Announcing Fedora 11 Beta
by Jesse Keating
This is the part where I usually come up with something clever to say
before the useful information regarding a development release. I had
something great, I really did. In fact I had the most clever statement
in the world. Only you see, my cat jumped on my keyboard, right when I
was testing emacs (I don't even use emacs!) and the darn X session just
got zapped! All my cleverness gone, and this, well this is just a
tribute.
When Fedora 10 was released, users and press alike gushed: "Slick and
stable... has a rock solid feel." "Fast and easy." "A great release."
What's next for the free operating system that shows off the best new
technology of tomorrow? You can find out at:
http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease
We also hope to repeat the crazy success of Fedora 10's Beta contest!
Test five things in the Beta that are important to you as a user. If you
find a bug *and* report it, you get the free attention of a package
maintainer on a problem personally important to you! Do your part to
make Fedora 11 that much better.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/
Among the top features of this ground-breaking release:
* Automatic Fonts & Mime Installer - Allows programs on the
desktop to automatically install applications, fonts, multimedia
capabilities, and clipart.
* Fingerprint Readers - Better experience for systems with
fingerprint readers, including support through the graphical
Authentication Configuration tool and gnome-about-me.
* Intel, ATI, and Nvidia kernel modesetting - Fedora 10 provided
the first steps by a major distribution in using the kernel
modesetting (KMS) feature to speed up graphical boot. Fedora 11
has increased the video card coverage of the KMS feature, with
more to come.
* Virt Console - Fedora 11 provides more accurate mouse pointer
positioning and higher screen resolutions for virtual machine
consoles, along with other improvements such as simpler use of
USB devices.
* MinGW Cross-compiler - Build and test full-featured Microsoft
Windows programs, from the comfort of a Fedora system, without
needing to use that "other OS."
* Volume Control - The multimedia experience of Fedora users is
improved by an easily understandable and much more flexible
volume control.
But wait, there's more! For developers there are all sorts of goodies:
* Python 2.6 - This new version in Fedora is a precursor to Python
3000 (3.0), including many compatibility measures to help
developers get their code prepared for the next generation of
Python.
* NetBeans 6.5 - NetBeans IDE 6.5 is a significant update of
NetBeans IDE 6.1 that includes improved JavaScript, AJAX, Ruby,
and database support.
* gcc 4.4 - The gcc compiler suite has been updated to the latest
version, featuring better error detection for the latest in
safety and execution.
* Eclipse profiling tools - Add the power of various native
profiling tools into the Eclipse IDE and integrate with the rest
of the development environment.
Peek under the hood and there is still more:
* Desktop Environments - Updates to Gnome 2.26 and KDE 4.2.1 bring
the latest innovations and functionality to desktop users. Xfce
and Sugar have also been updated.
* Anaconda Storage - New storage code for the Anaconda installer
improves the ability to handle new types of storage. The rewrite
does not change the user interface.
* Minimal Platform - New installer features make it much easier to
create very small installations for embedded applications, such
as for a server or desktop appliance.
* Control groups - Allows system administrator to partition the
system resources into different sub groups, and dedicate these
sub groups resources to different applications' need.
* DeviceKit - A simple, modular system service to manage devices
and designed to partially replace HAL. Users gain a graphical
disk management application that integrates nicely into the
desktop.
* DNS Security - DNSSEC (DNS SECurity) is a mechanism that can
prove integrity and authenticity of DNS data.
* ext4 filesystem - ext4 is the new default file system for Fedora
11 (replacing ext3) allowing for larger file system support and
better performance by providing real-time fragmentation
prevention and smarter data allocations.
* sVirt MAC - sVirt integrates SELinux with the Fedora
virtualization stack to allow Mandatory Access Control (MAC)
security be applied to guest virtual machines
* Power Management - Fedora 11 includes new power monitoring
utilities and a new system daemon that automatically adjusts
power settings to reflect the current system use. There is also
a facility to review the system and make suggestions on
improving power consumption.
* IBus input method - Ibus has been rewritten in C, and provides a
simple, clean default system for changing the way international
users input information into a Fedora system.
And that is only the beginning. A more complete list and details of each
new cited feature is available:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList
For release information, including common and known bugs, please refer
to the release notes:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes
Since this is a Beta release, there may still be some rough spots still
in the polishing phase. Some of them are already known and in the
process of fixing. If you find a problem, please check the list of known
issues and then file a bug:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes#Known_Issues
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
14 years, 8 months
Fedora Weekly News #169
by Oisin Feeley
Fedora Weekly News Issue 169
Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 169 for the week ending March 29th,
2009.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue169
This week in "What Happened Last Summer?" Developments conveys an
announcement on the Fedora intrusion of 2008. Announcements reels-off a
list of interesting "Upcoming Events". PlanetFedora selects choice blog
posts including Richard W.M. Jones' RPM-dependency visualizer. Marketing
reports that "Fedora has the Most New Features". Ambassadors reports
that "Fedora is on the move in Italy". QualityAssurance shares the
results of "Test Days" for the nouveau driver and other outstanding
work. Translation catches-up on problems with Persian l10n and more.
Artwork asks is it too late for "A Lion for Leonidas?". Security warns
of a "Firefox Emergency". Virtualization concludes that "KVM and QEMU
Merge Feature Stays in Fedora 11" and on "Web Based libvirt Management"
and a comprehensive "Fedora Virtualization Status Report".
If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see
our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback:
fedora-news-list(a)redhat.com
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join
FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala
Contents
1 Fedora Weekly News Issue 169
1.1 Announcements
1.1.1 Fedora Board
1.1.2 Fedora 11
1.1.3 Qt 4.5.0
1.1.4 FUDCon Berlin 2009
1.1.5 Upcoming Events
1.2 Planet Fedora
1.2.1 General
1.3 Marketing
1.3.1 Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-03-24
1.3.2 Fedora on Twitter and Identi.ca
1.3.3 Fedora has the Most New Features
1.4 Ambassadors
1.4.1 Fedora is on the move in Italy
1.4.2 Got Ambassador News?
1.5 QualityAssurance
1.5.1 Test Days
1.5.2 Weekly meetings
1.5.3 Wiki changes
1.5.4 Bugzappers meeting schedule
1.5.5 Triage Days on the Wiki
1.6 Developments
1.6.1 What Happened Last Summer
1.6.2 Emacs Cabal Disables Xorg Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
1.6.3 ZFS-based Upgrades
1.6.4 Repoview Temporarily Bust in Fedora 10
1.6.5 LGPL Qt-4.5 in Fedora 10 and Fedora 9
1.7 Translation
1.7.1 FLP Meeting
1.7.2 FLP Admin Meeting
1.7.3 Anaconda File Ready for Translation
1.7.4 Release Notes Moved in the Repository
1.7.5 PackageKit 0.4.6 version for Fedora 11
1.7.6 New Members in FLP
1.8 Artwork
1.8.1 Preparing for the Berlin FUDCon
1.8.2 A Lion for Leonidas?
1.9 Security Week
1.9.1 Firefox Emergency
1.10 Virtualization
1.10.1 Fedora Virtualization List
1.10.1.1 KVM and QEMU Merge Feature Stays in Fedora 11
1.10.1.2 Fedora Virtualization Status Report
1.10.2 Fedora Xen List
1.10.2.1 Success with Experimental Fedora 10 pv_ops dom0
1.10.2.2 Yum Repository for Experimental Dom0 Kernels
1.10.3 Libvirt List
1.10.3.1 More Formal libvirt Release Scheduling
1.10.3.2 New Release perl-Sys-Virt 0.2.0
1.10.3.3 SCSI Host Pools Patch
1.10.3.4 API for Host Interface Configuration
1.10.3.5 Web Based libvirt Management
== Announcements ==
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events
Contributing Writer: Max Spevack
=== Fedora Board ===
Our fearless leader[1] reminded[2] the community that the Fedora Board
will be "holding its monthly public meeting on Tuesday, 7 April 2009, at
1800 UTC on IRC Freenode."
Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation.
Join #fedora-board-public to discuss topics and post questions. This
channel is read/write for everyone.
Paul also mentioned a change in the procedure for the meeting. "We're
trying something new (albeit in a minor way) in this meeting. The
moderator will still be available to gather input from the
#fedora-board-public channel, but will voice people, one at a time, in
the queue in the #fedora-board-meeting channel."
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-March/msg00009.html
=== Fedora 11 ===
Jesse Keating[1] announced[2] that the Beta composes are complete, and
that the freeze on Rawhide has been lifted.
Andreas Bierfert[3] announced[4] that opensync was being downgraded to
0.22, as discussed on fedora-devel-list. As a result, maintainers will
need to rebuild "all packages which depend on opensync in some way."
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-March/msg00019....
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AndreasBierfert
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-March/msg00018....
=== Qt 4.5.0 ===
Kevin Kofler[1] informed[2] the community that, "we are working on
providing Qt 4.5.0 as updates for Fedora 9 and 10." There are several
important pieces of information that anyone who maintains a Qt-4-based
package needs to know. Please read the full announcement.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Kkofler
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-March/msg00020....
=== FUDCon Berlin 2009 ===
Max Spevack[1] reminded[2] the community about FUDCon Berlin 2009[3],
including registration[4], lodging[5], and speaking[6] opportunities.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MaxSpevack
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-March/msg00005.html
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009
4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009_attendees
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009_lodging
6.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon_Berlin_and_LinuxTag_2009_talks
=== Upcoming Events ===
March 31-April 2: Linux Solutions[1] in Paris, France.
April 1-2: OpenExpo[2] in Bern, Switzerland.
April 15: NYLUG[3] in New York, New York, USA.
April 17-19: Summer Geek Camp 2[4] in Antipolo City, Phillipines.
April 18: BarCamp Rochester[5] in Rochester, New York, USA.
April 19-22: Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit[6] in Malta.
1.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/SolutionsLinux/SolutionsLinux2009
2.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/OpenExpo/OpenExpo2009_Berne
3. http://nylug.org/
4. http://fedora.bluepoint.com.ph/index.php?entry=20090204000843
5. http://barcamprochester.org/
6. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_EMEA_Partner_Summit_2009
== Planet Fedora ==
In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an
aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.
http://planet.fedoraproject.org
Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin
=== General ===
Dave Malcolm developed[1],[2] a command line app called show that allows
for access to various log files through an SQL-like interface. It
supports aggregates and can handle Apache access logs, /var/log/messages
and /var/log/secure and various others using backends from Augeas[3] for
configuration files like /etc/passwd.
Paul W. Frields explained[4] how to convert virtual disk images between
various formats using utilities from qemu.
Rakesh Pandit wrote[5] a "Report for National Institute of Technology
Hamirpur Software Activity Workshop" describing an event where students
were trained in software development using Free and Open Source
Software.
Nicu Buculei announced[6] that the Open Clipart Library has reached its
goal of 10,000 images.
Richard W.M. Jones posted[7] a visualization of RPM dependencies by
size, as part of his quest to build a minimal Fedora installation. A
later followup noted[8] that very different results occur depending on
how the dependencies are traversed (in this case, breadth-first
traversal versus depth-first). He then released[9] a tool,
rpmdepsize[10] to allow users to generate their own dependency
visualizations.
James Morris described[11] some security subsystem changes going into
the 2.6.29 kernel.
Jef Spaleta continued[12] writing about "the NSF workshop on software
sustainability for cyberinfrastructure" and the mismatch that often
occurs between the length of grant funding and expected software
lifetimes and lifecycles. Chitlesh Goorah followed-up[13] with the
abstract of the Fedora Electronic Lab position paper from the workshop.
Chitlesh later posted[14] some information on FEL's place in the open
source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) world.
Luis Villa wrote[15] about "deliberative nirvana and software design
myopia". He cited the White House's Open For Questions[16] site, built
using tools like Google Moderator and App Engine, allowing it to scale
on a technological level without any realistic limitations but with
results that may not perfectly reflect the United States due to
social/demographic limitations of the technology.
1. http://dmalcolm.livejournal.com/1301.html
2. http://dmalcolm.livejournal.com/1704.html
3. http://augeas.net/
4. http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1548
5. http://rakesh.gnulinuxcentar.org/?p=131
6.
http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2009/03/mission-accomplished-ocal-10k.html
7. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/size-of-rpm-dependencies/
8. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/size-of-rpm-dependencies-2/
9.
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/rpm-dependency-size-viewer-now-avail...
10. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/rpmdepsize/
11. http://james-morris.livejournal.com/39909.html
12. http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/38486.html
13.
http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2009/03/fel-position-paper-for-national-sc...
14. http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-we-shaped-fel.html
15.
http://tieguy.org/blog/2009/03/28/deliberative-nirvana-and-software-desig...
16. http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/
== Marketing ==
In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing
Contributing Writer: Kam Salisbury
=== Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-03-24 ===
The meeting log of the 2009-03-24 Fedora Marketing Meeting was made[1]
available.
=== Fedora on Twitter and Identi.ca ===
Fedora on Twitter.com passed 500 followers and Identi.ca 50
followers[2]!
=== Fedora has the Most New Features ===
In another example of Fedora leading the way, a comparison of the Fedora
11 and an upcoming similiar distribution's release shows that Fedora has
the lion's share of new features.[3]
1.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Marketing_meeting_2009-03-24
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2009-March/msg00146....
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2009-March/msg00232....
== Ambassadors ==
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors
Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero
=== Fedora is on the move in Italy ===
Luca Foppiano's recent blog item[1] outlines developments in Italy.
While Luca mentions that Italy has not yet reached the numbers of the
French and German communities, the Italian community is growing. With
around 7 ambassadors and 10 to 15 regular IRC participants, the
community has put down firm roots in the country.
For 2009, Luca reports that some activities are in the works, like:
* One meeting each month, to keep in touch regularly, have
brainstorming, discussions and involving all interested people.
* Pages on fedora wiki to keep and track internal information like
events and inventory.
"I think we are on the right way," Luca writes. "Stay tuned"
1. http://blog.foppiano.org/2009/03/15/moving-fedora-it-on-rails/
=== Got Ambassador News? ===
Any Ambassador news tips from around the Fedora community can be
submitted to me by e-mailing lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org and I'd
be glad to put it in this weekly report.
== QualityAssurance ==
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].
Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA
=== Test Days ===
This week's[1] was on the Noveau driver[2]for NVIDIA video cards, which
will become the default in Fedora 11. Thanks to an excellent turnout,
over 80 sets of results were reported, and several bug reports were
made: some of the issues have already been resolved. The developer
present was Ben Skeggs, and Adam Williamson, James Laska and Will Woods
were present for the QA team.
Next week again will see two test days. The first[3] will be on the
radeon driver for ATI graphics cards, while the second[4] will be on [5]
power management. Live CDs will be available for both test days so
you'll be able to test without a Rawhide installation. The Radeon test
day will be held on Wednesday (2009-03-01) and the Power Management test
day on Thursday (2009-03-02) in the #fedora-qa channel on Freenode IRC.
If you have a Radeon graphics card, please make sure to come along to
the first test day; if you have a laptop, please come to the second. If
you can't make it on the day, please do the tests and fill out your
results on the page another day.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-26
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NouveauAsDefault
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-04-01
4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-04-02
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PowerManagement
=== Weekly meetings ===
The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-03-25. Will Woods
reported that the Fedora 11 beta release had slipped.
James Laska reported that packaging work on the Semantic extension for
Mediawiki was progressing, and one package had already passed review. He
also noted that he had created a test Mediawiki instance with the
extension enabled, but had not yet been able to do much testing. Adam
Williamson confirmed that he also had not had time to do much testing.
Adam Williamson reported that planning for the Radeon test day was still
in progress. He also reported that Bugzappers team review of Anaconda
bugs for the Fedora 11 beta release had been successfully completed.
Adam Williamson reported that the Xfce test day was fully planned, and
Kevin Fenzi reported that he had successfully generated some live CD
images for the test day. Adam asked if someone could make sure these
images would be available for download.
Will Woods reported that he had been testing upgrade scenarios for the
Fedora 11 beta release and had found several bugs in this area.
James Laska noted that most critical bugs for the beta release were
already known and being tracked, and re-testing was not necessary for
any known issues. A long discussion followed on the correct place and
format in which to note known issues. The group agreed that known issues
for the beta release should be noted within the beta release notes as
separate sub-headings, and a concerted effort should be made to make
sure that the release notes were referred to in all official,
semi-official and unofficial communications regarding the beta release.
Will Woods' suggestion that this was a job for the <marquee> tag was
roundly rejected.
The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[2] was held on 2009-03-24. It was a
short meeting as several key group members were not able to attend.
Matej Cepl reported that he had consolidated his RHEL and Fedora triage
and signature scripts into a single Greasemonkey script[3]. Other topics
were deferred to future meetings or the mailing list for lack of a
reasonable number of group members to make binding decisions.
The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-04-02 at 1600 UTC (note
reversion to previous meeting time) in #fedora-meeting, and the next
Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-04-01 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings
3.
http://mcepl.fedorapeople.org/scripts/greasemonkey/bugzillaBugTriage.user.js
=== Wiki changes ===
The group discussed Christopher Beland's new How to Triage draft[1], and
Chris made several revisions and improvements. Chris summarized[2]
several remaining questions relating to the page, and Adam Williamson[3]
and Edward Kirk provided feedback[4].
