Distributions

Spinning Fedora

There was a discussion recently on the fedora-advisory-board list about when a derivative is an official spin vs. one that is Fedora based. It started out innocently enough with a request for trademark approval for an Appliance Operating Spin.

Right away Bill Nottingham noted that SELinux is disabled in this spin and wondered why. The answer was simple enough, there are some current issues with the building tool and SELinux.

A simple enough start to what turned into a somewhat lengthy discussion of what makes Fedora Fedora. This is not the first time that the Fedora Advisory Board has tackled this issue, but it seems that not all board members are in complete agreement of the difference between an official Fedora spin and something which is merely Fedora based.

Jesse Keating recalled a conversation that took place during the merge of core and extras on whether or not there should be a "Fedora Standard Base".

A draft version of trademark guidelines is available, and awaiting comments and approval by the Fedora Board. The guidelines in this document do not make any packages mandatory for trademark approval. They do state that official spins will include only those packages that are available in the official Fedora repository. Pretty much all spins, with the notable exception of the Everything Spin, will contain a subset of all the packages in the repository and are left to chose which packages they need or don't need.

Axel Thimm posted that official spins should have high standards and should improve the brand name.

Of course, it's not just about the trademarks. The discussion also brought up the kickstart pool and whether unofficial spins should be included in the pool, or even whether all official spins should be included. So there could be trademarked Fedora spins that aren't allowed in the kickstart pool, perhaps because of their choice of packages. Or there could be "Xora", a Fedora based distribution, that would be in the kickstart pool and available in the Fedora Hosted service.

Jeff Spaleta looked at how the kickstart pool might be structured.

The bottom line, in this instance, seems to be that AOS (Appliance Operating Spin) will likely get trademark approval, since it only contains official Fedora packages. However, unless they get SELinux running on it, either with permissive mode or with a custom policy, it won't get into the kickstart pool. Or perhaps it will be relegated to a second-class pool.

It may seem odd that an appliance needs SELinux, but as Jeroen van Meeuwen says: "On the other hand, of course we do have an agenda to push and that agenda includes SELinux as being one of the core features of the entire Fedora line of products (including the few enterprise linux spin-offs). It's one of the main features and we would rather see appliances built upon an AOS that has SELinux enforcing by default while it can still be disabled."

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PLD Live 2.0 beta3

PLD Live 2.0 beta3 is out, along with a new Anaconda installer on the Live CD.

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Webconverger update

Live CD images of Webconverger 3.3 beta are available for testing. "Announcing Webconverger 3.3 beta Live CD with a new feature to install to the hard drive. This is a much anticipated feature where users can effectively setup a PC as a public Web kiosk in a matter of minutes."

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Debian successor to Lenny has been named

The release of Debian that follows Lenny has been named. In keeping with the Toy Story theme, the codename will be Squeeze (a "three-eyed space alien"). The name was announced as part of a release update email. "We are happy to publish yet another issue of our highly successful motivational status updates. This month's issue contains, as reward for your continued interest, the name for lenny's successor."

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German and French reach 100% for po-debconf in unstable

The Debian project has announced 100% completeness for po-debconf translations in unstable (not counting Debian Installer packages, handled in a specific way). "The i18n work force would like to thank all translators who made this happen as well as all package maintainers who had a very collaborative attitude wrt localization efforts during the entire etch-lenny release cycle."

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The proposed Fedora key-migration plan

For those who wonder how the Fedora project plans to migrate its users to a new set of package signing keys, a proposed plan has been posted. It involves an update to the fedora-release package (signed with the old key) which swaps in a new key and repository location, and a slow movement of older packages to the new repository. It should work, as long as one is sure that the old key can be trusted for a little longer.

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Fedora Board meeting minutes (2008-AUG-26)

Terse minutes from the August 26 Fedora board meeting have been posted; they offer some hints at how the "infrastructure issues" discussion went. One-line summaries include "Ongoing tension between Fedora being able to act independently and Red Hat being liable for Fedora's actions" and "Don't want to get into a situation where every Fedora decision or announcement has to be vetted through Red Hat executive levels".

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KDE 3.5.10 in Slackware

We previously reported that KDE 4.1 is available in Slackware current. Now the KDE 3.5 branch has been upgraded to 3.5.10.

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SUSE HackWeek

Some articles and pictures from the SUSE HackWeek can be found on the openSUSE Lizards blog site.

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Call for testing of 2.6.27 kernel in Intrepid

A new 2.6.27 kernel became available for Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex, along with a call for testing. "We'd like to ask everyone to really give it a good kicking around to ensure we aren't introducing major regressions from 2.6.26."

