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LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 11, 2007Looking forward to Fedora 7LWN readers will, by now, be well familiar with the fact that the Fedora universe is changing. There will be no more Fedora Core releases, and the repository known as Fedora Extras is going away. In their place will be a combined distribution known simply as Fedora, with the next release being called Fedora 7. The Fedora community is busily trying to figure out just what that release is going to look like.Bill Nottingham posted a discussion document on January 4. It keeps the previously-discussed schedule, with the first test release happening on January 30 and general availability of Fedora 7 on April 26. There's a long list of objectives for this release, some of which are:
There's much more on the list, but the above should be enough to give a sense for what is going on. The Fedora developers would like to improve their distribution in a number of significant ways, and in a very short period of time. Most of the desired changes are uncontroversial. The creation of a desktop version of the distribution, however, has been the subject of a fair amount of discussion. The Fedora distribution has traditionally been fairly strongly tied to the GNOME desktop. As Fedora tries to expand its community, though, there is a stronger set of voices calling for support of a KDE version of Fedora as well. Nobody seems to oppose that idea, but there is still a shortage of consensus on how it should be done. As often seems to happen in community discussions, the Fedora developers have gotten hung up on a relatively unimportant issue: naming. Current plans call for the GNOME-based version of the distribution to be named "Fedora Desktop," while the KDE-based version would be "Fedora KDE." The KDE users, who were under the impression that they had a desktop too, think that this naming goes against the idea of KDE being an equal citizen. Others claim that "Fedora Desktop" is meant to be a combination of the "best of breed" desktop software, most of which just happens to come from the GNOME project. They hold out the possibility of a separate "Fedora GNOME" version for GNOME purists; it would feature tools like AbiWord, Gnumeric, and Epiphany, which currently have failed to qualify for the "best of breed" designation. This idea doesn't seem to make the KDE community feel much better. Jeff Spaleta has posted a call for peace on this issue, saying:
But more importantly in the near term. the fact that there is going to
be a KDE spin is a fundamentally important step in terms of opening
the process for community involvement. How about we, as engaged and
proactive community members, focus on making the technical side of
that happen. Whether the Desktop spin is called the Desktop spin or
the 'Office Professional Workforce of Doom' spin its trivially
unimportant compared to helping Rex get the KDE spin out the door.
On the technical side, the biggest disagreement would appear to be over whether Firefox should be included. There has also been some discussion of OpenOffice.org and Evolution. In each case, there seems to be some tension between a "pure" KDE system and a desire to include applications that some users are likely to want. Since the unwanted presence (or absence) of any of these tools is relatively easy to correct after installation, one assumes that a solution will be found that everybody is able to live with. This kind of discussion is not new in the free software community, but it is relatively new to Fedora. As this distribution opens up and accepts more input from outside of Red Hat, there is no doubt that it will get more opinions as well. How these newcomers are accommodated will have a big effect on how successful a more community-oriented Fedora will be. We should see some concrete signs of how well the community is working sometime around late April.
