FWN/Issue277

Fedora Weekly News Issue 277

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 277 for the week ending June 1, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This week's announcements from the Project include more details on the decision to retire the Fedora blogs service, announcement of the appointment of Guillermo Gomez to the Fedora Board, and a call for FUDCon APAC hosting bids. In development news, announcement of a FESCo election Town Hall, and some changes to the packaging guidelines this week. Fedora In the News offers 11 new trade press and blogosphere postings on Fedora 15, and Translation brings us up to date on that team's activities, including a fix to the translator credit system, Transifex-related notices, and new members and teams of the Fedora Localization Project globally. Our issue rounds out with security advisories for Fedora 13, 14 and 15 released this past week.

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues 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. 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, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora Announcements

retiring blogs.fedoraproject.org on 2011-07-01

Kevin Fenzi announced:

"Greetings.

There has been some confusion and misunderstanding around blogs.fedoraproject.org recently. This email will hopefully clear them up.

At the Tempe Fudcon, the Fedora Infrastructure team determined that we should retire our blogs.fedoraproject.org service. The reasons for this were:

• We currently have no infrastructure members who are driving support of this service. (Fixing bugs, following upstream or improving the service).

• Wordpress has a long history of security issues, requiring frequent, custom patches or updates to keep it secure.

• Many other sites out there are providing blog services as their core mission, likely resulting in a more feature-full and compelling offering. Some of these sites like wordpress.com are commited to free software, like Fedora is.

• Usage of the service was quite low. We have 92 blogs, but only 39 of them had more than 5 posts. Only 6 of them had posts in the last month, and only 23 had posts in 2011.

While we are open to interested parties stepping forward to help us maintain the service, currently there is no compelling reason to keep the service running.

We will be happy to help any user wishing to transition their blog to another service. We will provide web site redirects and dumps of their posts.

Please contact fedora infrastructure (infrastructure at lists.fedoraproject.org) with further questions or concerns.

kevin"

Appointment to the Fedora Board and reminder of upcoming elections

Jared K. Smith announced,

"The Fedora Board consists of five elected seats and four appointed seats. In this elections cycle, there will be two openings for appointed Board seats and three opening for elected Board seats. As part of the normal Board succession process, one Board appointment is made before Board elections and the other is made after the election cycle.

I'm happy to announce that Guillermo Gomez has accepted the responsibility of serving on the Fedora Board. Guillermo has demonstrated his commitment to Fedora through his tireless efforts on a number of different fronts, including working on packaging, development, and ambassador programs. He has also shown his ability to mentor new contributors and help grow the Fedora community. I have no doubt that he'll continue these efforts while on the Board, and that he'll bring his perspective to help the Board as it makes decisions affecting the direction that Fedora takes. I would like to publicly thank Guillermo for his willingness to serve, and I hope the entire Fedora community will join me in welcoming him to the Board.

Guillermo will fill seat A4 (see the Board History for a list of the seats), which has been held by Stephen Smoogen for the past year. I'd also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Stephen for the work he's done on behalf of the Fedora Board.

Elections for the three open elected seats on the Board (as well as FESCo elections) will begin on June 2nd at UTC 0001, as shown on the Fedora wiki's Elections page. All community members are encouraged to cast their vote until the elections close at the end of the day (UTC time) on June 8th. Within a week or two of the end of elections, another appointment will be made for the remaining Board seat (seat A3). If you have interest in serving on the Fedora Board, please don't hesitate to contact me directly to indicate your willingness to serve.

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

FUDCon APAC now open for bids

Jared K. Smith announced:

"FUDCon (the Fedora Users and Developers Conference) is the premier Fedora event. We typically have a FUDCon event in North America, Latin America, and Europe each year. This year, I'm pleased to announce that we'll also be having a FUDCon event in the Asia-Pacific region.

I've confirmed that we have budget set aside for a FUDCon in the Asia-Pacific region, and I'm now soliciting bids for FUDCon APAC. Bids should be created on the Fedora wiki, and a link to the bid mailed to the fudcon-planning list. All bids should be completed by June 23rd. Soon after the bidding process has closed, I'll meet together with FAMSCo, the Ambassadors in that region, and our primary corporate sponsor to pick the winning location. After the location has been selected, we'll invite people to start registering and due to the details of our budget, the time frame for FUDCon APAC this year will likely be in either November or December. Next year, I'll work to try to spread the FUDCon events around a bit more evenly, so that we can have one FUDCon event roughly each quarter.

The bidding process is described in more detail at. Any interested parties are invited to submit their bids up until June 23rd. If you have any questions or concerns, please bring them up on the fudcon-planning mailing list.

I look forward to seeing your proposals!

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader "

Elections: Notice of change in voting period and correction of eligibility for the Board election

David Nalley announced:

"Hi folks,

Wanted to make you aware of a situation that was discovered last night and responded to this morning.

A number of people caught an issue in the eligibility configuration for voters in the Board Election. Per the Board's Succession Planning document this election is open to any person in the Fedora Accounts System who has completed the CLA. I mistakenly configured this election for CLA+1 which means that in addition to completing the CLA a person would have to be a member of an additional group. Members of the infrastructure team noted this and created a ticket in the Board's trac system late last night (no link as it's not visible to non-board members). That mis-configuration has now been corrected, and to ensure that we have not unduly disenfranchised any potential voters, the Board election period only has been extended by 24 hours from 08 June 23:59:59 to 09 June 23:59:59. Please note that the election period for the FESCo election remains unchanged.

I apologize for mis-configuring the election app, and thank the vigilant members of our community and infrastructure team who caught the issue so early in the process and helped to correct the problem in a timely manner.

Thanks,

David Nalley"

Fedora Development News

The Development Announcement list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

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

Reminder: Fedora Engineering Steering Committee election town hall is today

Robyn Bergeron announced,

"Greetings!

As previously announced, the town hall for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) is today, May 31, 2011.

The town hall will be taking place at 1800 UTC (2pm US-Eastern).

For information on how to participate, please see

Further information about the elections, including the schedule and process, can be seen here

There are 5 seats open in this FESCo election, and 8 candidates. Please consider attending the town hall today, and bringing your questions to be asked of the nominees during the course of the town hall.

A summary and the IRC log will be posted and linked from the wiki after the discussion, if you're unable to watch it live.

FESCo candidates and their information can be seen here

Cheers,

Robyn"

Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

Tom Callaway announced:

"Here is this week's change to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

---

The systemd guidelines on naming unit files have been amended to tell packagers how to make compatibility symlinks for alternate service names should their service have had a different name in the past.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Systemd#Naming

---

These guidelines (and changes) were approved by the Fedora Packaging Committee (FPC).

Many thanks to the Fedora Community, and all of the members of the FPC, for assisting in drafting, refining, and passing these guidelines.

As a reminder: The Fedora Packaging Guidelines are living documents! If you find something missing, incorrect, or in need of revision, you can suggest a draft change. The procedure for this is documented here

Thanks,

~spot"

Outage: Upgrades/Reboots - 2011-05-31 18:00 UTC

Kevin Fenzi announced:

"Outage: Upgrades/Reboots - 2011-05-31 18:00 UTC

There will be an outage starting at 18:00 UTC on 2011-05-31, which will last approximately 2 hours. During this time there may be very short outages of services as machines are updated and rebooted into new kernels.

Machines will be rebooted in an order that allows for least disruption to services.

In many cases, there will be no noticeable downtime due to redundancy and fail-over.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at or run:

date -d '2011-05-31 18:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:

System updates/Reboots.

Affected Services:

• BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
• Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
• Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
• GIT / Source Control
• DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
• Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
• Email system
• Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
• Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
• Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/
• Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.org/
• Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/
• Fedora Talk - http://talk.fedoraproject.org/
• Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/
• Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/
• Smolt - http://smolts.org/
• Spins - http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
• Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
• Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
• Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Unaffected Services:

Ticket Link: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/2790

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the ticket for this outage above."

Fedora Events

The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning. Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding. In plain words, 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 - August 2011)

• North America (NA)
• Central & South America (LATAM):
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
• India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events

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.