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Feature Freeze in place; Alpha 5 freeze ahead

The Feature Freeze is now in effect for Intrepid. From now until release, the focus is on polishing and bug fixing. "Our next testing milestone, Intrepid Alpha 5, is scheduled for next Thursday, September 4."

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New Tin Hat release 20080830

Tin Hat is derived from hardened Gentoo. The project aims to provide a very secure, stable and fast Desktop environment that lives purely in RAM. "This release includes bugfixes/updates to keep Tin Hat in sync with Gentoo, including updating the hardened kernel to the latest stable version: 2.6.25-hardened-r4."

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Arch Linux Newsletter

The Arch Linux Newsletter for September covers new versions of Eclipse and Pacman, Arch at FrOSCon 2008, Arch in the 10 Best-designed Linux Distribution Websites, a Review: FaunOS 0.5.4, a featured interview with Allan McRae, Roman Kyrylych & Grigorios Bouzakis, Talk About Arch Linux Bugs.and much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 268

The DistroWatch Weekly for September 1, 2008 is out. "The world of Linux distribution has traditionally associated the arrival of September with the start of a grand testing period as all major projects are about to finalise their feature lists, freeze their development trees and begin fixing any remaining bugs. So what can we expect when the final products eventually hit the download mirrors? We'll take a look at the feature lists of all major distributions to see what's coming up in the next few months. In the news section, Debian announces the code name of its post-Lenny release, Novell launches SUSE Studio - a web-based tool for building custom distributions, and Linpus Technologies releases an installable Linpus Lite live CD for netbooks. Also among the interesting web links, a user reports how Xubuntu has managed to turn an OLPC into a perfect travelling companion, while the developers of FreeNAS tell us why their FreeBSD-based distribution is an excellent way of storing important files on a remote machine."

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Echo Monthly News, Issue 1

The development team for Fedora's echo-icon-theme has released it's first Echo Monthly News. Inside you'll find New Icons, "Huge" icons - 256x256, One Canvas Work-Flow, Automating the secondary jobs, Echo for Fedora 10?, Future plans, and a Request for feedback.

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Fedora Weekly News 141

The Fedora Weekly News for August 30, 2008 covers the Fedora Unity release of Fedora 8 Re-Spin, Planet Fedora articles on the Education Spin, how to get an OLPC laptop, Tech Tidbits, Fedora at events, discussions on Resurrecting Multi-Key Signatures in RPM and Intrusion Recovery Slow and Steady, and much more.

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Gentoo Monthly Newsletter

The Gentoo Monthly Newsletter for August 2008 covers PHP4 removed from the Portage tree, Trustees Meeting, Interview: Google Summer of Code Student Nandeep Mali, Tigase: A Gentoo-based LiveCD, Tin Hat: A Hardened Gentoo-based LiveCD, and much more.

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OpenSUSE Weekly News/36

This edition of the OpenSUSE Weekly News looks at Hack Week III, openSUSE Election Committee Founded, openSUSE at Utah Open Source Conference, T&T: Accelerate your build speed with Icecream, linux.com: A video tour of openSUSE 11 (with KDE 4 desktop), and several other topics.

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #106

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for August 30, 2008 covers: Second Ubuntu Developers Week, Intrepid feature freeze - Alpha 5 freeze ahead, Call for testing of 2.6.27 kernel(Intrepid), Xfce 4.6-beta now available for Intrepid users, Asia Oceania board, Using identi.ca for Ubuntu information, Ubucon El Salvador, This week in Launchpad's web API, Full Circle Magazine #16, Ubuntu Christian 4.0, Post your Xfce news on reddit, Server team meeting summary, and much more.

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Build an embedded Linux distro from scratch (developerWorks)

IBM developerWorks has a tutorial (registration required) on building a custom embedded Linux distribution. "This tutorial shows you how to install Linux on a target system. Not a prebuilt Linux distribution, but your own, built from scratch. While the details of the procedure necessarily vary from one target to another, the same general principles apply. The result of this tutorial (if you have a suitable target) is a functional Linux system you can get a shell prompt on."

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Triggering Commands On File/Directory Changes With Incron (HowtoForge)

HowtoForge covers the use of incron on a Debian etch (stable) system. "This guide shows how you can install and use incron on a Debian Etch system. Incron is similar to cron, but instead of running commands based on time, it can trigger commands when file or directory events occur (e.g. a file modification, changes of permissions, etc.)."

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