news 28 Posted February 3, 2009 Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 161 for the week ending February 1, 2009. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue161 This week's FWN goodness offers a very special update from the Fonts SIG to bring us up to date on their work leading up to Fedora 11. You may also notice that we are tweaking the wiki formatting to take advantage of the cite module and other features in MediaWiki, and employing User: references for links to named Fedora folk. We'd love to hear your feedback on these changes. Also in this week's intrepid issue details on the upcoming Fedora monthly public meeting, updates on upcoming events with a Fedora presence, and news updates from around the Fedora Planet. In Developments, details on a slight delay to F11 Alpha and Electronic Automation Tools updates. Translation news brings updates from the latest FLP meeting and website translation updates, along with more Fedora 11 plans. A couple brief updates from the Infrastructure Team, including discussion of possible automation of fedora hosted requests. The Artwork beat paints a lovely picture with details on Fedora 11 visual details, and we're brought up to date with the latest security advisories for Fedora 9 and 10. The issue completes with updates from the various virtualization projects, including details on a new libvirt and virt-manager, as well as meaty updates on the Fedora Xen list. Enjoy, everyone! We are currently looking for a new writer to cover the Fedora Ambassadors for FWN. The work chiefly involves summarizing each's week's traffic on the Fedora Ambassadors' list, and is likely a time committment of perhaps one hour per week. If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[1]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list ( -at -) redhat.com FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala == 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 === Fedora Board Meeting === Paul Frields wrote[2] that "the Board is holding its monthly public meeting on Tuesday, 3 February 2009, at 1900 UTC on IRC Freenode." * Join #fedora-board-meeting to see the Board's conversation. This channel is read-only for non-Board members. * Join #fedora-board-public to discuss topics and post questions. This channel is read/write for everyone. 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-January/msg00018.html === Legal === Tom Callaway announced [1] that "after talking with Red Hat Legal about how we should be handling trademarks in package summaries and descriptions, we came to the conclusion that it would be far easier (and less risky for Red Hat) if we did not use "" or "®" notations at all." 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-January/msg00012.html === Fedora 11 === Fedora 11 Alpha is likely to be delayed for a few days (originally scheduled for February 3) due to a GUI checkbox bug in Anaconda and a problem with nfs-utils that prevented installs over NFS. See the links [1] [2] [3] below for all the technical details. 1. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-January/msg00013.html 2. ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-January/msg00014.html 3. ↑ https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=483375 === Upcoming Events === Fedora will have a presence at several events in the next few weeks. Feel free to join us, February 6 - 8: Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM)[1] February 20 - 22: Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE)[2][3] Also, people are encouraged to register for Fedora or JBoss.org related speaking slots at LinuxTag 2009.[4] 1. ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/FOSDEM/FOSDEM2009 2. ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SCALE7X_Event 3. ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_at_SCaLE_7x 4. ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LinuxTag_2009_talks == Special Report: Fonts SIG == Contributing Writer: Nicolas Mailhot Since Fedora 11 Alpha is quickly approaching, here is a much-delayed edition of the fonts SIG irregular status report. You may recall FWN covered the font surveys in FWN #153[1]. The following special report is largely in addition to that previous report. I should probably have done one for Fedora 10 release, but (silly me) expected then that the new font packaging guidelines would be adopted quickly. After all, they only reworded existing rules and added material already presented and discussed on the fonts and devel lists. Of course various instances decided to celebrate F10 by taking a break, then there was some bike-shedding, then we had the Christmas vacations, then FUDCON and more bike-shedding. Live and learn. At least after being hammered to death the result is clear and clean. Anyway, to the report. 1. ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue153#Fonts_Survey === New fonts packaging guidelines === After much anguish and unexpected developments FPC and FESCO approved the complete set of fonts packaging changes that we had submitted.[1] The end result is: 1) a completed and clarified policy page[2] 2) two new packaging templates[3] [4] 3) a helper package with rpm macros, documentation, plus fontconfig and spec templates[5] 1. ↑ https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-January/msg00007.html 2. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:FontsPolicy 3. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Simple_fonts_spec_template 4. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts_spec_template_for_multiple_fonts 5. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_fonts_policy_package === Distribution-wide font auditing and repackaging === Some innocent repoqueries revealed a distressing number of source packages (>130) that made us ship fonts while completely ignoring our previous fonts packaging guidelines and existing licensing rules. So applying new font guidelines twists quickly turned into distribution-wide operation. 1) Its advancement is now tracked[1] 2) A (long) FAQ was published to help packagers with no fonts experience[2] 3) To make sure documentation, QA and other groups are aware and help implement the changes they've been proposed as a Fedora 11 feature[3] 1. ↑ https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=477044 2. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Shipping_fonts_in_Fedora_(FAQ) 3. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Repackaging_of_Fedora_fonts === Wishlist status === Our wishlist stood at 56 entries for last report. It has now reached 76 entries [1]. The current fonts packagers are clearly unable to cope with Fedora demands, fresh blood is needed before it moves into 100+ numbers. At the same time the respected lwn.net is running a front page article[2] listing more indispensable free or open fonts, some of them being neither in Fedora nor in our wishlist yet. Volunteers to package those or at least add them to our wishlist are welcome. The free and open font landscape is really moving now, and the quality and breadth of its font offerings is now a distribution differentiator. 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Font_wishlist 2. ↑ http://lwn.net/Articles/315872/ === Review status === At this time there are no un-reviewed font packages in Fedora bugzilla. However, several reviews have been open for quite a long time with their requesters not acting on review comments. Please do respond to review comments. Reviewing packages is tedious ungrateful work and getting no response after one is demotivating. === New packages === Ignoring renamings ctan-musixtex-fonts, dustin-dustismo-roman-fonts,dustin-dustismo-sans-fonts, hanazono-fonts, google-droid-sans-fonts, google-droid-sans-mono-font, google-droid-serif-fonts, serafettin-cartoon-fonts, and unikurd-web-font are now available in the repository. The most user-visible of those are probably the Droid fonts, but Dustimo had been waited for a long time. Several other fonts previously hidden deep inside apps have now been exposed as part of the ongoing F11 auditing and repackaging. The complete set of changes is documented as usual[1] Several new packagers worked on those and on other packages not pushed yet and I want to thank them publicly for their contribution to a better Fedora. 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts_inclusion_history === Web font surveys === Fedora 10 shipped with an openjdk plugin that should be complete enough to run web font surveys. There is no reason left for Fedora users not to participate in them, and help web designers select fonts that work well with Fedora browsers. Please take the time to contribute to these[1] 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Linux_fonts_on_the_web:_CSS_and_font_surveys === Better fonts whiteboard === The desktop team has added a whiteboard page[1] to the wiki to help identify the software changes needed to improve Fedora fonts and text handling. Please contribute comments and complements to this page to help make Fedora better. 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/BetterFonts === Font autoinstallation === Rumors on IRC are that the feature is advancing fast. Hopefully we'll have finished cleaning up our font packages before they need to be rebuild to add auto-install metadata[1]. Automating this operation requires clean packages free of historic cruft. 1. ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/AutomaticFontInstallation And that's all for this issue, thank you for reading it to its end. == 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 === Chris Ball posted[1] a video and brief description of some patches to the Vino VNC server to support the multiple pointers on X over VNC, so there will be no more fighting over the mouse cursor when connecting into another computer. Mark J. Wielaard wrote[2] about what he does for a living at Red Hat, including a link to a LWN article that he wrote that provides a high-level overview of Systemtap. John J. McDonough described[3] some of the upcoming changes to the Fedora Docs project, including its leadership. Karsten Wade chimed in[4] with some more details including some additional history. Matthew Garrett discussed[5] some of the issues associated with power management under Linux and how "to make it sufficiently useful and inobtrusive that manual configuration is almost never required." Gary Benson shared[6],[7],[8],[9],[10] a series of articles that he wrote about the internals of Zero and Shark (projects which extend OpenJDK to let it run on new platforms without additional and often cumbersome low-level CPU-specific support). Martin Sourada developed[11] a set of scripts "which are intended to ease the life of echo-icon artist - they create new icons from template, are able to add icons/symlinks to echo icon theme and add manage their local git repository." Matthew Daniels mused[12] on the topic of "Social Responsibility" and getting technology out into people's hands everywhere and making all of this social hardware and software accessible. Jonathan Roberts posted[13],[14] some thoughts about how some of the upcoming major Gnome 3.0 changes might be able to handle things like locating information ("Ubiquitous Search") and saving information automatically. Richard Hughes created [15] a nice graphical UI front-end for Powertop. Adam Williamson expressed[16] some frustrations with the fact that the drivers for the Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo) graphics chip (most notably used in the Dell Mini 12) don't seem to compile cleanly or integrate well with anything, and in fact only work on Ubuntu Netbook Remix. John Palmier proposed[17] "10 thoughts on what is needed for the Linux Desktop to win". 1. ↑ http://blog.printf.net/articles/2009/01/26/multi-pointer-remote-desktop 2. ↑ http://gnu.wildebeest.org/diary/2009/01/29/what-are-you-working-on-systemtap/ 3. ↑ http://wb8rcr.multiply.com/journal/item/87/The_relentless_march_of_change 4. ↑ http://iquaid.org/2009/01/31/leading-from-the-comfort-of-my-armchair/ 5. ↑ http://mjg59.livejournal.com/106581.html 6. ↑ http://gbenson.net/?p=116 7. ↑ http://gbenson.net/?p=118 8. ↑ http://gbenson.net/?p=119 9. ↑ http://gbenson.net/?p=121 10. ↑ http://gbenson.net/?p=122 11. ↑ http://mso-chronicles.blogspot.com/2009/01/developing-new-library-for-icon-artists.html 12. ↑ http://danielsmw.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/social-responsibility/ 13. ↑ http://jonrob.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/gnome-30interfaces-in-general/ 14. ↑ http://jonrob.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/gnome-30interfaces-in-general-part-2/ 15. ↑ http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/01/30/gnome-power-manager-and-processor-wakeups/ 16. ↑ http://www.happyassassin.net/2009/01/30/intel-gma-500-poulsbo-graphics-on-linux-a-precise-and-comprehensive-summary-as-to-why-youre-screwed/ 17. ↑ http://www.j5live.com/2009/02/01/10-thoughts-on-what-is-needed-for-the-linux-desktop-to-win/ === How-To === Ian Weller offered[1] some tips on moving pages around on the Fedora Project Wiki as part of the new Wiki Tip of the Week[2] series. Kulbir Saini explained[3] "How to setup gitweb on Fedora/CentOS". Ding-Yi Chen provided[4] some quick instructions on how to sync between Evolution and a Sony Ericsson K510i phone. Steven Moix wrote[5] instructions on how to configure a GSynaptics touchpad (which is included with many laptops these days) now that there is no xorg.conf file for the GSynaptics utility to modify. 1. ↑ http://ianweller.org/2009/01/26/wiki-tip-for-the-week-of-jan-26-2009-moving-pages-with-ease/ 2. ↑ User:Ianweller/Wiki_tip_of_the_week 3. ↑ http://fedora.co.in/content/how-setup-gitweb-fedoracentos 4. ↑ http://dingyichen.livejournal.com/9382.html 5. ↑ http://www.alphatek.info/2009/01/29/gsynaptics-touchpad-on-fedora-10-hal/ == Developments == In this section the people, personalities and debates on the Share this post Link to post
