Fedora News Updates #11
by
Colin Charles
For the week of: Thursday, May 6 2004
Available at:
http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/issue11.shtml
This is the eleventh issue of the Fedora News Updates. Some
newsworthy things with regards to external development have cropped up,
it being picked up by some news feeds out there. Of highlights this
time around is the message from the Fedora Project Leader, as well as
from the Fedora Legacy Project Leader.
A message from the Project Leader
For the past few months, the main task on the ever-lengthy Fedora to-do
list, is to open up some form of public repository for contributors to
the Fedora Project.
The main issue here is that we're looking for a usable source code
management (SCM) system, that can scale well for a large project like
ours. Please bear with us, as we would like to get this right on the
first try. As you can imagine, changing the internal build system and
code management repositories have massive repercussions on our
development process and breakages can falter our Red Hat Enterprise
Linux deliverables.
Thanks for understanding.
Cristian Gafton
Fedora Project Leader
Fedora Core 2 test3 released
The third and final test release of Fedora Core 2 has been released,
with the release message at:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-April/msg02693.html.
Yes, SELinux is now disabled by default, meaning Fedora Core 2 will not
have it enabled by default. A few more interesting fixes like CD1 not
booting and new translations have made it into this test release.
It should be noted that the FC2 Final freeze date is approaching - all
packages should in theory
be
built by the end of the working day on the 6th of May.
A message from the Fedora Legacy Lead
We have a resurgence of interest in the project, most likely due to
RHL9 becoming EOL. We also have a new dedicated download server
in place, and as DNS updates users will be directed to that new
server. There are a bunch of mirror requests that have been
submitted over the last month or so, that we have not processed due to
bandwidth issues, these will now be processed. Our mirror system
will continue to grow.
There are a large number of pending updates, and newly created bug
reports with packages up for initial QA. We can use all the help
we can get to QA these packages so that we can push them into
updates-testing, and finally updates. Some of these include RHL9
packages. Some very helpful folks at Red Hat have offered their
help with keeping some packages updated, which is going to turn out to
be a huge service to the project.
Finally, there has been some talk of making Fedora Legacy a non-profit
organization. Initial reaction by some folks at Red Hat has been
favorable, but Red Hat Legal has to get involved. Who knows how
long this will take, or which direction it will go, but I will continue
to pursue this transition.
Jesse Keating
Fedora Legacy Project Leader
Dual-head AGP video cards that "just work"
So you're in the market for a new video card, and want to make sure all
that money you spend doesn't go to waste - i.e. it will work flawlessly
with Fedora. Matthew Polashek asked just that and there were some good
recommendations:
Web cams that "just work"
Seems that another popular question popped up, with regards to webcams
and which one's work with Fedora. Users have posted their experiences:
Taming the mailing lists
Sopwith sent out a
mailing
list reminder to all, to make sure people post to the correct
lists. Reiterating this more is important - end-users don't want to be
filling random cruft on the developer only mailing lists, or assuming
they're testing a release, on the Core lists. User discretion is
advised, and remember to always search the mailing list archives! These
and many more, came out of the "
Taming
the mailing lists?" thread.
Two new useful scripts
Brian Bober has written a script that has proven useful in logging AVC
error messages that SELinux tends to spew out. He has instructions as
well as the script at:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-April/msg02503.html.
Chris Kloiber has written fedorasync.sh (
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-May/msg00227.html),
which is meant to allow the creation of DVD ISO's on a daily basis from
the development tree of Fedora.
FedoraNEWS.ORG gets translated
Thomas Chung has kindly pointed out that the FedoraNEWS.ORG website
currently has a site translation, available in
French. It should also be
noted that there are many more
translations available,
including Russian, Italian, Spanish, and German.
Some new documentation
Ow Mun Heng has been working on a
QoS/TrafficShaping
(Shorewall) HOWTO (
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-April/msg04811.html),
while Homer adds some
improvements
for the next HOWTO.
Dave Pawson has been working on the
Connecting to a
Palm document, which is a step-by-step guide for getting syncing
working.
Fedora Core 2 test3 notes
- Why do we have 4 CDs now, rather than just 3 CDs? And why are we
not making each individual ISO larger, as 700MB discs are becoming
common-place? Sopwith mentioned that this has been tried
before, with negative results, and Stephen Smoogen mentions that
this might be a
possibility in FC3.
- Kernel 351+ merges Markus Lidel's I2O patches that are currently in 2.6.6-rc3-mm2. Testing is needed for Adaptec and DPT SCSI RAID hardware that previously used the dpt_i2o driver in the 2.4.x kernels. More details about I20 development is available at http://i2o.shadowconnect.com/.
- sg (scsi generic), for burning CD's isn't required (http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-April/msg01095.html);
however there are a few things that require it (http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-April/msg01096.html),
and this is why sg
is shipped.
- If IPV6 is bugging you, Jim Tate shows you how to turn it off: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-April/msg02505.html.
- Dave Jones, kernel maintainer, has some interesting insights into
the kernel as to why sticking
to the mainline kernel is good.
- And now, some of the machines it's been tested on: Dell
Inspiron 5100, Acer
1353LM laptop, IBM
Thinkpad 600x, and even Telsa enjoyed great success on the dual-Athlon
she has.
Looking ahead
It's time to plan for Fedora Core 3 and its
goals!
Of worthy mention are:
If you have a goal, or an aim, the rest of the developers are bound to
enjoy hearing it. We're nearly approaching FC2, so hang in there for
another release.
Software
Evolution, next generation
David Malcolm has taken over maintenance of the Evolution packages, and
the 1.5.7 packages for Fedora are available for download. Read his
notes as to how to add it to your regular feed:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-April/msg04011.html.
Project Utopia
John (J5) Palmieri has got experimental Project Utopia packages
available at:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-April/msg01072.html.
This is a yum repository.
Statistics for sendmail
Philip Chapman mentions he's tried isoqlog, sendmail_stats and mrtg (
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-April/msg04073.html),
and then gets pointed out to
Awstats
or even
epylog.
Cooperative bug isolation project
A joint effort between UC Berkeley and Stanford to bring debugging to
the Internet age! They're targeting some specific packages in Fedora
Core 1, and the notes are here:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-May/msg00825.html.
Thank you for reading this issue
of Fedora News Updates. Think there's some news snippet you'd like to
contribute to Fedora News Updates? Send e-mail to
colin@fedoranews.org.
This issue of Fedora News Updates brought to you by
Colin Charles.
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