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Beland/How_to_Triage
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg01105.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg01125.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg01110.html
=== Bugzappers meeting schedule ===
Adam Williamson requested[1] a final decision on re-scheduling the
Bugzappers group movement, but no final conclusion was yet reached.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg01108.html
=== Triage Days on the Wiki ===
Adam Williamson apologized for the delay, and announced [1] that a
Triage Day page was now available on the Wiki, explaining the existence
and function of the Bugzappers group's weekly Triage Day.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg01129.html
== Developments ==
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the
@fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
=== What Happened Last Summer? ===
Paul W. Frields broke radio silence to provide[1] a detailed explanation
of last August's (2008-08-12) security problem. Briefly, a Fedora
Project systems administrator used a pass-phraseless SSH key. This was
copied from the administrator's machine and used to gain access to
Fedora infrastructure. Subsequently trojaned versions of OpenSSH and rpm
were built and deployed on Fedora infrastructure. The investigation
concludes that these packages were detected and removed before any rpms
were built with them or distributed to Fedora users. The full, detailed
communication includes a time-line.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-March/msg00010.html
=== Emacs Cabal Disables Xorg Ctrl-Alt-Backspace ===
Much work has been done on the Fedora 11 release notes[2] to advise
users of significant changes. A thread started[3] by Gerry Reno to
question the disabling of Ctrl-Alt-Backspace as a key combination to
kill the X server shows that these beta release notes are an important
means to notify prospective users of new features of the operating
system. Gerry was among many contributors to the thread that preferred
to keep the traditional functionality enabled. This change was an
upstream Xorg decision apparently taken to prevent users from
accidentally killing their X servers. Although there had previously been
extensive discussion (reported in FWN#162[4]) and a nice, hot flamewar
on the upstream lists[5] the change seemed to take many by surprise.
This prompted[6] accusations that "[...] big changes like this need to
be advertised extensively instead of just quietly slipped in."
Roland McGrath suggested[7] ways in which xorg.conf could be changed
using a kickstart post-scriptlet but preferred that such choices would
be pushed into the users' "keyboard shortcut" preferences. Gerry
raised[8] the issue of the use of the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace combination
being essential to virtual machine management.
Another dissatisfied user was Arthur Pemberton. He requested[9]
discussion of why such large changes as disabling Ctrl-Alt-Backspace,
removing Xorg.conf in favor of auto-detection, and others had been made
without what he considered to be enough discussion. Response to this
line of questioning suggested[10] variously that the change had been
made "secretly" upstream in order to appease an emacs-using cabal, and
that Fedora had adopted the changes solely because Ubuntu had done so.
This latter accusation was disputed[11] by Matthew Garrett. The emacs
angle seems to come from the fact that the emacs key-combinations
"Ctrl-Alt-End" and "Ctrl-Alt-\" are, with certain keyboard layouts, a
danger to fumble-fingered users. Arthur pointed[12] to an added
complication in a use case in which booting with the monitor powered off
requires restarting the X server.
Felix Miata mentioned[13] that OpenSuSE's solution was to require that
the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace sequence be struck twice before it took effect.
This was also suggested[14] by Gerry during a thread in which Matthew
Garrett and Matthias Clasen explained that the Terminate_Server symbol
could be bound to any desired key-binding through XKB maps.
Ahmed Kamal suggested[15]: "To anyone wanting to kill X when it hangs,
why not login through a VC and `pkill X' .. Just like any process, why
do we have to have magic keys!" Similarly Adam Jackson challenged[16]
the assertion that it would be possible to use the key combination to
deal with faulty drivers.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01682.html
3.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue162#Fedora_11_Alpha_Released
4.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2008-September/038786.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01705.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01691.html
7.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01697.html
8.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01770.html
9.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01791.html
10.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01888.html
11.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01732.html
12.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01820.html
13.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01804.html
14.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01708.html
15.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01989.html
=== ZFS-based Upgrades ===
Neal Becker posted[17] a link to an interesting way to use the
capabilities of the ZFS filesystem to take snapshots of the system and
provide a safe, stable way to upgrade. Seth Vidal seemed[18] sanguine
that this would be relatively easy with a YUM-based system.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01597.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01599.html
=== Repoview Temporarily Bust in Fedora 10 ===
After a report from Uwe Kiewel that he could not create a repoview for
Fedora 10 Everything Seth Vidal posted[19] that there was a fix
available in rawhide but it had not got into Fedora 10 yet. Konstantin
Ryabitsev (Icon) built the updated packages and Josh Boyer posted[20]
that they would be available very shortly.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01585.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01648.html
=== LGPL Qt-4.5 in Fedora 10 and Fedora 9 ===
KevinKofler announced[21] updates of Qt-4.5 for Fedora 10 and Fedora 9.
He detailed the advantages of this backwards-compatible update and
suggested that maintainers of Qt-4-based packages do some quick checks
to ensure that there would be no snags.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01696.html
== Translation ==
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n)
Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N
Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee
=== FLP Meeting ===
The common meeting for the Fedora Localization Project team was held on
25th/26th March 2009[1][2]. The discussion centered around general
feedback
around the new transifex interface for statistics and submissions.
Currently,
it lacks the FLP logo and is also not the landing page for the project.
AnkitPatel from the FLP-Admin team informed that these issues can be
fixed
after the end of Fedora Infrastructure freeze period.
Other issues that were discussed were the non-availability of the
updated
Anaconda file and problem related to leadership in the Persian
Translation
team. The meeting was chaired by NorikoMizumoto.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00181.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00180.html
=== FLP Admin Meeting ===
The FLP Admin team met[1] on 24th March 2009 to discuss about the new
transifex instance, publican/docs support for statistics generation on
transifex, feedback ticket filing FAQ, coordination with Fedora
Infrastructure team to iron out the current issues.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00165.html
=== Anaconda File Ready for Translation ===
Ville-Pekka Vainio announced[1] the availability of the updated Anaconda
.po files for translation. The files were held back due to a delay from
the Anaconda developers who were running additional tests [2].
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00191.html
2. http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=484784#c5
=== Release Notes Moved in the Repository ===
The location of the translated .po files of Fedora Release notes were
recently moved without notification, within the git repository[1][2].
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2009-March/msg00093.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00158.html
=== PackageKit 0.4.6 version for Fedora 11 ===
RichardHughes announced[1] that the 0.4.6 version of PackageKit would be
part of Fedora 11 and translations for this version were to be submitted
by 29th March 2009. PackageKit 0.4.6 is scheduled for release on 30th
March 2009.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00178.html
=== New Members in FLP ===
Hamid Reza Neyari (Persian)[1], Hedda Peters (German)[2], Sam Friedmann
(French)[3], Sveinn Helgi Sverrisson (Icelandic)[4], Imre Csuhai
(Hungarian)[5] joined the Fedora Localization Project during the past
week.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00168.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00186.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00189.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00190.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00192.html
== Artwork ==
In this section, we cover the Fedora Artwork Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork
Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei
=== Preparing for the Berlin FUDCon ===
Max Spevack presented[1] on @fedora-art a check list with items needed
by the organizational team for the upcoming FUDCon in Berlin: a T-shirt
design, a magazine ad, posters, banners and more "I'd love to use FUDCon
Berlin to really show off the coolness of the Fedora Art team, and to
provide our EMEA crew with some reusable resources for future FUDCons in
the region, as well as some stuff that we can use for the F11 release,
and then auction off or something :)"
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00171.html
=== A Lion for Leonidas? ===
Samuele Storari advanced[1] a new concept for the Fedora 11 artwork, a
lion "So I created a new theme based on the meaning of the name:
Leonidas come from Lions and Leonidas was a king,so why don't use
another king? This graphic proposal is about the proud and the glory for
being a king and the subject is shouting:'The King is here!'" The
graphics were generally liked but considered a bit too late by Martin
Sourada[2] and Máirín Duffy[3] "We are *really* late in the schedule
right now, and we had already made a decision, based on our survey, to
go with a landscape depicting Greece so we have a number of mockups and
work around that concept already".
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00179.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00181.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00184.html
== Security Week ==
In this section, we highlight the security stories from the week in
Fedora.
Contributing Writer: JoshBressers
=== Firefox Emergency ===
On Friday, a new version of Firefox [1] was released. The number of
hours that went into this event are amazing to even consider. For most
of the week, there were various groups working non stop to make this
happen. Be sure to update your firefox, it's pretty important.
1.
http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/03/26/cansecwest-2009-pwn2own-explo...
== Virtualization ==
In this section, we cover discussion on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list,
@fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list of Fedora
virtualization technologies.
Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley
=== Fedora Virtualization List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.
==== KVM and QEMU Merge Feature Stays in Fedora 11 ====
After missing the previous round (FWN #165[1]) and some development
delay, the KVM and QEMU package merge feature[2] of Fedora 11 has been
marked as accepted by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee[3].
"Currently, there is both a qemu package and kvm package. The KVM
package's source is a fork of the QEMU source, but KVM regularily
re-bases to the latest QEMU source and merging of KVM support into the
QEMU code base is actively under-way."
1.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue165#Approved_F11_Virtualization_Fe...
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KVM_and_QEMU_merge
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FESCO
==== Fedora Virtualization Status Report ====
After a few weeks off, Mark McLoughlin reached back into the future and
produced an exhaustive status report[1] covering all the developments in
fedora Virtualization for the last month. Grab a bowl of popcorn and dig
in!
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-March/msg00068.html
=== Fedora Xen List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.
==== Success with Experimental Fedora 10 pv_ops dom0 ====
Users are continuing to build experimental kernels with pv_ops dom0[1]
support. Pasi Kärkkäinen was happy to report[2] success getting a
"custom Xen pv_ops dom0 kernel working with virt-install and/or
virt-manager on Fedora 10".
"I was able to run the following on Fedora 10 32bit PAE pv_ops dom0:"
* CentOS 5.3 32bit PAE PV domU
* Fedora 10 32bit PAE PV domU (using virt-install and custom
kickstart to force PAE kernel installation to avoid the anaconda
BUG[3])
Pasi was successful by using:
* pv_ops dom0 kernel (2.6.29-rc8 or newer) "Compile with
CONFIG_HIGHPTE=n since it seems to be broken still"
* libvirt 0.6.1 and related packages from Fedora 10 updates-testing
* xen 3.3.1-9 packages from rawhide/F11 rebuilt for F10
* LVM volumes for domU disks (tap:aio is not yet supported by pv_ops
dom0 kernel)
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-March/msg00071.html
3. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=470905
==== Yum Repository for Experimental Dom0 Kernels ====
Since Koji removes scratch builds after some time, Michael Young
created[1] a repository[2] for the experimental Dom0 capable[3] kernels
he's experimenting with.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-March/msg00078.html
2. http://fedorapeople.org/~myoung/dom0/
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0
=== Libvirt List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.
==== More Formal libvirt Release Scheduling ====
After Daniel Veillard proposed a libvirt 0.6.2 release next week, Daniel
Berrange thought [1] the "release schedule has become a little too
variable in timeframe and quality in recent times[...]" (FWN #155[2])
and suggested:
* Monthly releases aiming for the 1st of the month.
* Any non-trivial new feature for release must be reviewed, approved
and committed at least 1 week before the release.
Daniel Berrange is also "working on an integration test suite, which
will enable us to run automated tests against individual hypervisor
drivers. This will help us detect regressions in hypervisor drivers, and
more importantly let us ensure that all drivers are implementing
consistent semantics for their APIs."
Daniel Veillard tended[3] "to agree on the approximate rule of one
release every months [sic] but I would like to keep this flexible" and
offered this schedule for the next 2 releases:
* 0.6.2:
commit feature freeze: Tuesday 31 Mar
expected release date: Friday 3 Apr
* 0.6.3:
commit feature freeze: Friday 17 Apr
expected release date: Friday 24 Apr
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00435.html
2.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue155#Release_of_libvirt_0.5.0_and_0...
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00446.html
==== New Release perl-Sys-Virt 0.2.0 ====
Daniel Berrange announced[1] an update of the Perl binding for libvirt,
perl-Sys-Virt[2].
New features:
* Fix network create API, and UUID lookups
* Implement storage pool, storage vol, node device, security model,
domain events and event loop APIs
* Improve way constants are exposed to Perl layer
* Fix horrible memory leak in methods returning a hash
* Fix integer overflow in APIs using 64-bit ints (aka 'long long')
* Minimum required libvirt C library for building is 0.6.1
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00449.html
2. http://search.cpan.org/dist/Sys-Virt/
==== SCSI Host Pools Patch ====
David Allan has been working[1] on a reworked SCSI host storage pool[2]
patch for some time, and appears to be close to ironing out all the
bugs.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00420.html
2. http://www.libvirt.org/storage.html
==== API for Host Interface Configuration ====
The Shared Network Interface feature[1] was deferred to Fedora 12 while
David Lutterkort continues to work on netcf[2] (FWN #164[3]).
Now Laine Stump has posted[4] "a first attempt at the public API that
will hook up to libnetcf on the libvirtd side."
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Shared_Network_Interface
2. http://people.redhat.com/dlutter/netcf/
3.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue164#netcf_Network_Interface_Config...
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00397.html
==== Web Based libvirt Management ====
Radek Hladik is developing[1] "a simple web application in PHP to
monitor and control VMs using libvirt." The stateless nature of the web
presents efficiency problems when each action must call out to the virsh
command. Radik sought advice on picking from a list of approaches.
Daniel Berrange picked[2] door number two, which is to create a
libvirt-aware Zend extension in C. "A few people have expressed interest
in this idea in the past, but unforatuntely I'm not aware of anyone
having written any code for this yet. We'd very much like to see a PHP
binding for libvirt developed & happy to give advice/support to anyone
attempting this."
Russell Haering mentioned[3] a Django (python) WebApp he's working on,
called virtadmin[4]. To bridge the stateless to stateful gap, the
"system consists of a python daemon used for actual libvirt interaction
and a separate django web interface that interacts with the daemon via
AMF over https."
Although more of an appliance, it is also worth mentioning oVirt[5].
"oVirt is a small host image that provides libvirt service and hosts
virtual machines and a web-based virtual machine management console."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00402.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00407.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00409.html
4. http://trac.osuosl.org/trac/virtadmin
5. http://ovirt.org/
--
Oisin Feeley
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OisinFeeley
14 years, 8 months
Update and Report on Fedora August 2008 Intrusion
by Paul W. Frields
This communication provides additional information on the Fedora
infrastructure intrusion first reported on August 14, 2008. In part
this communication reiterates information provided in previous
announcements.
On August 12, 2008, a failed cron job on a Fedora host reported an
error to the Fedora system administrators. While investigating the
source of this error, the sysadmins reviewed the recent logs and
discovered that the package complement on the host had changed.
Further investigation showed that changes were the result of tampering
by an intruder. Once the extent of the problem was discovered, we
notified the community:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-August/msg00008...
The compromise was not the result of a software vulnerability, and as
we have previously stated, our investigation has revealed no such
vulnerabilities. Instead, the intruder took a copy of a SSH private
key which was not secured with a passphrase from a system outside the
Fedora infrastructure. The intruder then used that key, which
belonged to a Fedora administrator, to access Fedora systems. In
addition, based on system log sudo entries, we believe the intruder
also compromised that user's password. New security policies for
Fedora administrators directly address the further safeguarding of
keys, as noted below.
The Fedora package signing key was present on a system to which the
intruder had access during the time of the event, but the results of
our investigation did not lead us to believe the intruder accessed the
key.
The intruder used the account's privileges to build modified versions
of openssh and rpm. These packages would have allowed the intruder to
capture the passphrases of unwitting users on our build system, or the
passphrase used to secure the package signing key. With the signing
key's passphrase and access to that key, the intruder would have been
able to fraudulently sign packages.
The intruder did deploy the modified packages, and the modified SSH
package may have captured passphrases for a short time. However, the
investigation supports the conclusion that the modified packages were
discovered before anyone accessed the system to sign any packages
using the modified RPM package. Therefore, we do not believe the
intruder ever had access to the passphrase to the signing key.
Nevertheless, previous announcements have explained clearly the
precautionary reasons for our earlier decision to deploy a new package
signing key. Details on the process and progress of the signing key
changes can be found here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/New_signing_key
The modified packages were only installed on a small number of Fedora
infrastructure systems, and therefore we do not believe Fedora account
holders were at significant risk during the time the intruder had
these packages in place. We also required passphrase and SSH key
changes from Fedora users, to increase our confidence going forward.
To reiterate, our analysis supports our initial findings that the
Fedora Project infrastructure delivered no software compromised by the
intruder to any of its mirrors, or the master repository from which
they synchronize content. Our investigation also shows that the
intrusion affected only a few internal Fedora infrastructure servers.
Most of the mitigation work done by the Fedora Infrastructure team was
precautionary, and allows us to have higher confidence in our present
and future work.
The Fedora Infrastructure team quickly responded to the threat,
isolated the systems in question from the network, made snapshots of
affected hosts, assessed the damage, and proceeded to rebuild Fedora's
entire infrastructure essentially from scratch. By the end of the
first week after the event, most essential systems were functioning
nominally again. The remainder of the work took close to three weeks
to complete fully, and return all systems to normal status.
To increase our security posture, the Fedora Infrastructure team now
requires all members of the Fedora system administrator groups to use
passphrases on their private keys. That policy is found, along with
other policies of the Infrastructure team, here:
http://infrastructure.fedoraproject.org/csi/security-policy/
The Infrastructure team is also actively developing a Community
Services Infrastructure project (http://fedorahosted.org/csi) and
supporting documentation to include these lessons in their guidance.
