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A new system log daemon for Fedora

Fedora 8 will be using Rsyslog instead of sysklogd. In fact, rsyslog is already in rawhide. The Fedora wiki site notes that sysklogd seems to be dead upstream and there are many new features that people have been requesting. Rsyslog seems to be the package that best meets the requirements of a feature-full yet backward compatible system log daemon.

The list of rsyslog features includes native support for writing to MySQL databases, support for (plain) tcp based syslog, support for sending and receiving compressed syslog messages, support for receiving messages via reliable RFC 3195 delivery, the ability to generate file names and directories dynamically, control of log output format, good timestamp format control, the ability to reformat message contents and work with substrings, support for log files larger than 2gb, support for file size limitation and automatic rollover command execution, support for running multiple rsyslogd instances on a single machine, support for ssl-protected syslog (via stunnel), the ability to filter on any part of the message, the ability to use regular expressions in filters, support for discarding messages based on filters, the ability to execute shell scripts on received messages, control of whether the local hostname or the hostname of the origin of the data is shown as the hostname in the output, the ability to preserve the original hostname in NAT environments and relay chains, the ability to limit the allowed network senders, powerful BSD-style hostname and program name blocks for easy multi-host support, multi-threaded, experimental support for syslog-transport-tls based framing on syslog/tcp connections, a copy of klogd.c has been included under the name of rklogd for those Linux systems that need one, support for IPv6, the ability to control repeated line reduction ("last message repeated n times") on a per selector-line basis, and more. Rsyslog is actively maintained and new features are added every few days.

The biggest issue in Fedora so far seem to be the upgrade path and how to replace sysklogd gracefully. Hopefully this will be resolved (or at least well documented) before the final Fedora 8 release. Those who do a clean install of Fedora 8 should have no problems whatsoever.

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New Releases

Ark Linux 2007.1-rc1 released

The Ark Linux team has announced the immediate availability of Ark Linux 2007.1-rc1, the first release candidate of the new version of its multi-purpose desktop operating system. Ark Linux can be used for office/school work, desktop publishing, graphics, multimedia entertainment/editing, gaming, software development, and more.

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Distribution News

openSUSE gets a new manager

It appears that former openSUSE manager Andreas Jaeger has been promoted within Novell, so the management of the openSUSE distribution has been passed to Stephan Kulow. "Stephan - known also as Coolo - the 'born release dude', has been with Novell/SUSE for five years. Before that he worked on Linux distributions at Caldera. His wide experience in Linux includes the dinosaurs (called s390), desktop technology (KDE), several build systems (including his own at Caldera), and SUSE tools like package translation."

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Smolt, Open Invitation

Smolt is a hardware profiling tool used by Fedora to get automated information from users who opt-in. Fedora is now announcing functional clients that work in SuSE, Debian, and Ubuntu. "But we need your help! We would like knowledgeable contributors help with our code base, especially in the scope of packaging the smolt client for SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandrake, you name it. We're hoping Smolt will grow far beyond being just a "Fedora" thing and become a "Linux" thing. If you are a member of another community and are interested in collaboration please let me know, if you know someone that might be interested, tell them!"

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Rahul Sundaram on Smolt

Rahul Sundaram talks a bit about Smolt and its usefulness in this LiveJournal entry.

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fedorapeople.org is now available

fedorapeople.org is a site where Fedora contributors can upload files for sharing with the world. It is perfect for uploading specfiles, srpms, patches, etc. Each Fedora contributor has 150M of quota-controlled space.

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Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) Elections -- voting open

Voting is now open for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee elections. All 13 seats are up for election. Click below for a list of candidates and voting instructions. The vote is open until July 22 23:59:59 UTC.

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Fedora Board Recap

Click below for a recap of the July 10, 2007 meeting of the Fedora board.

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Handling of inactive Debian Accounts

The debian.org account database is under review a list of developer accounts that appear to be inactive is being checked. "The purpose of this review is simply to minimise the number of live but unused debian.org accounts since they (in sufficent numbers) are an active security concern. It's _not_ intended as a judgement or criticism of contributions to Debian made by those who may end up on our radar."

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Debian GNU/kFreeBSD amd64 development machine

The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD porters have announced that there is now a Debian GNU/kFreeBSD amd64 machine available to the Debian developers.

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Gobuntu-devel mailing list created

A mailing list has been created for the discussion of Gobuntu. "Gobuntu is a new flavour of Ubuntu that is aiming to apply the strictest possible interpretation of the Free Software Foundation's "Four Freedoms" to all content, both code and media, on the disk."

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Ubuntu Server: time to get on board

The Ubuntu Server Team is dedicated to building a stable, feature rich server platform based on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. The team is looking for help from other interested community members.

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Distribution Newsletters

Fedora Weekly News Issue 96

The Fedora Weekly News for July 14, 2007 looks at the "new" Fedora Board, FESCo Elections, Planet Fedora articles _Attn: Content Management Geeks_, _Fedora 8 themes - Round 1_, and _RMLL07 : Alan Cox on fedora-fr booth_, and much more.

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Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #48

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for July 14, 2007 covers the imminent release of the next Gutsy Gibbon alpha release, Tribe 3. Mark Shuttleworth also brings us some some fresh open alternatives with Gobuntu and a proposal for a pure free-software-only laptop, the Launchpad people have released and open sources their first component, Scribes Team is highlighted for the hard work, and much much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 211

The DistroWatch Weekly for July 16, 2007 is out with mini-reviews of CentOS 5.0 LiveCD, Berry 0.82 and AntiX "Spartacus"; Mandriva 2008 details, Gobuntu announced, Sabayon tidbits and Fedora 8 features; and more.

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Totally "free" Ubuntu? That's the plan for Gobuntu (Linux.com)

Linux.com covers recently announced plans for the Gobuntu distribution. "Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced a new "freedom-focused flavour of Ubuntu" devoid of any proprietary software, which may hold special appeal for open source purists."

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Distribution reviews

With new code base, Supergamer is fun again (Linux.com)

Linux.com has a review of the live DVD Supergamer VL. "Supergamer is a unique Linux distribution whose primary focus is on fun -- specifically, gaming. Supergamer VL, now based on VectorLinux, is all new, with additional games, new code base, and new look and feel. Let the games begin."

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