Distributions

Fedora 12: a conversation with Paul Frields

Last week, just before the final release of Fedora 12 was announced, I had the opportunity to speak with Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields. The following article is based on that conversation.

Although F12 had a slightly shorter release cycle than F11, there are more new and improved features in this release. Support has been added for many models of wireless and video cards. Paul was particularly excited about the newly-added support for bluetooth tethering, which allows him to connect his laptop to the internet through his mobile phone.

Of course there are also new desktop productivity applications, and new artwork for this release. Thanks to the Fit and Finish project there are clearer menus, and tooltips and notifications are better positioned and easier to read. PackageKit, a system designed to make installing and updating software on your computer easier, can be used with shell commands or GUIs. It uses PolicyKit for fine-grained permissions.

For Java programmers there's NetBeans 6.7 and SystemTap users will be happy to see it integrated with Eclipse. System administrators and software testers should appreciate the virtualization features. These include the kernel shared memory (KSM) feature, which allows better performance for more guests using less RAM. The introduction of libguestfs and the interactive tool guestfish allow easy access to virtual machine disk images.

We spoke briefly about the What is Fedora? debate and Fedora's target audience. Paul was looking forward to discussing these and other topics at the upcoming FUDCon in Toronto, December 5-7, 2009. Paul went on to say that Fedora already has thousands of contributors, but they are always interested in encouraging more people to contribute. Of course there are many ways to contribute. Developers, artists, translators, bug reporters, wiki editors, etc. should all feel comfortable in contributing to the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project seeks to cultivate a community of contributors with open ideas. By designing a better system for contributors they hope to create a better system for consumers as well.

We also talked about the future of rawhide. Jesse Keating has proposed a significant change to rawhide, which is Fedora's development branch. "So my plans are really funny. I plan to make rawhide more unstable more of the time, and I plan to make "rawhide" more stable more of the time. Crazy eh? How can I do this? By splitting "rawhide" in two."

In this proposal rawhide will not be an installable tree. Instead it will become a repository of developmental and experimental packages. People who want the latest versions of their favorite software can install all the packages they want from rawhide, but the base system will be more stable. On the other hand, there will also be a "pending release" installable tree. The installable tree will spawn F13 alpha, beta, and any snapshots that are released for testing until the final F13 release. Meanwhile developers can work on bringing the latest features to the rawhide versions of these packages, without stopping for feature freezes. There is more information about this proposal on the wiki. There was also a recent meeting about this proposal, and this meeting summary provides an overview with a look at some of the obstacles.

Fedora elections are coming up, the nomination period is over and candidates have started campaigning. Seats are open on the Fedora Advisory Board, FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), and FAmSCo (Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee). A short list of release names for Fedora 13 is out now, and voting will begin soon.

Fedora is free software and it is built using free software. Paul likes to think of it as "drinking your own champagne". Fedora 12 is available now, along with several official spins. Download Fedora 12 from a mirror near you, and check out the new features for yourself.

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Chromium OS source released

Google has posted some information about Chromium OS, along with the current source. "First, it's all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs." See the Chromium OS page for more information.

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KNOPPIX 6.2 / ADRIANE 1.2

Klaus Knopper has announced the release of KNOPPIX 6.2 and ADRIANE (Audio Desktop Reference Implementation And Networking Environment) 1.2. The release notes contain more information. "The current version 6.2 has been completely updated from Debian/"Lenny", "Testing" and "Unstable", and uses Kernel 2.6.31.6, xorg 7.4 for supporting currentmost computer hardware."

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Owl moves to 2.6 kernels, integrates OpenVZ; new ISOs

Openwall GNU/Linux has released fresh ISO images of Owl-current for x86 and x86-64. "These ISOs represent a major development milestone. We have replaced the default kernel with a 2.6 OpenVZ one (featuring optional container-based virtualization), we've integrated OpenVZ tools (vzctl and vzquota packages needed to create, control, examine, and/or destroy OpenVZ containers), and we've dropped support for Linux 2.4 kernels (although they're still supported in the maintained Owl 2.0-stable branch - until our next release)."