Team members have also worked on deploying SELinux throughout our
infrastructure as well as an audit and prelude intrusion detection
system for added good measure. Furthermore, the Fedora release
engineering team is also leading efforts on further improvements and
refinements to Fedora's package signing system and procedures.
Community members are invited to contact the appropriate Fedora team
if they wish to get involved in any of these processes.
The specific facts that emerged during the investigation, which was
international in nature, made it necessary to restrict information
flowing to the public, to avoid damaging the effectiveness of the
investigation. That restriction has been unfortunate, and is not in
the ordinary spirit of openness and transparency with which we strive
to define the Fedora Project.
We appreciate the patience and support the Fedora community has given
us over the past several months. We also wish to express our thanks
for the technical assistance of the security response team at Red Hat.
This report concludes the matter from the Fedora Project's
perspective, and provides a final accounting of the intrusion event
and response by the Fedora infrastructure and management teams.
Following is a detailed time line, in UTC, of activities by Fedora
contributors.
= = = = =
2008-08-12 01:00:00 - Last packaging signing process from a Fedora admin. Key would have been on host temporarily up until this time.
2008-08-12 07:49:05 - Standard Fedora 'pkgconfig' package installed by the intruder. This package is required to build an 'openssh' package. Intruder proceeds to build a modified 'openssh' package.
2008-08-12 08:10:46 - modified 'openssh' package installed by intruder.
2008-08-12 17:46:50 - Standard Fedora 'gettext' package installed by intruder. This package is required to build an 'rpm' package.
2008-08-12 20:18:36 - Standard Fedora 'mc' package installed by intruder, possibly for convenience of stealth.
2008-08-12 21:33:59 - Bacula backup started (scheduled job)
2008-08-12 22:01:54 - Bacula backup Ended
2008-08-12 22:31:51 - modified 'rpm' package installed (along with standard Fedora package dependencies for 'rpm').
2008-08-12 22:51:00 - Cron job failed, notified admins.
2008-08-12 22:53:00 - Fedora Infrastructure admins first noticed and started poking around at why RPM had changed.
2008-08-12 23:11:00 - Infrastructure team lead is notified and more prodding begins.
2008-08-12 23:38:00 - Infrastructure team members gather for discussions on dedicated, private IRC channel and conference call.
2008-08-13 01:50:00 - It becomes more clear that a script is not at fault. LVM snapshot taken.
2008-08-13 04:00:14 - Bacula backup (during the intrusion) restored to secure location
2008-08-13 04:04:14 - Discovery of an RPM in /root/.ssh/ provides proof of malicious intent.
2008-08-13 04:05:00 - Red Hat security team notified.
2008-08-13 04:46:00 - Compromised host prohibited from routing out or in. All machines on its network are preventing access from it. Outbound connections logged.
2008-08-13 05:16:00 - Fedora Project Leader notified.
2008-08-13 06:13:00 - Host state saved (Xen guest). We have a running copy of the host as it was without a reboot.
2008-08-13 06:14:00 - Users who have accessed the machine during the intrusion advised to change their passwords and SSH keys.
2008-08-13 10:13:00 - Work continues in concert with Red Hat security team members. Preliminary announcement prepared
2008-08-14 17:36:00 - All passwords and SSH keys disabled.
2008-08-14 23:15:13 - Preliminary announcement to fedora-announce-list, 1+19:11 after initial determination of malicious event.
2008-08-15 02:47:00 - All administrator access forced to shell access only for partial re-enabling of account system.
2008-08-15 12:00:00 - (approximate) Fedora's package build system, koji, patched to revoke all access.
2008-08-15 13:11:00 - Last package build routine allowed to complete before shutdown. Comprehensive verification of the build system database contents begins, comparing against known source for malicious content.
2008-08-16 15:30:03 - Update announcement to fedora-announce-list, 3+11:26 after initial determination of malicious event.
2008-08-17 22:34:00 - Members of sysadmin-web group allowed back on app servers.
2008-08-18 04:06:31 - Primary content verification of build system and CVS completed.
2008-08-18 18:06:00 - CVS admins allowed back on servers, and handle additional verification for hosted projects.
2008-08-19 02:07:45 - Update announcement to fedora-announce-list, 5+22:03 after initial determination of malicious event.
2008-08-19 02:37:00 - Hosted project verification completed, and Fedora Hosted back online.
2008-08-19 20:19:00 - Anonymous access via cvspserver allowed.
2008-08-20 02:53:00 - Writable access to cvs1 reactivated.
2008-08-20 18:35:00 - Koji build system officially open and building again.
2008-08-22 12:00:02 - Update announcement to fedora-announce-list, 9+07:56 after initial determination of malicious event.
2008-09-19 02:41:29 - Update announcement to fedora-announce-list, 37+22:37 after initial determination of malicious event. Investigation and issue resolution continues.
2009-03-30 14:00:00 - Final report to fedora-announce-list, 229+9:56 after initial determination of malicious event.
= = = = =
--
Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
14 years, 8 months
Reminder: Fedora Board IRC meeting 1800 UTC 2009-04-07
by Paul W. Frields
The Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Tuesday, 7 April
2009, at 1800 UTC on IRC Freenode. The Board has settled on a
schedule that puts these public IRC meetings on the first Tuesday of
each month. Therefore, the next following public meeting will be on 5
May 2009. For these meetings, the public is invited to do the
following:
* Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation.
* Join #fedora-board-public to discuss topics and post questions. This
channel is read/write for everyone.
**CHANGE OF SOP: We're trying something new (albeit in a minor way) in
this meeting. The moderator will still be available to gather input
from the #fedora-board-public channel, but will voice people, one at a
time, in the queue 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. If this process works well, we'll use it at later meetings and
note the change on the wiki.
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!
--
Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
14 years, 8 months
Fedora Weekly News #168
by Oisin Feeley
Fedora Weekly News Issue 168
Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 168 for the week ending March 22nd,
2009.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue168
With the Fedora 11 Beta release slipping by one week Announcements
reminds the community about "FUDCon Berlin 2009". In PlanetFedora the
recent Red Hat patent acquisitions are among several topics covered.
Ambassadors reports on the OLPC XO work at Rochester Institute of
Technology. QualityAssurance gets excited about "Test Days" for
DeviceKit, Xfce and an upcoming one for nouveau. Developments reflects a
lot of anxious upgrading and "How to Open ACLs and Find Non-responsive
Maintainers". Translation notes the "Upgraded Transifex" and translation
to Cornish. Infrastructure advises in "Change Requests" that the infra
team is in freeze and lists all the approved recent changes and
hotfixes. Controversy rages in "Artwork" over the choice of Greek temple
imagery. Yet again SecurityAdvisories lists packages that you want,
really, really want. Virtualization worries about "More Flexible x86
Emulator Choice". Needless to say there's lots more to read this week!
If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see
our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback:
fedora-news-list(a)redhat.com
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join
FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala
Contents
1 Fedora Weekly News Issue 168
1.1 Announcements
1.1.1 Fedora 11
1.1.2 FUDCon Berlin 2009
1.1.3 Upcoming Events
1.2 Planet Fedora
1.2.1 General
1.3 Ambassadors
1.3.1 RIT Pitches in on OLPC Project
1.3.2 Got Ambassador News?
1.4 QualityAssurance
1.4.1 Test Days
1.4.2 Weekly meetings
1.4.3 Wiki changes
1.4.4 Bugzilla status, priority and severity procedures
1.5 Developments
1.5.1 Auto Upgrading YUM Not Worth It
1.5.2 How to Update from Fedora 10 to Rawhide
1.5.3 Fedora 11 Beta Slips by One Week
1.5.4 Finding the Source
1.5.5 Fedorahosted Releases
1.5.6 How to Open ACLs and Find Non-responsive Maintainers
1.6 Translation
1.6.1 Upgraded Transifex
1.6.2 New Coordinators/Members in FLP
1.7 Infrastructure
1.7.1 svn-to-git Mirror
1.7.2 Change Requests
1.8 Artwork
1.8.1 Post-inclusion Feedback for the Beta Artwork
1.8.2 A Possible New Direction for the Wallpaper
1.8.3 Completing all the Graphic Pieces
1.9 Security Advisories
1.9.1 Fedora 10 Security Advisories
1.9.2 Fedora 9 Security Advisories
1.10 Virtualization
1.10.1 Enterprise Management Tools List
1.10.1.1 Virt-p2v and RAID Controller Drivers
1.10.1.2 NetWare Support added to virtinst
1.10.2 Fedora Xen List
1.10.2.1 Which Xen Configuration Files
1.10.3 Libvirt List
1.10.3.1 Xen PCI Device Passthrough
1.10.3.2 Secure Guest Migration Draft Patch
1.10.3.3 More Flexible x86 Emulator Choice
== Announcements ==
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events
Contributing Writer: Max Spevack
=== Fedora 11 ===
Jesse Keating[1] announced[2] that the Beta of Fedora 11 will slip one
week, due to some issues with both PPC and anaconda. The new Beta
release date is March 31.
=== FUDCon Berlin 2009 ===
Max Spevack[3] reminded[4] the community about FUDCon Berlin 2009[5],
including registration[6], lodging[7], and speaking[8] opportunities.
1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-March/msg00015....
3. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MaxSpevack
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-March/msg00005.html
5. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009
6. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009_attendees
7. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009_lodging
8.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon_Berlin_and_LinuxTag_2009_talks
=== Upcoming Events ===
March 23-29: LUGM OpenWeek [1] in Manipal, India.
March 25: Document Freedom Day in Kolkata, India.
March 25: Document Freedom Day in Opera, Italy.
March 26: Infotech Niagara Beta Awards[2] in Buffalo, New York, USA.
March 26: Ithaca College EdTech Day[3] in Ithaca, New York, USA.
March 27-29: PyCon[4] in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
March 31-April 2: Linux Solutions[5] in Paris, France.
April 1-2: OpenExpo[6] in Bern, Switzerland.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/LUGMopenweek
2. http://www.infotechniagara.org/events/?id=193
3. http://www.ithaca.edu/edtechday/
4. http://us.pycon.org/2009/about/
5.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/SolutionsLinux/SolutionsLinux...
6.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/OpenExpo/OpenExpo2009_Berne
== Planet Fedora ==
In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an
aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.
http://planet.fedoraproject.org
Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin
=== General ===
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury explained[1] how to build a Live USB stick
from a Live CD image. Another option, suggested in the comments, is to
use the liveusb-creator[2].
Paul W. Frields described[3] some of the preparations that the Fedora
Marketing team has been making for Fedora 11, including in-depth
articles on some of the new features.
Richard Hughes showed off[4] an updated Gnome PackageKit update viewer.
Rob Tiller, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP at Red Hat
responded[5] to concerns within the community about Red Hat's patenting
efforts and the Red Hat Patent Policy[6]. Paul W. Frields wrote[7] about
the response, and a lively discussion in the comments ensued.
David Woodhouse posted[8] about some documentation he had written to
support Greylisting and the exim-greylist package shipped with Fedora.
Jef Spaleta wrote[9] his "most important Fedora blog post ever" which
revolves around the "NSF sponsored workshop on Sustainable
Cyberinfrastructure"[10]. The workshop is important "for people who
believe in either the function of basic science research as a catalyst
for technical and social progress or people who believe strongly in open
development methodologies as a catalyst for deeper and more impactful
collaborations. Even more so if you happen to be in the union of those
groups and a US citizen and care about how the NSF as a Federal agency
goes about funding research and education."
As an interesting aside, Dave Jones mentioned[11] that it takes two days
and twenty minutes to run badblocks on his new 1TB hard drives.
Richard W.M. Jones worked[12] on building a minimal Fedora installation
and managed to get an installed system down to 225MB. He later
responded[13] to a comment about why it makes sense to minimize Fedora
as opposed to building a custom minimal distribution. And then he
managed[14] to get the minimal distribution down to 15.9MB.
Amit Shah benchmarked[15] various filesystems (including ext4) to find
out how well they handled pre-allocation of disk space and the new Linux
fallocate support.
1. http://sherry151.blogspot.com/2009/03/live-usb-magic.html
2. https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/
3. http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1437
4. http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/03/17/the-next-update-viewer/
5.
http://www.press.redhat.com/2009/03/17/discouraging-software-patent-lawsu...
6. http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html
7. http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1536
8. http://www.advogato.org/person/dwmw2/diary.html?start=201
9. http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/37433.html
10. http://cisoftwaresustainability.iu-pti.org/
11. http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/2009/03/19/badblocks-1tb-drive/
12. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/why-minimal-is-225-mb/
13.
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/why-not-use-a-minimal-distribution/
14.
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/febootstrap-minimal-now-159-mb/
15.
http://www.amitshah.net/2009/03/comparison-of-file-systems-and-speeding.html
== Ambassadors ==
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors
Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero
=== RIT Pitches in on OLPC Project ===
(This item corrects a report on this topic filed in FWN Number 166)
The Fedora OLPC project seems to have found a friend at Rochester
Institute of Technology[1]. Fedora Ambassador Karlie Robinson met RIT
professor Stephen Jacobs at an OLPC Grassroots meeting on January 22 and
learned of Jacobs' interest in doing a class around the XO.
Days later, David Nalley announced the Fedora Ambassador Developers
Project and Karlie brought Professor Jacobs up to speed on what Fedora
is doing around the XO,[2] where Fedora is providing XOs to those who
will do development work. The deal revolved around getting XOs for
Jacobs classroom in exchange for the RIT students working on Greg
DeKoenigsberg's 4th Grade Math project[1].
1. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Rochester,_NY
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2009-February/msg00033.html
=== Got Ambassador News? ===
Any Ambassador news tips from around the Fedora community can be
submitted to me by e-mailing lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org and I'd
be glad to put it in this weekly report.
== QualityAssurance ==
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].
Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA
=== Test Days ===
This week we had two test days, far more exciting than the boring
regular one! The first[1] was on DeviceKit[2], which will replace HAL
for disk and power management in Fedora 11. Turnout was not the highest,
but those who came along were able to find several issues which are
being addressed with the help of some of the developers involved,
including David Zeuthen and Matthias Clasen. The second test day[3] was
on Xfce[4], which is being updated to a major new release (4.6) in
Fedora 11. A group of enthusiastic Xfce users showed up and were able to
do some productive testing and refining of the Xfce environment together
with the lead packager for Fedora, Kevin Fenzi.
Next week's test day[5] will be on Nouveau[6], the new default video
driver for NVIDIA cards for Fedora 11. This is a very important event,
as NVIDIA graphics cards are the most popular type, and the new driver
is a fairly big change, so we need testing on a wide range of hardware
to make sure it's ready. A live CD will be available for the day so
you'll be able to test without a Rawhide installation. It will be held
on Thursday (2009-03-26) in the #fedora-qa channel on Freenode IRC. If
you have an NVIDIA graphics card, please make sure to come along, or -
if you can't make it on the day - do the tests and fill out your results
on the page another day.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-17
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DeviceKit
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-19
4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Xfce
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-26
6. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NouveauAsDefault
=== Weekly Meetings ===
The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-03-18. The full log is
available[2]. James Laska reported good progress in his work on the
Semantic test result reporting extension for mediawiki. Packaging is
complete and he is next planning to put up a test instance of mediawiki
with the plugin enabled.
Adam Williamson reported that the Intel graphics adapter test day had
been a success, and a follow-up event was in the works. He also reported
that a Radeon test day had not yet been planned and promised to follow
that up with the appropriate developers.
Jesse Keating was asked to report on the status of the beta release. He
said that current Rawhide and particularly Anaconda was still too
unstable and said he expected the beta release would slip if he could
not get a Rawhide tree with a good Anaconda soon. He requested further
testing of Rawhide installation from the QA group, and some help from
the main QA group and the Bugzappers group on organizing and checking
existing bug reports against Anaconda.
Adam Williamson reported that the Xfce test day was fully planned, and
Kevin Fenzi reported that he had successfully generated some live CD
images for the test day. Adam asked if someone could make sure these
images would be available for download.
The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[3] was held on 2009-03-17. The full
log is available[4]. John Poelstra asked for feedback on the draft
Standard Operating Procedure for new memberships which he had sent to
the mailing list. The group generally approved of the draft. It was also
agreed that the 'triagers' and 'fedorabugs' groups in FAS should be
merged or linked, so that anyone who joined the triagers group
automatically becomes a member of fedorabugs. Edward Kirk proposed not
putting the SOP online and into operation until the appropriate changes
have been made in FAS, and this was agreed. Christopher said he will
send a draft of the new 'How to Triage' page to the mailing list for
discussion in the coming week.
The group discussed Adam Williamson's draft front page for the Wiki
area. Discussion centred on the links in the Tools and Procedures
section. Adam explained that he expected further work on the Wiki to
clean up and merge the pages linked to in that section, so the number of
links would be smaller. Christopher Beland fixed the links in the draft
which were broken. Christopher proposed putting up the new page
immediately and then working to clean up the pages further down the
hierarchy, and this was agreed by the group.
The group discussed the revised Components and Triagers[5] wiki page and
agreed the new layout was good. John Poelstra did not like the static
statistics. Adam Williamson pointed out that it is planned to replace
them with dynamically updated data from Brennan Ashton's metrics tool
once it is complete.
John Poelstra brought up the potential meeting time and date change.
Adam Williamson promised to send a mail to the mailing list summarising
the results of the matrix survey to see if a definite conclusion could
be made about whether to move the meeting.
