Distributions

News and Editorials

Fedora's Packager Sponsors Responsibility Policy

A Linux distribution is really the sum of its packages. The more packages that are available, the more useful it becomes for a wide range of needs. Case in point, Debian has some 20,000 plus packages available to it's users, and to the wide variety of Debian-based distributions.

Fedora doesn't have quite as many packages available (yet), but the project hasn't been working at it for nearly as long either. Of course having thousands of packages available is no good if they won't interact well with each other. A distribution isn't just a collection of random binary packages. Packaging guidelines are critical for ensuring that any package you (the user) installs, works well with the rest of your system.

Fedora is working toward having an ever growing number of volunteers maintaining an ever growing number of packages, and still having an integrated distribution that works whether you want the "Everything Spin" or one of the highly specialized Spins, or something in between.

One part of making that happen is having sponsors for new volunteers, and coming up with a policy to guide these sponsors. A draft version of the Packager Sponsors Responsibility Policy was posted to Fedora-devel late last week. The wiki version contains some additions and clarifications.

With the new policy, sponsors are maintainers with a good record of package maintenance and have shown a willingness to review packages and assist others. Sponsors act as mentors for new contributors, as package reviewers and ultimately they are responsible for making sure that bugs are fixed in their sponsored packages.

The policy also indicates some conditions where a sponsorship might be revoked:

Like all such policies, it will evolve over time, but all in all it is a good start to a policy that should help new maintainers get involved with the Fedora project.

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New Releases

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 announced

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 has been released. "Today we released the second update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. As with earlier minor releases, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 comes with a broad set of bug fixes, updated hardware support capabilities, quality improvements, and a set of new software features that have been backported from upstream open source projects to the Enterprise Linux 5 code base."

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Distribution News

SUSE Linux and openSUSE

Thesis on openSUSE Published

The openSUSE News points to a recently published thesis on "Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities" which details the collaboration between Novell and the openSUSE community. A summary of the study, the full thesis, and pictures are available at Jan Fredrik's Weblog. "Ch 4 Empirical-findings -- From here on we wander into the world of Novell and the openSUSE project. Based largely on interviews with developers, managers and community members, this chapter presents some of the history of the openSUSE project, the software products, the development process and the openSUSE community." (Thanks to Stephan Binner)

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New Distributions

FAN (Fully Automated Nagios)

FAN (Fully Automated Nagios) aims to provide a CD based on CentOS in order to simplify installation of Nagios and other Nagios tools. Tools installed by FAN are: Linux, MySQL, Nagios, Nagios Plugins, NaReTo, NagVis, Centreon, Net-SNMP and NDOUtils. Version 0.3 was recently released.

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Freezy Linux

Freezy Linux is a free, easy-to-use Linux-based operating system for the home. The initial version, 1.0, is based on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and the GNOME desktop environment. It comes as a live CD which can be installed to the hard drive if desired.

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RedPost Launches Wicker: A Customized Ubuntu for Digital Signs and Photo Frames

RedPost inc. has announced the launch of Wicker, their customized version of Ubuntu that runs on their digital signs. "Eric Kanagy, CEO, led the project to develop Wicker. "We've customized Ubuntu to make it work like a digital sign or photo frame and we figured we may as well offer it to the world. It's nothing too fancy -- it just does what it's supposed to do.""

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Distribution Newsletters

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #92

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for May 24, 2008 covers the Ubuntu Developer Summit Intrepid Ibex, Ubuntu Live canceled, new Ubuntu Membership Approval Boards to meet, new Ubuntu Contributing Developers, a new Launchpad podcast, and much more.

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OpenSUSE Weekly News/23

This edition of the OpenSUSE Weekly News looks at openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3, People of openSUSE: Wolfgang Koller, Status Updates, Duncan Mac-Vicar P.: The greatest unknown openSUSE 11.0 package management feature, Lukás Ocilka: Function Keys in YaST ncurses Frontend, andi.opensuse-id.org: KDE 4.0.4 on openSUSE 10.3, and more.

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Gentoo Monthly Newsletter: 26 May 2008

This edition of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter covers Gentoo Foundation reinstated, Council Meeting Summary, upcoming events, an Interview with Google Summer of Code Student Eric Thibodeau, and much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 254

The DistroWatch Weekly for May 26, 2008 is out. "An interesting week that brought two big enterprise Linux updates (SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, both released on the same day) and a number of smaller distribution releases, of which Absolute Linux 12.1, Ultimate Linux 1.8 and TinyMe 2008.0 seem the most impressive. But the big focus of the coming weeks is undoubtedly openSUSE 11.0 - the most innovative Linux distribution release for some time. Do help with testing, though, if you can. In the news section, Paul Frields and Mark Shuttleworth talk to various publications about their respective distributions, CentOS explains why it takes three weeks to build a new version of its distribution, Xubuntu plans to add some of the much-requested features into Intrepid Ibex, and Famelix GNU/Linux receives undue attention from Microsoft's anti-piracy body. Also not to be missed: our first look at OpenSolaris 2008.05 and an update on Zenwalk's package management utility, Netpkg."

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Interviews

Interview with Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields

Softpedia has an interview with Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields covering the release of Fedora 9, plans for Fedora 10, and some thoughts about working with other distributions. "Well, I should point out that FOSS isn't a simple competition; it's more like 'co-opetition' – so adopting an 'us vs. them' attitude ends up being not very constructive or healthy. It's much healthier to build FOSS by having a robust policy for dealing with upstream software communities. The Fedora policy of working closely and vigorously with these upstream groups means we're not just consuming that work, we're contributing to it actively. By comparison, simply creating patches in our own distribution creates a maintenance drag, as well as an uneven experience for FOSS users who work on a number of platforms. Having the software work differently on each distribution doesn't reassure users about how well FOSS works. When we find problems, we send the solutions, via patches and other forms, back to the upstream communities and work with them to get them included where they make sense. That improves FOSS for *everyone*, and not just Fedora."

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Distribution reviews

Review: Lightweight Linux distributions (Abandoned Zone)

From the Abandoned Zone (blog) comes this review/comparison of several lightweight Linux distributions: Arch 2007.08-2, Damn Small Linux 4.2.5, Puppy 4.0, TinyMe Test7-KD, Xubuntu 8.04, and Zenwalk 5.0. "After installation the system was rebooted. Boottime was measured from Grub to Desktop (login information was entered as quickly as possible) and I ran glxgears to see how well my graphics card was working (this was a problem in the past). Than I took a quick look how well the hardware is detected, which default software is installed and how it performs."

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