Fedora Weekly News Issue 205

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 205^[1] for the week ending December 6, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Welcome to the post-FUDCon Toronto 2009 issue of Fedora Weekly News! In this issue, details on the various Fedora elections and announcement of the Fedora 13 release name, as well as news of the new Bugzilla 3.4 public beta availability. In news from the Fedora Planet, details on why Chromium is not packaged for Fedora, an upcoming Gnome Color Manager release, a guide to theming Plymouth, and much more! Updates from FUDCon Toronto and work towards Fedora 13 from the Marketing beat. In news from Ambassadors, a report on a F12 event in Nicaragua. Translation brings us news of an upcoming outage for translate.fedoraproject.org and details related to this, a draft Fedora 13 schedule, and new Localization team members. From the Design team, brainstorming on the Goddard theme, and a new mailing list for the Echo icon set. Security Advisories brings us up to date on patches for Fedora 10, 11 and 12. The Virtualization beat wraps up this issue, with details on a Red Hat Virtualization online event on 12/9, details on a new virt-manager release. Enjoy this issue of FWN!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page^[2]. 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, including general announcements^[1], development announcements^[2] and Events^[3].

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

FEDORA BOARD, FESCO & FAMSCO ELECTIONS

The Fedora Board, FESCO and FAMSCO Election are scheduled to start at 0000 UTC on 5th December 2009 and run until 2359 UTC on 15th December 2009.

Fedora Board, FESCo & FAmSCo Elections - Voting Information

Nigel Jones, Fedora Election Admin, announced that the elections for the Fedora Board, Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee have been created and are due to start at 0000 UTC on 5th December 2009 and are scheduled to run until 2359 UTC on 15th December 2009.^[1]. He also mentioned:

“All groups have chosen to use the Range Voting method ^[2]

Ballots may be cast on the Fedora Elections System at ^[3]. If this is the first time you've used the voting system, please refer to the Fedora Elections Guide, currently located at ^[4].

Please Note There will be a Fedora Infrastructure outage during the voting period that may effect the voting application, as a result we have brought the voting start date forward to the 5th December instead of the 8th December.

As announced by Paul Frields in the event of extended outage, we will as appropriate extend the voting period.

We have also implemented a new feature in our voting software, so users can verify their votes. Vote verification can be done at: ^[5] You will be prompted for your Fedora Account System username and password and a list of elections where votes have been recorded will be listed.

For more information please refer to: Fedora Infrastructure Outage Information: ^[6] ^[7]

Contingency plans in case of extended outage: ^[8]

Fedora Board Election:

This election, the Fedora Board is electing two candidates and will appoint another two members.

Vacating the seats on the board this election are elected representatives Matt Domsch & Bill Nottingham, and appointed representatives Christoher Aillon and Dimitris Glezos^[9].

The candidates for this election, in alphabetical order are:

Chris Tyler (ctyler)
Colin Walters (walters)
Matt Domsch (mdomsch)
Steven M. Parrish (SMParrish)

To vote, you must have a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

Vote Here: ^[10]

Town Hall Logs: ^[11] ^[12]

Fedora Engineering Steering Committee Election:

For this election, FESCo will be electing four candidates to sit on the committee.

Vacating the seats on FESCo this election are Jon Stanley, Dan Horák, Jarod Wilson, and David Woodhouse.

The candidates for this election, in alphabetical order are:

Adam Jackson (ajax)
Christoph Wickert (cwickert)
Justin M. Forbes (jforbes)
Matthew Garrett (mjg59)
Peter Jones (pjones)
Richard June (rjune)
Robert Scheck (rsc)

To vote, you must have a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and be a member of another Fedora group.

Vote Here: ^[13]

Town Hall Logs: ^[14] ^[15]

Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee Election:

This election FAmSCo will be electing all 7 seats on the committee.

These seats were previously held by Max Spevack, Joerg Simon, Francesco Ugolini, Thomas Canniot, Rodrigo Padula, David Nalley and Susmit Shannigrahi.

The candidates for this election, in no particular order are:

David Nalley
Jean-Francois Saucier
Joerg Simon
Luca Foppiano
Maria Gracia Leandro
Max Spevack
Robert Scheck
Rodrigo Padula de Oliveira
Sandro Mathys
Scott Seiersen
Shakthi Kannan
Susmit Shannigrahi

To vote, you must be a member of the ambassadors group in the Fedora Account System.