The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-03-25 at 1700 UTC (note
changed time, in UTC reference frame) in #fedora-meeting, and the next
Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-03-18 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings
2. http://www.happyassassin.net/extras/fedora-qa-20090318.log
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings
4.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings/Minutes-2009-Mar-17
5. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Components_and_Triagers
=== Wiki Changes ===
Adam Williamson announced[1] that he had added a new column to the
Components and Triagers[2] wiki page to make it easy to find out who is
the maintainer of a given component (and other information on it).
Christopher Beland changed[3] the stock response text for EOL bugs in an
attempt to make it friendlier. Adam pointed out[4] that changes to the
stock responses should be mirrored in the GreaseMonkey script. Chris
also announced[5] a draft of a new How to Triage page for the group's
feedback. Adam and Milos Jakubicek both approved of Chris' work and
provided some suggestions to improve it.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00885.html
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Components_and_Triagers
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00926.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00937.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00931.html
Bugzilla status, priority and severity procedures
Christopher Beland began a discussion[1] about the use of various
statuses, resolutions and the priority and severity fields in Bugzilla.
Adam Williamson pointed out[2] that some of the more unconventional
statuses and resolutions come from the RHEL side, where there is a
specific and carefully defined workflow, and these statuses do not
always mean exactly what they might appear to. Further to this, Tom Lane
noted[3] that the Bugzilla page defining each status[4] contains
accurate information on the RHEL workflow. He then suggested[5] that a
similar page should be created to define a standard workflow for Fedora
bugs, and included in Bugzilla. Jesse Keating suggested[6] that instead,
the Fedora and RHEL workflows should be merged so that both would use
the same statuses and resolutions in the same ways.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00942.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00943.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00949.html
4. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/page.cgi?id=fields.html#status
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00960.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00962.html
== Developments ==
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the
@fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
=== Auto Upgrading YUM Not Worth It ===
A discussion over the possible ways to upgrade from Fedora 10 to Fedora
11 was started[1] by Gerry Reno when he asked why preupgrade[2] from
Fedora 10 only presented Rawhide as an option and not Fedora 11 Alpha.
A quick answer posted[3] by Gianluca Sforna mentioned the technical
difficulties of tracking the versions of packages included in the alpha
release. Paul W. Frields was[4] concerned that anyone trying such an
upgrade made sure to update rpm before upgrading. This latter point
spawned[5] a longish thread in which the possibility of making YUM take
care of checking to see whether a newer version of itself or rpm is
available.
Will Woods suggested[6] that running preupgrade instead of doing a `yum
upgrade' avoided all that confusion.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01145.html
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpgrade
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01147.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01168.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01185.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01254.html
How to Update from Fedora 10 to Rawhide
When "nodata" reported[1] that an attempt to update rpm resulted in
errors and preupgrade also failed he concluded[2] that the
instructions[3] on the wiki were flawed.
Seth Vidal and Jesse Keating were[4] sure that "nodata" was not using
the correct procedure which they stated as a two stage process with the
first step being a:
yum update rpm
with the Fedora 10 repository enabled and then to enable the Rawhide
repository and do a general:
yum update
Unfortunately this seemed[5] to not work for "nodata" and Michael A.
Young's suggestion[6] that a "[...] temporary issue with F10 having a
more recent version of audit-libs than rawhide [...]" seemed like a
promising lead. "Nodata" resolved[7] problem by using the rescue CD to
do a "rpm -e --nodeps" and then "rpm --rebuilddb".
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01227.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01245.html
3.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes#RPM_issues
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01250.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01253.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01266.html
7.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01231.html
=== Fedora 11 Beta Slips by One Week ===
Jesse Keating announced[1] that Release Engineering, QA and maintainers
had agreed that the beta release of Fedora 11 would slip by seven days
due to several issues mostly related to the rewrite of anaconda storage.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01163.html
=== Finding the Source ===
A request was posted[1] for help in finding the Fedora kernel sources by
Joe Ovanesian. A quick pointer was given[2] by Tom Diehl:
# yum install yum-utils
# yumdownloader --source package_name
Eric Sandeen wondered[3] if it might be better to use the upstream
repositories and Joe explained[4] that his objective was to build a new
kernel from source and use KGDB[5] to gain familiarity with the source.
Todd Zullinger pointed[6] to a goldmine of information on the topic on
the wiki[7].
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01100.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01101.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01130.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01151.html
5. http://kgdb.linsyssoft.com/
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01154.html
7. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Building_a_custom_kernel
=== Fedorahosted Releases ===
Jon Stanley posted[1] a quick note to say that he had made it easier to
specify the upstream source URL in specfiles due to a change in
fedorahosted.org
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01015.html
=== How to Open ACLs and Find Non-responsive Maintainers ===
A couple of related threads dealt with the need to deal with a package
which lay dormant apparently due to maintainer inactivity.
Manuel Wolfshant had inquired[1] earlier in the week about the allowing
the provenpackagers to fix the gdal package. Jon Stanley promised[2] to
re-add a ticket dealing with the issue to an upcoming FESCo meeting.
In a separate thread the latest Rawhide Report[3] led Kevin Kofler to
ask[4] for an opening of the ACLs on gdal[5] so that it could be fixed
for multiple dependent packages. When Jesse Keating asked[6] Alex
Lancaster if he started the non-responsive maintainer process the answer
appeared[7] to be that it was Jesse himself. In an aside MilosJakubicek
provided[8] links to the current process. Alex seemed[9] to demonstrate
clearly that the maintainer was inactive.
1.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00962.html
2.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01035.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01234.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01268.html
5. GDAL is a library to handle Geographic Information Systems data
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01296.html
7.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01301.html
8.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01298.html
9.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg01303.html
== Translation ==
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n)
Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N
Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee
=== Transifex Upgraded ===
The backend for the statistics and submission page of FLP -
translate.fedoraproject.org, has been migrated[1] to the new version of
Transifex[2]. Submission of translations would continue via the new
Transifex instance. Additionally, generation of translations statistics
would also be done by this tool. All the modules from the damned-lies
instance, used to generate statistics earlier, are now part of the
transifex instance[3].
The new translate.fedoraproject.org page also allows translators to put
temporary locks on files that they are currently translating. Bugs about
the FLP transifex instance can be filed in the Red Hat bugzilla
(Fedora-L10n/Transifex component) and bugs about Transifex are to be
reported in the upstream Transifex trac[4].
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00147.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00127.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00135.html
4. http://transifex.org/newticket
=== New Coordinators/Members in FLP ===
Steven Whitehouse joined the FLP [1][2] to start the Cornish language
translation team. Kris Thomsen is the new Danish team coordinator[3].
1.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00123.html
2.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00125.html
3.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00111.html
== Infrastructure ==
This section contains the discussion happening on the
fedora-infrastructure-list
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure
Contributing Writer: Huzaifa Sidhpurwala
=== svn-to-git Mirror ===
Jim Meyering said [1] that he would like to set up an svn-to-git mirror
for a project on fedorahosted. The mirror was set up[2] and will be
maintained by him at the Red Hat Emerging Technology Group webspace. It
is not open for ssh access to people outside of Red Hat, so it's rather
limited.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-March/msg0...
2. http://git.et.redhat.com
=== Change Requests ===
Due to the impending release of Fedora 11 beta, the infrastructure team
is in a change freeze right now.
The following change requests were made during the week:
1. [1] Change a piece of code in fas2 which would reduce a particular
loop time from 5 mins to 8 seconds. This change was approved and the
hotfix was put on the server.
2. [2]Add redirect from /legal/trademarks/guidelines to
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines. This change
was approved.
3. [3] Make transifex run under transifex user and not apache user. This
change was also approved and committed.
4. [4] Change request to update transifex on app1 to the 0.5 version.
The change was approved.
5. [5] Remove Fedora8 from the infofeed updates: Somehow fedora8 is
still being looked for for the infofeed rss feed on
planet.fedoraproject.org. This was approved and changes were made.
6. [6]Use single quotes for the mysql backup cronjob,this has been
causing us to get extra cron spam (and stalling mysql updates). Again
this change was approved and committed.
7. [7]Make sure inactive accounts can't auth to other webapps. Approved
and committed.
8. [8] Minor bodhi update. Changes include. Again approved and applied.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-March/msg0...
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-March/msg0...
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-March/msg0...
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-March/msg0...
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-March/msg0...
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-March/msg0...
7.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-March/msg0...
8.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-March/msg0...
== Artwork ==
In this section, we cover the Fedora Artwork Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork
Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei
=== Post-inclusion Feedback for the Beta Artwork ===
After the new wallpaper design was included in Rawhide and presented to
the users, the feedback process started.Jef Spaleta forwarded[1] a
concern raised on the OLPC list[2] by Mikus Grinbergs, about the
religious implications of using a temple "Seems to me whoever chose the
background that was introduced last week did not consider that items
with overtones of dissentious subjects such as politics or religion
might elicit emotional reactions. I'm concerned that when my system
prominently shows a picture with a temple, that might be interpreted as
'Mikus worships paganism'."
Martin Sourada did not[3] support this reaction: "I don't see a valid
reasoning there. There is vast difference between you worshiping ancient
Greece gods (not that it would be something bad if you actually do) and
having a huge Zeus' temple wallpaper hanging on your wall, let alone the
wallpaper in your PC." Paul Frields explained[4] "the conveyance as far
as I know is simply to acknowledge the heritage of the 'Leonidas' name.
Any other inference is probably a stretch" and Brian Hurren also
supported[5] this line of reasoning: "I think that the modern meaning of
a Zeus temple is a lot broader now than it was before. Kind of like an
old abbey in England would have a different meaning now." The
conversation was spiced by a very sarcastic reaction[6] from Máirín
Duffy "I'm just too distraught to carry on. I feel like my entire world
is full of these things symbolizing other things, and I'm finding myself
strangely offended by everything."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00100.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2009-March/msg00147.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00101.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00103.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00107.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00104.html
Matthias Clasen raised[1] another kind of criticism regarding the
composition: "IMO it is really overloaded with all too well-known
motifs, to the extent that it appears almost like a satire of a
constructed background image. I mean, it has clouds and mountains and
doves and a black forest and a green lawn _and_ a greek temple. Any 2
out of these 6 might combine to a nice background, but all six are just
too much for my taste", a kind of positive feedback appreciated[2] by
Máirín as the purpose of releasing the graphic concepts early "Thank you
for the feedback. Receiving this kind of feedback is exactly why we
aimed to get a wallpaper into the beta."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00109.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00111.html
=== A Possible New Direction for the Wallpaper ===
Considering the received feedback Máirín Duffy, raised the idea[1] of a
possible change of direction and going with a different theme, islands
"I saw the movie Mama Mia this weekend for the first time, and it's a
movie based on a pretty Greek island" or Mount Olympus "we could take
the temple out of the current wallpaper and focus a bit more wholly on
the mountains as the symbol of Greece rather than the temple", with
Martin Sourada supporting[2] a simplification of the 'temple' image
"Hm... I'd say get rid of the trees or make them just complimentary part
of the wallpaper, drop the focus away from mountains and instead have it
on the temple" and Nicu Buculei wished for[3] more time to gather
post-beta feedback "possibly this will make Paul nervous and it may put
some deadlines in danger, but before committing to a radical change, I
think it would be useful to see the post-beta feedback from a larger
mass the users: the first wave of reviews, blogs and forum talks (the
perception setters). We all here, supporters or critics, are pretty much
subjectively involved and I think a breath of fresh air from the outside
is valuable."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00112.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00117.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00137.html
=== Completing all the Graphic Pieces ===
Máirín Duffy posted[1] on @fedora-art a template proposal for various
banners which would be used in Fedora 11 "What do you think about this
as a base style to go with for the various banners/splashes for F11?"
and asked the team for opinions about the Greek cultural motifs "Is it
too over-the-top Greek? I was trying to go for a subtle and contemporary
interpretation of a classic Greek motif." Charles Brej was enthusiastic
and started working on a Plymouth theme[2] based on it "I do like.
Simple yet styled. I made a plymouth splash based on it" and Nicu
Buculei proposed[3] combining with the wallpaper image "I would like
them more vivid, maybe combined with the photo we are going to use as a
background?" a proposal took and improved[4] Máirín, in what Paul
Frields calls[5] "art volleys".
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00145.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00151.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00159.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00160.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00162.html
== Security Advisories ==
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from
fedora-package-announce.
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce
Contributing Writer: David Nalley
=== Fedora 10 Security Advisories ===
* mldonkey-3.0.0-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg006...
* evolution-data-server-2.24.5-4.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg006...
* opensc-0.11.7-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg006...
* bugzilla-3.2.2-2.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg006...
* ejabberd-2.0.4-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg007...
* drupal-cck-6.x.2.2-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg007...
* weechat-0.2.6.1-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg007...
* thunderbird-2.0.0.21-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg007...
* ghostscript-8.63-5.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg007...
=== Fedora 9 Security Advisories ===
* mldonkey-3.0.0-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg005...
* wireshark-1.0.6-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg006...
* bugzilla-3.2.2-2.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg006...
* evolution-data-server-2.22.3-3.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg006...
* ejabberd-2.0.4-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg006...
* opensc-0.11.7-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg006...
* weechat-0.2.6.1-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg007...
* drupal-cck-6.x.2.2-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg007...
* ghostscript-8.63-2.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg007...
* thunderbird-2.0.0.21-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg007...
== Virtualization ==
In this section, we cover discussion on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list,
@fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list of Fedora
virtualization technologies.
Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley
=== Enterprise Management Tools List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list
==== Virt-p2v and RAID Controller Drivers ====
Based on Fedora 10, "virt-p2v is an experimental live CD for migrating
physical machines to virtual machine guests." [1]
Jonathan Pregler[2] and Nick Haunold asked about a lack of HP and Dell
RAID drivers in virt-p2v. No answer was found, but Jonathan Pregler is
now working[3] on creating a SUSE live CD with virt-p2v and the RAID
drivers embedded.
1. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v/
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00075.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00085.html
==== NetWare Support added to virtinst ====
John Levon patched[1] pngpython-virtinst to support NetWare PV installs.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00065.html
=== Fedora Xen List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.
==== Which Xen Configuration Files ====
Urs Golla was confused[1] "about the configuration files for XEN user
domains in Fedora."
Daniel P. Berrange[2] explained that parts of Xen uses different
configuration formats.
* xend stores master config files in SXPR[3] format in
/var/lib/xend.
* xm stores python-like config files in /etc/xen
"XenD itself has no knowledge of these files," (in /etc/xen) "so it
can't manage them. They should not be used in Xen >= 3.0.4 If you have
existing files in /etc/xen, then you can load them into XenD by doing
'xm new configname', at which point both Xend and libvirt will be able
to manage them. For Xen < 3.0.4 libvirt has some limited support for
reading /etc/xen files directly"
Using pnglibvirt and the virsh command, the above configuration files
are essentially obviated. Instead an intermediate XML configuration[4]
can be modified and applied back to xend.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-March/msg00043.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-March/msg00054.html
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression
4. http://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html
=== Libvirt List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.
==== Xen PCI Device Passthrough ====
A patch[1] from Daniel P. Berrange "provides initial support for PCI
device passthrough in Xen, at time of boot. It does not (yet) implement
device hotplug for PCI". "XenD only supports 'unmanaged' PCI devices -
ie mgmt app is responsible for detaching/reattaching PCI devices from/to
host device drivers. XenD itself won't automatically do this".
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00270.html
==== Secure Guest Migration Draft Patch ====
Chris Lalancette followed[1] the RFC[2] of last week with a "rough first
draft of the secure migration code" and sought comments on the approach
before putting the final polish on it.
Daniel Veillard wasn't enitrely satisfied[3] with the "costs related to
the 64KB chunking imposed by the XML-RPC" and was "Trying to reopen a
bit the discussion we had before on opening a separate encrypted
connection". Daniel Veillard "would like to make sure we have room in
the initial phase to add such a negociation where an optimal solution"
on a dedicated TCP/IP connection "may be attempted, possibly falling
back to a normal XML-RPC solution".
Daniel P. Berrange pointed[4] out "This isn't XML-RPC. This is our own
binary protocol using XDR encoding, which has very little metadata
overhead - just a single 24 byte header per 64kb of data.", and poposed
a 'MIGRATION_INCOMING' message which could cause libvirted to "switch
the TCP channel to 'data stream' mode."
Chris Lalancette tested the migration code and found the draft secure
migration caused a "slowdown of between 1.5 and 3 times". "What I'm
going to do early next week is do some additional work to try to get
DanB's suggestion of the STREAM_DATA RPC working. Then I'll try
benchmarking (both for duration, and CPU usage)".
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00276.html
2.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue166#Secure_Guest_Migration_Betwee...
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00338.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00341.html
==== More Flexible x86 Emulator Choice ====
Daniel P. Berrange explained[1] the current pnglibvirt restricts "what
emulator binary we allow for QEMU guests on x86 arches". "This patch
makes QEMU driver more flexible" ... "when setting up its capabilities
information." "This should finally remove the confusion where a user in
pngvirt-manager selects 'i686' and then wonders why we've disallowed
choice of 'kvm'. It also fixes 'virsh version' when only qemu-kvm is
installed."
The path to each emulator binary is hardcoded in libvirt. Daniel
Veillard found[2] this approach "worrying". The merge[3] of pngqemu and
pngkvm will make the reliance on a pathname to determine a binary's
capabilities even less tenable.