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SimplyMEPIS 8.5 alpha Release

Warren Woodford has announced the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.4.80, the alpha release of MEPIS 8.5. MEPIS is based on Debian Stable source with some newer packages. Warren said: ""In this case, a lot of users have asked that we support the KDE 4.3 desktop, yet other users have asked that we continue to support KDE 3.5.10. So in the spirit of our ongoing updates, we are building 8.5, not as a replacement for 8.0, but rather as an alternative for those users who want KDE 4.3. We will continue to support 8.0 with KDE 3.5.10 in parallel with 8.5 and KDE 4.3.""

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New source package formats now available

The Debian dpkg maintainers introduce new source package formats, "3.0 (quilt)" and "3.0 (native)". "The last step for us (dpkg maintainers) in this project is to change dpkg-source to use those new formats by default. However, before we do this we want to ensure that no packages (in sid) will be broken due to this switch and there are quite a few packages left to fix:"

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Fedora 12 lets unprivileged users install packages

Fedora bug #534047 contains an interesting Fedora 12 surprise: "PackageKit allows you to install signed content from signed repositories without a password by default. It only asks you to authenticate if anything is unsigned or the signatures are wrong." So any user can install any package found in the official repository. Some Fedora developers, at least, seem to see this as a feature; see this rapidly-growing thread for the discussion.

The bug report contains the incantation needed to disable this behavior:

    pklalockdown --lockdown org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install

Evidently that is not a long-term solution, though; see this post for a rather more involved fix. Stay tuned: we'll probably post a longer look at this issue in the near future.

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Fedora 12 updates PackageKit

Fedora has released an update to PackageKit to "switch the signed install permission to require the root password". This is the fix for the change that allowed unprivileged package installation, which led to an uproar from some Fedora users and developers. Note that it is a regular update, not a security update. Click below for the update information.

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Cooperative Bug Isolation for Fedora 12

The Cooperative Bug Isolation project has been made available for Fedora 12. "CBI is an ongoing research effort to find and fix bugs in the real world. We distribute specially modified versions of popular open source software packages. These special versions monitor their own behavior while they run, and report back how they work (or how they fail to work) in the hands of real users like you. Even if you've never written a line of code in your life, you can help make things better for everyone simply by using our special bug-hunting packages. We currently offer instrumented versions of Evolution, The GIMP, GNOME Panel, Gnumeric, Nautilus, Pidgin, Rhythmbox, and SPIM."

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Fedora Board Recap

Click below for a recap of the November 19, 2009 meeting of the Fedora Advisory Board. Topics include Trademark licenses, an update proposal, FUDCon session setup, F12 release, FreeMedia, F13 naming, and more.

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Nouveau To Enter The Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Kernel (Phoronix)

Phoronix is reporting that Ubuntu 10.04 will ship with the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware. Nouveau is a reverse-engineered driver that is released as free software—unlike the NVIDIA-provided drivers. "With Ubuntu 9.04 it became easier to use the Nouveau driver with Ubuntu Linux as a snapshot of its DDX driver (xf86-video-nouveau) and its kernel DRM code were packaged up and made available through its package repositories, which continues to be the case in Ubuntu 9.10. Though after the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week for 10.04 'Lucid Lynx', Canonical is now going to put Nouveau into the kernel by default. Not too many details beyond that or their intentions are known at this time, but Nouveau developers are currently being asked about the matter."

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Retirement of Ubuntu's lpia architecture

Ubuntu will not support lpia architecture in 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and beyond. Existing lpia users on stable versions of Ubuntu will be supported through the support period, but upgrades are not recommended. "Recent announcements by Intel indicate that processors supported by the lpia architecture are expected to remain compatible with the IA32 instruction set, so there is a reduced expectation of the need to retain a separate architecture to address future requirements. As of 9.10, lpia and i386 share the kernel configuration, reducing most of the benefits potentially available in previous Ubuntu releases."

