Highlights in Fedora 26
The much anticipated release of Fedora 26 was made on July 11. As usual, it came with a wide array of updated packages, everything from the kernel through programming languages to desktops, but there are also internal tools and installation mechanisms that have changed as well. Beyond that, the new Python Classroom Lab is aimed at teachers and instructors to make it easier to get a full-featured Python (of various flavors and with lots of extras) in several different easily installable forms. Though it was delayed by more than a month from its original planned release date—something the project embraces at some level—Fedora 26 looks like it was worth waiting for.
The distribution is delivered for workstations and servers, as well as a version, Atomic Host, for container deployments. The Fedora Cloud Base has virtual machine (VM) images for several different cloud options including raw, QEMU copy on write (qcow2), libvirt/KVM, VirtualBox, and two versions for the Amazon Public Cloud. For server installations, there is a preview version of the Modularity initiative, which will (eventually) allow mixing newer components with older ones in ways that will mirror some of the advantages of a rolling release model.
There is plenty for desktop users too. For those who want something different from the default GNOME 3.24 desktop, there are spins covering most of the popular desktop environments (KDE Plasma, XFCE, LXDE, Cinnamon, Mate, LXQt, which is a new spin, and more); there is even a spin for the Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) desktop that came out of the One Laptop per Child initiative. For more specialized uses of the distribution, Fedora Labs provides curated sets of packages for several interest areas: robotics, astronomy, multimedia, security, and games. These tools can be installed as a full Fedora image or simply added to an existing Fedora installation as one bundle.
Fedora is not just available for x86 systems, either. There are multiple images for ARM aarch64, PowerPC PPC64, and PowerPC PPC64LE available from the alternate architectures page. For Raspberry Pi enthusiasts or those interested in ARM server images, the Fedora ARM page is the place to look. The alternative downloads page also has minimal network installers, BitTorrent download links, testing images, and more.
Much of that diversity has been present in Fedora for some time now, though refinements and additions have been made over time, of course. One of the things that the distribution has been working on recently is upgrading from previous versions of Fedora. In the release announcement, Fedora project leader Matthew Miller described it this way:
As far as software goes, it all starts with a 4.11 kernel. On top of that, GNU C library (glibc) 2.25 and GCC 7 are part of Fedora 26. A mass rebuild of all of the distribution using the new compiler and libc was part of the process of building the release. Other programming languages have been updated as well: Python 3.6, Golang 1.8, Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) 8.0, PHP 7.1 (and Zend Framework 3.0), Ruby 2.4, and so on. System tools and libraries were not left out: OpenSSL 1.1.0, DNF 2.0, Cyrus IMAP 3.0, etc.
On the workstation side, there are some updates as well. LibreOffice 5.3 is in Fedora 26 and there have been many enhancements to the GNOME desktop. The tracker indexing service has been sandboxed for better security and Qt applications are better integrated with the desktop theme. In addition, the Fedora Media Writer application can now create bootable SD cards for ARM devices such as Raspberry Pi.
That's all pretty standard stuff for a new Fedora release. Much of the effort lately has been "under the hood" to some extent. The modularity work is proceeding and the prototype Boltron server based on that work is coming soon. Miller highlighted that in the announcement:
The Python Classroom Lab is a more-visible effort that comes out of the Python SIG and its Fedora Loves Python initiative. The lab comes as a Vagrant VM or Docker container to make it easy to install on various systems or it can be installed on Fedora as a bundle. It provides multiple versions of Python (3.6, 2.7, and PyPy 3.3) that are even more "batteries included" than the language itself. The scientific Python stack, IPython, Jupyter Notebook, Git, the Ninja IDE, and more are all part of the bundle. It should provide instructors with a known environment they can rely on for all their students to use.
One perhaps amusing side note is that the web site for the classroom lab (and quite a few others) tries to switch the language of the content based on the browser's geographic location, which is probably quite helpful to most. If, however, your language abilities do not match your current location, as is true for me, it gets a little annoying to keep switching back to English after following links.
Looking ahead, Fedora 27 is currently scheduled for October 24, but a "rain date" of October 31 is listed as well. That is fairly tight for a Fedora release, with less than four months of development time between the two. One reason for the push for late October is to try to align better with the GNOME 3.26 release that is planned for September. It is hoped that the elimination of alpha releases will help make that possible, but that initiative remains unproven at this point.
Miller has been thinking well beyond that, though, as he noted in a post to the Fedora devel mailing
list on July 6. He has created "super-drafty F28 and F29
schedules
" that try to align the releases with Fedora's traditional
May and October release dates. That would put Fedora 28
on May 1, 2018 and Fedora 29
at the end of October 2018 (each with their own rain dates). So far, most
of the complaints have been about
the super-short Fedora 27 cycle, though there have been some concerns about
the mass rebuild scheduled for Fedora 28 as well. That rebuild may
conflict
with the GCC development schedule to some extent.
