| Saturday, April 19th, 2008 |
| 12:02 pm |
Fedora 9 Xfce Spin: An update A lot of my time last week was spend in spinning and respinning and testing the changes for the Fedora 9 Xfce Spin. As promised earlier, my new progress report has been published. I am happily running rawhide on my main laptop for the last couple of months and the progress has been quite good. I am especially contend with the postive feedback cycle on all the issues reported and fixed with PackageKit. Fedora 9 is going to be out fairly soon now. Very cool. Current Mood: accomplished |
| Monday, March 3rd, 2008 |
| 11:46 pm |
Fedora 9 Xfce Spin - Progress report I have posted a short progress report on the changes in the upcoming Fedora 9 Xfce Spin. Check it out.  |
| Thursday, February 21st, 2008 |
| 7:12 pm |
Improving Fedora 9 Xfce spin There are a number of changes being considered for the Xfce spin (Live CD) for Fedora 9. I have filed a few bugs and there has been progress in fixing some of the issues in rawhide. Everything I am evaluating and keeping track of is available at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram/XfceLiveIf you have any comments on any of these ideas, feel free to edit the wiki or post your comments here. I can't promise everything you suggest will be implemented but I will promise that everything that is suggested will be carefully considered. |
| Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 |
| 11:22 am |
Announcing Fedora 8 Xfce Spin As promised earlier, the Xfce Spin of Fedora 8 is now available. Live CD's are available now for x86 and x86_64 architecture. I fine tuned the package list to fit into a CD even for x86_64 architecture unlike the other live images. We need to test PPC live cd a bit more and that is likely to follow after sometime. Meanwhile, I appreciate any feedback you might have on this. Digg It. |
| Sunday, February 10th, 2008 |
| 5:16 am |
Bouts of Productivity The last couple of weeks have been very productive for me. I tend to work to get motivated to do different things in leaps for reasons unknown to me. I am happy when that happens. Fedora XFCE SpinFedora XFCE spin was approved recently and is about to be released in a couple of days. Whew! Took longer than I thought since everybody is the project is just about learning to deal with the inflow of new Fedora spins. Thanks to upstream developers, Fedora XFCE maintainers, translators and many others in the community, Fedora Board, Release Engineering team and Seth Vidal for coordinating. It really takes a lot of work between people to get a new spin out. As always, I appreciate any feedback you have. Do post comments or drop me a mail. The number of spins I proposed got me a request from the Fedora Board to propose a new process and I have a draft that needs to be reviewed and discussed further. Livecd-tools For RHEL 5I have branched livecd-tools for EPEL repository for RHEL 5 and compatible rebuilds. Had to work on patching the software, testing it extensively and building several live cd's before pushing into the testing repository for EPEL. You can create live cd's from any number and combination of RHEL 5 compatible packages now. A major difference between RHEL 5 and Fedora is that RHEL 5 live cd's won't be installable to hard disk since that requires a newer version of Anaconda only available in Fedora now. With over a dozen spins that I have been working on, getting a deeper understanding of livecd-tools was inevitable and it ended up being useful at $day_job which is very nice too. More Software PackagesSpend the last two days (and nights) on packaging software. Build two new packages for Fedora. Gyachi is a yahoo client for Linux that supports voice and video both ways and it is only client that supports both well to my knowledge. The user interface is rough but functionality is just awesome. My colleague, Gregory D Hosler is the primary upstream developer now and we were able to coordinate on several issues and I have added him directly as a co-maintainer in Fedora without having to work through a new package which is a first of it's kinds. I am planning to write a document that makes it clear that upstream developers or new contributors can directly become co-maintainers in Fedora without going through the regular sponsorship model. I have also packaged checkgmail which is a system tray application that alerts on new mails, provides a preview and has several options including deleting, archiving, marking as spam and so on. It has a nice simple configuration option. I had to rebuild all my packages for the new GCC in rawhide too. Interesting learning exercises. Many thanks to Parag Nemade for reviewing and approving my packages. One of the quiet unsong heroes of the Fedora Project working his way to nearly 500 package reviews. A monumental achievement only topped by Jason Tibbs. Reviewing Packages I did a review for ocfs2-tools submitted by a upstream Oracle developer. Interesting multi-vendor and volunteer community colloboration is happening in Fedora. A sign of a very healthy community project. I am happy. |
| Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 |
| 5:19 am |
Fedora 9 Alpha Out Fedora Project continues it's rapid pace of Free software innovation with the release of Fedora 9 Alpha. While other distributions are beginning to adopt PulseAudio and PolicyKit, we are again one step ahead with new projects like FreeIPA. Red Hat continues to be the largest contributor to the Linux kernel, it has also contributed major improvements like the new GNOME VFS layer - GIO/GVFS that is part of the alpha release.  Some major highlights of Fedora 9 Alpha include * Support for resizing ext2,ext3 and NTFS partitions during installation
* Support for creating and installing to encrypted filesystems
* Faster and more efficient yum dependency resolver
* PackageKit
* FreeIPA, an integrated solution combining Linux, Fedora Directory Server, FreeRADIUS, MIT Kerberos, NTP, DNS and providing web and commandline provisioning and administration tools.