Daniel P. Berrange agreed [4]"this approach we're currently using has
pretty much reached the end of its practicality. In particular it is
impossible to solve the problem of figuring out whether a plain 'qemu'
binary supports kvm natively. To adress that, we'd actually need to run
the binary and probe its output. This would require pretty much
re-writing this entire capabilities setup logic from scratch. Similarly
coping with varying path locations is another problem we can't easily
solve with this current code."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00281.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00339.html
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KVM_and_QEMU_merge
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00345.html
--
Oisin Feeley
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OisinFeeley
14 years, 8 months
Fedora Weekly News #167
by Oisin Feeley
Fedora Weekly News Issue 167
Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 167 for the week ending March 15th,
2009.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue167
This week Announcements links to some helpful "Fedora Classroom IRC
Logs" including one on using mock. PlanetFedora big-ups several posts
including David Lutterkort's explanation of how config file manipulation
can be simplified using XPath to query Augeas. Marketing notes the
latest meeting log. QualityAssurance reports that the last "Test Day"
for Intel graphics chipsets was valuable and advertizes the next for
XFCE. Developments summarizes the "Provenpackager Re-Seed" and watches
aghast as the "Mono Conflagration Jumps to Blog". Artwork listens to
some ideas about a "Theme Song". Virtualization reports the Xen "dom0
Kernel: Better, Still not Ready" and KVM "Snapshot Support Discussed".
If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see
our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback:
fedora-news-list(a)redhat.com
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join
FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala
Contents
1.1 Announcements
1.1.1 Fedora Classroom IRC Logs
1.1.2 Upcoming Events
1.1.2.1 FUDCon Berlin 2009
1.2 Planet Fedora
1.2.1 General
1.3 Marketing
1.3.1 Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-03-10
1.3.2 Fedora 11 Features 80% Complete or Better
1.4 QualityAssurance
1.4.1 Test Days
1.4.2 Weekly Meetings
1.4.3 Bugzappers Wiki Re-organization
1.4.4 Advertising Triage Days
1.4.5 Metrics
1.5 Developments
1.5.1 GSoC InstantMirror
1.5.2 Enhance Anaconda to Enable Repositories As Needed ?
1.5.3 Password Resets and Inactive Accounts
1.5.4 Mono Conflagration Jumps to Blog
1.5.5 Documentation Betas
1.5.6 Provenpackager Re-Seed
1.5.7 Closing Bugs NEXTRELEASE
1.6 Artwork
1.6.1 Theme Song
1.6.2 Artwork for the Beta Release
1.7 Virtualization
1.7.1 Enterprise Management Tools List
1.7.1.1 New Release virt-manager 0.7.0
1.7.1.2 New Release virtinst 0.4.3
1.7.2 Fedora Xen List
1.7.2.1 dom0 Kernel: Better, Still Not Ready
1.7.2.2 Missing Hypervisor Capabilities Restored
1.7.3 Libvirt List
1.7.3.1 Snapshot Support Discussed
1.7.3.2 Memory Ballooning Support for QEMU
== Announcements ==
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents
Contributing Writer: Chris Tyler
=== Fedora Classroom IRC Logs ===
Rahul Sundaram noted [1] that IRC logs were available for the Fedora
Classroom [2] sessions held on March 7-8:
* Introduction to bash shell scripting[3] - Scott McBrien
* Training & Tips for Fedora Ambassadors[4] -- Max Spevack
* Fedora Trademarks[5] -- Paul W. Frields
* Perl Basics[6] -- Doran Barton
* Using the Windows cross-compiler[7] - Richard Jones
* Introduction to mock, the chroot package builder[8] -- Kevin Fenzi
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-March/msg00003.html
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom
3.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Introduction_to_bash_shell_scripting_Classr...
4.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Training_and_Tips_for_Fedora_Ambassadors_Cl...
5.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Trademarks_Classroom_%2820090307%29
6.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Perl_Basics_Classroom_%2820090307%29
7.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Using_the_Windows_cross-compiler_Classroom_...
8.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Mock_Classroom_%2820090308%29
=== Upcoming Events ===
March 21: Free Software Embedded/Hardware workshop in
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India.
March 23-29: LUGM OpenWeek [1] in Manipal, India.
March 25: Document Freedom Day in Kolkata, India.
March 26: Infotech Niagara Beta Awards[2] in Buffalo, NY, USA.
March 26: Ithaca College EdTech Day[3] in Ithaca, NY USA.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/LUGMopenweek
2. http://www.infotechniagara.org/events/?id=193
3. http://www.ithaca.edu/edtechday/
==== FUDCon Berlin 2009 ====
FUDCon Berlin[1] will be held from June 26 - 28 in Berlin, Germany.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDConBerlin2009
== Planet Fedora ==
In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an
aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.
http://planet.fedoraproject.org
Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin
=== General ===
Dimitris Glezos analyzed[1] how Fedora's Localization community has
grown (hint: a lot).
Will Woods mentioned[2] that in Fedora 11, all of the x86 that were
previously .i386 will be replaced with .i586 (with requisite kernel arch
changes too).
Jef Spaleta asked[3]: "How do we want casual users to do a Fedora
Desktop install?" In other words, should Fedora be pushing new users
towards DVD install media, or installable Live CDs?
Joseph Smidt wrote[4] about the massive number of users downloading
Fedora. According to the statistics[5], around 100,000 new users have
started using Fedora 10 since Fedora 9 (based on unique IPs checking in
using yum).
Jeroen van Meeuwen responded[6] to an earlier post (that may have lacked
context) by explaining how certain dependency checks would be handled in
Cobbler for ris-linux and Windows provisioning.
David Lutterkort explained[7] how you can use Augeas and XPath to easily
and uniformly query a system's configuration files.
Bastien Nocera boasted[8] about the new Gnome Volume Applet.
1.
http://dimitris.glezos.com/weblog/2009/03/08/flp-advancement-study
2. http://qa-rockstar.livejournal.com/7478.html
3. http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/36540.html
4.
http://californiaquantum.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/another-100000-week-for...
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
6. http://kanarip.livejournal.com/11912.html
7.
http://watzmann.net/blog/index.php/2009/03/11/querying_system_configuration
8. http://www.hadess.net/2009/03/our-new-volume-feature.html
== Marketing ==
In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing
Contributing Writer: Kam Salisbury
=== Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-03-10 ===
The meeting log of the 2009-03-10 Fedora Marketing Meeting was made[1]
available.
1.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Marketing_meeting_2009-03-10
=== Fedora 11 Features 80% Complete or Better ===
The Fedora 11 Features List[1] neared completion.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList
== QualityAssurance ==
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].
Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA
=== Test Days ===
This week's regular test day[1] was on the Intel graphics card driver,
particularly kernel mode setting[2]. Kristian Høgsberg was the developer
present. Several people showed up and provided valuable testing for the
full set of test cases on various chips, giving a good overview of the
current state of the driver in several situations. A follow-up event
will be held before the release of Fedora 11 to check on the progress of
fixes for the identified issues. Further testing in this area is still
very helpful: the Wiki page contains full instructions on performing the
range of tests, and the Results table is still available, so anyone with
an Intel graphics adapter is encouraged to visit the Wiki page, perform
the tests, and file bug reports as appropriate.
Next week will be special, as two test days are scheduled. A special
test day is planned for Tuesday[3], on DeviceKit[4] - the partial HAL
replacement scheduled to be included in Fedora 11. Anyone can help with
this testing, so please come along and help out at the test day! The
regular test day[5] will be on the Xfce desktop environment[6],
particularly the new 4.6 release that will be part of Fedora 11. If Xfce
is your desktop environment of choice, please come along and help make
sure it'll be working properly in Fedora 11.
The DeviceKit test day will be held on Tuesday (2009-03-17) and the Xfce
test day on Thursday (2009-03-19) in the #fedora-qa channel on Freenode
IRC. Please come by to help make sure these features will be in shiny
working order for Fedora 11!
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-12
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/IntelKMS
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-17
4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DeviceKit
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-19
6. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Xfce
=== Weekly Meetings ===
The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-03-11. The full log is
available[2]. After a bracing discussion on how to send an apparently
empty line to IRC, James Laska reported little progress in his work on
making the Semantic test result reporting extension for mediawiki
available as a package. He also deferred investigation of X.org test
suites for next week. Adam Williamson noted that he had discussed one
such suite, rendercheck, with Ben Skeggs, and he will make a package
available either as a scratch build or in the official repository to be
used in the upcoming nouveau Test Day. The group agreed to see if it
might be useful for other graphics test events.
Jesse Keating and Will Woods reported that they had not had time to look
at a method for identifying bugs caused by GCC 4.4 miscompilation
issues. The group evaluated the response to the known bugs in this area,
and decided that the responses suggested most issues would be resolved
by fixes to GCC itself, and this should not cause major problems.
Adam Williamson reported that he and François Cami had spoken to the
intel and radeon driver developers about holding test days for those
graphics drivers, and were in the process of organizing both events.
Jesse Keating reported that a serious bug in squashfs in the Rawhide
kernel was causing Rawhide installation to be impossible. This was to be
fixed by a kernel update in the following day's Rawhide (which turned
out indeed to be the case). He also reported that initial signing of
packages for F11 was in progress in chunks, in order to ease the
synchronization load for the mirroring system.
Jesse also reported that work on the substantial rewrite of Anaconda's
storage code was in progress. The group agreed that this was quite close
to the beta release, and that it seemed possible there could still be
substantial problems in the code at the time the beta should be
released, so discussed what kind of problems might be acceptable for a
beta release and what might not. Despite some concern on the part of
Will Woods, the group agreed to evaluate issues on a case-by-case basis,
taking care to make sure all issues in this area were added to the beta
release blocker bug so they would be evaluated.
The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[3] was held on 2009-03-10. The full
log is available[4]. John Poelstra reminded the group to evaluate all
bugs with regard to the Fedora 11 blocker ('F11Blocker') and Fedora 11
target ('F11Target') blocker bugs. He also announced that Monday
2009-03-16 will be a bug blocker day, for the maintainers, QA and
release engineering groups to go over the list of blocker bugs.
The group agreed to require a short self-introduction email to
fedora-test-list as the criterion for becoming a member of the
fedorabugs group in FAS. Edward Kirk volunteered to write up this
procedure into an SOP, as discussed at the previous meeting.
The group again discussed the Wiki re-design, particularly how the front
page should be laid out and how the main information flow should work
from there. Everyone agreed that it was important to keep the front page
short and simple and lay out a clear linear path for potential new
members to follow. The group agreed to wait for Adam Williamson to
finish his combination of Edward Kirk's draft[5] and Christopher
Beland's draft[6], with reference to the ideas discussed in the meeting.
The group also discussed the new Tracking page (since re-arranged to
become Components and Triagers [7]), and agreed it was a good layout,
but some of the content that had been merged into it should not have
been. Adam Williamson suggested that the statistics be updated regularly
and automatically via Brennan Ashton's metrics script.
Edward Kirk reported that he had updated the bug workflow graphic[8] to
reflect that NEEDINFO is no longer a status, but some members had
trouble seeing the updated graphic due to caching issues.
The group discussed the potential new meeting time with reference to the
availability matrix[9], but did not yet come to a decision.
The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-03-18 at 1700 UTC (note
changed time, in UTC reference frame) in #fedora-meeting, and the next
Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-03-11 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings
2.
http://wwoods.fedorapeople.org/fedora-qa/fedora-qa-20090311.log.html
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings
4.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings/Minutes-2009-Mar-10
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Tk009/bugzappers
6. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Beland/BugZappers
7. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Components_and_Triagers
8. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow
9. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugzappers_meeting_matrix
=== Bugzappers Wiki Re-organization ===
Christopher Beland worked hard to revise several areas of the Wiki,
including a new Tracking page[1] which combined pages on active
triagers, priority triage components, group goals and finding bugs[2].
After feedback from Edward Kirk, John Poelstra and others, this was
reduced simply to the Components and Triagers page[3], leaving the
others separate for now. Christopher updated these pages also. Adam
Williamson submitted his combined new front page draft for the group's
review[4].
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Tracking
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00437.html
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Components_and_Triagers
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00662.html
=== Advertising Triage Days ===
Christopher Beland pointed out that triage days are not advertised
anywhere in the Wiki[1]. Adam Williamson apologized and explained[2]
that this is because he is short on time at present as he is taking an
internal Red Hat training course during his work days. He welcomed any
help from the group in adding information about the triage day events to
the Wiki.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00695.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00713.html
=== Metrics ===
Christopher Beland reported[1] that he could not access the pages for
Brennan Ashton's triage metrics reporting system. Brennan thanked him
for the feedback[2] and explained that there was a hardware issue on the
server. John Poelstra suggested[3] that the code for the metric system
be hosted in the Bugzappers group's git repository.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00693.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00727.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00739.html
== Developments ==
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the
@fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
=== GSoC InstantMirror ===
Warren Togami asked[1] for any interested parties to get involved with a
GSoC[2] project to improve repository replication to mirrors.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00873.html
2. http://code.google.com/soc/
=== Enhance Anaconda to Enable Repositories As Needed ? ===
Jud Craft reported[1] that installing from the Fedora 10 DVD with the
fedora-updates repository enabled resulted in a broken NetworkManager
due to a missing dependency on libudev.so.0. Jud pointed out[2] that
although he could install the missing library from the DVD the situation
would present a serious problem to anyone that tried "[...] a network
install with updates [...] the result (a system without network access)
can't be fixed without A) network access, or B) another Fedora image
(also possibly requiring more network access)."
In answer to Jef Spaleta's questions Jud revealed[3] that:
"[libudev.so.0] doesn't seem to actually be installed by the stock F10
image. If I do a plain install (no updates), NetworkManager works fine.
Running a `yum update' then pulls down all the updates, as well as
`Install libudev0'. So at some point I suppose NetworkManager picked up
a dependency on libudev0, but for some reason updating during the
installation process doesn't pull this new package in." Kevin Kofler[4]
and Jesse Keating[5] both pointed out that: "[T]he updates repo isn't
the Everything repo. To really do a proper install with updates you have
to enable both the Updates repo and the Everything repo." Kevin added
that this was why the install from DVD with updates enabled was not an
officially supported method.
Several people, including Thorsten Leemhuis, suggested[6] that modifying
the anaconda installer to be aware of which repositories depend on each
other would be useful. Jesse Keating was[7] not averse to the idea as
long as it could be done in a "[...] distro agnostic way. Avoiding
hardcoded hacks specifically for Fedora is one of the goals of anaconda
upstream."
Later Jeremy Katz explained[8] that the thinking behind the installer
ignoring unsatisfiable dependencies in such cases is to "[...] get
someone installed and then let them clean up afterwards[.]"
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00921.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00929.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00938.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00944.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00947.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00953.html
7.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00955.html
8.
http://://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00976.html
=== Password Resets and Inactive Accounts ===
When Mike McGrath was perturbed[1] that so many FAS account holders had
failed to reset their passwords recently a discussion of the
entanglement of active account status and passwords followed.
Many respondents posted that they had received the email notifications
but had not needed to, or had not had time to, perform their password
reset.
Tom Lane worried that forcing periodic password resets caused people to
weaken security by writing down their passwords but Bruno Wolf III
argued[2] that a potentially bigger threat might be "[...] someone
forging messages from Mike with deceptive URLs that trick people into
changing their passwords using a hostile proxy. Doing things in the
current manner is training people to get fooled." He added that
cryptographically signing the reset messages was important.
Till Maas requested[3] consistent titling of the password reset
notification emails, suggested extending the grace period beyond two
weeks and asked that the notification contains the information that the
contents of the user's fedorapeople.org home would be moved.
Mike McGrath and others explored[4] possible grace periods and numbers
of warning emails.
Patrice Dumas asked why there was a password reset at all and was
answered[5] by Jesse Keating that it was "[...] the best way Infra has
today to discover all the active and inactive accounts." In response
Toshio Kuratomi pointed[6] to an open ticket which nominally deals with
how long accounts should be left open if passwords have expired but had
become[7] an investigation of how account inactivity can be determined.
After Mike McGrath explained that "[...] we've got thousands of
contributors, relatively few of them actually commit to cvs. So we could
go around to figure out how to make all of our various auth points
report back but that's a lot of work. The account system is the only
common point of entry for every contributor [...]" Christopher Aillon
suggested[8]: "So let's require to them to simply _log in_ to FAS to
reset the timer (you need to do that to change passwords, anyway!)."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00509.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00612.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00710.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00779.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00658.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00677.html
7. http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1237
8.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00812.html
=== Mono Conflagration Jumps to Blog ===
Following the FESCo decision not to replace rhythmbox with banshee as
the default media-player in Fedora 11[1] some follow-up clarifications
were made by parties to the discussion and the conflagration jumped
between @fedora-devel and the personal blog of David Nielsen, the
Banshee ex-maintainer and perhaps the main force behind the Mono SIG[2].
Bill Nottingham put forward[3] a concise time-line which attempted to
show that the proposal had been handled in a straightforward and usual
manner. Bill noted that the Desktop SIG had expressed[4] a lack of
enthusiasm early in the process and that the imminent beta-freeze meant
that the decision had to be taken without further prolonged discussion.
AdamWilliamson suggested[5] that because Mono's Microsoft links worried
many F/OSS developers it would have been a good idea to address such
concerns: "[...] explicitly rather than just pretend they don't exist in
your initial proposal (the word 'Mono' does not actually occur a single
time in the initial version of the Wiki page you posted)."
