Fedora News Updates #6
by
Colin Charles
For the week of: Wednesday, February 18 2004
Available at:
http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/issue6.shtml
Welcome to the sixth issue of Fedora News Updates, the weekly (or
bi-weekly) newsletter for the Fedora community. The issue has been
delayed due to other commitments; however, with this issue,
we bring the launch of a nice, new test release of Fedora (and the
comments that follow with it!).
Fedora Core 2 test1 released!
Bill Nottingham, the giver of "oh so flaming death!" announcements,
brings the news of
Fedora
Core 2 test1 being released. Read those release notes for more
information as to its availability, where Bugzilla bugs need to be
filed, and so on. Then go ahead, and download the 4 ISOs and have a lot
of fun.
This week, we also got the news that the
schedule has been modified - the new schedule is at
http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/.
FedoraForum
A new site in the Fedora community has been created:
Fedora Forum. In the forum
styled nature of things, these are discussion groups minus the e-mail,
and all entirely web-based. One of its aims is to support the Fedora
Core users as a community. Thanks to Matt (a moderator there) for
pointing this out.
Fedora Legacy Updates...
In a previous issue (Issue #4), we mentioned that the Fedora Legacy
documentation was being written by Jonas Pasche and pointed you towards
his personal site. This is not necessary any longer, as the FAQ and the
end-user documentation is as the main Fedora Legacy website at
http://www.fedoralegacy.org/docs/.
The legacy project now has a Wiki -
http://www.fedoralegacy.org/wiki/
- for documentation creation. Hats off to Jesse Keating for
setting
it up.
Memory usage sky-rocketing?
Seems to be a very common question on the lists, it seems. People tend
to wonder why their memory usage has sky-rocketed, and they have very
little free RAM left. Rodolfo J. Paiz answers it nicely at
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-February/msg00840.html.
In short, Linux uses up all its available resources rather than wasting
it sitting there idle. Mark Mielke
clears
up issues with regards to the swap file, and its growth. So don't
worry if memory gets used up - its just an efficient usage of your
resources!
Hard disk surface checks
Thinking you have a hard disk that's about to stop working? Many ways
have been pointed out, from getting a boot CD, to
using
dd. If that's not enough, using
destructive
read/write bad block scans were covered, and how sometimes they
don't
really work as well.
Roll your own ISOs
Fedora CD ISOs not sufficient for your purposes? Want to add the
updated RPMs on to them instead? Geoffrey Leach points us to several
resources, including a link to a set of scripts that allow you to
automate the build process. Read more at
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-February/msg01458.html.
Spec files
Attempting to roll your own RPM? You might need some assistance in
getting a good spec file - Harry Hoffman points us to one at
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-February/msg00342.html.
Fedora Core 2 test1 notes
Keeping in mind this is a test release, and these notes are for
testers, and not end-users of the general Fedora Core 1 product. The
fedora-test-list
has been brimming with questions and answers, so like always, look into
Bugzilla first.
If you're testing Core 2 test1, and think something was missed, please
do not hesitate to e-mail me.
Software
NTFS Support
Dag Wieers has done it again. Via his apt repository, there are NTFS
kernel modules available! Read more at
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-February/msg02780.html.
VPN Clients
In case folks were wondering, SSH can provide really useful VPN
functionality. Peter Eddy
points
us to the
VPN PPP-SSH
Mini-HOWTO.
Firefox
From Phoenix, to Firebird, and now Firefox; the browser that has gone
through three name changes after three releases. It is now
available
for QA testing as Warren Togami pointed out. If you're tracking Dag
Wieers' apt repository, it is also available there at
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/firefox/.
OpenOffice.org dictionary installation
Sometimes, manual intervention to get the dictionary of your choice
installed. Santavy Peter has written a good how-to guide at
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-February/msg01612.html.
Desktop cluster? Go OpenMosix.
Tim Brier points us to the
OpenMosix
kernel, and he has it running on Fedora Core 1 without issues. He
recommends
reading the notes and using the RPMs.
Gimp 2
Bleeding edge software, Gimp 2 is available as RPMs as well. This
version of The Gimp uses GTK2, so it is much more streamlined with the
GNOME desktop. Marius Andreiana
points
us to
http://www.gnome.org/~drc/gimp-rpms/.
Planner
What used to be known as Mr. Project is now known as Planner, and as
usual, Dag Wieers has packaged it up and its available at
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/planner/.
MySQL
MySQL can be installed via RPMs - Wipe_Out shows us the RPM's he
installs and points to a useful setup guide at
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-February/msg02818.html.
nvu
Mitch Wiedemann has an excellent guide to installing NVU at
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-February/msg03604.html.
Veritas NetBackup
Older Sun JVM's had a bug that prevented the Veritas NetBackup to load.
Ulrich Drepper has his solution at
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-February/msg03654.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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