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.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Good times with Fedora Linux upgrades (ZDNet UK)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a review of Fedora 15 from the UK ZDNet site:

"I've found that upgrading from version to version of Fedora is quite easy in fact. And one bonus is that all of the software on the system is automatically upgraded to the latest version which includes the latest bugfixes, etc. Sure, running software updates on the existing distribution running on the system will work, too, but updates are no longer released for a particular version of Fedora about 13 months after it is initially released. While this sounds bad, it really isn't. The upgrade process for Fedora is as simple as inserting the CD (or flash drive), selecting "upgrade" at the main menu, and following a few simple steps. What you end up with is a system that is totally up to date and refreshed with all of the latest RPM packages, while all data is completely retained. What is more of a pleasant surprise with Fedora upgrades is that all files and settings are completely retained for most if not ALL software on the system because Linux stores everything in the user's profile folder."

The full post is available.

Fedora 15 (Lovelock) Released (ZDNet UK)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded another posting on the release of Fedora 15 from ZDNet UK:

"Whew. That was longer than I had intended it to be, but I suppose with a release which makes changes of this magnitude it is to be expected. My personal summary is that Gnome 3 seems pretty nice, and I have made a lot more progress in adjusting and adapting to it, and actually starting to like it in a relatively short time than I ever have made with Ubuntu Unity. I think for Fedora loyalists this will be an excellent new release, if they are willing and able to accept Gnome 3; the same is probably true of those who are new to Fedora but at least have supported hardware."

The full posting is available.

Fedora 15 – Bringing You The Latest In Linux

Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article on Fedora 15's release from makeuseof.com:

"It’s another great day in the world of Linux. Fedora 15 was finally released two days ago, and this new release brings a massive amount of changes compared to Fedora 14. In fact, there’s so many changes that a lot of them can’t fit into this article. However, the major features that have changed are too important to leave out, that impact users in a very obvious way."

The full article is available.

Linux Fans Say Fedora 15 Is Too Easy To Use

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a short post highlighting features in Fedora 15 from itportal.com:

"Apart from the new Gnome 3 desktop, another noticeable feature on the platform is the systemd configuration. Systemd replaces SysVinit and Upstart for system and session management and brings a faster boot experience. The Fedora Project has added a cloud based BoxGrinder appliance builder tool to the platform to aid developers. Fedora 15 also comes with Linux 2.6.38, the SystemD configuration utility and a new firewall system. Fedora 15 will also come with a range of new applications including LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox 4 so that it has greater out-of-the-box functionality."

The full article is available.

GNOME 3 on Fedora 15

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a blog posting on the GNOME 3 experience in Fedora 15:

"I’ve just installed Fedora 15, and one of the things that surprised me was GNOME 3. I knew from the release notes that GNOME was coming to Fedora 15, but I didn’t bother looking at the details nor at the larger versions of screenshots. I knew that GNOME 3 was going to be better than the older versions, but never thought that it was this good."

The full article is available.

Intel Sandy Bridge On Fedora 15 Is Decent (Phoronix.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a listing of features in Fedora 15:

"Fedora 15 had worked fine "out of the box" on this notebook, complete with the GNOME Shell and its Mutter compositing working without fault. Fedora 15 is using Linux 2.6.38 and Mesa 7.11-devel, with various back-ports by Red Hat's engineers. Our usual platter of OpenGL Linux tests had also run fine on a stock Fedora 15 installation on this Sandy Bridge hardware without lock-ups or other problems like we have on other distributions"

The full article is available.

Five must have Gnome shell extensions for Fedora 15

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a short posting offering some suggestions for GNOME panel widgets to add:

"The weather is an important part of our life and I like to keep an eye on the weather conditions. There is an extension which helps you to have a weather notification on the panel itself. This extension adds a notification and a menu next to the dateNtime menu at the center of the panel. This is a rather new extension and still have some rough edge to it."

The full posting is available.