A question put by Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wondered[6] whether there was
anything preventing the Mono SIG from creating their own Fedora spin in
which banshee was given pride of place as the default media-player. Rex
Dieter confirmed that there were no obstacles on this path.
A proposal to adopt a Code of Conduct modeled upon Ubuntu's was[7] made
by Richard W.M. Jones. He also expressed regret that David was leaving
Fedora and apparently moving to Ubuntu as referenced[8] by a blog entry.
Reading the blog suggest that Foresight Linux seems more to David's
taste although one comment does point out[9] that Ubuntu "[...] head
community people have been calling for volunteers to increase the work
surrounding Mono and have a huge love for banshee[10] and Canonical
isnt anti-mono since some of their new job postings desire Mono as a
skill[11]."
Seth Vidal was[12] among those who wondered specifically how such a code
could be enforced and also where specifically the Fedora Project could
be alleged to have engaged in misconduct on this issue. Reading David's
blog seems to suggest both that any rudeness was privately exchanged and
that his perception is[13] that "[...] Mono isn't welcome in Fedora, and
will always be a second class citizen[.]"
1.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue166#Fedora_11_Default_Mediaplayer_...
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Mono
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00529.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2009-February/msg00063...
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00526.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00523.html
7.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00498.html
8.
http://davidnielsen.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/drawing-my-own-conclusion/
9.
http://davidnielsen.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/drawing-my-own-conclusion/#c...
10.
http://castrojo.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/monodevelop-rockstar-needed-inqu...
11. http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/canonical_GDOS/
12.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00504.html
13.
http://davidnielsen.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/drawing-my-own-conclusion/#c...
=== Documentation Betas ===
John J. McDonough posted[1] that owners of major features should review
the Beta release notes. Scott Radvan posted[2] that the Security
Guide[3] would benefit from the scrutiny of any interested @fedora-devel
readers.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00835.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00823.html
3. http://sradvan.fedorapeople.org/Security_Guide/en-US/
=== Provenpackager Re-Seed ===
Jon Stanley asked[1] that everyone read the process by which the
"provenpackager" group will be repopulated.
A request by Ralf Corsepius for some definitions led Patrice Dumas to
post[2] that: "provenpackagers are people who can change all the
packages with opened ACLs. Sponsors are the people who can accept new
contributors in fedora." Further discussion led[3] Michael Schwendt to
voice a concern that non-responsive maintainers might be shielded from
feedback if provenpackagers step in to update and upgrade packages.
Kevin Kofler offered[4] the non-responsive maintainer process as a way
to rectify any problems with Bugzilla tickets being ignored.
Michael Schwendt questioned[5] Patrice Dumas in greater detail as to why
provenpackagers and sponsors are not equal sets.
Further details on how to apply to FESCo to become a provenpackager were
elicited[6] from JoshBoyer by Stepan Kaspal.
In a separate thread MichelSalim asked[7] about the preferred way to
become a sponsor.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00555.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00571.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00581.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00718.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00591.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00594.html
7.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00871.html
=== Closing Bugs NEXTRELEASE ===
Christoph Wickert requested[1] that all maintainers (and especially Red
Hat developers) would "[p]lease fix your bugs [1] in the release they
were filed against instead of just closing them NEXTRELASE!"
When Rahul Sundaram responded that it depended on the seriousness of the
bug and complexity of back-porting Daniel P. Berrange[2] and Rakesh
Pandit[3] acknowledged that such complex cases might exist but that
suggested that this was often a cop-out which could discourage users.
Jeremy Katz responded[4] "[...] as the person who has apparently pissed
you off this morning [...]" and described the case in point as much more
complex than Christoph had claimed. It seemed that Christoph's ability
to create LiveCD images of Fedora 11 using Fedora 10 as the development
platform had been stymied by changes to syslinux. Jeremy added that even
if this single change were reverted Christoph would need a newer kernel
and squashfs-tools and more.
Later Jeremy clarified[5] that the combination of livecd-creator + mock
were complicated by SELinux but that this had been addressed by recent
work.
One complication is that Bodhi uses NEXTRELEASE even for updates to
stable releases. After some confusion on this point LukeMacken posted[6]
that anyone wanting to change the behavior should file a ticket.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00552.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00575.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00572.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00622.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00777.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00672.html
== Artwork ==
In this section, we cover the Fedora Artwork Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork
Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei
=== Theme Song ===
Subodh Bhagat proposed[1] a new artistic initiative: a Fedora theme
song. Subodh asked: "Do we have something like a theme song for fedora?
Either lyrics or a composition?" The intitiative was saluted by
Konstantinos Antonakoglou[2]: "Sounds great! I got some music skills
(compose and play) too", Henrik Heigl[3]: "I also think of ideas like a
contest", Paul Frields[4]: "I think song in general is a great idea. I'm
a musician myself and an appreciator of songwriters", and Keiran
Smith[5] all of whom have experience in the field.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00060.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00062.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00064.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00065.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00068.html
=== Artwork for the Beta Release ===
In preparation for the upcoming Beta release, Paolo Leoni started[1] the
work on a website banner by proposing two graphic concepts, a generic
one and another based on the graphics for the Beta wallpaper image "The
first is a non-themed version, while the second uses a part of Mo's
wallpaper mockup." The general opinion was favourable to the themed
version and after a few iterations, Máirín Duffy concluded[2] with a
final version[3], a graphic which all the Fedora enthusiast are invited
to use on their blogs.
On a related note, Paul Frields reviewed[4] the Art's Team release
tasks[5] and produced a short list "the listed splashes, headers and
other art scheduled for March 27 includes" to check the status "Is the
listed date of March 27 enough time to produce these various
derivations?"
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00072.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00088.html
3.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:Deepsky-fedora11-beta-banner_2d.png
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00075.html
5. http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-11/f-11-art-tasks
== Virtualization ==
In this section, we cover discussion on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list,
@fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list of Fedora
virtualization technologies.
Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley
=== Enterprise Management Tools List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list
==== New Release virt-manager 0.7.0 ====
Cole Robinson announced[1] a new
image:Echo-package-16px.pngvirt-manager[2] release, version 0.7.0.
Virtual Machine Manager provides a graphical tool for administering
virtual machines for KVM, Xen, and QEmu. Start, stop, add or remove
virtual devices, connect to a graphical or serial console, and see
resource usage statistics for existing VMs on local or remote machines.
Uses image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibvirt as the backend management API.
New features:
* Redesigned 'New Virtual Machine' wizard (Jeremy Perry, Tim Allen,
Cole Robinson)
* Option to remove storage when deleting a virtual machine.
* File browser[3] for libvirt storage pools and volumes, for use
when attaching storage to a new or existing guest.
* Physical device assignment (PCI, USB) for existing virtual
machines.
* Bug fixes and minor improvements.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00058.html
2. http://virt-manager.org/
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00045.html
==== New Release virtinst 0.4.3 ====
Cole Robinson announced[1] a new
image:Echo-package-16px.pngpython-virtinst release, version 0.400.3.
virtinst is a module that helps build and install libvirt based virtual
machines. It 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).
This is largely a bug fix release.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00057.html
=== Fedora Xen List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.
==== dom0 Kernel: Better, Still Not Ready ====
Itamar Reis Peixoto reported[1] success with Michael Young's latest
image:Echo-package-16px.pngkernel build[2] and wondered when it could be
released.
Michael explained, "The current plan is to wait until basic dom0 support
makes it into the vanilla kernel, which should happen for 2.6.30, and
then decide if dom0 can be enabled and if the patches for full dom0
support can safely be added without affecting ordinary operation."
"At the moment there are still things that are broken such as X support
in some cases, and there are also Fedora patches that have been omitted
because they were tricky to merge, so it is too early to start adding
dom0 support to official Fedora kernels."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-March/msg00046.html
2. http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1238587
==== Missing Hypervisor Capabilities Restored ====
There was progress on a bug discovered[1] last week. This missing file
/sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities has been restored[2], however a
bug[3] remained[4] in libvirt or virt-install.
1.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue166#dom0_Kernel_Inches_Closer
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-March/msg00039.html
3. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=489799
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-March/msg00040.html
=== Libvirt List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.
==== Snapshot Support Discussed ====
In an attempt to make it easier to backup KVM windows guests, Matt
McCowan created[1] a checkpoint virsh function. "Modelled on the
virDomainSave[2] function it takes an optional script which it will
execute (and pass the name of the domain as an argument) while the
domain is paused, then resume the domain." Within this script, a backup
of the guest domain could be created.
The patch was seen as too ad-hoc, and not accepted as-is.
Daniel Veillard commented[3] "I think this can help administrators in a
controlled situation, but I'm hoping a real snapshotting API will be
possible at some point where image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibvirt goes
though the list of storage resources used by the domain and properly
make a snapshot using a storage API or return an error if that's not
possible."
Daniel P. Berrange described[4] what he would like to see. "In terms of
API I think I'd like to see snapshotting[5] available as part of a more
generic save/restore API. I tend to think of the current API as
providing 'unmanaged save/restore'". Libvirt does not track saved
images, so does not know if a snapshot is available to be started at the
restart of libvirtd."
"Thus I think the first step towards a general snapshot facility would
be to provide an API for 'managed save/restore' where we explicitly
track saved images." "With this, you could configure libvirtd, so that
when starting up, it" would "see if the guest was suspended before the
previous host shutdown, and if so, then restore from that saved image
automatically.[6] Or make it skip autostart completely, if any save
images exist, and allow an admin defined initscript to do auto restore
from the save image."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00177.html
2. http://libvirt.org/html/libvirt-libvirt.html#virDomainSave
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00199.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00205.html
5. http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/TodoVMSnapshots
6. http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/TodoDaemonRestart
==== Memory Ballooning Support for QEMU ====
Daniel Berrange patched[1] the libvirt QEMU driver to fully support
memory ballooning. "Memory ballooning allows you to have your guest
dynamically change its memory usage by evicting unused memory during
runtime. This is a useful feature because it reduces the impact your
guest can have on memory usage of your host by giving up unused memory
back to the host."[2]
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00200.html
2.
http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/memory-ballooning-feature-coming-soon-kvm
--
Oisin Feeley
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OisinFeeley
14 years, 8 months
FUDCon Berlin 2009 & LinuxTag reminders
by Max Spevack
Howdy FUDConners!
I'm here to remind everyone about the relevant details for FUDCon Berlin
2009 and LinuxTag 2009.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LinuxTag_2009
LINUXTAG: Berlin, Germany. June 24 - 27.
FUDCON: Berlin, Germany. June 26 - 28.
WHAT: FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a three-day
gathering of programmers, users, administrators, and ambassadors. FUDCon
Berlin will consist of speeches (in both English and German) that are
both technical and user-focused. Additionally, there will be two days
of hackfests, in which various features and projects within Fedora will
be be worked on.
WHO: You! FUDCon is free to attend. However, because FUDCon is being
held in conjunction with LinuxTag, attendees will need a LinuxTag
ticket. The Fedora Project will be able to provide these tickets, free
of charge, to attendees who pre-register for the event.
PRE-REGISTRATION information:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009_attendees
HOTEL information:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009_lodging
BAR CAMP and HACKFEST signups:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009
This is the PREMIERE FEDORA EVENT in Europe for 2009, and I hopeful that
we can have a turnout of 150 or more for the event.
See you there,
Max
14 years, 8 months
F-9 and F-10 NetworkManager update issues
by Josh Boyer
Hi All,
Several of you have reported issues with the F-9 and F-10
NetworkManager updates that were pushed last night (March 9)
related to an incorrect GPG key. The error output looked like:
Public key for NetworkManager-0.7.0.99-3.fc10.i386.rpm is not installed
However the key it was signed with was apparently the proper F9 or F10
GPG key.
This issue has been resolved for F-10 updates, and will be resolved for
F-9 updates relatively soon. In an effort for full discloser, I've
included a description of the events that caused this below.
Late last evening the NetworkManager update was submitted for a push to
fix an issue with the previous update that had caused somewhat of a
regression that seems to impact a large number of users. Rel-Eng signed
the update with the proper key, and pushed it out via Bodhi.
At the same time, Rel-Eng was attempting to get the Fedora 11 Beta packages
signed with a newly generated f11-test key that is much larger in size (this
is related to the Stronger Hashes Feature that is coming with F11). The use
of the larger GPG key requires some different arguments to be passed to rpm
for the signing phase, including using --digest-algo sha256. The signing
script was being reworked to invoke rpm correctly for this Feature, as well
as still work for the current release's GPG keys.
When the F-10 and F-9 updates were signed, a stale copy of the signing
script was inadvertently used. This contained the new F-11 invocation of
rpm with the proper GPG keys, resulting in a validly signed RPM but using
SHA256 as the hash type. The F-9 and F-10 RPM versions could detect that
the updates had been signed, however due to lack of support for the larger
hash type they could not validate the key. The error message reported by
RPM is somewhat confusing.
This morning the F-9 and F-10 updates were resigned properly and the repos
were recreated. This may take some time to filter to all the mirrors, so
please have patience.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
josh, for Fedora Rel-Eng
14 years, 8 months
Fedora Classroom - March 2009 completed
by Rahul Sundaram
Hi,
The following IRC sessions were conducted as part of the Fedora
Classroom effort last weekend.
* Introduction to bash shell scripting - Scott McBrien
* Training & Tips for Fedora Ambassadors -- Max Spevack
* Fedora Trademarks -- Paul W. Frields
* Perl Basics -- Doran Barton
* Using the Windows cross-compiler - Richard Jones
* Introduction to mock, the chroot package builder -- Kevin Fenzi
The IRC logs are available at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom
Thanks to the organizers and participants for some great sessions.
Rahul
14 years, 8 months
Fedora Weekly News #166
by Oisin Feeley
Fedora Weekly News Issue 166
Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 166 for the week ending March 8th,
2009.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue166
A small sample of this issue's stories reflects the imminent release of
Fedora 11! Announcements lists the freeze dates and upcoming Fedora
events. PlanetFedora rounds up essential blog reading including a piece
by Thomas Vander Stichele on "meltdown analysis". Marketing cheers for
"One Million New Fedora 10 Installations". In QualityAssurance a
reminder that the next of the "Test Days" is of interest to Intel video
users is just one of the items reflecting a massive amount of QA
activity. Ambassadors relates some OLPC news from Rochester Institute of
Technology. Developments explains why "Orphans are Purged" and asks are
we "Ready for a New RPM Version?". Translation highlights a "Study about
FLP". Artwork stares at the wallpaper while "Preparing for the Beta
Release". SecurityAdvisories lists stuff to help you avoid a rooting.
Virtualization pops some salient items out of the development maelstrom
including a "New Release of libvirt-0.6.1" and SELinux "sVirt Support
Committed". There's a lot more, so keep reading!
If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see
our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback:
fedora-news-list(a)redhat.com
FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala
Table of Contents
1 Fedora Weekly News Issue 166
1.1 Announcements
1.1.1 Fedora 11
1.1.2 Upcoming Events
1.1.2.1 FUDCon Berlin 2009
1.2 Planet Fedora
1.2.1 General
1.2.2 Education
1.3 Marketing
1.4 Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-02-26
1.5 One Million New Fedora 10 Installations!
1.6 Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-03-03
1.7 Ambassadors
1.7.1 RIT Pitches in on OLPC Project
1.7.2 Fedora at CUE
1.7.3 Got Ambassador News?
1.8 QualityAssurance
1.8.1 Test Days
1.8.2 Weekly Meetings
1.8.3 Bugzappers Wiki Re-organization
1.8.4 20 Second Boot Test Day Follow-up
1.8.5 Bugzappers Meeting Schedule
1.8.6 Ubuntu Triage Discussion
1.8.7 Introduction Emails
1.9 Developments
1.9.1 Orphans are Purged
1.9.2 Fedora 11 to Ship Tiger VNC
1.9.3 Ready for a New RPM Version ?
1.9.4 Windows Cross-compiler Added to comps.xml
1.9.5 Anaconda Default of Separate / and /home Partitions
1.9.6 Beta Freeze and String Freeze this Tuesday
2009-03-10
1.9.7 Fedora 11 Default Mediaplayer Not Banshee. Mono to
Blame ?
1.10 Translation
1.10.1 FLP Infrastructure Team Meeting
1.10.2 Statistics Page and Submission Outage
1.10.3 Publican Documents Now on tfp.org
1.10.4 F11 String Freeze Reminder
1.10.5 Study about FLP
1.10.6 New Members in FLP
1.11 Artwork
1.11.1 Echo Weekly News
1.11.2 Preparing for the Beta Release
1.11.3 Working on the Picture Book
1.12 Security Advisories
1.12.1 Fedora 10 Security Advisories
1.12.2 Fedora 9 Security Advisories
1.13 Virtualization
1.13.1 Enterprise Management Tools List
1.13.1.1 Managing Guest OS Types
1.13.1.2 virt-manager Storage Removal
1.13.1.3 virt-install Host Device Assignment Support
1.13.2 Fedora Virtualization List
1.13.2.1 User Interface Makeover for virt-manager
1.13.2.2 New Release virtinst 0.4.2
1.13.3 Fedora Xen List
1.13.3.1 dom0 Kernel Inches Closer
1.13.4 Libvirt List
1.13.4.1 New Release libvirt 0.6.1
1.13.4.2 sVirt Support Committed
1.13.4.3 Secure Guest Migration Between Hosts
1.13.4.4 Hynesim Project Interest in Libvirt
== Announcements ==
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents
Contributing Writer: Max Spevack
=== Fedora 11 ===
Jesse Keating reminded[1] the community that the Fedora 11 Beta
freeze[2] is coming this week. "It is scheduled for Tuesday, March 10th.
