Fedora News Updates #16

For the week of: Wednesday, September 29 2004

Available at: http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/issue16.shtml

Issue sixteen is now out. Its been long awaited. Help is required to keep up with the traffic on fedora-list - lieutenants, please step up. While there has been a lot of interesting news in the span of time since the last issue, they're still in the queue to be pushed out. We're moving to a definitely more dynamic solution in terms of pushing out news in a more timely fashion.

Fedora Core 3 schedule slips; FC1 EOL announced; Fedora Core 3 Test 2 released

The Fedora Core 3 schedule has slipped by a week, and the updated schedule is at: http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/. This means the expected release of Fedora Core 3 is now set at November 1st 2004.

Fedora Core 3 Test 2 got announced on the 20th of September 2004, as per the new schedule - the announcement information is at: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2004-September/msg00024.html. Some of the notable mentions include the removal of a static /dev to a dynamic /dev (provided for by udev), the GNOME 2.8 release candidate, KDE 3.3.0 and Xorg X11 6.8.0. Read more about udev in Fedora.

Consequently, Fedora Core 1 support has been passed on to the Fedora Legacy project.

Fedora Bugweek

Quick! Quick! Just a little while more for the Fedora Bugweek, to go. Read more at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-September/msg01026.html, and join the IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (#fedora-bugweek). As a consequence, there is now a fedora-patches-list.

Some basic "getting around" Fedora tools

Newbies will definitely appreciate the following posts, where there's information about how to use a few command line tools.

Tom Mitchell writes about how to use the apropos command to finding the right help for you.
Want to use find in conjunction with grep? http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-August/msg02446.html.
Think applications are taking too long to startup? Using time, and even strace, might tell you where the bottle-neck is: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-August/msg03902.html.

Fedora Core 2 kernel upgrade breaking CD recording

Kernel 2.6.8-1.521 which is the latest kernel for Fedora Core 2 has broken CD recording from userspace, as noticed by many. This is a security fix, rather than a bug. The issue has been covered well in an article at lwn.net: 2.6.8 and CD recording.

Translating Fedora

Feel like its necessary to translate Fedora while logged into a Windows-based machine? There's now a translation guide, titled Translate Fedora in Microsoft® Windows®. There is also a Fedora Translation Project FAQ online now.

Use SELinux again

And a kudos to you if you're already using it. If you're testing the development releases of Fedora Core 3, please try SELinux again. In case you want to know more about the targeted policy, Daniel Walsh wrote a good introduction to it at: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-September/msg00909.html.

New Lists

Fedora Extras has a new announce list for package announcements, called fedora-extras-announce-list - more information at http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-announce-list.

For discussion of the Fedora toolchain, like gcc, gdb, binutils, glibc and so on, there is fedora-tools-list. Read the announcement for more details.

The Rawhide Report

As testing has begun with FC3 test1, there have been some changes, issues and many other interesting new things that users will be seeing in the near future. Here are some of the recent discussions that circle around Rawhide:

There is no more ide-tape, which means CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDETAPE is now disabled in the latest kernels.
Nautilus, in GNOME 2.8 does not have the "View as Image Collection" option any longer. This is because of an upstream decision to remove the option.
Reiser4 has been released, with a lot of people wondering if Fedora Core 3's kernel will sport it - its been said time and again, that if upstream kernels don't have it, the Fedora kernels will not have it. The main reason is that Fedora will have SELinux enabled, and testing with Reiser4 hasn't actually happened.
Firefox & Thunderbird, from the Mozilla team are now in Rawhide, and will be included into Fedora Core 3! Read more at: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-September/msg00010.html.

A few more bits and pieces

Anyone reading Fedora People will now realise there are Rawhide Reports, everytime the build system releases a push. Read more about it at: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-August/msg01024.html.
FedoraNEWS.ORG has been translated to Romanian now.
fedora-list mailing list message statistics for August: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-September/msg00540.html.
Alexander Larsson has got a nice write-up as to how one can generate stack traces, so your bug reports are more useful to the developers.

Software

dmraid 1.0.0-rc4

Heinz Mauelshagen has a new release of dmraid for testing, and has more details at: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-September/msg01088.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.