Fedora Weekly News Issue 241

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 241^[1] for the week ending September 1, 2010. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Our issue begins with some announcements from the Fedora Project, including details on Fedora trademark defense and how you can help, development updates to Fedora 14 and upcoming Fedora events. News from the Fedora Planet is next, including announcement of the recent free software status change for glibc, libguestfs for SUSE and Ubuntu, an update on the Fedora Summer Coding project, and coverage of last week's IRC Fedora Board meeting. In Ambassador news, new Ambassadors joining the team and a summary of the traffic from the Ambassador and FAmScO list from this past week. In news from the Quality Assurance team, results from last week's Test Day on OpenSCAP, details on this week's Test Day on preupgrade and next week's on systemd, as well as coverage of Fedora 14 blocker review. In Translation news, details on upcoming Fedora 14 task for the team, discussion of problems related to statistics display on t.fp.o, and new members and sponsors for the Fedora Localization Project. In Design Team updates, word on the supplemental wallpaper voting results and discussion of a slogan for the website. Our issue finishes off with security advisories for Fedora 12, 13 and 14 from this past week. Enjoy!

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]

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2010-August/thread.html

Board IRC Meeting :: Fri 2010-08-27 at UTC 18:00 in #fedora-board-meeting

Fedora Project Leader, Jared K. Smith^[1] on Fri Aug 27 14:40:46 UTC 2010 announced^[2],

"Sorry for the late announcement... The Fedora Board is having a public IRC meeting today in #fedora-board-meeting at UTC 18:00 (2:00pm EDT, 11:00am PDT).

We'll follow the same protocol as we did on the August 13th meeting, as is explain here:^[3].

The entire meeting will be dedicated to Questions and Answers. We're going to limit any single question to eight minutes, so that we can cover as many questions as possible in the 60 minutes we have available. In the interest of rapid responses, the Board members will be encouraged to respond at will to questions, as we did in the previous meeting."

↑ Jared K. Smith jsmith at fedoraproject.org
↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2010-August/002855.html
↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board_public_IRC_meetings

Trademark defense -- you can help!

Paul W. Frields^[1] on Tue Aug 31 15:23:27 UTC 2010 announced^[2] that Red Hat Legal provides numerous services as counsel to the Fedora community, including defending Fedora trademarks against possible encroachment. On his announcement, he also mentioned,

"Occasionally, people who have no connection to our community attempt to use the Fedora trademark to signify business efforts that have no connection to the Fedora Project, our distribution, or the Fedora community.

Red Hat Legal is currently working on just such a defense. They've asked me to pass on a request for assistance in gathering physical evidence of our use of the Fedora logo worldwide prior to *January 30, 2007*.

Here's what Red Hat Legal needs. Please read this description carefully, and DO NOT REPLY to this list with attachments. That will keep the list usable by its many subscribers. Please reply directly to the addresses listed at the bottom of this email, and only if you have something that meets one or more of these criteria.

An item bearing the current Fedora logo that was produced or available in China prior to January 30, 2007 is optimal, but anything available worldwide would suffice.

Tangible objects -- paper brochures, CDs, buttons, mousepads, balloons, webpage printouts with a print date from before 30 January, 2007, T-shirts, etc. -- that were in existence before that date. For example, a T-shirt that says "Fedora 2005" on it would be good, or perhaps one with just a release number that's before January 30, 2007.

We have a Fedora 5 CD, but any others from before 30 January 2007 would be good. (AFAIK Fedora Core 6 is the only other applicable release, since FC5-FC6 were the two distros we produced with the logo prior to January 30, 2007.)^[3]

We're looking for a a hard copy of this Linux magazine from March, 2006:^[4]^[5]

...plus any other magazines, ads, news articles, etc. from before January 30, 2007 that talk about Fedora.

If it's not obvious from the object itself what the date is, Red Hat Legal may ask you to sign an affidavit explaining what the object is and how you know it existed before January 30, 2007.