They way we've historically enacted the beta freeze is to tag the
content in that day's rawhide into the freeze tag. That is, what gets
reported as rawhide-20090310 is the frozen content. As such, your builds
need to be complete by 0600 UTC March 10 2009 in order to be in the
Beta, without a special request."
The string freeze is also on March 10th.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-March/msg00006....
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Beta_Freeze_Policy
=== Upcoming Events ===
March 10-12: FOSE[1] in Washington, DC.
March 13-15: Chemnitzer Linux Tage[2] in Chemnitz, Germany.
1. http://fose.com/
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/CLT
=== FUDCon Berlin 2009 ===
FUDCon Berlin[1] will be held from June 26 - 28 in Berlin, Germany.
1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDConBerlin2009
== Planet Fedora ==
In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora - an
aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.
http://planet.fedoraproject.org
Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin
=== General ===
Michael DeHaan responded[1] to a post[2] by Karsten Wade from a few
weeks ago titled "Failure as the secret of success". Michael agreed and
argued that it is usually impossible to build a piece of software that
is 100% perfect for 100% of its users. "Failure is good. Chasing perfect
is bad. Making any one aspect perfect or spending too much time on it
tends to make other aspects of things bad. We need to get close enough
and find some new challenge to work on, so we have more time to iterate
and fail a few more times. We all need more time to fail."
Thomas Vander Stichele described[3] "an approach to doing meltdown
analysis". Also known as a post-mortem analysis, this is a useful
process for "when we've gotten into a bad situation involving multiple
people that we want to learn from and avoid next time".
Harald Hoyer summarized[4] the results from the 20 Seconds Boot Feature
Test Day and offered some suggestions for users and developers alike.
Matthew Daniels offered[5] some ideas to improve the Fedora
documentation by splitting the User Guide into three parts, Practicum,
Theory and Appendices & Glossary.
Mark J Cox published[6] a set of metrics that tracks security
vulnerabilities and the time-to-fix versus their time of disclosure
within RHEL.
John J. McDonough wrote[7] an article about Fedora, the four Foundations
of the project/community and how and why you should join.
Richard Hughes explained[8] some of the issues currently associated with
installing Applications as opposed to Packages (first by explaining the
difference between the terms Application and Package). Along with some
other folks, they published a proposed specification[9] that is
distribution-agnostic and should allow relevant metadata (including
localized content) as well as icons to be efficiently and easily
integrated into the local/distribution-specific software installation
utility.
Scott Williams made[10] The Case for Open Source.
Paul W. Frields announced[11] that after working with the Red Hat legal
department to revise the Fedora Trademark guidelines, a new version has
been released. Among other changes the changes should make building
remixes and unofficial spins easier.
Chitlesh Goorah posted[12] about the goals of Fedora Electronic Lab[13]
(FEL) and also how the project bridges the Open Source software and
hardware communities.
1. http://www.michaeldehaan.net/?p=879
2. http://iquaid.org/2009/02/28/failure-as-the-secret-of-success/
3. http://thomas.apestaart.org/log/?p=783
4.
http://www.harald-hoyer.de/personal/blog/20_Seconds_Boot_Feature_Test_Day
5.
http://danielsmw.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/user-guide-practicum-theory/
6. http://www.awe.com/mark/blog/2009030319.html
7. http://wb8rcr.multiply.com/journal/item/98/Join_Fedora
8. http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/03/05/application-installing/
9.
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/packagekit/plain/docs/app-install-v1.draft
10.
http://vwbusguy.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/the-case-for-open-source/
11. http://marilyn.frields.org:8080/~paul/wordpress/?p=1507
12.
http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2009/03/fels-solutions-for-design-centre.html
13. http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/
=== Education ===
Greg DeKoenigsberg started[1] working on a Sugar activity for 4th Grade
Maths[2] called "Dungeons of Mongo". Remember, you too can potentially
get a free XO as part of the Fedora Developers XO Program[3].
Chris Tyler announced[4] that the TeachingOpenSource.org[5] is open for
business, "a neutral collaboration point for everyone and everything
involved in Teaching Open Source".
Greg DeKoenigsberg congratulated[6] Chris on the new Teaching Open
Source community and provided some points that came up while visiting
with people who are in the trenches trying to teach Open Source. Chris
responded[7] and suggested that anyone interested should join[8] the
mailing list.
(As a related sidenote, Teaching Open Source has its own Planet[9] for
those interested)
Karsten Wade described [10] some of the issues associated with getting
kids interested in computers, Open Source and issues with the US
educational system in general.
Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury wrote[11] about a "visit to a high school in
a village located on the outskirts of Durgapur and made famous by the
DGPLUG project . This project set up a computer lab in a village school
where you don't even get proper drinking water and where none of the
students would have never had a chance of so as to even see a computer
if not for this project."
1. http://gregdek.livejournal.com/47069.html
2. http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Gdk/4th_Grade_Maths
3. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_developers_XO_program
4.
http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/190-TeachingOpenSource....
5. http://teachingopensource.org/
6. http://gregdek.livejournal.com/47357.html
7.
http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/191-TeachingOpenSource....
8.
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/TeachingOpenSource_Mailing_List
9. http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Planet
10. http://iquaid.org/2009/03/06/stumbling-around-in-the-k-12-space/
11. http://sherry151.blogspot.com/2009/03/blooming-bijra.html
== Marketing ==
In this section, we cover the Fedora Marketing Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing
Contributing Writer: Kam Salisbury
=== Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-02-26 ===
The meeting log[1] of the February 26th 2009 Fedora Marketing Meeting is
now available.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_meeting_2009-02-26
=== One Million New Fedora 10 Installations! ===
Paul W. Frields, Fedora project leader, declared that there has been "a
major up-tick in Fedora involvement over the last 6 months. Since the
release of Fedora 10, we've seen about 1 million new installations and
approximately 2 million unique visitors to fedoraproject.org each
month"[1]
1.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/fedora_10_regains_linux_fans?page=1
=== Marketing Meeting Log for 2009-03-03 ===
The meeting log[1] of the March 3rd 2009 Fedora Marketing Meeting is now
available.
1.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Marketing_meeting_2009-03-03
== Ambassadors ==
In this section, we cover Fedora Ambassadors Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors
Contributing Writer: Larry Cafiero
=== RIT Pitches in on OLPC Project ===
The Fedora OLPC project seems to have found a friend at Rochester
Institute of Technology[4]. Fedora Ambassador Karlie Robinson contacted
RIT professor Stephen Jacobs and discussed the project, which spurred
Jacobs' interest in doing a class around the XO.
Karlie brought Professor Jacobs up to speed on what Fedora is doing
around the XO[5], where Fedora is providing XOs to those who will do
development work. The deal revolved around getting XOs for Jacobs
classroom in exchange for the RIT students working on Greg
DeKoenigsberg's 4th Grade Math project[1].
So RIT students got XOs and the project got some more help.
1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_meeting_2009-02-26
2.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/fedora_10_regains_linux_fans?page=1
3.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Marketing_meeting_2009-03-03
4. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Rochester,_NY
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2009-February/msg00033.html
=== Fedora at CUE ===
Karsten Wade represented Fedora at last week's Computer-Using Educator
(CUE) conference in Palm Springs, California. Karsten gave a talk about
the advantages of bringing a culture of participation to the classroom.
A detailed report of what happened at CUE can be picked up at Karsten's
blog[1], specifically the items entitled "Stumbling around in the K-12
space" and "Moodle as a killer K-12 app."
1. http://iquaid.org/
=== Got Ambassador News? ===
Any Ambassador news tips from around the Fedora community can be
submitted to me by e-mailing lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org and I'd
be glad to put it in this weekly report.
== QualityAssurance ==
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].
Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA
=== Test Days ===
This week's regular test day[1] was on the rewritten handling of storage
devices in Anaconda[2]. Dave Lehman, Chris Lumens and Joel Granados were
the developers present. Several people showed up and provided valuable
testing in a wide range of scenarios, and the developers were able to
identify and resolve several bugs. Further testing in this area is still
very helpful. The wiki page contains instructions for using a
supplementary image while installing Rawhide, to use the new storage
code successfully, but the code will soon be available directly in
Rawhide, so testing can be performed simply by attempting to install
Rawhide in as many different storage scenarios as possible.
Next week's test day[3] is tentatively scheduled for testing Intel
graphics devices, especially the new kernel mode setting support and
identifying performance regressions from Fedora 10. It will be held on
Thursday (2009-03-12) in the #fedora-qa channel on Freenode IRC. If you
use an Intel graphics card, please come by to help make sure it will be
well-supported in Fedora 11 - the more testing, the better the code!
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-05
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/AnacondaStorageRewrite
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-12
=== Weekly Meetings ===
The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-03-04. The full log is
available[2]. Will Woods pointed out that the next week's meeting would
be an hour earlier for most people, after the onset of Daylight Savings
Time. Adam Williamson and Jesse Keating, as the resident West Coast
representatives, led a revolt against having to wake up at 7 a.m., and
the group agreed to move the meetings to 1700UTC from 2009-03-11.
James Laska reported on the progress of the project to make the Semantic
test result plugin for mediawiki available. He reported that he is
currently trying to make the plugin work in his test setup prior to
building a Fedora package for it, as the infrastructure group requires
all software used for Fedora systems be available as a Fedora package.
Adam Williamson offered to help with the packaging.
Will Woods and Jesse Keating reported that there had been no progress on
the autoqa systems this week, as Jesse had been tied up doing the mass
rebuild of Rawhide.
Will Woods reported that 33 of the Fedora 11 proposed features[3] have
not yet been reviewed by the QA group to ensure that they include a
workable test plan, and appealed for help from the group in getting this
process completed. He noted that features for which test days have
already taken place are likely to have workable test plans in place, as
these are generally necessary for a test day to happen, so suggested at
least those features could be quickly reviewed and, most likely,
approved.
Adam Williamson reported that the test day for the new nouveau driver[4]
for NVIDIA hardware was already planned and prepared, but that he was
waiting on developer replies for the planned Intel KMS[5] and automatic
fonts and MIME installer[6] test days. Jóhann Guðmundsson suggested
having a single big graphics test day, but Adam Williamson explained
that he did not want to do that as it would be too large and
unmanageable. James Laska suggested running the Piglit[7] OpenGL test
suite as part of the test days for drivers with usable 3D support
(radeon and intel).
Jesse Keating reported that the mass rebuild of Rawhide was complete.
Adam Williamson pointed out that three large bugs had resulted from GCC
4.4 optimization problems after the rebuild, and Will Woods reported
that this had been discussed during the release engineering meeting.
Will noted that the new hashing system in RPM was not backwards
compatible, the upshot being that those upgrading from Fedora 11 Alpha
to current Rawhide need to run 'yum update rpm' first. He queried why
yum did not automatically update itself and rpm before other packages,
and Jesse Keating explained it was because this would usually bring in
hundreds of other packages via Python and glibc dependencies in any
case, and so was not worth the effort.
Jesse Keating reported that live CD image builds from current Rawhide
were not working very well, and Anaconda is often broken while its
developers are busy working on the storage rewrite and EFI features.
The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[8] was held on 2009-03-03. The full
log is available[9]. The group agreed to make sure the two most
important Greasemonkey scripts for triagers were easily available in a
central place, and this was implemented by making them available
directly from the Wiki Tools page[10].
The group discussed Christopher Beland's plan to re-organize the Wiki
area. It was agreed that a mailing list discussion should take place to
create and agree upon a new front page for the Bugzappers wiki area, and
work could then progress on re-writing and re-arranging other pages
based on the organization system set up by the new front page. The group
also discussed and agreed upon a plan for revising the Components
page[11], and Christopher Beland pointed out that the current bug flow
diagram is incorrect, as it dates from before NEEDINFO was converted
from a bug status into a flag. Edward Kirk bravely volunteered to fix
the picture.
Finally, the group discussed creating SOPs (Standard Operating
Procedures) for Bugzappers, along the lines of those already used by the
Infrastructure group. John Poelstra proposed the first SOP cover the
procedure for gaining membership in the Bugzappers, and further proposed
that it should involve the prospective new member posting a
self-introduction email to the mailing list. Christopher Beland and
Edward Kirk opposed this as they were worried that some new members
would not feel comfortable posting such a message, particularly if it
contained personal information. The group agreed to discuss the proposal
further on the mailing list.
The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-03-11 at 1700 UTC (note
changed time, in UTC reference frame) in #fedora-meeting, and the next
Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-03-10 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.
1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings
2.
http://wwoods.fedorapeople.org/fedora-qa/fedora-qa-20090304.log.html
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList
4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NouveauAsDefault
5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/IntelKMS
6. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/AutoFontsAndMimeInstaller
7. http://people.freedesktop.org/~nh/piglit/
8. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings
9.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings/Minutes-2009-Mar-03
10. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Tools
11. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Components
=== Bugzappers Wiki Re-organization ===
Christopher Beland made several proposals[1] on reorganizing the
Bugzappers wiki area. This prompted a long discussion. In the end,
Christopher was asked to provide drafts for several of his proposed
changes for the group to evaluate. Both Christopher and Edward Kirk
provided drafts for a new front page. Adam Williamson commented[2] that
both drafts had good elements, and offered to create a new draft to try
and combine the two.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg01223.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00290.html
=== 20 Second Boot Test Day Follow-up ===
Harald Hoyer posted a follow-up email[1] on the previously-held 20
Second Boot test day[2], pointing to a blog post[3] where he summarized
all the useful data he was able to get from the test day.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00057.html
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-02-19
3.
http://www.harald-hoyer.de/personal/blog/20_Seconds_Boot_Feature_Test_Day
=== Bugzappers Meeting Schedule ===
Lalit Dhiri proposed[1] having a second meeting to accommodate those
whose schedules made it impossible for them to attend the regular group
meetings. Adam Williamson said[2] that was not likely to be practical,
but suggested that the meeting time could be moved if a time when more
group members would be able to attend could be identified. Susan Lauber
suggested[3] using the Wiki's meeting matrix template to handle
registering who is available when, and set up a Wiki page[4] for the
purpose.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00131.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00155.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00165.html
4. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugzappers_meeting_matrix
=== Ubuntu Triage Discussion ===
Paul Frields pointed out[1] a long discussion on the topic of bug
triaging in Ubuntu[2], and wondered what the lessons for the Bugzappers
might be. Adam Williamson suggested that it showed it is important for
triagers to follow up on bugs they triage, rather than just touching
them once and then never returning, which can leave the reporter more
frustrated than if the bug had never been triaged at all. In the ensuing
discussion, John Summerfield suggested that triagers should try to cover
one area of which they had substantial knowledge rather than attempting
to cover all bugs in all components[3], and that the Bugzappers group
should remember actively to involve package maintainers in the triaging
process[4]. Kevin Kofler explained[5] that, within the KDE SIG,
maintainers and triagers do work together and communicate via IRC.
1.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00211.html
2. http://lwn.net/Articles/321473/
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00312.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00385.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00393.html
=== Introduction Emails ===
Adam Williamson mooted the proposal from the weekly meeting that
introduction emails be required for new group members[1]. John Poelstra
supported the proposal[2], as did Edward Kirk[3]. Christopher Beland
suggested[4]that anyone who became active on the mailing list but did
not write a formal self-introduction email should also be accepted.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00266.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00314.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00319.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-March/msg00341.html
== Developments ==
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the
@fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
=== Orphans are Purged ===
It sounded[1] like Dickensian cruelty when Jesse Keating announced that
he would be purging the orphans. All that it meant however was that
those packages which were not blocked and had no owners would be "[...]
blocked, and will not be shipped with F11." The initial list mistakenly
listed EPEL packages and a shorter revised list was posted[2].
A follow-up posted[3] states that packages listed therein will be
removed on 2009-03-09 unless volunteers are found to maintain them.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00093.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00103.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00474.html
=== Fedora 11 to Ship Tiger VNC ===
Adam Tkac wrote[1] to explain why he had decided "one minute before the
beta freeze" to replace TightVNC with the TigerVNC fork. Adam has a
history of very actively seeking to merge improvements upstream which in
the past led[2] to the replacement of RealVNC with TightVNC when it
seemed that the latter was more willing to evolve. The glacial pace of
RealVNC development seemed to be correlated with the presence of a
non-Free enterprise edition. Adam reported that unfortunately a lack of
co-ordination of the TightVNC project had led to the TurboVNC and
TightVNC projects deciding that a fork was necessary. An initial mail
posted[3] by PeterÅstrand on @tigervnc-users provides some more details.
One specific outcome anticipated[4] by KingInuYasha was a "[...] proper
implementations of VNC 4 for UNIX like systems [...] Having a VNC
implementation that actually is kept up to date with the VNC protocol
and is optimized with extensions is something I have been waiting for
awhile now."
Another hint of good things which may come from a more rapid pace of
development was revealed[5] when Daniel Berrange asked about Adam's
plans to include the VeNCrypt server-side SSL/TLS extension. This would
result in a "[...] consistent TLS extension that's inter operable across
all the VNC clients & servers in Fedora." Daniel also mentioned that he
had "[...] recently defined & implemented another VNC auth extension
based on SASL. This provides for a good extendable authentication
capability, most importantly including GSSAPI Kerberos for single sign
on. I've got it implemented for QEMU, KVM, GTK-VNC and VINO already, so
again it'd be good to plan for adding it to TigerVNC too so we have a
widely interoperable strong authentication system."
