Fedora Weekly News Issue 238

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 238^[1] for the week ending August 11, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In this week's FWN, our issue kicks off with announcements from the Project, including details on the recent Fedora 14 Go/No Go meeting and a reminder on this weekend's Bugzilla 3.6 upgrade. In news from the Fedora Planet, coverage of the most recent Fedora Board meeting, test driving the Gnome 3 shell and some thoughts on Fedora and a K-12 strategy. News from the Marketing team include thoughts on a Fedora Activity Day at Ohio Linux Fest, work on Fedora 14 talking points, and minutes from this past week's meeting. One article from the trade press this week, this from India's Digit Magazine on Fedora 13. In news from the Design team, a request for some design work for Fedora balloons for events and work on the Fedora 14 Alpha release banner. Our issue wraps up this week with a few security advisories for Fedora 12 and 13, including the first for Fedora 14 this week. Read on!

The audio version of FWN - FAWN - is back! You can listen to existing issues^[2] on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page^[3]. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

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 Announcement News

The announcement list is always exclusive for the Fedora Community. Please, visit the past announcements at^[1]

One week slip of Fedora 14 schedule

Jared K. Smith announced^[2]:

"Today we held our readiness meeting for the Alpha release of Fedora 14. As you may know, this is a meeting with representatives from the Development, Release Engineering, and Quality Assurance teams. In these meetings, we evaluate the list of blocker bugs and give a "go" or "no go" signal on the state of the Fedora release.

You can read the minutes of the meeting^[3], but in short the decision was made that the release has not passed its release criteria^[4]. When this happens, the entire release schedule is slipped by a week, and we work to get things in better shape for the next meeting. We'll get the schedule^[5] updated in the next day or so, but in general this means that our general availability date for Fedora 14 has now gone from October 26th to November 2nd.

During composition of any further release candidates, the Fedora Release Engineering and Quality Assurance teams plan to be quite conservative in the updates they pull into the release candidates, so that we don't inadvertently create more blocker bugs. I'd also like to thank those who have really pushed hard to try to get the Alpha into shape. In particular, the Release Engineering team put in a lot of extra hours to compose our release candidates, and the QA team did a fantastic job of testing the release candidates and knocking out as many blocker bugs as possible.

While I regret the fact that the schedule has slipped, I'm confident it was the right decision to ensure that Fedora 14 is a rock-solid release.

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

Fedora Development News

Fedora 14 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting August 12, 2010 @ 12:00 AM UTC

John Poelstra^[1] on Tue Aug 10 19:51:28 UTC 2010 announced^[2],

"Join us on irc.freenode.net #fedora-meeting for this important meeting.

Thursday, August 12, 2010, @ 12:00 AM UTC ( *20:00 EDT/17:00 PDT,Wednesday, August 11, 2010* )

"Before each public release Development, QA, and Release Engineering meet to determine if the release criteria are met for a particular release. This meeting is called the: Go/No-Go Meeting."

"Verifying that the Release criteria are met is the responsibility of the QA Team."

For more details about this meeting see: ^[3]

In the meantime keep an eye on the Fedora 14 Alpha Blocker list and help us test!

^[4] ^[5]

Reminder: Bugzilla UPGRADE to 3.6 on August 13th 9:00 p.m.EDT [01:00 UTC]

John Poelstra^[1] on Wed Aug 11 15:33:08 UTC 2010 announced^[2],

"Sending on behalf of Dave Lawrence^[3]. This will affect Fedora too.

REMINDER: Red Hat Bugzilla (bugzilla.redhat.com) will be unavailable on August 13th starting at 9:00 p.m. EDT [01:00 UTC] to perform an upgrade from Bugzilla 3.4 to Bugzilla 3.6. We are hoping to be complete in no more than 5 hours barring any problems. Any services relying on bugzilla.redhat.com may not work properly during this time. Please be aware in case you need use of those services during the outage.

Also *PLEASE* make sure any scripts or other external applications that rely on bugzilla.redhat.com are tested against our test server before the upgrade if you have not done so already (see original email below). Let the Bugzilla Team know immediately of any issues found by reporting the bug in bugzilla.redhat.com against the Bugzilla product, version 3.6.

Greetings,

The Red Hat Bugzilla team is happy to announce another public beta release of the next version of Red Hat Bugzilla based on the upstream 3.6 code base.

Please test drive at: ^[4]

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 is stability. Functionality that currently works in our 3.4 code base should continue to work as expected in the new 3.6 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 3.4 is possible in the new system.

There are also numerous new features/fixes that are part of the upstream 3.6 release. For more detailed information on what has changed since the last release, check out the release notes page at^[5] .

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 ^[6]. File them under the Bugzilla product and relevant component with the version 3.6. With everyone's help we can make this a great release."

