FWN/Issue193

Fedora Weekly News Issue 193

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 193 for the week ending September 13, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In announcements, an invitation to the Fedora community to participate in research at Duke University on open source communities and an update on this December's FUDCon Toronto. A variety of recent postings from Fedora contributors follows in the Planet Fedora section. In marketing news, a call for Fedora 12 slogan ideas, update on weekly meetings and Zikula/Fedora Insight developments, and coverage of recent discussion aimed at getting Fedora into news channels to a greater extent. This week's QA news includes detail of the most recent Test Day activities around graphics card support, and coverage of this week's meetings. In translation news, more updates on Fedora 12 translation activities, and new Localization Project members from Spain. In Art news, a refresh of Fedora 12 wallpapers. This week's issue rounds out with Fedora Virtualization updates, including details on Fedora virt status and F12 virtualization release notes. Please enjoy FWN 193!

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

TOP MOST Announcements and Fedora 12 (Constantine) are as follows:

Fedora Board IRC Public meeting

"The Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Thursday, September 10, 2009, at 1600 UTC on IRC Freenode.", announced Fedora Project Leader Paul W. Frields. For this meeting, the public was invited to join the IRC channels #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation and #fedora-board-questions to discuss topics and to post questions. While inviting everyone, Paul also expressed, "The Board may reserve some time at the top of the hour to cover any agenda items as appropriate."

Help with Fedora Research

Greg DeKoenigsberg, Senior Community Architect at Red Hat announced , "we're looking for Fedora contributors who are willing to do one of two things:

1. Participate in an email interview with our Duke professors; or 2. Participate in a short phone interview (about 20 minutes) with our Duke professors."

Greg also explored about the participation of contributors. He expressed, "It's a simple thing that could be hugely valuable in the long run. We've got something special in Fedora, and the world wants to understand how it works. Your experiences matter." All the interested participant are requested to response to Greg DeKoenigsberg via email, please.

New entry of Build F12 collection packages for all language translators' review and correction

Noriko Mizumoto on development announcement had announced, "Build F12 collection packages for all language translators' review and correction". Meanwhile, he also mentioned, "Please notice that amazingly F12 has been translated into 52 language with more than 40% completion so far, and the percentage as well the number of languages are aggressively growing."

FUDCon Toronto 2009 update!

"Here's an update on the upcoming FUDCon in Toronto, being held December 5-7. Before the details, I want to give some special thanks and recognition to Chris Tyler of Seneca College in Toronto for his continued, invaluable assistance in setting up FUDCon. His help made it possible to establish a lot of these logistics while we were also preparing for Fedora presence at the Red Hat Summit last week. Thanks Chris!", widely announced by Paul W. Frields.

The FUDCon wiki page is chock full of details. Here is the major highlights of the announcement:

HELP US PLAN! GENERAL SCHEDULE PRE-REGISTRATION LODGING TECHNICAL SESSIONS FUDPUB HACKFESTS

"More information will be forthcoming as it develops!", says Paul while broadcasting the announcements.

RHCE Conference in New York City

On Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009 from 9am-1pm, Red Hat will hold a free, informal conference for RHCEs, offering information sharing on a variety of topics at the Rubin Museum in New York City. Details are available.

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

Tim Niemueller installed the Maemo 5 SDK on Fedora, but there were a few "gotcha's" which can easily be worked around.

Radek Vokál summarized his experience at the Red Hat Summit in Chicago, and took some nice pictures from around the city.

Harish Pillay analyzed some security vulnerabilities in Windows Vista, and compared them with the Red Hat line of products. "Why do they [Microsoft] have to resort to outright lies and misrepresentations?"

Matt Domsch mentioned that the Fedora infrastructure should now all work over IPv6.

Mel Chua made some suggestions for writing an effective press release.

Michel Salim rebutted the recent cries that OLPC has been a complete failure. "OLPC has failures in abundance, but it is a radical, category-creating product."

Greg DeKoenigsberg is seeking Fedora contributers (whether they contribute a little or a lot) to be interviewed for a research project.

David Lutterkort wrote about how to use Augeas to modify comments in configuration files.

Michael Tiemann posted an interesting comic strip (and an actual post) about how some companies are patent trolls. It's amusing, I promise.

Marketing

In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Mel Chua (Temporary sub for the week - Chaitanya Mehandru will be back next week with more Exciting News from Marketing. Stay tuned...)

Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-09-01

Meeting logs and notes for the 2009-09-08 Fedora Marketing Meeting were made available. All Marketing meetings and notes are open to the public.

Call for F12 slogan ideas

We need a slogan for the F12 release! A release slogan is a short call-to-action that fits the artwork theme from Design . (F11's slogan was "Reign," F10's was "Fire it up!") Please put your slogan ideas here: Feel free to discuss slogan ideas on the mailing lists - but also make sure to put your ideas in that table on that wiki page so they'll be counted. More details on the mailing list thread:

Passing on the Fedora print magazine proposal for the time being

After much thought-provoking and insightful deliberation and discussion with the community in response to the Linux Pro Magazine F11 special issue proposal, we have decided to pass on this opportunity for F12. Max Spevack: "There are several reasons why, which I discussed during today's Fedora Marketing meeting. For those who would like to read that over, please see http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-09-08/fedora-meeting.2009-09-08-20.01.log.html, starting at 20:39:27 in the log. As always, any comments are welcome. I really like the way this entire idea was discussed, considered, etc. in (what I consider) a very public and transparent way."

Fedora Insight update

Throughout the print magazine discussion, work on Fedora Insight (FI) continued, with launch less than a month away. FI will act as a central repository for Marketing materials, such as the ones that were proposed for the print magazine, making it easy to pull Marketing content into print at a future date in time.