Again, PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS LIST WITH ATTACHMENTS.

Photos or scans of anything like CD's, T-shirts, keyrings, mouse pads, etc. are acceptable. You can email these directly to edutton at redhat dot com

If the item is paper (like the magazine), you can mail it directly to:

 Erin Dutton
 Red Hat Legal Department
 Attention: Fedora TM items
 1801 Varsity Drive
 Raleigh, NC  27606

↑ Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2010-August/002856.html
↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/HistoricalSchedules
↑ http://www.linux-mag.com/id/2532
↑ http://www.linux-mag.com/channel/back-issues/march2006

Fedora Development News

The fedora development news list is intended to be a low traffic announce-only list for Fedora development.^[1]

Acceptable Types of Announcements

- Policy or process changes that affect developers. - Infrastructure changes that affect developers. - Tools changes that affect developers. - Schedule changes - Freeze reminders

Unacceptable Types of Announcements

- Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule) - Discussion - Anything else not mentioned above

↑ https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce

dist-f14-updates-testing tag/untag koji notices

Rex Dieter^[1] on Tue Aug 24 18:08:50 UTC 2010 announced^[2],

"You may have noticed notices landing in your mailbox today similar to: foo-1.0-2.fc14 successfully untagged from dist-f14-updates-testing by rdieter

You should be able to safely ignore all those, as the mess I caused trying to clean up some koji tags got sorted out. My apologies."

↑ Rex Dieter rdieter at math.unl.edu
↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-August/000669.html

Request compose of image for Software Review UI from Releng

noriko^[1] on Thu Aug 26 12:06:49 UTC 2010 announced^[2],

"Hi Release Engineering team

F14 collection packages should be built with latest translation by today, 26-Aug. Could you please kindly compose the image with those latest packages for software translation review?

Translators are scheduled to have review and correct software translation in built UI between 2010-08-30 to 2010-09-07 (deadline).

Thank you so much for you help."

↑ noriko noriko at fedoraproject.org
↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-August/000670.html

Orphan packages retired for F-14 (and rawhide)

Bill Nottingham^[1] on Fri Aug 27 19:03:59 UTC 2010 announced^[2],

"In accordance with the normal process, the following packages have been orphaned for Fedora 14 and rawhide.

JSDoc
bzr-gtk
cdf
crun
django-authopenid
drpython
fedora-security-guide-en-US
fet
fish
gg2
gnomecatalog
gperiodic
impressive
kasablanca
kflickr
lazygal
libmspack
mapbender
mediawiki-HNP
mediawiki-StubManager
minirpc
nettle
nget
nodm
pAgenda
papercut
pastebin
php-channel-phpdb
php-pear-Phlickr
php-pear-creole
php-pear-pake
php-pear-propel_generator
php-pear-propel_runtime
poker-engine
poker-eval
poker-network
poker2d
poker3d
poker3d-data
pyfacebook
pypoker-eval
python-numarray
python-urllib2_kerberos
qosmic
tanukiwrapper
tinyows
tpb
tremfusion
twitux
windowlab
x2vnc
xenwatch"

↑ Bill Nottingham notting at redhat.com
↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-August/000671.html

Important note about FAS Certs and lookaside cache

Mike McGrath^[1] on Tue Aug 31 00:10:43 UTC 2010 announced^[2],

"The short version (as paraphrased by tibbs):

20:01 < tibbs|h> nss-3.12.6-7 doesn't work, 3.12.6-12 works.

The longer version: A recent update to fas included an upgrade of the OS to the RHEL6 alpha. One unintended consequence of this is we're now generating pkcs#8 keys instead of rsa. This caused some older nss libraries to function differently which caused lookaside cache uploads to fail (lookaside is where the tarballs go when you build a new package).

So, if you're finding yourself unable to upload to lookaside cache. Make sure you update your version of nss. (F13 should be available now, F12 recently got enough karma to push and it should be available soon).

Sorry for the inconvenience."