One can probably be forgiven for suspecting that we may not see Fedora 27 by Halloween—or possibly even in November. There are lots of things going on in the project right now, new initiatives, plans, and so on, that would seem to make meeting the current schedule a formidable task. But only time will tell. In the meantime, there is much of interest going on in the Fedora world; it will be interesting to see where it all leads.
Posted Jul 13, 2017 14:24 UTC (Thu)
by eru (subscriber, #2753)
[Link] (14 responses)
An odd idea, considering all modern browsers transmit the user's configured language preference in the requests (HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE=...).
Posted Jul 13, 2017 15:28 UTC (Thu)
by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747)
[Link] (12 responses)
I assume it's because that's what Google does, and therefore nobody sends correct Accept-Language headers anymore. <sarcasm>And everyone lives in countries with exactly one official language, so that's not a problem.</sarcasm>
Posted Jul 13, 2017 23:18 UTC (Thu)
by nlucas (guest, #33793)
[Link]
Posted Jul 14, 2017 9:38 UTC (Fri)
by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
[Link]
Posted Jul 14, 2017 21:44 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link] (4 responses)
It does sound really unfair to people who can't read the most popular language in the region they're in, though, which must be pretty common. I don't travel enough ever to have experienced this myself.
Posted Jul 15, 2017 21:47 UTC (Sat)
by bernat (subscriber, #51658)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jul 15, 2017 22:04 UTC (Sat)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link] (2 responses)
Well, it can't be that simple, because a lot of countries, covering much of the planet, do not have an official primary language. The US has no official language; Canada has two, of equal status. And of course there is room for disagreement as to what is a country and probably as to what if anything is an official language of a country.
So if it's by country, someone had to sit down and assign one language to each country for web serving purposes, and I wonder why such person wouldn't use some more meaningful geography than country territories. Maybe there was already a table mapping IP address to country?
Posted Jul 16, 2017 6:04 UTC (Sun)
by bernat (subscriber, #51658)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 17, 2017 10:42 UTC (Mon)
by gidoca (subscriber, #62438)
[Link]
Posted Jul 15, 2017 21:48 UTC (Sat)
by bernat (subscriber, #51658)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Jul 15, 2017 22:14 UTC (Sat)
by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747)
[Link] (3 responses)
"OS language" is not a well-defined term, and it is not at all certain that you want to use the same language for different things. As an example, I live in Sweden, and my native language is Swedish, but I set LC_MESSAGES and LC_COLLATE to POSIX so I can search for error messages on Stack Overflow and find files with The One True ASCIIbetical File Name Order (TM). However, I quite like local things like the letters ÅÄÖ, decimal commas, A4 paper, SI units, and weeks that start on Mondays, so all the other LC_* variables are set to sv_SE.utf8. On top of that, I run KDE, which has its own system for localisation, and who knows exactly how that works. It has also been my experience that Swedish translations of web sites, even ones from really huge corporations, are embarrassingly bad, probably because almost every adult Swede can read English so nobody bothers to translate properly. I therefore tell Firefox to prefer languages in the order en-gb, en-us, en, sv-se, sv. Not that it helps, since many sites do geo-IP lokups and present a machine translated "Swedish" page anyway.
Posted Jul 16, 2017 6:07 UTC (Sun)
by bernat (subscriber, #51658)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 19, 2017 16:56 UTC (Wed)
by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
[Link]
That's been broken on Fedora for a while: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1005640
Posted Jul 20, 2017 9:59 UTC (Thu)
by kchr (guest, #117707)
[Link]
It is most likely to be what the user prefers to read in - any other factors (like location, keyboard layout) are simply not good enough to base a _language_ decision on.
See, a computer user is most likely using its OS with an appropriate language set. If this is not the case, the user is probably using a public computer, which probably has the most common language set based on the actual location and major languages spoken there. Which means no further assumtions needed here either.
Any other case should be considered fringe and not suitable for making these decisions.
Posted Jul 22, 2017 10:03 UTC (Sat)
by bmn1 (guest, #105591)
[Link]
Bugs can be opened in https://pagure.io/fedora-websites/issues, or you can also mail webmaster AT fedoraproject DOT org. Better (or new) translations can be provided with https://fedora.zanata.org/ joining the Fedora localization project.
Posted Jul 20, 2017 7:41 UTC (Thu)
by yoe (guest, #25743)
[Link] (5 responses)
No, it is not "amusing". It is terrible web design. It works for countries that are English-only, and fails for just about everything else:
- There seems to be a misbelief among north american developers that Belgium is a French-speaking country, where the reality is that it is a Dutch/French bilingual country, with Dutch spoken mostly in the north, and French mostly in the south. I can't count the number of sites that have greeted me in French, in the (mistaken) belief that my French is better than my English. I'm sure this isn't specific to Belgium
There is a scheme called "Accept-Language" in HTTP, which would have been a better match, except for the fact that most users don't configure their browsers to do it right, and therefore it doesn't work in many cases.
If a website wants to select a default language based on geography, they're making a terrible mistake. Even so, *if* they're going to do that, at least a language choice against that default must be retained at all costs. A user is more likely to know which language he speaks than a webserver is.