Vote Here: ^[16]

Townhall Log: ^[17] ^[18]

I'd also like to point out the following from Paul Frields' announcement for the June 2008 Board Election:

"I'd like everyone voting to remember that this isn't a popularity contest, or a reward system. Think about how you'd like to Board to look when you vote, the same way you think about how you'd like any government body to look when you cast votes for their elections. We have a lot of worthy candidates on this list, and you should pick the ones that you feel will best represent you in advancing the Fedora Project.

This is one of numerous ways in which our community makes decisions about the leadership of Fedora. Your vote counts, and I hope you take advantage of it."

This advice is still valid, not just for the Fedora Board election but for all three elections.

Thanks also go to John Rose and other volunteers who have helped with organising and running Town Hall meetings for these elections.”

FEDORA ANNOUNCE LIST

Board appointment

Paul W. Frields cordially announced,^[1]"I am pleased to announce that Christopher Aillon will continue in his appointed seat on the Fedora Project Board for this cycle. His term will last until the selection process following the release of Fedora14, in accordance with the Board's established succession planning. Christopher's presence on the Board has helped our discussions on a number of subjects over the past year, and I look forward to having him continue that relationship.

Apologies for making this announcement slightly after the beginning of elections, due to the schedule change of elections and the intervening FUDCon activity. The remaining Board appointment will be made after the close of the Board elections."

↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00004.html

Fedora 13 release name

Paul W. Frields- the Fedora Project Leader, announced^[1]GODDARD-the The Fedora 13 release name. On the same announcement Paul said, "The full GPG-signed message from our election coordinator, Nigel Jones, is attached. Thank you to the community for their suggestions,the Board for their work on additional diligence searches, and Nigel Jones for setting up the voting. Election Results for Fedora 13 Release Name Voting Period: 28 November 2009 00:00:00 UTC to 04 December 2009 23:59:59 UTC Nominations:

Botany
Gloriana
Goddard
Langstrom
Loana
Manfredi
Truro

Outcomes:

As defined in the election text, the one (1) candidate with the greatest number of votes will be chosen as the Fedora 13 Release Name.

Information:

At close of voting there were: 313 valid ballots

Using the Fedora Range Voting method, each candidate could attain a maximum of 2191 votes (313*7).

Results:

1. Goddard 1177 - --[ Cut Off ] -- 2. Langstrom 1009 3. Gloriana 977 4. Botany 922 5. Loana 707 6. Truro 654 7. Manfredi 504

As such, Goddard has been selected as the release name for Fedora 13. "

↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00005.html

Fedora 12 LXDE Spin available for download

Christoph Wicker announced ^[1], “Fedora 12 LXDE Spin available for download ^[2]. While apologizing for the delay and thanked everybody for patience, Christoph thanked a big thank to Jesse for supporting him.

Reminder: Fedora Board IRC meeting 1700 UTC 2009-12-03

Fedora Project Leader, Paul W. Frields, announced,^[1] “The Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Thursday, December 3, 2009, at 1700 UTC[1] on IRC Freenode.” Paul also briefed, “For this meeting, the public is invited to do the following:

Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation.

Join #fedora-board-questions to discuss topics and post questions. This channel is read/write for everyone.

The moderator will voice people from the queue, one at a time, in the

fedora-board-meeting channel. We'll limit time per voice as needed

to give everyone in the queue a chance to be heard. The Board may reserve some time at the top of the hour to cover any agenda items as appropriate. We look forward to seeing you at the meeting!”

↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00001.html

FEDORA DEVELOPMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Red Hat Bugzilla 3.4 Upgrade Public Beta

James Laska announced the Red Hat Bugzilla 3.4 Upgrade Public Beta^[1]. James said,"I am sending this on behalf of Dave Lawrence and the bugzilla team at Red Hat. Fedora uses this instance of bugzilla too.

Please forward this on to any appropriate lists that were missed.

Thanks, James .......... Greetings,

The Red Hat Bugzilla team is happy to announce the first public beta release of the next version of Red Hat Bugzilla based on the upstream 3.4 code base.