↑ John Poelstra
↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-August/000655.html
↑ Dave Lawrence
↑ https://partner-bugzilla.redhat.com
↑ https://partner-bugzilla.redhat.com/page.cgi?id=release-notes.html
↑ https://bugzilla.redhat.com

Fedora Events

Fedora events are the exclusive and 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 (June 2010 - August 2010)

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

Additional information

Reimbursements -- reimbursement guidelines.
Budget -- budget for the current quarter (as distributed by FAMSCo).
Sponsorship -- how decisions are made to subsidize travel by community members.
Organization -- event organization, budget information, and regional responsibility.
Event reports -- guidelines and suggestions.
LinuxEvents -- a collection of calendars of Linux events.

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

Karsten Wade pondered^[1] "a solution for a K12 strategy, or Treating our community leadership team like a FOSS project." Karsten imagines "a person, or a few people, deeply passionate about open source, young people, and education. We recognize that a big selling point for people is that FOSS can save cash-strapped schools a lot of budget. However, we think the higher goal is to teach open source participation" and looks back at how different communities (for example Fedora) have influenced others (such as RHEL).

Máirín Duffy outlined^[2] the topics covered by the August 6 Fedora Board meeting.

Peter Hutterer mentioned^[3] that the first draft of a multitouch protocol specification for X has been published.

Fabian A. Scherschel test drove^[4] the Gnome 3 Shell. But more importantly, Fabian wrote up the (fairly simple) steps to build the Gnome 3 Shell from Gnome's Git repository.

Nelson Marques shared^[5] some well reasoned suggestions on ways that Fedora can improve.

Matt Domsch found^[6] an interview by Linux.com of Jared Smith, the new Fedora Project Leader.

Marketing

In this section, we cover the happenings for Fedora Marketing Project from 2010-08-04 to 2010-08-10.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Neville A. Cross

Beth Lynn Eicher^[1]^[2] was exploring the possibility of holding a FAD at upcoming Ohio Linux Fest. David Nalley^[3] pointed some blockers for doing FAD.

Luke Slater^[4] proposed a tool for sharing social network passwords, so a group of people can keep updates the status on the different social networks. Henrik Heigl^[5] expressed concern about taking this tool for more than personal use. Paul Frields^[6] pointed out that there is HootSuite is already in use.

Andrew Overholt^[7] offered to help with Talking Points for Fedora 14. Paul Frields^[8] encouraged him to do it. Andrew commented that Charley was adding more info on the Talking Points. Karsten Wade^[9] agreed about being good to include on Talking Points for End Users section a bit of the MeeGo and KDE and finish the sentence saying "this will be a spin".

Last week there was not meeting due a massive network split on IRC, but now the delicious MMM (Marketing Meeting Minutes) are back, and logs are open for everyone as usual^[10]

Fedora In the News

In this section, we cover news from the trade press and elsewhere that is re-posted to the Fedora Marketing list^[1]

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/

Fedora 13 Review (Digit Magazine - India)

Jonathon Nalley forwarded^[1] a review of Fedora 13 from India:

"Fedora is, and is meant to a bleeding edge distro, yet manages to be very stable. While it may have a simple and easy install process and interface, it doesn’t offer too much to the Linux newbie. It feels less like an integrated distribution and more like a generic Linux installation, which it might well be; there are few customizations which are unique to Fedora, although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

For those who have worked on Linux for a while, Fedora is a nice way to come back to the basics, but those who are still new to the world of Linux might find themselves fighting with basic operations such as adding repositories – which come easily to other distributions. On the other hand its performs remarkably well. If you do opt for Fedora be prepared to spend some time on the CLI."

The full post is available^[2].

Design

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

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

Balloons

Ben Williams asked^[1] for a customized Fedora logo for use on balloons "We are wanting to produce some ballons for events in which ambassadors are attending" Nicu Buculei pointed^[2] at the problems of using a monochrome graphic "Based on the IRC discussion, Ben needs a *monochrome* version of the logo for cheap printing, which is against the logo usage guidelines. Using only the wordmark would be, IMO, not pretty enough, the price for color printing is prohibitive" and Maria Leandro and Máirín Duffy created it^[3] "I produced a print-ready PDF according to the vendor's specs using Tatica's mockup."

Alpha Release Banner

Alexander Smirnov created^[1] a first version for the Fedora 14 Alpha release "I'm started process creating Alpha release website banner , based on my template, with trying use Comfortaa and Droids Sans fonts" which was liked by Paul Frields^[2] and Martin Sourada^[3] "Seeing this banner, I feel like answering the question on it :D Yeah. I can't stand the wait..."

Security Advisories

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

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce