Fedora 11 alpha - and a new community liaison [LWN.net]

The Fedora Project has announced the Fedora 11 alpha release, complete with the requisite doggerel poetry. It is definitely early-stage software, but the announcement helpfully notes that it "should boot on the majority of systems." This is a good chance for those who are interested in the upcoming Fedora release to help find bugs.

Fedora has also brought in Adam Williamson as a community liaison. "I am working for Red Hat as of this Monday. I have been hired into the Fedora QA team essentially to drive community involvement in the Fedora QA process. RH - and, to put a more personal touch on it, Jay Turner, who's responsible for Fedora QA - felt that Fedora could really benefit from more community involvement in the QA process, so my role is to try and help develop that." Adam previously did community work for Mandriva.

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using it now :-)

Posted Feb 6, 2009 1:39 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (7 responses)

I'm running it off the LiveCD right now and I think I'm going to hit the "Install to Hard Drive" button soon.

One glitch is that networking didn't work until I disabled the firewall.

Another small annoyance is that I didn't see anything to tell me how to do things as root (the answer is that you do "su -" and you'll become root without being asked for a password).

My plan was to move to gNewSense, but since I haven't used any distro other than Debian in the last 8 years, I think I'll try Fedora for a while to see what the differences are.

gNewSense remains my target distro because I know they have a reliable policy of including only free software. When I use Debian, I have to occasionally research things myself (I had to turn off my wifi card to avoid using the binary-only blob driver they distribute). I don't know Fedora's freedom policy very well, but I know they talk about being a fully free distro (but it's not on gnu.org's list of fully free distros), so I'm interested to see the status of the freedom debate and implementation within their project.

Oh, and one last disappointment: No emacs on the LiveCD?? Emacs is the best part of a distro! :-)

and now the firewall works

Posted Feb 6, 2009 1:58 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Strange. I just re-enabled the firewall, and my Internet connection continued to work.

Strict?

Posted Feb 7, 2009 12:59 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (5 responses)

Fedora does have a policy but it may not be strict enough for your liking.

For example, it includes software which you must not alter and redistribute unless you also change the name and remove trademarks.

It includes some types of non-software (such as fonts and pictures) for which the source material is not available (and most likely would require non-free programs to edit it if it were made available)

It includes firmware (data or code which does not run on the CPU) which is freely redistributable but is not Free Software, such as the bits needed to initialise an nVidia video card, or Intel Wireless chipsets.

I personally don't find any of these things objectionable (some of them are perhaps unfortunate, the rest I couldn't care less about) but if you're the sort of person who thinks gNewSense is for them then probably Fedora isn't strict enough for your liking.

Strict?

Posted Feb 7, 2009 17:17 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

> It includes some types of non-software (such as fonts and pictures) for
> which the source material is not available (and most likely would require
> non-free programs to edit it if it were made available)

Fedora policy is to only include free/libre fonts.
There may be still some problem fonts in old packages such as tetex but new fonts are strictly checked. I don't know of any distribution that managed to completely audit TEX licensing yet. (and at least Tom Callaway is doing it).

I'm not aware of any special gNewSense font effort. I think they rely on the Debian font team like Ubuntu (not that the Debian font people do not do good work, but Fedora is certainly in the same class as them freedom-wise).

And any font can be pretty much be edited directly in fontforge, and many font authors consider the font files themselves the source format.

Strict?

Posted Feb 8, 2009 23:00 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Maybe I'm being unfair, but my assumption was that the donated Vera family f.e. would not have been designed by using fontforge or similar on the binary TrueType font data. I would have expected that the tools used by professional designers of type are more sophisticated, and would have a native format that stores more metadata than is present in TTF to simplify the type designer's job in re-using visual elements between glyphs for consistency - then the TrueType font would be "exported" for distribution. I'm happy to be proved wrong about that (and it suggests a niche for improved font making software).

Strict?

Posted Feb 9, 2009 7:26 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

I can't really comment on the pro tools, I never used them, but my understanding is that the font creation market is too small to support huge font tool software creation organisations, so the development of font creation tools free/libre or not) is done by very small teams and their features are limited. The numerous little problems found in Vera, Liberation and Droid after their release do not suggest any awesome tool proprietary foundry side.

I don't think any thread of typophile ever suggested fontforge was limited, just that it was different and ugly and difficult to install on windows or OS X.

Additionally, you massively underestimate the complexity a modern OpenType (TTF or OTF) container. OpenType is been designed to all the needed info is in the font file itself, and indeed a lot of OpenType features are little or badly supported by software yet.

So, there is certainly the potential for interested people to turn fontforge into the authoritative font creation tool and forget about closed tools altogether. Its dev team is pretty small, and already manages to do awesome work. With more contributors it could get wonderful.

Obvious improvements would be UI-side and adding read support for the internal formats of more closed font editors.

Strict?

Posted Feb 7, 2009 20:06 UTC (Sat) by spot (guest, #15640) [Link]

The Free Distro Guidelines say:

"As long as the conditions are reasonable, however, free system distributions may include these programs, either with or without the trademarks."

Fedora has all of our trademarks in one package, and we provide a generic, trademark-free alternative, if you do not wish to use them under the terms we've provided. I would argue we meet the "reasonable conditions" check here.

As for non-software, pictures are "Non-functional Data", where the only requirement is that they be freely redistributable (which implies that they can be copied). We treat fonts as functional data, and require that they be under a free license.

The firmware is a point where we differ. In the near future, it should be possible to make a Fedora spin which does not include any firmware. Unfortunately, we need to finish auditing texlive first, as we know there is non-free functional data inside of it.

License rules for Fedora

Posted Feb 12, 2009 16:01 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

For more about Fedora's licensing rules, see:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing