Distributions

Marketing Fedora

It is an exciting time for free software as massive strides forward have been made in increasing both market share and mind share within the less technically orientated circles of society. Ubuntu is now available pre-installed on Dell systems, SUSE on Lenovo systems, the Xandros based eeePC has sold millions already and the One Laptop Per Child project has gone into mass production. Stephen Fry, the popular British actor, is even pledging his support in national newspapers. Taking advantage of this momentum and using it to help extend existing communities is going to be vital for any free software project, and with this in mind Fedora is seeking to set itself on solid ground with a revitalised marketing effort which hopes to both define Fedora's position in the world and find new ways of growing its user and contributor base.

Recently the first tentative steps have been made along this path with the revitalising of Fedora's community marketing team. In Fedora talk there is now an official Special Interest Group (SIG). Following on from a session at the recent Fedora Users' and Developers' Conference the SIG is gaining a lot of momentum, with input from Red Hat's professional marketing team pouring in. This help is being provided on top of their Red Hat duties, and so their involvement is exactly the same as that of any other community members. So far their contributions have largely been aiding the creation of a long term marketing plan for Fedora, which will help to provide a more consistent message across Fedora's many outlets. This means that not only will Fedora's community Ambassadors be better briefed on what the key promotional aspects of Fedora are, but they'll have a better understanding of the best methods to achieve this and more support in terms of marketing collateral. The same benefits will also apply to Fedora's online marketing efforts, including their Developer Interviews and Release Overviews.

Creating this plan still depends on overcoming a number of challenges. Foremost amongst these is understanding exactly what Fedora is, and what its target audience is. Recently Fedora has gone from being a simple distribution, to the upstream for an increasing number of projects. Thanks to its open build tools and custom re-spinning applications there are a growing number of custom spins, and other projects such as the Creative Commons LiveContent CDs and DVDs, as well as offerings from the Fedora Unity Project. Graphical tools such as Revisor have made re-spinning easy. Other Fedora derivatives, notably Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the OLPC, don't rely on the custom re-spinning applications, but do rely on Fedora source code to build their distributions.

To accompany this, and widening Fedora's mission even further is the newly launched beta of a service called Fedora TV. Its goals are to encourage the use and development of free media formats such as OGG Vorbis/Theora, PNGs and SVGs, as well as encouraging the continued development of the free software tools to create media in these formats.

This is not to say that Fedora is no longer focused on its core purpose of providing a distribution which showcases the latest and greatest free software has to offer. Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Alpha was released recently and a quick glance at its release notes shows a lot of interesting new features appearing. Along with the usual bundle of software updates, including KDE 4 and GNOME 2.21.4, a lot of attention has been given to Anaconda, Fedora's system installer. In particular Anaconda now has the ability to resize partitions as well as create and install the system on encrypted partitions. Also exciting is the inclusion of FreeIPA, a system which "... combines the power of the Fedora Directory Server with FreeRADIUS, MIT Kerberos, NTP and DNS to provide an easy, out of the box solution" for managing various auditing, identity and policy processes. If the events following Fedora 8's release are anything to go by, we can expect to see many of these features appearing in other distributions during the autumn 2008 and spring 2009 release cycles.

Also a significant challenge for the Fedora Marketing SIG is not just defining what Fedora is, but persuading people that they want to be a part of it. In the short term this means promoting the large amount of work that Fedora does upstream and making it as easy as possible for people to get involved by lowering their barriers to entry. In the long term this means, as Paul Frields, Fedora's new project leader, recently commented, overcoming the "... decline of volunteerism in the USA overall ..."

Of course, talk and good intentions are wonderful, but without practical results are meaningless. To this end the Fedora Marketing SIG is already beginning to pick up speed. Concrete, long term plans are being laid with the aid of Red Hat's professionals; and in the short term Fedora seems to be cropping up in popular news sites more often than it has done for quite a while. Fedora developers are gaining increased recognition for the work that they put in, which often shows up in other distributions. With the release of Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Alpha, and the increased attention that this received in comparison to previous early development releases, as well as an already impressive set of new features, the future seems bright.

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CentOS 5 i386 - The CentOS-5.1 i386 Live CD is released

The CentOS Development team has announced the availability of the CentOS 5.1 i386 Live CD. This live CD can be used as a workstation, or as a rescue disk. Click below for more information.

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Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 updated

Debian has released its third update to etch, collecting together all of the updates since the original etch release for new installations. "This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems." Note that the update for the recent kernel local root privilege escalation problem did not make into this release is not listed as being fixed, but appears to be. Click below for more details.

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Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring Beta 2 "Orchis" released

The second beta of Mandriva Linux 2008.1 is available for testing. "This pre-release brings recognition of other installed distributions during installation, NTFS-3G (with write support) by default for all NTFS partitions, significant improvements to the Mandriva graphical software management tool and more."

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pg_live announcement

The latest and greatest version of pg_live, 8.3.0.1, is ready for download. "For those who don't know, pg_live is the [PostgreSQL] community's Linux Live CD, and is now 4 years old! The objective of pg_live is to introduce PostgreSQL to both the general public and seasoned DBA."

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Bits from the Debian Eee PC team

For those who would rather run pure Debian on their eeePC, the Debian eeePC team reports that there has been progress. "Thanks to the efforts of numerous users and developers who are being added to our ranks daily, we expect by the time Lenny releases we will be well on our way to providing a pure Debian solution for the Eee. Whether or not everything needed for the Eee is in Lenny at that time remains to be seen. We need to allow for how long it takes to get new drivers into the kernel. But if we miss the release, we will certainly provide backports and look forward to full support in the following release."