Posted Jul 20, 2017 8:43 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
If my memory isn't failing me, non-English Windows using Internet Explorer 4 through 7 (not tested recent versions) defaulted to setting up a sensible Accept-Language header, matching the language in use for the OS. Thus, trusting Accept-Language would get you the same language as the rest of the OS - if a Belgian set their Windows system to Dutch, Accept-Language would ask for "nl" (or "nl-be" - I can't remember if it took timezone etc into account).
I don't know if this has changed in newer versions, or if my memory is failing me, mind.
Posted Jul 24, 2017 17:00 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (3 responses)
For years, my mother (in Yorkshire) was greeted with an Italian Google homepage (well, OK, I flipped the relevant cookie to stop it, but I shouldn't have had to!), because her satellite Internet provider had its satellite downlink in Italy and nobody updated the geoip maps for years.
Posted Jul 25, 2017 14:40 UTC (Tue)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 26, 2017 12:22 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 26, 2017 13:30 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
If you paid for the full geolocation product in question, you did get an error bar (my employer does, and at the time of the story, I looked at our data to see that the product in the news gave us the location as longitude, latitude and 1,500km by 1,000km error radius for the problem IPs). The trouble was that there was a much cheaper (possibly even free - I can't remember at this remove) product that would give you the longitude and latitude of the centre of the ellipse they drew on the map, but not the error radiuses. Combine the cheap product with people ignoring the warning that you had no error bars, and you got into a mess; IIRC, some companies even drew on the underlying data feed, but hid the warning about no error bars on the cheap product from the user.
Plus, too many people have a "computer says so, must be true" attitude to precise results from a computer. This was a precise result, as it was stripped of the error radiuses, ergo it must be accurate.
Posted Jul 20, 2017 7:54 UTC (Thu)
by oldtomas (guest, #72579)
[Link] (1 responses)
Anyway -- glad I'm not alone. Phew :-)
Posted Jul 20, 2017 14:12 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Even in the "home" of the English language, namely England ...
Firstly, in geo-political terms there's no such place ... it's called "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (so our ISO code of GB/GBR pisses me off for not covering large chunks of the place!)
Even in terms of England, "proper" English is only spoken in the south-eastern bit - in the west they speak "welsh" - in quotes because "welsh" is the anglo-saxon term for the Britons who were here before them so I'm including Cornish and other such languages ...
Scots is not the language of the Scots - they speak Gaelic and their name is derived from the Roman name for Ireland ... Scots the language is the language of the Angles! who live between the Forth and the Tyne.
Basically modern geo-political boundaries bear no resemblance whatsoever to cultural/linguistic boundaries, and as has been said are rubbish for making such decisions. And we can probably blame a lot of the post-1945 political instability on the fact that Westerners seem oblivious to that fact cf all the nice straight-line borders imposed in Africa and the middle east, and the fighting that has gone on since ...
Cheers,
tries to switch the language of the content based on the browser's geographic location, which is probably quite helpful to most.
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Web sites choosing language
<sarcasm>And everyone lives in countries with exactly one official language, so that's not a problem.<sarcasm>
Do you think these automatic region-base language selectors use official languages of countries? I don't know how they work, but I'd assume they have a table of regions (as distinguishable by IP address) and popular languages, without regard to political boundaries or legal status of languages.
Web sites choosing language
Web sites choosing language
You are in country X, you get the official primary language of country X
Web sites choosing language
Web sites choosing language
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
WFM. Either it happens in specific sites, with specific languages or it has just changed.
Selecting language by Accept-language
$ curl -lis https://getfedora.org --header 'Accept-language: en' | grep -e Language: -e h1
Content-Language: en
<h1>Choose Freedom. Choose Fedora.</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Want more Fedora options?</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Be connected & informed.</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Read the docs.</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Get help.</h1>
$ curl -lis https://getfedora.org --header 'Accept-language: fr' | grep -e Language: -e h1
Content-Language: fr
<h1>Choisissez la liberté. Choisissez Fedora.</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Plus d’options Fedora ?</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Restez en contact et au courant.</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Lire les documentations.</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Obtenir de l’aide</h1>
$ curl -lis https://getfedora.org --header 'Accept-language: es' | grep -e Language: -e h1
Content-Language: es
<h1>Elija libertad. Elija Fedora.</h1>
<h1 class="thin">¿Quiere más opciones?</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Permanezca conectado e informado.</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Lea la documentación.</h1>
<h1 class="thin">Obtenga ayuda.</h1>
Highlights in Fedora 26
- It fails utterly for expats like yourself who don't speak the local language.
- There are plenty of places in the world where multiple languages are spoken equally among the local populace. In those areas, the best a website can do is offend half the people for getting them the wrong language
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Highlights in Fedora 26
Geo-language
I see that as a part of patronizing software (the software knows better than the user), which has the huge danger of developing into a self fulfilling prophecy. I see the potential for dystopia there, honestly.
Problem is, there's a huge industry out there betting their farms into manipulating people's behaviour -- that creates a terrible symbiosis with this kind of "patronizing" software...
Geo-language
Wol