Fedora News Updates #5

For the week of: Wednesday, February 4th 2004

Available at: http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/week5.shtml

Welcome to the fifth 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.

Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO

Eric Raymond has a new HOWTO on how to get all forms of multimedia working - be it MP3 playback, Flash, and even streaming video and audio. It is comprehensive, and is available at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Fedora-Multimedia-Installation-HOWTO/index.html.

Updated schedule

As Elliot Lee pointed out, Fedora Core 2 test1 is delayed, as there are some issues being fixed, before a release. As a consequence, we have a new schedule (incorporating the delay), and Bill Nottingham has posted when an expected release might be.

Keyboards

Want the equivalent of locking your screen with a certain number of keystrokes (namely Ctrl+Alt+Del)? Marc Williams came up with a useful solution that works with GNOME.

The issue with many modern keyboards is that they come with all these additional buttons and keys that do interesting "multimedia" things, for instance. They work well with the drivers supplied, but us Linux users seem to be a little left out. Well, Christopher Wickert points us to Lineakd, while Keith Robertson-Turner gives you a nitty gritty howto entitled Tips for using "extra" keyboard keys mini HOWTO.

Fedora Bug Day #2

Jef Spaleta isn't naming the "top" triager for last week, as there were backlogs of easyfix comments. 61 bugs have been officially triaged and have a QA whiteboard string. It should also be noted that Miloslav Trmac made significant contributions in the past week, and now has also enrolled in the Fedora Community Bug Squad.

Alan Cox has provided some tips to get you started in making the Bug Squad's job more convenient.

Today's Bug Day, nicknamed "the strings they are a'changin'" focuses on fixing bugs in user visible text, that would need to be retranslated. And in case anyone is trying out Rawhide, Elliot Lee confirms what the correct categories are for reporting.

Adding unlisted printers

redhat-config-printer (renamed now to system-config-printer) is CUPS compliant, and while it has a large database, it may not have everything at the moment. Tim Waugh tells us how it'll be done in Fedora Core 2, Joe Beach actually goes thru a lengthy process of getting it sorted, and Tim points that system-config-printer from Fedora development will work.

IRC Changes

The #fedora channel on irc.freenode.net is now set to a "restricted" mode. This means that you will have to have a nickname registered with freenode before you can get on the #fedora channel. To do this, get some help from the NickServ by typing /msg NickServ help.

Software

KDE 3.2

KDE 3.2 has been released, and there are RPM's available at mirrors near you (or from ftp.kde.org). Steven Ulrick also recommends a useful mirror.

WINE

Ever wanted to map a drive letter and mount a windows share using WINE? William Murray shows us how at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-January/msg06203.html.

Red Carpet

An overview of Red Carpet in Linux.Ars is quite an interesting read as a package management option. Heed the advice of not upgrading the kernel! Thanks to Brent Bradbury for the link.

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.