↑ Mike McGrath mmcgrath at redhat.com
↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-August/000672.html

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 (Sept 2010 - November 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

Tom Callaway announced^[1] that glibc is finally Free Software!^[2]

Paul W. Frields is looking^[3] for anyone who might have anything with the Fedora logo from prior to 2007. "Please go read the full announcement^[4] to see what you can do to help."

There are now libguestfs binaries for Linux distributions other than Fedora^[5], including OpenSUSE 11.3 and Ubuntu 10.4, thanks to the work of Richard W.M. Jones.

Karsten Wade has started planning^[6] for future student programs like the Fedora Summer Coding. "We’re not sticking to summer in one hemisphere and we’re already doing projects that are beyond code. Students Contributing is descriptive of what we’re doing."

Stephen Smoogen wrote^[7] about the role of Fedora, and how the perceptions of it have changed. "For a long time I was under the impression that Fedora was the replacement for Red Hat Linux...Fedora began to morph into a distribution for Innovators by Innovators."

Máirín Duffy summarized^[8] the Fedora Board Meeting of 27 August, 2010.

Jon Masters suggested^[9] a number of things that could benefit Fedora. "Fedora doesn’t suck, but it could be a lot more useful to a lot more people...Policy, feedback, goals, all of these things will determine how many of the things I would like to see are feasible, in line with Fedora’s longer term vision, and so forth. So let’s see a very specific vision and direction and all be much happier for it."

Jon's comments encouraged a number of other well-reasoned discussions, and Máirín Duffy^[10], Alex Hudson^[11] and Luca Botti ^[12] all chimed in with their thoughts.

Ambassadors

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Ambassadors Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

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

Welcome New Ambassadors

The Fedora Ambassadors Project saw a couple of new Ambassadors joining in after undergoing to mentoring process.

Dr. Tilmann Bubeck joined ^[1] The Fedora Ambassadors Project from Germany mentored by Robert Scheck

Samuel Iglesias joined ^[2] The Fedora Ambassadors Project from Spain mentored by Robert Scheck

Michele Bursi joined ^[3] The Fedora Ambassadors Project from Italy mentored by Robert Scheck

Russell Golden joined ^[4] The Fedora Ambassadors Project from the USA mentored by Ben Williams

Summary of traffic on Ambassadors mailing list

Bert Desmet informed ^[1] about the dates for Fosdem ^[2] and hoped to see a large Fedora group again. Gerard Braad expressed hope ^[3] that he may be able to arrange a trip for the event. Paul W Frields informed ^[4] that the budget exists to enable The Fedora Project Leader to make the trip.

John wanted to know ^[5] the status of Fedora Swag for Software Freedom Day celebrations in Dallas. David Duncan stated ^[6] that since the wiki did not indicate an owner, he would go ahead and take ownership to do the necessary coordination.

Manuel Escudero shared news ^[7] about an appliance for musicians and music production called Synthelos Linux ^[8]. Frank Murphy provided the URL to the page about Audion Creation Spin Development ^[9]. Kris Thomsen volunteered ^[10] to help.

Manuel Escudero posted ^[11] about a project called 'Hermes' ^[12] which relates to the building of a feed parser customizable by the user that notifies when there is important news.

Paul W Frields replied ^[13] to the discussion about Fedora in stores ^[14] by pointing to the Trademark Guidelines ^[15]

Daniel VanStone informed ^[16] about an event ^[17] in Arlington, Texas and requested ^[18] those in or, near the area to join. David Duncan responded ^[19] stating that he would be at the Python Convention in Waco with Fedora goodies.

