news 28 Posted December 15, 2008 -- Fedora Weekly News Issue 156 -- Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 156 for the week ending December 14th, 2008. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue156 This week's issue features an exciting discount for Fedora community members in Australia and New Zealand on Red Hat certification training and exams. Coverage of Fedora Planet includes event reports from a FOSS event in India and a Parisian Fedora install fest, along with a nifty XO Exchange Registry. Another flamewar eruption is covered on the Developments beat, along with updates on the D-Bus in Fedora and discussion on making 'updates-testing' more useful. Fedora websites are now available in Russian and Bulgarian, as reported in this issue's Translations beat. The Artwork beat reports on the Fedora Art Team's re-envisioning discussion as well as using the Fedora branding in the OLPC Sugar interface. The security advisory beat updates us on Fedora 9 and 10 updates, along with reminders of Fedora 8 end of life, January 7, 2009. In virtualization news, details of the latest libvert in RHEL and CentOS 5.2. All this and more in this week's FWN! FWN is considering changing the format in response to some reader suggestions. The Developments section this week attempts to be considerably shorter and places URLs below each section instead of interspersing them after each paragraph. We welcome reader feedback on the subject: fedora-news-list ( -at -) redhat.com. If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[1]. FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala [0] http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join -- 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/ Contributing Writer: Max Spevack -- Red Hat Certification offer -- STOP THE PRESSES.....50% Discount on Red Hat Certification Exams When the going gets tough - the tough get certified! Maximise your chance of career success in 2009 with Red Hat training and certification Special End of Year Offer for Fedora community members in Australia and New Zealand. 50% discount of all Red Hat Exams taken in Australia and New Zealand by February 28th, 2009 Get your certification today! Act now... simply visit http://www.apac.redhat.com/training/dates.php3 for a complete list of Red Hat exams available until 28th February, 2009 and write "Fedora Community Special" in the Promo code box. Make sure you use your Fedora email id when registering to qualify for the 50% discount. If you have a mate who would benefit from a Red Hat certification, make sure you pass on the good news! -- Terms and Conditions -- This offer begins December 15, 2008 and ends on February 28, 2009. Offer void if participant cancels, no shows, or requests a refund. Offer is subject to availability. Exams, reschedules and any retakes must be completed by February 28, 2009. Participants must register for the promotion at http://www.apac.redhat.com/training/register.php3 and enter “Fedora Community Special†in the Special Offers section, using their Fedora email id to register. Offer may not be used for exams in which you are already enrolled, cancellations and re-bookings. This offer is not valid in conjunction with any other promotions or special pricing. Participant is responsible for assessing his/her suitability for enrolling in the appropriate exam. Government employees and contractors may not be eligible to receive this offer and the participant acknowledges that his/her employer is aware of and consents to the receipt of the offer, and that the receipt of the offer does not violate the organisation’s policies and regulations. Void where prohibited by law. Offer is available to residents of Australia and New Zealand only. Red Hat reserves the right to withdraw or extend this offer at anytime. -- Updates -- Paul Frields wrote[1] about the update problem affecting D-Bus. "Recently, an update of D-Bus software package in Fedora 10 caused the substantial breakage of some applications, including PackageKit." The announcement includes instructions that explain how a user can update the system manually using yum on the command-line, and return to business-as-usual. If you are unable to perform a normal system update using PackageKit and need help, please read the full announcement. [1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-December/msg00012.html -- 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 Jones answers[1] some frequently asked questions and common misconceptions regarding Virtual Memory in Linux Tom Tromey concluded[2,3,4] his excellent series on scripting and extending GDB with Python, including some PyGTK widgetry inside GDB. Michael DeHaan contemplates the complexity of software projects and how to encourage new people to get involved and contribute. "Projects that have a lot of complex interrelationships and need a lot of experience with the codebase (that is acquired over a long period of time) are less apt to attract casual contributions"[5] Jesse Keating announced[6] a new Fedora Hosted project, Offtrac: "Offtrac is my attempt at creating a python library for interacting with trac via xmlrpc." The project can already perform a number of tasks including querying, retrieving and creating tickets and milestones. Kulbir Saini presented[7] some ideas for hacking a Linux install to make it boot faster. Luis Villa offered[8] a followup regarding some comments that he had made criticizing OpenOffice.org's user interface and praising Office 2007. MáirÃn Duffy put together[9] an impressive Lightscribe label template for Fedora. Greg DeKoenigsberg introduced[10] the XO Exchange Registry that "connects people who have XOs and don't need them with people who need XOs and don't have them." Tom Callaway ranted[11] (don't worry, those are his own words) about FOSS licensing. He notes that there are no clear standards for what defines a "Free" distribution, as there are often cases where truly difficult questions arise, but adds "This is why for Fedora, the goal of being 100% Free isn't something that we're losing sleep over. Sure, we'd like to be 100% Free, and we're working towards that every day, but actually being 100% Free is HARD, especially if you want more than 700 MB of packages." John Poelstra discussed[12] the "Benefits of Detailed Schedules" after last week's approval of the Fedora 11 schedule. Till Maas announced[13] "some webpages that cache bugzilla queries of package review requests". So if anyone out there would like to jump in and help review some packages, please do so! (there were 719 packages in the NEW state when Till's post went up and already 725 by the time this sentence was written). Luke Macken decided to share[14] a small python program that determines "the amount of time Fedora updates spend in testing within bodhi". Click in to see the results. Matthew Garrett apparently spent a bit of time traveling, and during that time analyzed[15] a number of showers, as a metaphor for UI design in software. Luke Macken committed a Python API for interacting with the Fedora Wiki and shows off[16] some of its statistical gathering abilities. [1] http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/132396.html [2] http://tromey.com/blog/?p=548 [3] http://tromey.com/blog/?p=550 [4] http://tromey.com/blog/?p=552 [5] http://www.michaeldehaan.net/?p=798 [6] http://jkeating.livejournal.com/66433.html [7] http://fedora.co.in/content/how-boot-your-fedora-faster [8] http://tieguy.org/blog/2008/12/10/why-im-not-a-big-fan-of-ooo-part-53240/ [9] http://mihmo.livejournal.com/65518.html [10] http://gregdek.livejournal.com/42524.html [11] http://spot.livejournal.com/303000.html [12] http://poelcat.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/benefits-of-detailed-schedules/ [13] http://blogs.23.nu/till/2008/12/cached-package-review-buglists/ [14] http://lewk.org/blog/time-in-testing.html [15] http://mjg59.livejournal.com/104279.html [16] http://lewk.org/blog/wiki.html -- Events -- Folks are still posting[17,18,19] photos and writeups of their experience at FOSS.IN. It really sounds like an amazing time was had by all. [17] http://rishikeshsharma.blogspot.com/2008/12/manipur-fedora-10-release-party.html [18] http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings/2008/12/08/fossin-2008/ [19] http://kushaldas.in/2008/12/10/what-else-we-did-at-fossin/ Thomas Canniot wrote[20] about a successful Fedora Install Fest in Paris [20] http://blog.mrtomlinux.org/index.php?post/Fedora-10-Install-Fest-Report -- Developments -- In this section the people, personalities and debates on the Share this post Link to post