* GNOME 2.21 Development Release
* KDE 4.0
* Firefox 3 Beta 2
* Kernel 2.6.24.. and many more. |
| Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 |
| 11:53 pm |
RFC: Fedora Xfce Spin Fedora Xfce Spin is a variant of Fedora with a focus on low resource systems and in particular Xfce users. It is a live cd image that you can optionally install to hard disk or USB images. I have a kickstart file available at http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org/livecd-fedora-8-xfce.ksThis is meant for Fedora 8. You can either take a look at the list of packages or try creating a local image # yum install livecd-tools # livecd-creator --config
You might want to use a local mirror and --cache option to livecd-creator. Creating local customizations is trivial. Comments, fixes and suggestions, welcome. My plan is to create a initial image for Fedora 8 and then create incremental revisions with a solid release as part of Fedora 9. |
| Sunday, November 11th, 2007 |
| 4:28 am |
Fedora 8 Games Spin - Feedback Requested  One of the custom spins of Fedora that didn't get much attention because of the late addition is the Fedora 8 Games spin. This custom version of Fedora 8 from the games special interest group in Fedora includes tons of free and open source Linux games in a installable Live DVD. Download it and check it out. More information is available at the game spin wiki page. Any feedback is most welcome. Digg it |
| Friday, November 9th, 2007 |
| 3:50 am |
Some early press reports of Fedora 8 In addition to a earlier review from Linux.com, new ones of Fedora 8 have started flowing in. News.com has a report that covers primary a major new feature that makes it easy to rebrand Fedora for derivative distributions and Arstechnica has a mini review that covers unique features like PulseAudio as default sound server, PolicyKit authentication mechanism, the new look and feel including a color-changing wallpaper and three new custom spins including a Games Spin, a Developer Spin and Electronics Labs Spin. |
| 12:07 am |
Werewolf thriller today "Werewolf" moves across the land Router meltdowns close at hand Sysadmins in search of blood For those who caused this bandwidth flood And whosoever took the risk But failed to make an extra disc Must face the Bastard Op from Hell And lose his access to the shell The best of Linux now is here To kill the FUD and strike with fear The hearts of those who steal your rights And hide their code far from your sight Closed source takes away what's yours But you'll never shake the horror Until you taste the freedom and The power of FEDORA! Fedora 8 Released. Check it out.  |
| Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 |
| 8:09 am |
Fedora 8 Release Summary Fedora 8 is about to be released. You thought you knew all about Fedora 8? Check out our Fedora 8 release summary. Took nearly a whole night to gather and present all the information.
Many thanks to Jonathan Roberts for helping out in this and the long ongoing series of interviews about the new features in Fedora 8. Welcome to the best of Free software.
 |
| Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 |
| 5:45 am |
PackageKit in Fedora PackageKit (and gnome-packagekit) packages have been reviewed and approved for Fedora. It will be available in the Fedora development branch (Rawhide) shortly. Things are going well according the plan for Fedora 9. Richard Hughes, Robin Norwood (who is going to be maintainer for Fedora), James Bowes, Luke Macken (Bodhi fame), Tim Laurisden (yumex fame) and other Red Hat, Fedora and community developers are involved in this project. The plan is to introduce this as a alternative package manager for Fedora 9. Maybe it will end up being the default instead. Brilliant work from everyone involved.
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| Saturday, October 27th, 2007 |
| 5:37 am |
Fedora 8 - Blocker bugs status As we get ready for a new release of Fedora, the things we worry about most are the blocker bugs. A couple of QA meetings back, I suggested to Will Woods to post status reports of the blocker bugs every week or alternative week to get some eyes on the important bugs that can block a release and delay it and he has been doing those now and then.
As you can see from the latest report, we are progressing well and looks like we will have this release on time.
Another surprising thing is that the progress on having localized content on the Fedora website. Within a couple of days, we already have the website available in five languages. Go, Go, Go.
 |
| Thursday, October 25th, 2007 |
| 8:31 pm |
Fedora 8 review
Linux.com has a review of Fedora 8 (Test 3) which is mostly a positive critique.
Fedora 8 renews tradition of innovations
Some comments:
After seven releases of its own and the previous Red Hat releases, Fedora has most aspects of putting a distribution together down to a routine.
Yes and no. While we are indeed having a much much better foundation than we were when we started out with Fedora, we haven't yet figured out all the aspects of the release. There was a time when people were wondering if Fedora as a community distribution would ever flourish. I think that question has changed into how successful will it be? Fedora 7 was a major milestone from the project perspective and I hope Fedora 8 can shine better by showing off benefits that are immediately apparent to the end user having the advantages of a better base to build from. It is not yet a routine however. John Poelstra talked about how successful the new feature process has been and what needs to change. When I suggested something similar to the Fedora Board earlier, it was immediately dismissed by saying we don't have the culture of planning that far ahead but I was convinced that we would tremendously benefit from a more organized development and it is clear to me that it is indeed the case but more participation from developers is required.