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Fedora Board Recap 2008-FEB-12

John Poelstra has posted a recap of the February 12, 2008 meeting of the Fedora board. Click below for a look.

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My latest project: factory livecds

Stephan Kulow has made available factory live CDs of the latest openSUSE alpha release, making it easier than ever to take openSUSE for a test drive.

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Planning for Ubuntu 8.10ish - The Intrepid Ibex

Now that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) is now past feature freeze, it's time to look forward to the next Ubuntu release. "And so I'd like to introduce you to the Intrepid Ibex, the release which is planned for October 2008, and which is likely to have the version number 8.10. During the 8.10 cycle we will be venturing into interesting new territory, and we'll need the rugged adventurousness of a mountain goat to navigate tricky terrain. Our desktop offering will once again be a focal point as we re-engineer the user interaction model so that Ubuntu works as well on a high-end workstation as it does on a feisty little subnotebook. We'll also be reaching new peaks of performance - aiming to make the mobile desktop as productive as possible."

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YDL v6.0 is now shipping on DVD, pre-installed on PS3s

Yellow Dog Linux is now available on DVD and pre-installed on Sony PS3.

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Fedora Weekly News Issue 120

The Fedora Weekly News for February 11, 2008 is out. Topics include "Announcing Fedora 8 Xfce Spin", Planet Fedora articles "KDE 4 Interview", "Announcing Fedora Ambassadors Wall", "Insert favorite Elvis joke here", "Publican - the 'new' Documentation Publisher", and "SCALE 6X Trip Report", and much more.

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Gentoo Monthly Newsletter #2

The Gentoo Monthly Newsletter for February 18, 2008 looks at GMN feedback and improvements, Gentoo Trustee Elections, kernel security exploits: upgrade ASAP, KDE 4.0.1 in the tree, Council Meeting Summary, and several other topics.

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OpenSUSE Weekly News/10

The OpenSUSE Weekly News for the week starting February 11, 2008 covers SUSE Hack Week Innovations, FOSDEM 2008 - This Weekend, In Tips and Tricks: How to Enable 3rd-party Upgrades, and much more.

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #78

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for February 16, 2008 covers Developer Week, MOTU Freeze Team, Hardy Alpha 5, Hug Day, PulseAudio, and much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 240

The DistroWatch Weekly for February 18, 2008 is out. "Do you trust your distribution? Does it have what it takes to provide you with important and timely updates? The issue of operating system and applications security in the era of millions of interconnected multi-user computing systems is more important than ever. In this week's issue we investigate how different Linux distributions handled the much-publicised vmsplice() privilege escalation exploit announced last week. In the news section, the Fedora developer community offers more desktop options to their users, VectorLinux announces a fast, light edition designed for old hardware, and ex-Linspire's Kevin Carmony goes doom and gloom on the CNR.com software installation service. Looking ahead, this week is likely to deliver further opportunities for heavy distro testing with the upcoming arrival of the fifth alpha of Ubuntu 8.04 and the first release candidate for Mandriva Linux 2008.1."

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Interview with Fedora KDE SIG developers

Jonathan Roberts continues his series of interviews on the Fedora wiki, by chatting with members of the KDE Special Interest Group (SIG) about including KDE 4 in Fedora 9. "Kevin Kofler: I am personally doing my best to fight that reputation within the KDE community, and that, together with what we accomplished within Fedora to make KDE a first class citizen, is starting to pay off. There has always been lots of animosity against Fedora on dot.kde.org, the KDE news site, mostly due to old gripes against Red Hat Linux 8.0 (and some of that will probably never go away, it's like the old 'Qt is not free' troll which is completely obsolete, yet still comes up from time to time), but lately there have been more and more positive echoes. Doing such PR is not an easy task though, as even correcting obvious inaccuracies can be perceived as flamebait (and thus backfire). On the other front, within Fedora, we're all working on getting KDE recognized as much as possible, ensuring it gets the first class citizen treatment it deserves. All in all, I'm happy with where we're headed."

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Fedora and the art of creating an inclusive community (C|Net)

Matt Asay talks with the new Fedora leader Paul Frields, in this C|Net blog. "What is your background? How did you get involved in Fedora? I started with Fedora in the documentation group in 2003. After working in documentation I moved into packaging (Fedora Extras), art work, marketing, translation, and other areas of Fedora (mostly "collateral" groups). I'm not a hard-core software developer. I've tended to get involved in all the other areas of Fedora."

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Linpus offers a Linux for newbies and experts alike (Linux-Watch)

Linux-Watch takes a look at the Linpus Linux Lite distribution. "Linpus Technologies has long been known in Taiwan for its Linux distributions. Now, it wants to become a player in the global Linux market with its new Linux distribution Linpus Linux Lite, which features a dual-mode user interface. One mode is for people who may never have used a computer before; the other is for experienced Linux users. According to the company, these two modes are Easy and Normal."

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Lenovo Launches Linux Laptop and Leaves Lots of Questions (eWeek)

eWeek has a review of the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 with SLED 10 pre-installed. "Right off the bat we found that that the fingerprint reader, the USB ports, the integrated wireless (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), the sound card, the networking and so on all were well-supported and work as expected. That is no small task considering how fickle Linux drivers can be and how much of Lenovo's ThinkPad technology is proprietary."

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