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 330

The DistroWatch Weekly for November 23, 2009 is out. "Chromium OS, Google's long-awaited entry into the operating system market, finally made a tentative appearance last week. Although it created much excitement on many technology news sites, the new Linux-based distribution doesn't target general desktop computers; instead it attempts to kick-start a new era of cloud computing on netbooks and other portable devices. Fedora 12, the latest version of the popular distribution and the other big topic of discussion last week, has been hit by an unprivileged package installation controversy, while its unofficial LXDE edition has been withdrawn due to a nasty bug. But other than these two issues, the new release looks great - read our first-look review to find out more. In other news, Ubuntu removes GIMP from default installation, FreeBSD prepares for the imminent arrival of 8.0-RELEASE, openSUSE re-evaluates its decision to remove the DHT technology from the Transmission BitTorrent client, and founders of Qimo 4 Kids, an Ubuntu-based distribution for children, discuss the beginnings of their project and the motivation behind using open source software to start a charity. Also in the news section we link to interviews with Fedora's Paul Frields and Mandriva's Buchan Milne. Finally, this week's Questions and Answers column considers the pros and cons of rolling versus time-based distribution release models. Happy reading!"

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Fedora Weekly News 203

The Fedora Weekly News for November 22, 2009 is out. "Fedora 12 "Constantine" was released this past week, and we kick off this week's issue with a sampling of reviews from around the globe. Also in announcements, details on a change in Fedora 12's PackageKit permissions. In news from the Fedora Planet, some details on what's involved with providing delta RPMs, a new feature in Fedora 12, a site visit to the new Red Hat Computing Lab at Carnegie Mellon, and much more from Fedora contributors. Quality Assurance brings us up to date with the recent weekly meetings of the QA team which have focused on F12, with lots of interesting detail behind the scenes! In Translation news, details on updates and errata for Fedora 12 release notes, and a couple translation requests from SSSD and Midnight Commander. Security Advisories keeps us current with security patches for Fedora 10, 11, and 12. In news from the world of Fedora virtualization, coverage of a recent interview with virtualization luminaries, a status report on Fedora virtualization and details on the latest version of libvirt. Enjoy FWN 203!"

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The Mint Newsletter - issue 97

This issue of the Mint Newsletter covers the first release candidate of Linux Mint 8 "Helena", and several other topics.

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OpenSUSE Weekly News/98

This issue of the OpenSUSE Weekly News covers Board Election 2009 Startup, openSUSE 11.2 Launchparties, openSUSE Spotlight: What does the openSUSE Board do?, Uwe Gansert: Interactive AutoYaST Rules, openSUSE Forums: K3B and mp3 support, and more.

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #169

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for November 21, 2009 is out. "In this issue we cover: Lucid Ubuntu Developer Summit Videos, New LoCo Council Members, America's Membership Board Meeting: November 18th, 2009, Developer Membership Board public meeting, LoCo Contact Change: Wisconsin LoCo Team, Doctor Mo: Ice Skating at UDS, Matthew Helmke: Heading Home from UDS-L, Joe Baker: An Interview with Richard Johnson (nixternal), Martin Pitt: Nicer Launchpad upstream releases with lp-project-upload, and much, much more!"

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Interview: Red Hat on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (Montana Linux)

Scott Dowdle interviews Red Hat's Andy Cathrow and Jim Brennan about the company's latest Enterprise Virtualization technology. "ML: In the year between the merger with Qumranet and the release of RHEV for Servers, what were the primary changes made to the product? AC: We made many, significant changes. A quick, but not complete list includes: * SAN support - including iSCSI and Fiber channel (previously NFS only) * Multipath I/O * NIC bonding (host) * Multiple nics (guest) * VLANs * High availability * System scheduler (distribution policies, scheduling VMS) * Power Saver * Support for large hosts 96 cores, 1TB RAM * Support for large guests 16 cores, 256GB RAM * Support for managing hosts - including configuration files and software updates".

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Czajkowski: Qimo 4 kids - NGO Interview

Laura Czajkowski has an interview with Michael and Michelle Hall of the Qimo 4 kids project. "QuinnCo is a very small not for profit located in Central Florida. In fact, it's just the two of us, Michelle and I, operating out of our house and garage. We take in second hand computers, fix them up if they aren't working, then put Ubuntu or Qimo on them and give them out to kids and families in need. We given out approx. 50 computers this year."

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