Please test drive at:^[2]

Over the years Red Hat has made substantial customizations to Bugzilla to fit into the Engineering tool chain. Over time the upstream has incorporated some of these customizations or solved them in different ways. Upgrading reduces our customization footprint (and thus maintenance) while bringing many bug fixes & enhancements.

The main area of focus for our public betas are stability. Functionality that currently works in our 3.2 code base should continue to work as expected in the new 3.4 release. These include various ajax optimizations, needinfo actor support, frontpage.cgi, product browser, several various UI enhancements, and of course the XMLRPC API.

Please feel free to point your various scripts and third party applications that use the XMLRPC API at the test server to make sure they continue to function properly.

There are numerous other changes behind the scenes that we haven't listed. The goal is to make sure that functionality that people have come to expect in 3.2 is possible in the new system.

There are also numerous new features/fixes that are part of the upstream 3.4 release. For more detailed information on what has changed since the last release, check out the Release Notes page.

The database is a recent snapshot of the live database so should be useful for testing to make sure the information is displayed properly and changeable. Also with a full snapshot it is possible to test for any performance related issues. Email has been disabled so that unnecessary spam is not sent out. So feel free to make changes to bugs to verify proper working order.

We are asking for everyone to get involved as much as possible with testing and feedback on the beta releases to help us make this the most robust and stable release possible.

Please file any enhancement requests or bug reports in our current Bugzilla system at bugzilla.redhat.com. File them under the Bugzilla product and relevant component with the version 3.4. With everyone's help we can make this a great release.

Thanks The Red Hat Bugzilla Team "

Upcoming multi-day outage

Mike McGrath briefed,^[1] “Starting on December 12th The Fedora Project will start to move several servers, disk trays and related hardware from our current hosting location to another. This move is planned to be completed on December 15th and will ultimately provide better hosting facilities and room for growth.” While mentioning the reason, he said, “Since the servers will physically be loaded onto a truck and moved, this means lots of services people rely on will be down. We'll be working hard and using whatever tricks we have at our disposal to keep things as normal as possible, for example ^[2] will remain up (which includes the mechanism yum uses to get its mirror list).

Some critical services like the buildsystem will be completely unavailable for 48 hours or longer. I'll be sending another update out as the day gets closer to remind everyone. Also this is the official ticket we're tracking with for those who care to watch it:^[3]

Please do stop by #fedora-admin on irc.freenode.net or comment in the ticket with any questions or concerns you have.”

FEDORA EVENTS

Fedora events are the source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Upcoming Events

North America (NA)^[1]
Central & South America (LATAM) ^[2]
Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)^[3]
India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)^[4]

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events^[1]

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/PastEvents

Planet Fedora

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora^[1] - an aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

↑ http://planet.fedoraproject.org

General

Tom Callaway explained^[1] why Chromium is not yet officially packaged for Fedora.

Richard Hughes plans^[2] to release the first supported version of Gnome Color Manager this week, along with lots of new features. Daniel Berrange continued^[3] with instructions for setting up Firefox to respect your color management wishes.

You can now automatically encrypt QCow2 virtualization disk images in Fedora 12, according^[4] to Daniel Berrange. "Why might you want to encrypt a guest's disk from the host, rather than using the guest OS's own block encryption capabilities (eg the block encryption support in anaconda) ? There's a couple of reasons actually..."

John Poelstra mused^[5] about "Marketing to Fedora’s Target Audience:"

"Some people people may chafe at the notion of the Fedora Distribution as a 'product.' I can understand that, particularly if working on a 'product' is associated with strict process, lots of bureaucracy, endless meetings, and the pressure to constantly generate more revenue. Maybe that is one reason some people think defining a target audience for the Fedora distribution is going too far."

Ryan Rix is working^[6] on Fedora-tour, to introduce new users to Fedora. "For example, there would be different sections in the tour:

What is Fedora Linux
What is the Fedora Project
What’s new in Fedora 13?
Get to know Fedora Desktop Edition
Get to know Fedora Electronics Lab"

Charles Brej wrote a two^[7] part^[8] guide to theming Plymouth. "Judging by the many forum postings and articles, many people do enjoy a nice boot splash and there is a real desire to customise their spin or even the individual machine to their preferred theme. In this guide I will try and show you how to make your own custom splash, walking though the process of viewing, changing and installing."