Second Life releases some codeThere is a wide variety of online role-playing games on the net. Second Life is unique among them, however, and not just for the lack of quests to fulfill or monsters to kill. In the Second Life environment, "residents" can lease "property" and create interesting artifacts through the use of a built-in scripting language. The environment has proved free and powerful enough to bring together hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have engaged in large-scale acts of world building. Second Life has shown what can happen when the tools of creation are available to all, but it remains a proprietary service running on proprietary software.As of January 8, however, Second Life has become a little less proprietary. Linden Lab, the company which owns Second Life, has announced the release of the Second Life viewer application under version 2 of the GPL. The viewer is the client which runs on the user's system; it is a significant chunk of code. Its release should enable interested developers to enhance the Second Life experience - and, perhaps, stabilize the Linux client somewhat. The way is not yet clear for an entirely free Second Life client, however, as the released code depends on a number of libraries shipped in binary form. Interestingly, many of those libraries (cURL, expat, Mesa, ogg/vorbis, openssl, zlib, etc.) are free software; it is not clear why Linden feels the need to ship its own copies of them. There are a couple of proprietary libraries in there as well, however. Linden hopes to either relicense or route around those libraries in the near future; a quick glance by your editor suggests that this objective should not be too hard to achieve. The Second Life client would appear to be almost free. Those who would hack on the client code must sign a contributor agreement [PDF] before contributing any changes back. This agreement is essentially a copyright transfer; it allows Linden to do anything it wants with the code. Linden offers commercial licensing terms, so contributors should be sure that they have no objections to that use of their code. The freeing of this code is a good thing; it brings the free software world that much closer to being a first-participant in the creation of interesting virtual worlds. It is only a beginning, however. The bulk of the logic which implements Second Life lives on the server side, and that code remains proprietary. Imagine if the original WWW browsers had been released into a world where a single company owned the only web server; that is, to a first approximation, where we stand with Second Life at this time. As long as this state of affairs persists, Second Life will remain just another proprietary service. Linden has some grand visions for how Second Life could grow:
A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is
focused on building the Second Life Grid - a vision of a globally
interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed
by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming
months in support of this architecture.
Now that sounds like fun, but it will only reach its potential if the server code is free. Linden continues to make noises - but no promises - about freeing this code. The freeing of the client is a good start; it shows that Linden is serious about involving the community. Releasing the server code will require a rather larger leap of faith on Linden's part, however; the server is where the company makes its money. Let's hope that Linden can find a way to take that leap.
Hardware that Just WorksFor whatever reason, there has recently been increase in the number of corporate LWN subscribers who want to receive information by fax. Your editor, having long seen facsimile as a sort of quaint technology for people who don't have email access, has never kept a fax machine around; there just hasn't been much call for it. Recently, however, wandering over to the local mailbox outlet to send faxes has become somewhat tiresome - and time consuming. The printer was showing signs of old age as well, so it seemed it was time to get a new toy in the form of one of those all-in-one devices which can print, scan, copy, and, yes, send faxes.A long stint as a system administrator was enough to teach your editor that the management of printers ranks high on the list of Truly Obnoxious Tasks. For whatever reason, making printers work properly has always been painful, whether one is connecting a dot-matrix line printer to a VAX or a contemporary inkjet to a Linux system. So your editor approached the task with some trepidation, and with a fair amount of advance research. To this end, the linuxprinting.org site, which was merged into the Free Standards Group last year, remains an invaluable resource. Your editor ended up with an HP OfficeJet device which performs all of the required functions. It may yet be convinced to wash the dishes as well, though it seems that feature is not yet well supported under Linux. Everything else is, however. Printing Just Works. Scanning with xsane Just Works. Overall, it is a very nice device, and making it work with Linux was just about painless. A great deal of credit is due to HP, which has made free drivers available for its hardware. Thanks to this openness on HP's part, its hardware is fully supported on Linux systems and can be used to its full potential. That policy just resulted in another sale for HP, and, probably, many others. It behooves us to be sure that HP hears that feedback from its Linux customers. If manufacturers understand that supporting Linux means more sales, they will support Linux. Credit is also due to the HPLIP project, which has packaged HP's drivers with a significant amount of support code. HPLIP integrates well with CUPS, which has done a great deal to civilize printing on free systems. Finally, the distributors have done a lot of work to make the setup of new printers easy. All of this work has transformed an administrator's job; when your editor thinks back to writing lpd output filters for a new device, he feels an immediate need for a strong drink. Now it has become necessary to find a new excuse for drinking. Congratulations to all of those who have managed to bring about such an improvement over a few short years.
linux.conf.auThe seventh edition of linux.conf.au starts on January 15 in Sydney. Over the years, linux.conf.au has become one of the most vibrant, interesting, and just plain fun free software events on the planet. This year's program looks likely to continue the trend. LWN editor Jonathan Corbet is lucky enough to be speaking at the event; come and say "hi" if you're in the area.
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
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