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DistributionsNews and Editorials Defining the Fedora ProjectThere has been a discussion on the Fedora advisory board mailing list recently on the subject: "What is the Fedora Project?". John Poelstra started the discussion in an attempt to get this item off the agenda before 2010.
We really need to resolve this topic that has been on the board's
agenda since January 2009. For some of us, since we joined in July
2009. I'm proposing that we set a hard deadline of "the end of FUDCon."
This means that by the time we leave FUDCon the first part of December
2009, this issue will be officially closed and off our agenda until
there is a reason to revisit it and we can start 2010 with a clean
slate.
Beside the fact that it's an old agenda item, the Fedora Project continues to grow, and, without direction, that growth could eventually lead to fragmentation and chaos. Some definition of the target audience for the Fedora distribution, and some goals for the project are useful for everyone involved. Mike McGrath wrote:
I've said it on the board list so I'll say it here. I strongly believe
that volunteers can be [led] and I believe volunteers can lead. Right now
Fedora is a place for everyone to just come and do whatever they want
which is harming us in the long term. There's plenty of room for everyone
in the Linux universe. I understand that by narrowing our focus we might
lose some contributors who disagree with our values and mission. But
that's better [than] not having one and having volunteers work against
each other because they joined The Fedora Project thinking it was one thing
only to find it's something else.
While there was general agreement that some kind of focus was needed, Greg DeKoenigsberg wanted to make it clear that competing visions still have a place in the project:
I also believe, however, that the Board must guarantee the freedom for
dissenting community members to move in their own directions. Fedora's
governance was built to ensure precisely this freedom. The Board is
empowered to bless the "Foo Project", but any Fedora contributor is free
to form the "Anti-Foo SIG," even if the goal of that SIG is to prove,
through their constructive actions, that the direction of the "Foo
Project" is wrong.
But, Máirín Duffy sees it as more of a positioning and messaging problem, as, currently, there is no coherent story for Fedora:
I don't *think* folks here take issue with the ingredients we've got
floating around in the kitchen, and I don't think anyone is looking to
throw any of them out. I think the problem is more that we haven't
decided on a recipe with which to present them in. In the end, we've got
to offer a menu that makes sense. And to the outside world, the Fedora
menu looks like a confused mess. Rather than try to interpret it, most
folks head down to the street to the more-easily-grokked McDonald's.
The project is more than just a distribution, it includes the entire community of contributors and users. The Fedora distribution also includes many spins, each of which has its own target audience, so perhaps the definition of a target audience should only apply to the default spin. Does that default spin contain development tools to appeal to developers? Does it target the lowest common denominator user with software for email, web browsing and an office suite? The project would like the default spin to fit on a single CD, so that it is accessible to people with low bandwidth and older hardware. You can't make a decision about what goes into the default if you don't know your target audience. Fedora does have a Mission statement: "The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community." It also has defined values, or Foundations.
"Freedom, Friends, Features, First"
The four foundations are the core values of the Fedora community. They sprung from work on the Fedora marketing plan, and have replaced the old "infinity, freedom, voice" slogan. That slogan originally emerged from the design of the Fedora logo. That design has become a very powerful and effective part of Fedora's brand and image, but does not sufficiently describe our core values in a clear and effective way. Fedora needs to define goals that align with its mission and values. No decisions have been made yet, be we look forward to seeing some definition to Fedora's target audience and some goals for the future soon.
New Releases Gentoo Ten Live DVD 10.1Gentoo has released an update to the Gentoo Ten Live DVD. Version 10.1 contains numerous bug fixes and enhancements.
Mandriva Linux 2010 RC2 is availableMandriva Linux 2010 RC2, last development version, is available for testing. See the 2010 RC2 wiki page for additional information.
Nexenta Core Platform 3 Alpha1 ReleasedThe Nexenta project has announced the availability of the Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 alpha1. This is the first release towards NCP3.0. "This is an alpha release, and a moving target until we reach the final release. It is in a good shape for developers to tinker with.. and we welcome community efforts to improve NCP3."
Distribution News A report from the RPM summitAn RPM summit, featuring developers from Red Hat and SUSE, was held at the openSUSE conference in September. A report from the event has been posted; it is a sort of near-future roadmap for RPM. "Soft dependencies keywords that are already used by SUSE (Recommends, Suggests, Supplements, Enhances) will be recognized in the future versions of RPM. RPM will not do anything with them except of storing in the database and reporting to higher levels of package management stack. There is an ongoing discussion whether and how to implement soft dependencies in YUM."
Debian GNU/Linux Debian pushes development of kFreeBSD portThe Debian Release Team has announced that squeeze, the upcoming release, will support the FreeBSD kernel. "The kFreeBSD architectures for the AMD64/Intel EM64T and i386 processor architectures are now release architectures. Severe bugs on these architectures will be considered release critical the same way as bugs on other architectures like armel or i386 are. If a particular package does not build or work properly on such an architecture this problem is considered release-critical."
Misc Debian developer news (#18)This issue of miscellaneous developer news covers 3-way merge of debian/changelog files, Pending security issues now shown in PTS pages, DEP-3 updated for compatibility with git format-patch, debian-devel and ITPs, and wiki.debian.org bugstatus.
