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DistributionsNews and Editorials A brief look at some distribution newsIn the process of reading through a number of distribution mailing lists your editor encountered several items that seemed worthy of mention, but none that seemed to provide enough for a complete article. So the following will be a brief look at a variety of topics.The Fedora Bug Zappers subproject was recently announced on the fedora-devel mailing list. This is a team of people who triage bugs and act as a bridge between the users and developers. The team is meeting regularly, and new bug zappers are always welcome. Donnie Berkholz ran an informal survey that was answered by 50 Gentoo developers. The results have been graphed, one page per question. For example, the question "What are the top 3 issues facing Gentoo?" is here. "Developers' top 5 issues are manpower, publicity, goals, developer friction, and leadership." The pie chart shown on the previous page has been replaced by a bar chart. There are eight more questions that remain to be charted. The openSUSE project has been discussing the creation of a developer blog. Although other blogs exist they tend to range off-topic. This would be specifically a place to talk about development topics, such as new features in YaST. Posts would be tagged so that people who wanted to find more about YaST could find all entries with that tag. Ubuntu wants all users to be involved with bug squashing. Do 5 a day - every day!, says Daniel Holbach.
What you can do? That's up to you, your interests and your abilities.
- If you're a developer, you can help out reviewing patches and getting them uploaded. - If you want to just confirm new bugs, you can do that. - If you have experience with a certain package and want to triage bugs you can do that and forward them upstream if necessary. - If you know your way around Ubuntu quite well, you can help assign bugs to the right package. That's not a bad idea, regardless of your distribution of choice.
New Releases Foresight GNOME Edition 2.0 Alpha 4 ReleasedThe Foresight team has announced the fourth alpha test release of the upcoming Foresight GNOME Edition 2.0. This latest release features numerous bug fixes, package updates, and GNOME 2.21.90.
Ubuntu Hardy Alpha 5 releasedThe fifth alpha of Ubuntu's Hardy Heron is available for testing. This release is available as Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu JeOS, Xubuntu, Gobuntu and UbuntuStudio. Alpha 5 includes several new features that are ready for large-scale testing.
Launchpad 1.2.2 releasedThis version of Launchpad has lots of bug fixes and new features, faster PPA builds, enhanced bug subscriptions and more karma. "There's also exciting news for Launchpad beta testers! You can now apply to use Launchpad to run a mailing list for a team you're involved with."
Distribution News Debian GNU/Linux Bits from the DPL: FTP assistants, marketing team, init scripts, electionsDebian Project Leader Sam Hocevar has some news for Debian developers introducing new FTP assistants, setting up a Debian Marketing Team, a look at improving the init system, and the upcoming DPL election.
Fedora Fedora Education SIGThe Fedora Education Special Interest Group has been formed. There is a wiki page and a mailing list. Interested people are invited to join.
Fedora Amateur Radio SIGThe Fedora Amateur Radio SIG or Fedora-Hams for short, has been announced. "We have been busy this past week submitting packages for review, most of them have been accepted and are now in Fedora, more waiting for reviews and more that still need packaging to be finished. On my FedoraPeople.org page I have a list of the packages in fedora, in review, in progress and dreams."
Fedora Board Recap 2008-FEB-19Click below for a recap of the February 19th meeting of the Fedora board.
Are you a Fedora Contributor and want a LWN subscription?To support the 10th anniversary of LWN.net, the Fedora Project has purchased 65 subscriptions to be given to Fedora contributors in a lottery. Interested people will have hopefully already replied to the announcement since the deadline is March 1. We would just like to say Thank You Fedora and congratulations to the winners!
SUSE Linux and openSUSE Getting Local User Groups off the groundThere has been some discussion (click below for the starting point and a link to the thread) about forming openSUSE local user groups. Short term goals include promoting the 11.0 release and organizing 11.0 release parties.
Other distributions PCLinuxOS security forumPCLinuxOS has started a security forum to inform users of security updates. If you are running PCLOS you'll want to keep up with this forum.
Distribution Newsletters Fedora Weekly News Issue 121The most recent Fedora Weekly News covers a wide variety of Fedora topics including: FUDCon for Fedora 10, lots of FOSDEM coverage, the Amateur Radio and Education SIGs, a way for Fedora contributors to get an LWN subscription and more. Click below for the edition.
OpenSUSE Weekly News/11This edition of the OpenSUSE Weekly News covers the availability of Factory Live CDs, FOSDEM 2008 is Over, Mono Hack Week Summary, In Tips and Tricks: How to fix the Amarok Update Problems; How to try out openSUSE releases with VirtualBox, In the Press: SUSE Linux on the ThinkPad T61 Review; Compiz wins "Window Manager of the Year" Award, and several other topics.
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #79Issue #79 of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is out. Contents include articles on the release of Hardy Heron Alpha 5, the introduction of the Intrepid Ibex, the 5-a-day bug squashing effort and more. Click below for the full edition.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 241The DistroWatch Weekly for February 25, 2008 is out. "Great week for all the fans of FreeBSD - according to the project's updated release engineering page, the delayed FreeBSD 7.0 should be up on the mirrors within hours! In the news section, Ubuntu introduces the all-new Intrepid Ibex, Gentoo polls its developers on issues facing the project, gNewSense announces a new level of package freedom in its repositories, and PCLinuxOS sets up a dedicated forum board for security notices. Other topics in this week's issue include a quick tutorial on using the cut and paste commands for manipulating columns of data in text files and a brief introduction to Ultimate Edition, an Ubuntu-based distribution for the desktop."
Distribution meetings openSUSE @ CeBITopenSUSE will be at CeBIT next week (March 4 - 9, 2008). Stop by and say hello if you are there, and look for openSUSE presentations on Saturday and Sunday.
Newsletters and articles of interest rawhide and cooker comparedAustin Acton made a back to back comparison of Fedora rawhide and Mandriva cooker. Since these are both development snapshots the results may vary from day-to-day, but the results are still interesting.
Interviews Interview with NetworkManager developer Dan WilliamsThe Fedora wiki interviews continue with a conversation with Dan Williams, NetworkManager hacker. "So you bring up your mobile broadband card and tell NM to share that connection over wireless. NM might create a new Ad-Hoc wireless network, get an automatic IPv4 address, set up NAT, and advertise itself as a router for other wireless clients like Mac OS X does. Magic."
People of openSUSE: Rossana MottaPeople of openSUSE has been interviewing openSUSE contributors. The most recent interview is with Rossana Motta, well-know among SuSELinuxSupport forum users. "What especially motivates you to participate in the openSUSE project? It has been, and always is, awesome to be part of Opensuse community, not only to learn more about linux and computers in general but also to "meet" great people located all over the earth. I really feel like in a big family, that is walking all together to improve the whole community and OS."
Interview with Wolven, creator of Wolvix, and his sidekick Oithona (Raiden's Realm)Steve Lawson interviews Wolvix creators Wolven and Oithona. "I first tried Wolvix as a live CD in its 1.0.5 version back in November 2006 and was immediately blown away by it. Since then I've had Wolvix 1.1.0 (Hunter) installed in two different virtual machines and a laptop, as well as having run it repeatedly as a live CD on various machines, and it has never let me down once. As it's now based on Slackware 11.0, Wolvix is rock-solid stable and, thanks to its pairing with the lightweight Xfce desktop environment (Fluxbox is available as an option), it's also remarkably quick, particularly useful for older, less well-specified PCs."
What's New in FreeBSD 7.0 (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet takes a look at the soon to be released FreeBSD 7.0. "Federico Biancuzzi interviewed two dozen developers to discuss all the cool details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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