Ian Weller created^[9] a new command line tool, mw to interact with MediaWiki installations, as if it were a VCS.

Mark J. Wielaard and others ^[10] "had some fun and made tracing python methods through systemtap possible."

Marketing

In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Ryan Rix

Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-12-8 and 2009-12-1

Meeting logs ^[1] and notes ^[2] for the 2009-12-01. Meeting logs ^[3] and notes ^[4] for the 2009-12-08. Fedora Marketing Meeting were made available. All Marketing meetings and notes are open to the public. ^[5]

F13 Marketing Preparation

The Marketing team is organizing resources for the Fedora 13 marketing push^[1]. The general consensus from the 12-8 meeting was that we need to start earlier and work faster so that we aren't rushing at the time of GA. Also, effort will go into making sure that the schedule syncs properly with other SIGs and teams on Fedora.

↑ http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-13-draft/f-13-marketing-tasks.html

Fedora In The News

This week's FUDcon in Toronto garnered media attention from a few avenues, including LinuxPlanet^[1] and LWN^[2]

Fedora Insight

At FUDcon this week, Mel Chua, Simon Birtwistle, Pascal Vincent Calarco and Diana Martin participated in a hackfest to push Fedora Insight into production^[1]. As of Tuesday, it is nearly ready for deployment, however, some last minute help of Karsten Wade to create^[2] a list of content that the team is interested in including into Fedora Insight. Fedora Insight should be ready to go by this time next week.

Fedora-tour Coding Begins

Fedora-tour's development started this week, with Ryan Rix filing an infrastructure ticket for FedoraHosted space^[1] and setting up a git repo on his FedoraPeople space^[2]. Fedora-tour developers are looking for contributors to the project.

Limesurvey coming to Fedora Infrastructure

At FUDcon, Yaakov Meir Nemoy wanted to create a survey for attendees to fill out and give feedback on the event. Looking for a suitable tool turned up limesurvey^[1], however, it was found that LimeSurvey was still in review^[2]. Eric Christensen will update the package and Robyn Bergeron and Ryan Rix will be setting up an instance on Fedora's Publictest servers.

Ambassadors

In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors

Fedora 12 event in Nicaragua

Neville Cross reports that a Fedora 12 launch party was held in Managua, Nicaragua. With nearly 40 people in attendance, the event focused on introducing Fedora, how to contribute and what's new on Fedora 12. As a guest, a talk was given from a representative of a Central American's womens group. T-shirts were distributed, as well as media, stickers and T-Shirts. Neville's report an and other links can be found at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Yn1v/Fedora12

FAmSCo election now open: Vote

Among other elected bodies in the Fedora Project, the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee (FAmSCo) elections are now open for voting. If you haven't done yet visit https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/ to cast your vote. Your vote is important and crucial.

Fedora 12 is here

With Fedora 12 Constantine now here, this is a reminder that posting an announcement of 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^[1].

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N

translate.fedoraproject.org Outage From December 12, 2009

translate.fedoraproject.org would be unavailable during the upcoming multi-day outage scheduled from December 12th 2009, to move the server hardware to a new location^[1].

↑ https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00000.html

Issues with translate.fedoraproject.org

Over the past week, translate.fedorarproject.org site was bugged by several issues ranging from non-availablity of .po files, submission problems, timeouts etc^[1]. A problem related to submissions over SSH was fixed by the Fedora Infrastructure team^[2]. Additionally, a problem with the ssh-agent setup used by transifex is creating problems related to read/write access on the fedorahosted.org repositories^[3]. These issues may remain for a few more days in view of the limited availability of the Fedora Infrastructure admins attending the FUDCon and the upcoming server move schedule. Meanwhile, any further issues are to be reported directly via Fedora Infrastructure tickets.

Currently, an older version of transifex is being used for translate.fedoraproject.org^[4], which is awaiting an upgrade^[5].

Fedora 13 Draft Schedule

A draft of Fedora 13 schedule, pertaining to tasks for translation and documentation has been proposed by John Poelstra^[1]. This schedule has been drawn up on the basis of the task flow for Fedora 12.