All in all it looks as though contrary to their slogan "The VNC that
bites" TigerVNC will be superb.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00213.html
2.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue119#Baracuda_To_Replace_VNC_.3F
3.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=alpine.LFD.2.00....
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00217.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00221.html
=== Ready for a New RPM Version ? ===
On 2009-02-26 Panu Matilainen asked[1] if it would be possible to
introduce RPM-4.7 at this late stage of the Fedora 11 release cycle.
This new version decreases memory use and improves performance. Panu
emphasized that it was not as large an upgrade as the "[...] 4.4.2.x ->
4.6.0 leap-of-faith upgrade last year [.]"
Bill Nottingham was among those who expressed concern that rpm-4.7 would
be completely ready for the final release of Fedora 11. He also wondered
if there would be incompatibilities with previous rpm version. Panu
answered[2] that rpm-4.7 was expected to be ready for the final release
and that incompatibilities would only result if packagers used the POSIX
file capabilities. This latter is protected against with an rpmlib()
dependency.
A certain amount of disquiet at the idea of "[g]oing with a beta version
of critical infrastructure like RPM [...]" based on the recent changes
to RPM was voiced[3] by Tom Lane. Upon a challenge from Seth Vidal some
problems with the process of upgrading rpm to handle stronger hashes
were listed[4] by Bill Nottingham. These included including "No solution
for handling packages natively on F9" and Tom Lane expanded[5] on the
point: "I'm personally still ticked off that I'm being forced to update
my development workstation to F-10 immediately in order to continue
doing useful work on rawhide packages. I don't have time for that right
now. Since F-9 is still supported, isn't it a management failing to have
allowed this to happen without a plan to make mock on F-9 work?" The
general response seemed to be that developers need to use one of the
virtual machine solutions in order to be able to build for rawhide.
A substantial sub-thread on the rate of change in rawhide and whether or
not developers should use it or stick to the current stable release with
a virtualized instance of rawhide developed[6] following some thoughts
from Adam Williamson.
RahulSundaram asked[7] for more information on the use of LZMA
compression as this is one of the new features of rpm-4.7. Panu
replied[8] LZMA will not be used by default as it would make even the
current Fedora 10 rpm unable to read packages produced with such
compression.
A FESCo decision made on 2009-03-06 confirmed[9] that rpm-4.7 would be
the version shipping in Fedora 11.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02117.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02161.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02134.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02142.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02146.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02213.html
7.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02156.html
8.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02173.html
9. http://bpepple.fedorapeople.org/fesco/FESCo-2009-03-06.html
=== Windows Cross-compiler Added to comps.xml ===
Following from a FESCo 2009-03-06 decision Richard W.M. Jones asked[1]
to add a "Windows cross-compiler" group to comps.xml before the rapidly
approaching 2009-03-10 string freeze.
Kevin Kofler asked why Richard did not call it "MinGW cross compiler"
and Richard responded[2] that he wanted to avoid trademarks and leave
open the possibility to broaden support to other non-embedded platforms.
He came up with either "Consumer cross-compilers (CCC) or Consumer
cross-compiler collection (CCCC)." Kevin had some other interesting
questions about the legality of possible OS X cross-compilers and the
desirability of one group per OS. Richard pointed[3] to an earlier
thread on the latter question.
=== Anaconda Default of Separate / and /home Partitions ===
A long-standing bugzilla entry was referenced[4] by Lex Hider as
background for the idea that anaconda should support separate /home and
/ partitions in order to support clean installs during upgrades. Lex's
detailed post included links to relevant previous discussion.
Adam Williamson was very much in favor of the idea and in response to
Jesse Keating suggested[5] some heuristics which might allow anaconda to
determine the relative sizes of the / and /home partitions. Bruno Wolff
III's / partition size (circa 40GB) proved[6] to be surprisingly large
due to multiple languages installed. Michel Salim[7] and Callum
Lerwick[8] both brought up the necessity to have a large / partition in
order to be able to run preupgrade.
Lex elaborated[9] on possible space requirements for such a scheme.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00365.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00384.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00397.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01903.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01960.html
6.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg01976.html
7.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02167.html
8.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02021.html
9.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-February/msg02356.html
=== Beta Freeze and String Freeze this Tuesday 2009-03-10 ===
Dennis Gilmore posted[1] a heads up on 2009-03-06 that "[...] anything
that needs translations needs to be done by COB [Tuesday]. This is a
blocking Freeze any packages you need included in the Beta release must
be requested via release engineering [.]"
A brief amount of confusion occurred[2] due to the misnaming of the day
of the week. Till Maas also wondered exactly what Close Of Business
meant exactly for an international project like Fedora.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00430.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-March/msg00425.html
=== Fedora 11 Default Mediaplayer Not Banshee. Mono to Blame ? ===
A summary of FESCo deliberations posted[1] by BillNottingham stirred
DavidNielsen to object that he had not been alerted (as maintainer) that
discussion of the Banshee media player was to occur. David also
objected[2] that the onus had been placed on him to convince the
maintainer of the competitor Rhythmbox package to allow the replacement.
He also suggested that the use of the Mono language was a stumbling
block due to RHEL eschewing Mono: "[...] RHEL does not ship Mono, if
RHEL wants to ship Rhythmbox that is their decision but what Fedora
ships should not be. What else are we going to be dictated from above..
who else should bother to make proposals for what they preceive to be
improvements?"
Jesse Keating responded[3] that his understanding was that the desire to
avoid mono in Fedora is to avoid bloating the LiveCDs with dependencies.
The IRC logs bore out[4] this interpretation with FESCo members
explicitly stating that "[...] what its written in should have no
bearing on what goes in[.]" It was also clear however that RHEL, as the
largest downstream distributor of an OS directly derived from Fedora,
would not be ignored.
== Translation ==
This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora Translation (L10n)
Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N
Contributing Writer: Runa Bhattacharjee
=== FLP Infrastructure Team Meeting ===
The second meeting[1] of the FLP Infrastructure team was held on
2009-03-05. The important topics discussed included the enabling of
login via FAS for the Transifex instance, Publican support (statistics),
inclusion of the Transifex RPM files into the yum repositories etc.
Meanwhile, the test instance of http://translate.fedoraproject.org with
a new version of transifex is currently available on
http://publictest14.fedoraproject.org for testing and feedback. The
statistics can be viewed without login. For advanced operations, a
log-in can be created on the server[2].
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00033.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00019.html
=== Statistics Page and Submission Outage ===
Due to a failed refresh process, the translation statistics were not
correctly generated on translate.fedoraproject.org[1]. The error was
fixed rapidly by the FLP Infrastructue Team[2].
Additionally, Xavier Conde Rueda reported[3] failure to submit
authconfig and fedora-web module via the submit page. The error, caused
in the main server, was fixed by the Fedora Infrastructure team[4].
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00006.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00010.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00050.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00056.html
=== Publican Documents Now on tfp.org ===
The two publican documents which were requested for translation by
Ruediger Landmann can now be submitted via
translate.fedoraproject.org[1]. Until last week, these files had to be
sent back to Ruediger for submission.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00025.html
=== F11 String Freeze Reminder ===
FLSCo member NorikoMizumoto has sent out a reminder[1] of the upcoming
String freeze[2] date to the Devel team. The string freeze for Fedora 11
is scheduled to be in place on the 10th of March 2009.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00009.html
2.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ReleaseEngineering/StringFreezePolicy
=== Study about FLP ===
DimitrisGlezos has put together a study[1][2] about the progess of the
Fedora Localization Project. The discussion includes various aspects of
FLP including the community structure, communication, language coverage,
FLP backend administration and engineering etc.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00051.html
2.
http://dimitris.glezos.com/weblog/2009/03/08/flp-advancement-study
=== New Members in FLP ===
Jorge Gallegos[1], Ricardo Pinto[2], Teemu Vartiainen[3] and Alexey
Vasyukov[4] joined the Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish and Russian
translation teams respectively.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00026.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00030.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00036.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2009-March/msg00047.html
== Artwork ==
In this section, we cover the Fedora Artwork Project.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork
Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei
=== Echo Weekly News ===
Martin Sourada announced[1] on @fedora-art a new edition of the Echo
Weekly News [2] "This issue covers February 2009 and contains this
topic: New Icons, Perspective" and a few days later he also advanced[3]
a new design for the "computer" icon.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00012.html
2. http://fedorahosted.org/echo-icon-theme/wiki/MonthlyNews/Issue7
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00038.html
=== Preparing for the Beta Release ===
With the Beta release for Fedora 11 nearing, Paul Frields asked[1] about
the wallpaper status "We are a little past that deadline if the
wallpaper is to get into the Beta spin as was originally intended, but
it *can* still happen. I suggest deciding on a candidate by tomorrow. If
the design isn't perfect there is still time to tweak it as we move
toward the Preview Release and the other collateral designs are made"
and Máirín Duffy came[2] with a round of images[3], which gathered the
consensus of the team with the reserve[4] on improving them further
post-Beta. The images were also packaged[5] in a yummable format by
Martin Sourada.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00023.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00026.html
3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_Artwork#Beta_Mockups
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00028.html
5.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00030.html
=== Working on the Picture Book ===
After the project was initiated on @fedora-marketing a couple of months
ago, the time came for implementation on @fedora-art and Máirín Duffy
started the process[1] with an acclaimed[2] first mockup "Let the games
begin! :) My concept for the theme of the book here is a guide on how to
be Fedora. There would be 4 chapters, freedom, friends, features, first.
The photos for each chapter will have the model's perspective on the
chapter's four f, talking about how that f affects their life and
affects their role in Fedora. Then below that, per picture, we could
suggest to the readers how they can bring that into their own life with
a suggestion. Kind of a call to action" which was followed by a round of
improvements[3] from Nicu Buculei.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00014.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00015.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2009-March/msg00020.html
== Security Advisories ==
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from
fedora-package-announce.
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce
Contributing Writer: David Nalley
=== Fedora 10 Security Advisories ===
* mediawiki-1.14.0-45.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg000...
* psi-0.12.1-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg000...
* jhead-2.86-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg001...
* wireshark-1.0.6-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg001...
* curl-7.19.4-1.fc10 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg001...
=== Fedora 9 Security Advisories ===
* mediawiki-1.14.0-45.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg000...
* psi-0.12.1-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg000...
* dkim-milter-2.8.1-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg001...
* jhead-2.86-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg001...
* curl-7.19.4-1.fc9 -
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-March/msg001...
== Virtualization ==
In this section, we cover discussion on the @et-mgmnt-tools-list,
@fedora-xen-list, @libvirt-list and @ovirt-devel-list of Fedora
virtualization technologies.
Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley
=== Enterprise Management Tools List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the et-mgmt-tools list
==== Managing Guest OS Types ====
Cole Robinson created[1] a patch to provide a --list-os-options option
to virt-install and virt-convert. Output from this option would be used
to help users determine the appropriate argument for --os-type. The
--os-type option is used to "Optimize the guest configuration for a type
of operating system. This will attempt to pick the most suitable ACPI &
APIC settings, optimally supported mouse drivers and generally
accommodate other operating system quirks."
This touched off a discussion[2] of how such information is managed.
Daniel P. Berrange pointed out shortcomings in the current approach and
perscribed the following fixes, and supplied an example XML file.
* An XML schema for defining all the information wrt to guest OS
distros that is relevant to virt management tools.
* A C library for querying the information in the XML file(s).
* Bindings of the C library into Python/Ruby etc as needed
* Ability for local admins to extend / override the information
either by editing the XML files directly, or a pretty GUI
Cole later dropped[3] his patch and automated[4] the creation of the OS
list in the virt-install man page instead.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00023.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00028.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00034.html
4.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00033.html
==== virt-manager Storage Removal ====
A patch[1] from Cole Robinson "adds a storage aware delete dialog to
virt-manager. When deleting a VM, we are presented with a list of
storage attached to it, with an option to remove individual disks as
part of the delete process."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00042.html
==== virt-install Host Device Assignment Support ====
Cole Robinson added[1] "support for host device assignment to virtinst
and virt-install. This adds a --host-device[2] command to "Attach a
physical host device to the guest. HOSTDEV is a node device name as used
by libvirt (as shown by 'virsh nodedev-list')."
Daniel P. Berrange described[3] the management options for host devices.
* "If 'managed=yes' then libvirt will automatically detach the
device from the host driver."
* "If 'managed=no' then libvirt expects that the caller has already
ensured the device is detached from the host before *ALL* attempts
to start the guest, now & in the future."
This change supports the KVM PCI Device Assignment feature[4] in Fedora
11.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00003.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00006.html
3.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2009-March/msg00007.html
4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KVM_PCI_Device_Assignment
=== Fedora Virtualization List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.
==== User Interface Makeover for virt-manager ====
Daniel P. Berrange pointed[1] out "there's a significant redesign of
image:Echo-package-16px.pngvirt-manager in progress" and brought
attention to Cole Robinson's 'New VM' wizard makeover[2]. Daniel added
"Many more design improvements are targetted for the next few
virt-manager releases, impacting nearly every area of the UI, so keep an
eye out for more UI review postings during F12 timeframe too."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-March/msg00001.html
2.
http://blog.wikichoon.com/2009/02/virt-manager-in-fedora-11-new-vm-wizard...
==== New Release virtinst 0.4.2 ====
Cole Robinson announced[1] a new virtinst release, version 0.400.2.
image:Echo-package-16px.pngpython-virtinst is a module that helps build
and install libvirt based virtual machines. It 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 features:
* New virt-clone option --original-xml, allows cloning a guest from
an xml file, rather than require an existing, defined guest.
* New virt-install option --import, allows creating a guest from an
existing disk image, bypassing any OS install phase.
* New virt-install option --host-device, for connecting a physical
host device to the guest.
* Allow specifying 'cache' value via virt-install's --disk options
(Ben Kochie)
* New virt-install option --nonetworks (John Levon)
* Lots of backend cleanups and documentation improvements.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-March/msg00002.html
=== Fedora Xen List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.
==== dom0 Kernel Inches Closer ===
Pasi Kärkkäinen walked[1] the bleeding edge while testing Xen dom0 host
support. Using Fedora 10 with Xen 3.3.1-9 from Rawhide and a custom
built 2.6.29-rc7 pv_ops dom0 kernel the system boots, but virt-install
and virt-manager fail with the error "Unsupported virtualization type
'xen'".
It seems[2] that /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities is not present
for some unknown reason.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-March/msg00017.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-March/msg00023.html
=== Libvirt List ===
This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.
==== New Release libvirt 0.6.1 ====
Daniel Veillard announced[1] a new image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibvirt
release, version 0.6.1.
Libvirt is a C toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities
of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes).
New features:
* new APIs for Node device detach reattach and reset (Mark
McLoughlin)
* sVirt[2] mandatory access control support (James Morris and Dan
Walsh)
Improvements:
* don't hardcode ssh port (Guido Gunther)
* new test cases and testing infrastructure (Jim Meyering)
* improve the SExpr parser (John Levon)
* proper error reporting on xend shutdown command (John Levon)
* proper handling of errors when saving QEmu domains state (Guido
Gunther)
* revamp of the internal error memory APIs (John Levon)
* better virsh error reporting (John Levon)
* more daemon options to allow running multiple daemons (Jim
Meyering)
* error handling when creating a QEmu domain (Guido Gunther)
* fix timeouts in QEmu log reading (Guido Gunther)
* migration with xend 3.3 fixes (John Levon)
* virsh XML dump flags cleanup (Cole Robinson)
* fix build with loadable drivers (Maximilian Wilhelm)
* internal XML APIs to read long long and hexa values (Mark
McLoughlin)
* function to parse node device XML descriptions and associated test
(Mark McLoughlin)
* generate network bridge names if not provided (Cole Robinson)
* recognize ejectable media in hostdev hal driver (Cole Robinson)
* integration of sVirt (Daniel Berrange)
There were also dozens of cleanups, documentation enhancements,
portability and bug fixes.
With about five weeks since the release of 0.6.0[3], Daniel added "So
quite a bit of changes happened in one month of development, so it's
getting clear we aren't really slowing down and keeping a relatively
fast release cycle is needed. So expect 0.6.2 in a month or so."
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00144.html
2.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SVirt_Mandatory_Access_Control
3.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue161#New_Release_libvirt_0.6.0
==== sVirt Support Committed ====
Daniel P. Berrange applied[1] the sVirt[2] patches to enable selinux
support in libvirt.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00092.html
2.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SVirt_Mandatory_Access_Control
==== Secure Guest Migration Between Hosts ====
Chris Lalancette posted[1] a request for comments on secure migration
with an initial focus on Qemu. The proposal included two options. One
leveraged existing RPC while the second created a new well known port to
handle the migration. Using RPC adds a layer of authenitcation which may
possibly be avoided in the second option by simply opening a new port in
a firewall.
Sticking with existing RPC and enhancing[2] the authentication system
for migration seemed to be the consensus.
1.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00094.html
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00148.html
==== Hynesim Project Interest in Libvirt ====
Florian Vichot of the Hynesim[1] project was interested[2] in replacing
their wrappers around KVM, VirtualBox, and OpenVZ with libvirt, and so
asked about support for a number of features including auxiliary TAP
devices in the host to correspond with ethernet devices in the guest.
1. http://www.hynesim.org
2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-March/msg00115.html
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Oisin Feeley
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OisinFeeley
14 years, 8 months