Fedora News Updates #3

For the week of: Wednesday, January 21st 2004

Available at: http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/week3.shtml

Welcome to the third issue of Fedora News Updates, the weekly (or bi-weekly) newsletter for the Fedora community. We aim to release this often and can do so with the help of the community. It should contain user information as well as some useful developer discussions that will shape the outcome of Fedora. Thanks for all the wonderful comments for the first issue, and keep those e-mails coming!

LinuxWorld

Fedora is being well represented at LinuxWorld. It's really meant for community gathering as well as discussions with newbies, developers and the like. If you're lucky enough to be at LinuxWorld, go pay the Fedora community a visit. If anyone has a write-up, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Keep on schedule!

To make it for Fedora Core 2 test1, the cut-off date for all packages is the morning of the 23^rd January 2004. This will allow a testing tree to be built over the weekend, and will probably mean that we see test1 on the 2^nd February 2004, as per the schedule.

Fedora Core 1 for AMD64 test1

It has been launched! The much awaited AMD64 (x86_64) Fedora Core 1 has been released. This is hopefully a single test release to test for hardware compatibility, and there are some instructions in the post as to how to deal with issues on Bugzilla. If posting to a mailing list, make sure it is fedora-test-list. Seth Vidal kindly pointed out that the ISOs are also available via BitTorrent.

Web happenings

The Fedora web site has been updated. One of the more interesting things to come out of the update is the SELinux integration page.

Fedora People, is a site that aggregates a bunch of blogs, for people within the Fedora community. So instead of the usual stance of "Planet Fedora" (like many other projects do), we have Fedora People, a site which describes "Who is The Fedora Project?". Many thanks goes out to Seth Vidal.

We've also seen the birth of Fedorazine, a Fedora community site. It has interesting newsfeeds, and allows more user participation in the site.

Wide Open, the new Red Hat Magazine for Open Source Professionals and Advocates has an article on The Fedora Configuration Tool Project, by Brent Fox. It is a preview article (from a subscription-only magazine), accompanied by screenshots as well.

up2date or yum errors

Everyone seems to be complaining about errors that up2date or yum spews out to them, just to get an update on Fedora Core done properly. Alexander Dalloz decided to write up a good answer to this FAQ, which is pretty comprehensive. Remember, the key to get away from all the errors would be to use a mirror near you. The future will be cleverer code that chooses mirrors, and has all the client support required.

Installing more TrueType Fonts

Getting more TTF's installed seems to be trivial with the instructions at the Installing TrueType Fonts guide. For those using GNOME (default on Fedora Core), Nautilus has an easier method with its fonts:/// browsing system. Nautilus' fonts:/// support drag-and-drop as well!

Get rid of beeps

In the last issue we found out to remove the beeps from GDM, and now we find out how to get rid of the loud beep when you hit the Backspace key in a console (and there's nothing to delete). Or if you hit the Tab key, and there is more than one option to choose from.

Your own up2date server II

As mentioned in the previous issue, Dale has changed a bit of his script, and has it available at: https://www.redhat.com/archives/k12osn/2004-January/msg00428.html.

Alexandre Oliva shows us how to use Dag Wieers home made apt repository via yum. Useful if you do not want to get apt on your system, and stick with yum/up2date.

More kernel related items

Dave Jones has Fedora Kernel FAQ that has got useful pointers, and answers to plenty of questions (like why is there no NTFS support in Fedora, for instance) - definitely a must read. Another wiki with regards to kernel 2.6-test running on FC1 has some useful installation instructions as well.

Dave has also mentioned that work on the FC1 kernel will reduce (as he prepares for FC2). If you've ever wondered where the Fedora kernel get's names like vmlinux-2.4.22-1.2138.nptl, they're based on CVS idents. And for those wanting to try out kernels with their own patches, a Fedora CVS server is being setup to allow just that.

And no, we won't be seeing the preemptible patches for production use - it might exist in the beta test cycle of FC2, but there's no saying yet.

Installing a new window manager

David Jackson walks us through how he got IceWM working on Fedora Core. If anyone else has more tips on getting other window managers running, do share them!

Applications

OpenOffice.org

Dan Williams has begun building the gnome.org OpenOffice.org for Fedora Core 2. This is a cooperative effort with the guys at Ximian, Debian, Red Hat, and others to provide a more integrated and advanced OpenOffice.org to the Linux community. Enhancements include much better integration into the GNOME desktop, better font detection, and heaps more usability and integration improvements. The current Rawhide release is not as well tested as the previous Fedora Core releases from the user's standpoint (there may still be issues with upgrades from 1.0.x, and previous 1.1.0 settings are not picked up yet), but these will be ironed out over the coming weeks. Also, hopefully, in the next month, Fedora's OOo will ship with native widgets enabled.

system-config-language

There is now a text user interface for system-config-language, and people are encouraged to test it out.

Mozilla

Michael Kearey shows us how to add Mozilla official yum repositories, especially for Fedora users. With these, you can get Mozilla 1.6!

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, with content from Dan Williams, Seth Vidal, and Andre Robatino.