Guest session and user management on Fedora 15 (linuxbsdos.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded a posting on user management in Fedora 15:

"User management on Fedora 15 is just as easy as on any other distribution or operating system. And the graphical user management tools (there are two) are very intuitive to use. There are two types of user accounts on Fedora 15 – Standard and Administrator. The Administrator has root or super user privileges. During installation, the user created may be added to the Administrators group. A user in this group can execute all commands using sudo"

The full posting is available.

Fedora 15 Xfce review (linuxbsdos.com)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded another posting from linuxbsdos.com on the Xfce spin for Fedora 15:

"This article presents a review of the Xfce spin, and it is the first for this edition of Fedora on this site. Fedora 15 sports several new features. Some are not particularly relevant to a desktop user, but others are. Those will be noted in the appropriate sections of this review."

The full posting is available.

Fedora (KDE) System Spotted Running Maya 3D on 'Doctor Who Confidential'

Rahul Sundaram forwarded an article noting Fedora trainspotting in an upcoming 'Doctor Who Confidential' episode:

"A System running Fedora with KDE SC 4 was spotted on 'Doctor Who Confidential' episode broadcast this Saturday in UK. It is great to see that large organizations like BBC are using Linux systems for production. The footage starts at 32:00 where Animation supervisor Neil Roche is talking about animation effects showing us a system running Fedora."

The full posting is available.

Linux Mint 11 and Fedora 15: In One Week, Two Gems Debut

Kara Schiltz forwarded:

"As promised previously <http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/228298/five_linux_distributions_get_a_fresh_boost.html>, the final release of Fedora 15 launched on Tuesday to a global audience of fans eager to check out its implementation of the GNOME 3 desktop.

Linux desktops are a particularly critical subject, of course, now that the default Unitydesktop in Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" has proven so controversial, and the Fedora team announced that it was abandoning its own Unity efforts some time ago. GNOME 3 may be slightly less controversial, but it's still generating a lot of discussion."

The full posting is available.

Translation

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

Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee

Translation Credit Loss Problem Resolved

A major issue related to the loss of Translator Credits in modules submitted via transifex.net has been resolved by the Transifex development team. The problem had also been escalated to the Fedora Legal team.

Autotranslate Feature Disabled for Fedora Modules on Transifex

The Autotranslate feature on transifex.net has been disabled for Fedora modules in view of a possible conflict with the Terms of Usage of the Google Translated API that was being used for the feature.

FPCA Signing on Transifex.net

All participants to the Fedora Localization Project are required to sign the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement (FPCA) at https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/fedora/cla/ in addition to signing it on the Fedora Account System

The last date to sign the FPCA is June 17th 2011

Fedora Documentation and Websites missing for F15

A number of Fedora Documentation modules and Fedora Websites modules were not available for translation for Fedora 15 as they could not be migrated to transifex.net before the release. However, translation can be continued for some of these modules which are being gradually migrated by the writers to transifex.net.

New Members and Teams in FLP

Cindy Ludwig (German), Hung Tran (Vietnamese), Tarun Kumar (Hindi), Anurag Garg (Hindi), Hugo Jiménez Hernández (Spanish), Goran Rakic (Serbian), Nuno Martins (Portuguese), Ricardo Gyorfy (Brazilian Portuguese), Ivan Pomykacz (Czech) , Roman Spirgi (German), Florian Masuth (German) joined the Fedora Localization Project recently.

Security Advisories

In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce for the period May 26- June 1, 2011.

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

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 15 Security Advisories

• pure-ftpd-1.0.32-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060972.html
• unbound-1.4.8-5.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060958.html
• php-ZendFramework-1.11.6-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060878.html
• viewvc-1.1.11-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060830.html
• dovecot-2.0.13-1.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060825.html
• gimp-2.6.11-14.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060817.html
• systemtap-1.4-9.fc15 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060791.html

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

• viewvc-1.1.11-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060834.html
• rssh-2.3.3-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060818.html
• dovecot-2.0.13-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060815.html
• systemtap-1.4-6.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060790.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

• viewvc-1.1.11-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060859.html
• rssh-2.3.3-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060829.html
• systemtap-1.4-6.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060810.html
• libcgroup-0.35.1-5.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-May/060769.html