transifex Version Upgrade on translate.fedoraproject.org

The version of Transifex used in translate.fedoraproject.org is set to be updated soon to v.0.7.2 (to be released next week) . Diego Búrigo Zacarão informed about the modifications that are going to be made by Mike Mcgrath next week, that would enable higher number of connections to translate.fedoraproject.org. However, considering that the translation deadline for Fedora 12 is set for 22nd September 2009, the version upgrade may happen after the translation due date.

Translations for Transifex Moved to www.transifex.net

The translations for the Transifex module would not be accepted from translate.fedoraproject.org anymore. This module has now been moved to www.transifex.net .

RPM Module Removed

The RPM module is at present not available for translations, due to some errors and has been removed from the 'Various' collection in translate.fedoraproject.org.

New Members in Fedora Localization Project

Filip Slunecko (Czech), and Marila Latini (Italian) joined the Fedora Localization Project last week.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

A Chilean Logo

As Jonathan Barrios, from the Chile community, asked for a personalized artwork for a local event, "I think here I can get some help to make the logo for Fedora Linux Day - Chile and one poster to promotion this event", Charles R. Sutton proposed a first try as a new contributor and after an in-depth research of the logo usage guidelines he followed with a new, complying, version. A bit later, María Leandro proposed another version "Something like this? Remember that those are 2 proposals; you should pic only one. I like most the one at bottom" which apparently made everyone happy "that is perfect. I prefer the one on the bottom as well. Great work!"

Virtualization

In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization technologies on the @fedora-virt and @fedora-xen-list lists.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Fedora Virtualization List

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

KSM Tuning Service

A new feature for Fedora 12, Kernel Samepage Merging, enables KVM guest virtual machines to share identical memory pages. This is especially useful when running multiple guests from the same or similar base operating system image. Because memory is shared, the combined memory usage of the guests is reduced. KSM works by scanning memory, looking for identical pages.

Dan Kenigsberg posted a KSM control daemon in a "simple script that controls whether (and with what vigor) should ksm search duplicated memory pages."

"An unattended host running a variable number of qemu-kvm's needs to tune ksm automatically, since when memory is tight, it's better to spend more cpu on merging pages. In more relaxed cases, it's just a waste of time."

Host Iptables Settings for Bridged Guests

Mark McLoughlin pointed out that the recommended means of configuring iptables on the host to allow traffic to pass to a bridged guest is to disable netfilter on the bridge altogether.

 # cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf <<EOF
 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0
 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0
 EOF
 # sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

This "will be the default with Fedora 12."

Fedora Xen List

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

Xen Domain0 Kernels

Until support for pv_ops is added to the upstream kernel (F13?), it takes some twiddling to host Xen guests on Fedora. Even then it isn't recommended for anything more than experimentation at this time. More adventurous users are reporting some success with experimental kernels and running a Xen dom0.

Current dom0 kernel options include building one from Jeremy Fitzhardinge's git repository or installing Brian Young's RPM.