Manuel Escudero posted ^[20] about being unable to run the latest Skype release because if requires the "1:4.6" Qt libraries and asked whether that meant not having Skype in Fedora 14 KDE Spin. Scott Dowdle pointed out ^[21] that Skype does work with Fedora 13 and KDE available from the official repositories. Mathieu Bridon responded ^[22] that the issue was more appropriate for the Fedora users mailing list ^[23] Ryan Rix explained ^[24] the Skype issue in a bit more detail

Continuing on the fedoracommunity.org portal design, Gianluca Sforna compared ^[25] about finding Regional Team resources via ubuntu.com and, the current Fedora infrastructure. Máirín Duffy joined ^[26] the discussion asking as to whether there are more websites that would require linking to.

Max Spevack informed ^[27] that the event organizers should check the availability of power for the Fedora table at the Ohio Linux Fest. Ben Williams confirmed ^[28] about such a check and stated that the Red Hat and Fedora exhibits are side-by-side.

John Poelstra posted ^[29] about upcoming Fedora 14 Schedule Tasks. Schedule retrospective page captures all the important details ^[30]

Bert Desment wondered ^[31] if, looking at past attendee trends, Fosdem could have a structure like FUDCon thus making it easier for people to request sponsorship.

Sascha Thomas Spreitzer announced ^[32] the FUDCon Zurich media exchange which would enable attendees to carry media ^[33] for event owners at other places

Nilesh Vaghela reported ^[34] about Fedora 13 workshop at GLS, MCA Department, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Photographs have been uploaded ^[35] as well

Gianluca Sforna posted ^[36] an EMEA only notice about orders ^[37] for Polo Shirts ^[38] being collected

David Duncan reported ^[39] ^[40] about the participation at the PyTexas event

Joerg Simon posted ^[41] FAmSCo Meeting Minutes for 2010-08-30

Summary of traffic on FAmSCo mailing list

This week we take a break from reporting on FAmSCo meetings and instead, post a summary of the traffic on the mailing list.

Joerg Simon posted ^[1] about FAmSCo meeting for 23-08-2010 being adjourned due to too few FAmSCo members being able to attend

Joerg Simon let the FAmSCo members know ^[2] that he was a bit unhappy with the current process of dealing with reimbursements. He specifically pointed out the issue with Pierros's Africa Trip

María Leandro agreed ^[3] with Joerg and wondered if this is indeed a good thing to happen.

Max Spevack admitted ^[4] that there was room for improvement and promised to work on this and the other reimbursements

Susmit Shannigrahi mentioned ^[5] that his relocation had caused him to miss previous meetings but now that he is settled in he would be attending the meetings at 0600 UTC

With reference to Andrew Overholt's mail last week ^[6], Max thanked Andrew for his continued commitment to Fedora ^[7] hoped to see him during FUDCon in January 2011

Joerg Simon followed up ^[8] with Mustafa Qasim related to copyrighted materials in blog post and best practices of an Ambassador.

Mustafa replied ^[9] mentioned about his confusion and requesting guidance about procedures.

Paul W Frields suggested ^[10] that the Planet be fed with a category/feed specific to Fedora thus allowing Mustafa to use his blog in the manner he is comfortable while at the same time not contravening, however, inadvertently, any guidelines of posting.

Joerg Simon posted ^[11] a reminder about the FAmSCo meeting on 30-08-2010

Joerg Simon proposed ^[12] that the Ambassador Mentors organize a meeting the first Monday every two months starting 06-09-2010 at 1900. An agenda ^[13] has also been posted. This is a direct outcome of the Mentoring Survey.

Joerg Simon posted ^[14] FAmSCo Meeting Minutes for 2010-08-30

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team^[1]. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page^[2].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week's Test Day^[1], held on 2010-08-26, was on OpenSCAP^[2], an open implementation of SCAP, which aims to provide a standardized approach to maintaining the security of systems. There was a good turnout for the Test Day, and it was successful in discovering five significant bugs for the developers to work on, one of which has already been fixed.

This week's Test Day^[3] on 2010-09-02 will be on preupgrade^[4], the Fedora in-place upgrade system. This is always an important test day as we attempt to ensure the upgrade mechanisms for the next release work as expected. As upgrading is a complex process and highly dependent on the installed system, it would help to have as many testers as possible to help track down any bugs we can find. As always, the Test Day will run all day in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel. You will need to have an installed Fedora 13 system you don't mind hurting in order to help out with the testing - but remember, testing in a virtual machine is easy and non-destructive!