Mel Chua says: "I finally realized the way to keep [the Fedora Insight status page] up to date was to link to our ticketing system , since *that* is up to date... now it's time to turn our attention to FI content." Mo Duffy's excellent work on the FI theme continues with special thanks to Simon Birtwistle and Keiran Smith for their help.

Help wanted: Getting Fedora in the news

Susmit Shannigrahi brought up a great idea this week: A lot of "industry"-type magazines will have an editorial calendar that they make available, usually a year or so in advance. What if we had a team that acted as a liaison between the magazine and interested writers from the Fedora community? "...if a magazine is going to have an issue on Localisation, the team will ensure there is an article on Transifex if someone is interested to write it. Or if a magazine is going to roll out an issue on IT infrastructure, the team will ensure that someone writes about puppet and so on." Are you interested in this idea or in helping out? Do you have any publications to add to the Marketing press publications list? Email the marketing list today!

Fedora in the News

Rahul Sundaram spotted a TechRepublic blog entry on delta RPMs in F11. "If... you have a slow Internet connection or you pay-per-byte for your Internet connection, then using Presto makes sense: it will download smaller files which will save time and money."

Via Karlie Robinson: The Fedora community, featuring our own Fred Grose and Karlie Robinson, is mentioned in an article about RIT professor Steve Jacobs's course on teaching open source development for the One Laptop Per Child and Sugar Labs projects.

Marketing HOWTO: Creating press releases

Inspired by Fedora Infrastructure's SOPs , we've started a category for Marketing HOWTOs in order to document our collective marketing knowledge and make it easier for community members to add a little Marketing jazz to their projects. The first one is on writing press releases , inspired by Ian Weller's request for feedback on the Creative Commons re-licensing announcement.

Marketing Research

Robyn Bergeron has started forming a Real Market Research Strategy for Fedora. See the Marketing Research wiki page and help us answer a few questions that will help us figure out what information is most crucial to gather first.

QualityAssurance

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week saw three main track Test Days making up Graphics Test Week: ATI / Radeon Test Day, NVIDIA / Nouveau Test Day, and Intel graphics Test Day. Each event was very busy and turned up a range of bugs which will now be worked on by the driver developers. Many thanks to everyone who helped test! If you missed the Test Days but would like to test your graphics adapter for Fedora 12, you can still visit the Test Day pages, download the test live image, and report your results.

Last week's Fit and Finish Test Day was on sharing. As usual, the Fit and Finish group identified several issues which could be improved to present a better sharing experience, and filed several bugs.

Next week will see two main track Test Days. The first is on audio, including PulseAudio. This is always a hot-button topic for Fedora releases, and PulseAudio has seen some significant changes and improvements from Fedora 11. If you want to make sure audio will work perfectly with your hardware in Fedora 12, please come along and help with the testing!

No Fit and Finish track Test Day is planned for next week.

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

No meetings were held this week for either the QA or BugZappers groups, due to the absence of important group members and the North American public holiday on Monday 2009-09-07.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-09-14 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-09-15 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Test Day live spin

Bruno Wolff announced he had got the spin configuration for the Test Day live image added to the official Fedora spins git repository. Kamil Páral replied to say he had modified the live image creation guide to reflect this change (which makes generating live images configured for Test Days much easier).

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Translation deadline and Review Package Build Request

The first phase of software translation for Fedora 12 has been completed on September 10th 2009. Unlike other earlier releases, for Fedora 12 the translators in FLP would be able to review and update these translations until 22nd September 2009. This has been made possible by the approval from FESCo to allow the FLP's request to be provided with test builds of the Fedora Packages.

FLSCo member Noriko Mizumoto and FLP Admin team member Ankit Patel are currently co-ordinating with the maintainers of 48 packages, for which rebuilds have been requested by the FLP. Individual bugs have been filed for each of these packages along with instructions and tracked via a master tracker bug. As per the Fedora Schedule, the package builds are to be completed by 14th September 2009.

Freeze Break for imsettings

The maintainer of the imsettings package Akira Tagoh, requested for a freeze break for the package to resolve a bug file against some of the strings in the .po file. The freeze break request was granted and the strings have been updated.

Issue Related to gnome-system-monitor Resolved

A long pending issue regarding the translation of a string customized in the gnome-system-monitor package for Fedora, has been resolved by Matthias Clasen.

New Members in Fedora Localization Project

Juanjo Escribano(Spanish) joined the Fedora Localization Project last week.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team.

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

F12 Wallpaper Refresh

Máirín Duffy posted on @Design-Team an improved perspective mosaic for the Fedora 12 wallpaper "We can't be totally satisfied with the current default can we?" and after her request for feedback Paul Frields replied positively "I've been using it on my main station without any major concerns" but also asked about the lack of blogging about the wallpaper evolution "There are schedule items for blogging about the wallpaper -- has anyone been doing that lately, regarding the latest candidate(s)?". Máirín pointed to the late slowness of wallpaper evolution and later remembered everyone about another take on the design from María Leandro "Ahh I forgot to mention Tatica's work [...] which I think we should develop further instead"

Virtualization

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

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Fedora Virtualization List

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

Fedora Virt Status

In the latest Fedora virtualization status report, Mark McLoughlin reminds us "The Fedora 12 release is looming large. At this stage, all efforts should be focused on polishing off everything for the final release." and "September 17th, we will be holding be holding Fedora Test Day in order to test all the latest Fedora 12 virt goodies".

Read on for Mark's full treatment of the latest developments in virtualization.

Fedora 12 Virtualization Release Notes

The initial draft of the virtualization portion of the release notes is complete. Read all about the impressive list of 11 new features and other improvements in Fedora 12! F11 had 6 new virt features by comparison.