Interview with Paul Frields

By Rebecca Sobol
November 26, 2008

Paul Frields is the Fedora Project Leader and in the days before the Fedora 10 release he was giving telephone briefings to the media. I took advantage of about an hour of Paul's time to talk about Fedora and the Fedora 10 release. The following article is based on that conversation.

To begin with, we talked about Fedora's new Special Interest Group (SIG) for servers running Fedora. Fedora is a fast-paced distribution, and therefore not suitable for all servers. There are many places Fedora makes an excellent server, though. Some of those uses are: in house, non-internet facing servers or servers with a separate firewall. It is used in server farms and home servers, and other places where the 13 month life cycle is not a problem. The roadrunner supercomputer, a hybrid cluster with both IBM PowerXCell and AMD Opteron processors runs both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Roadrunner holds the number 1 spot in the top500 list.

Fedora is more than a bleeding edge desktop, although it is good at that. Fedora sponsors the development of many projects through FedoraHosted.org, and provides many other contributions to upstream projects. Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is a community effort by Fedora developers to provide high-quality add-on packages that complement Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its compatible spinoffs such as CentOS or Scientific Linux. Fedora also contributes to The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Fedora does serve many needs.

Including those of "remixers", the creators of derivative distributions. The new trademark guidelines, still in draft form, are designed to spell out the DOs and DON'Ts of creating a remix. Remixers can chose packages from the official Fedora repository, EPEL, RPMFusion and other repositories. Packages can also be built from source, with or without patches; to create the distribution they want.

Naturally, I asked Paul about the infrastructure/security problems that were announced last August. LWN covered the issue in August and September. We have yet to see a final analysis of what happened. Paul did say that a team of Red Hat engineers and Fedora volunteers rebuilt everything from scratch, and signed the packages with new keys. Beyond that, we were told that the investigation is ongoing and more information will be available once the investigation is complete.

Fedora 10 was announced this week, along with the RPM Fusion and ATrpms repositories, updated for Fedora 10. Here are some highlights of this release.

With Fedora 9 it became possible to create a persistent USB device, that is a key that can be updated, remember settings and store some data. With Fedora 10 you have all that, plus you can encrypt your home directory on the key.

The new NetworkManager features connection sharing to enable collaboration everywhere. PackageKit advances the software management system with its ability of using yum, apt, conary, and other existing tools. PackageKit can search for codecs, listen to dbus and communications between applications. With the long-term roadmap for PackageKit, this utility will understand what packages you need and will get it for you. F10 has faster boot times, kernel mode settings and improved virtualization with KVM.

Paul said that the number of Fedora Ambassadors doubles each year. The ambassador program is world-wide, with people who represent the Fedora Project to the wider public, help spread the word about Fedora, Linux, and Open Source, become a point of contact for local community members and channel the feedback to Fedora Project, help recruit project contributors and think of creative ways for promoting Fedora.

Fedora 10 has more official spins than ever before. These are specialized distributions that contain only packages in the main Fedora repository. A small sampling includes the Fedora Electronics Lab (FEL) Spin, Fedora KDE Desktop, Fedora Edu/Math Spin and Fedora XFCE Desktop. So check out Fedora 10, or one of the many spins and remixes that are available.