Next week's Test Day^[5] on 2010-09-09 will be on systemd^[6], the new initialization system being introduced in Fedora 14. This is a major change which will affect every user of Fedora 14, so it would help to have as many testers as possible to help track down any bugs we can find. As always, the Test Day will run all day in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel. You can help out with testing using a live image or a virtual machine, so there's no need to alter your main system. Please drop by and help test systemd if you can!

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 14 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac^[7].

Fedora 14 Beta blocker review

The first blocker review meeting for Fedora 14 Beta took place on Friday 2010-08-27^[1], and James Laska posted a recap^[2]. The group considered the eight open blockers for the Beta release and accepted two, rejected two, and left four on the list without confirming them, pending further information.

AutoQA

Josef Skladanka posted a draft^[1] of a guide to writing AutoQA tests^[2]. Josef, Kamil Paral and James Laska continued to revise and refine the page over the next few days.

Vojtěch Aschenbrenner improved the upgrade path test^[3] to run automatically on post-bodhi-hook and to improve the output format.

Translation

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n) Project^[1].

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N

Fedora 14 Tasks

John Poelstra informed^[1] the list about the upcoming tasks for Fedora 14. As per the schedule, translation and review of the software UI messages is currently underway.

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/trans/2010-August/007935.html

Problems Related to Statistics Display on translate.fedoraproject.org

After multiple complaints (including non-availability of files^[1]) on the fedora-translation mailing list about errors in the translation statistics on translate.fedoraproject.org, Diego and Piotr removed the deprecated projects and releases from the list of projects that are refreshed during a translation statistic update^[2]. The statistics refresh process was being stalled when it encountered some of these deprecated projects. The list of these packages are still available for historical information.

Earlier, a delayed update of the statistics for initscripts created much confusion about a string freeze break^[3].

Image File for Translation Review Prepared

Fedora Release Engineering team has released an image file, which can be used by the Translators to test the translated messages on the user-interface of software packages lined up for Fedora 14^[1].

↑ http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/trans/2010-August/007937.html

Files for The Fedora Documentation Index Page

In response to a query from Noriko Mizumoto^[1] and Yulia Poyarkova^[2], Ruediger Landmann from the Fedora Documentation team listed out the files that are to be used by the translators to translate the Index page of Fedora Documentation^[3]. However, the translations will not be automatically generated and needs to be published by a member of the the 'doc-publishers' group.

New Members and Sponsors in FLP

Nicolas Maître (French)^[1], Tianle Wang^[2], Hervé Marcy (French)^[3] and Josep Sanchez (Catalan)^[4] joined the Fedora Localization Project recently. Thomas Canniot is now a sponsor for the French team^[5].

Design

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

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

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

Supplemental Wallpapers

After the Design Team members voted on their preferred supplemental wallpaper proposal in the previous week, Máirín Duffy summed^[1] the votes "Here's the votes I've tallied from the list so far", Emily Dirsh created a "winners" wiki page^[2] and Emily and Nicu Buculei started^[3] a double-check on the licenses "The next step is to re-check the licenses to ensure we are all OK with the usage." Martin Sourada is taking care^[4] on the packaging.

A Slogan for the Website

Paul W. Frields asked^[1] the Design Team about polishing the website mockup, in the form of a slogan "Should the Marketing team come up with some text to replace that filler text?" and slide-show "Does the Design team want additional help with the slides seen in the mockups?". As a non-native English speaker Jef van Schendel declined^[2] "Since I'm not a marketing guy and English isn't even my native language, it'd be great if Marketing could have a look at it and write some decent text for the page. :)" but Máirín Duffy was enthusiastic^[3] "YES!!!!!!! ZOMG yes."

Security Advisories

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

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

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