Fedora Resignation of Josh Boyer from FESCoJosh Boyer has resigned from the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). David Woodhouse will replace Josh on FESCo. "Josh will be focusing on the QA of updates to stable Fedora releases, where he will need all the help that he can get. Please reach out to Josh and offer whatever help you can provide him in this effort."
Mandriva Linux Re-introducing Mandriva LinuxMandriva has introduced a series of articles re-introducing Mandriva Linux. The first article, "Being a Linux distribution publisher", is out. "Let's start with a large overview of the Linux distribution publisher activity for Mandriva. We will deal with the best known, public and freely available versions (Free and One)."
Ubuntu family Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address booksHere's an interesting note from Canonical's Elliot Murphy, noting that CouchDB 0.10.0 has been loaded into the nearly-ready "Karmic" release. It seems they have big plans for how they plan to use it: "[B]y the time Ubuntu 9.10 is released on October 29th every single Ubuntu user will have an address book stored in CouchDB that replicates with one.ubuntu.com, and Tomboy notes that are replicated via a web API at the application but then stored in CouchDB and carried along in the CouchDB replication that we have set up. Optionally they can also store all their Firefox bookmarks in CouchDB and have those replicated as well. We'll be doing our best to help teach application developers to use CouchDB in order to 'cloud-enable' their apps."
Other distributions FreeBSD Status Reports April - September, 2009The FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report is available. "This report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and September 2009. During that time a lot of work has been done on wide variety of projects, including the Google Summer of Code projects. The BSDCan conference was held in Ottawa, CA, in May. The EuroBSDCon conference was held in Cambridge, UK, in September. Both events were very successful. A new major version of FreeBSD, 8.0 is to be released soon. If you are wondering what's new in this long-awaited release, read Ivan Voras' excellent summary."
Distribution Newsletters DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 324The DistroWatch Weekly for October 12, 2009 is out. "Ladislav and crew are on vacation this week, but we'll muddle through okay. It was a bit of slow week as several popular distributions are gearing up for their next major releases, but the news has been exciting. Novell got annoyed at Red Hat claiming 75% market penetration and Debian was used to power an underwater vehicle to victory. Then I moved into Sabayon's latest to see if their KDE 4 build could perform any better than others I've tried. All this and more in this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly - happy reading!"
Fedora Weekly News 197The Fedora Weekly News for October 11, 2009 is out. "Starting off with announcements, which includes general, development and event announcements, word that the Docs team will be switching to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA), an update on Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) leadership, and updates on Fedora 12 milestones. In news from the Fedora Planet, selected posts from the Fedora contributor community that includes discussion on "What is Fedora?", mockups for the fedoraproject.org redesign, and discussion on virt-top. In Ambassador news, detail on the Utah Open Source Conference. Translation brings us notification of new members to the Fedora Localization Project, coverage of some discussion around docs.fedoraproject.org issues, and other issues. In Design Team news, a request for more font packagers, discussion around reuse of Fedora Remix logos, and acceptable use cases. There are a few Fedora 10 and 11 security updates in the Security Advisories beat, and the issue rounds out with virtualization news, including more detail on the new virt-top release, and limiting VNC access to a single guest. Read on, and enjoy!"
OpenSUSE Weekly News/92This issue of the OpenSUSE Weekly News covers openSUSE News: Introducing the 'openSUSE Boosters' Team, The Geek Stuff/Ramesh Natarajan: Unix Sed Tutorial: How To Write to a File Using Sed, Martin Vidner: WebYaST Beta 1, openSUSE Forums: openSUSE 11.2 will support live updates, KDE 4.3.2 Stabilizes Free Desktop, and more.
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #163The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for October 10, 2009 is out. "In this issue we cover: 2009 Community Council vote complete, Ubuntu Server Eucalyptus Testers Needed, Developer Membership Board Meeting: New Approval Process, Ubuntu Translation Templates Priority, New MOTU's, LoCo News: Catalan, Copenhagen, & Paris, Bazaar 2.0.0: interview with Martin Pool, Help us improve Launchpad's icons, Ubuntu Forums Interview & Tutorial of the Week, The Planet: Joey Stanford & Roderick Greening, Ubuntu 9.10 - Almost Perfect, Hulu Desktop (Linux), and much, much more!"
Newsletters and articles of interest The 10 Best Linux Distributions of 2009 (DaniWeb)DaniWeb takes a look at the 10 best distributions for 2009. "It was exactly one year ago today that I published my original "The 10 Best Linux Distributions" and it's time to put forth a new list for this year's best. Without looking at the old list, I've decided to compile this one from scratch. This 2009 list takes several factors into account for placement in the list: Community support, commercial support, software variety, update engine and distribution frequency. Even for old Linux salts, there are a few surprises on this list. For starters, Ubuntu is not number one."
More Linux Distros That Dont Suck (tech.nocr.at)tech.nocr.at presents part two in a series on Linux Distros That Dont Suck. "Following Linux Distros That Dont Suck from earlier this year here is a comprehensive list of, you guessed it, more Linux Distros that dont suck. Some of these are more obscure lesser known distros that are quite powerful and very useful. Some of these come from personal use some of them came from the great comments you readers posted the first time I did this."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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