Nor are the trio of yum, Pirut, and Pup for software installation greatly changed, aside from a noticeable increase in speed.
Pirut has the ability to install packages from media and easy editing of software repositories and opyum complements it by providing offline installation capabilities but assuming just the speed increase is noticeable, I am happy with that.
The security tools centering around SELinux are similarly unchanged
Not quite. SELinux has some nice enhancements which Dan Walsh has been blogging out. I have installed xguest to check out the kiosk mode feature and will be looking into that soon.
Similarly, the new release maintains the Fedora tradition of introducing a new desktop. While Fedora 7's was a slightly over-the-top airbrushed theme, Fedora 8's Infinity theme heads in the opposite direction with a minimalist theme whose default wallpaper suggests a series of converging vapor trails.
True. Fedora 8 presents a community coordinated artwork and while it is not going to turn faces, it is subtle and nice. One hurdle down the steady path towards the community. Nodoka theme also is good contribution.
These standard elements are not flawless -- the installer, for instance, could include Xfce as a desktop alternative
Sure. We could but we have more software in the repository than would fit into a single DVD. So there are some choices not available in the official images. Others have done such all encompassing spins however and they are pretty useful to some users.
I wonder whether the proliferation of codec installers is worth the effort, and whether users might not be better off installing the LAME package from rpm.livna.org, Fedora's unofficial non-free repository, instead.
Aside from the fact that Livna and Freshrpms among others are converging at http://rpmfusion.org, we are still waiting on Red Hat Legal to see if linking to third party repositories is ok for us to do. I am supportive of such an effort though and the design of Codec Buddy would allow alternative sources.
This release makes it obvious that the Fedora community prides itself on innovation. If nothing else, the public documentation of each change on the project wiki should make the perspective clear. If, despite being marked on the wiki as complete, some of these innovations seem flawed or limited, that seems only inevitable -- with so many efforts at finding a new direction, some are bound to fail, or to be less successful than others, especially in their first release. Fedora deserves appreciation for trying. At the introductory stage, that matters more, perhaps, than complete success.
That nails it right on the head. Thanks to Bruce Byfield for some insightful comments but he has missed quite a lot of improvements in this release. Partly our responsibility to make this easier for reviewers to find and I am working on that. As always, help and feedback is most welcome.
 |
| 12:27 am |
Fedora 8 - Attacking bugs before release We had a Fedora QA meeting a few hours back focused on keeping track of the bugs before Fedora 8 release.
Will Woods, who leads the QA team, Jesse Keating - Release Engineer for Fedora, Rex Dieter - KDE co-maintainer, Jeremy Katz - All around ninja, Kevin Fenzi - Xfce maintainer and myself discussed the status of rawhide, reviewed and triaged the blocker bug list for a long time which has gone down from 36 odd bugs to under 15 bugs for this release and we aptly have 15 days left. The release is usually composed and send off to the mirrors 4 days before the actual release and the addition of several spins like developer, electronics and games means that we need to start preparing a bit early.
Some of these bugs are already fixed but needs additional confirmation before being closed. Help out if you can. There are still some that require more information or hardware specific bugs lurking in there which are going to be hard to test or fix. All in all, looks we are headed for a pretty good release to me.
 |
| Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 |
| 8:49 pm |
Fedora 8 Countdown There has been a few backend changes to the Fedora website that makes it easier to do content updates. Fedora project wiki has also been cleaned up a bit.
As you might notice from the slight url change, we are gearing up for enabling translation of the website content into other languages. This should help us continue the good tradition of supporting other languages and enabling the large community of translators to increase Fedora's reach to more people in time for Fedora 9.
Check out the new countdown that we have in http://fedoraproject.org.
We will also intend to launch a news site for Fedora shortly.
 |
| Monday, October 22nd, 2007 |
| 1:45 pm |
The final strech to Fedora 8
Grab the latest rawhide live images and send in your feedback in the fedora-test list or bugzilla. |
| Saturday, October 20th, 2007 |
| 10:48 pm |
Codec Buddy in Fedora 8
Codec Buddy (Codeina) is the wrapper in Fedora 8 which helps educate the users on the advantage of open formats or optionally install multimedia codecs when you click on any multimedia content that is not supported by Fedora out of the box.
To know more about how codec buddy works and see some screenshots, take a look at the codeina page. |
| 7:24 pm |
Do'ers A number of others folks have been pushing for a better tested and supported live upgrade path for a long time. Time to organize better and participate in that effort now.
Join the Live Upgrade Special Interest Group at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/LiveUpgrade.
Incidentally this is the first non-packaging related SIG for Fedora. Should be interesting work. Join in and have fun. |
| Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 |
| 7:30 pm |
Amusing #fedora IRC channel stats From my xchat irc log archives of 777 days of #fedora, I have a run a perl script to get some pretty amusing stats available at http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org
My IRC nick is mether and I used to be pretty active on the channel before though I have deliberated cut down on the time I spend answering questions to actually helping out in Fedora by proactively fixing out some of the frequently asked questions on these channels. A lot of familiar faces have been busy bees here. Kudos to the folks helping out in building the Fedora community. |
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