↑ https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-December/msg00017.html

New Members

Dmitry Melnikov (Russian)^[1], Kevin Mon (Chinese)^[2], Elad Alfassa (Hebrew)^[3] and Stephan Schiffleithner (German)^[4] joined the Fedora Localization Project last week.

Artwork

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team^[1].

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork

Brainstorming for Goddard

With the release code name for Fedora 13 announced as Goddard, Luya Tshimbalanga started on @design-team a brainstorming^[1] about its theming "With some research, theme will be based on these following categories: Rockets (propulsion, spacecraft); Space (based on Goddard Flight Center website); Astrodynamics" and Nicu Buculei followed^[2] on the rocketry approach "I think rocketry is quite obvious: stars, space flight, rocket schematics. Depending on the direction we will take with the distro in the near future, I think a concept like 'fedora: for your inner rocket scientist' or 'fedora: is not rocket science' would be fit (my *strong* preference would be for the former)."

New Mailing List for Echo

Martin Sourada announced^[1] the creation a new mailing^[2] list for development of the Echo icon theme^[3], Henrik Heigl wondered^[4] about the need of having the talk on a different list than @design-team "I think it could be better to discuss all design things on ONE Mailinglist".

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce.

http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Virtualization

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

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

Events

Red Hat Virtual Experience

On December 9th 9am EST to 6pm EST, Red Hat will be holding an online "event focused on Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions, including virtualization and cloud computing." Titled "Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009"^[1] Attendees can participate in keynote sessions and "chats with business leaders, executives, key developers, customers, and strategic partners", and "learn what's on the horizon from Red Hat and industry partners—innovations in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, tools, security, and deployment in the cloud."

↑ http://www-2.virtualevents365.com/rhexp/about.php

Fedora Virtualization List

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

KSM Tuning Daemon and the KSM Kernel Thread Process

Gianluca Cecchi was^[1] surprised to find that ksm was not running even though it was enabled with chkconfig. After starting more guests, ksm was found to be running.

Dan Kenigsberg added the follwing explaination to the KSM feature page^[2] "Fedora's kvm comes with 2 services controlling the behavior of ksm. One, simply called ksm, is just a nice means to start and stop ksm's kernel thread. The other, called ksmtuned, controls the first service and tunes its parameters according to the memory stress that is generated by KVM virtual machines. ksmtuned may stop ksm service alltogether, if memory is not in need. Later, if ksmtuned senses that memory stress has risen, it will fire up ksm again."

Soon after the explaination, Dan posted a patch^[3] which will cause ksmtuned to log any ksm state changes. This patch will soon be available in an update.

KSM was also recently covered in FWN 200^[4].

New Release virt-manager 0.8.1

Cole Robinson announced^[1] new releases of virt-manager 0.8.1 and virtinst 0.500.1.

Virtual Machine Manager^[2] provides a graphical tool for administering virtual machines, using libvirt as the backend management API.

Virtinst is a python module that helps build and install libvirt based virtual machines. Currently supports KVM, QEmu and Xen virtual machines. Package includes several command line utilities, including virt-install (build and install new VMs) and virt-clone (clone an existing virtual machine).

New virt-manager Features:

VM Migration wizard, exposing various migration options
Enumerate CDROM and bridge devices on remote connections
Can once again list multiple graphs in the manager window (Jon Nordby)
Support disabling dhcp (Michal Novotny), and specifying 'routed' type for new virtual networks
Support storage pool source enumeration for LVM, NFS, and SCSI
Allow changing VM ACPI, APIC, clock offset, individual vcpu pinning, and video model (vga, cirrus, etc.)
Many improvements and bugfixes

New virtinst Features:

virt-install now attempts --os-variant detection by default. This can be disabled with '--os-variant none' (distro detection currently only works for URL installs)
New --disk option 'format', for creating image disks formats such as qcow2 or vmdk
Many improvements and bugfixes

"Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release through testing, bug reporting, submitting patches, and otherwise sending in feedback!"

Also see coverage of the release on linux-kvm.com^[3]. Version 0.8.0 of virt-manager was announced^[4] on July 28th, 2009.

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