Fedora Weekly News Issue 34

From FedoraNEWS.ORG

Written by Thomas Chung on 2006-02-20

This issue is also available in the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish

Welcome to our issue number 34 of Fedora Weekly News (FWN), the weekly newsletter for the Fedora community. The latest issue can always be found here.

Table of contents

Red Hat Magazine February 2006

Red Hat Magazine (http://www.redhat.com/magazine/) February 2006 Issue #16 is out. According to Red Hat Magazine Editor's Blog (http://blogs.redhat.com/magazine/):

This issue is very near and dear to our hearts. We're talking all about
the Red Hat Summit (http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/) coming this June to the friendly and fun city of Nashville.
But words just weren't enough for us to express our sentiments. You'll find
a photo tour (http://www.redhat.com/magazine/016feb06/features/summit_nashville/) of the city with almost as much emphasis on music as
Nashville itself. Within the featured articles, you'll also get a glimpse into one
Red Hatter's experience last year at the Summit and how just attending landed him a job with us (http://www.redhat.com/magazine/016feb06/features/benedict/).

On a related note, Red Hat Magazine is asking:

We'd like to ask a favor of you readers. We have a new survey (http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/96255/2988/) up, hoping to collect your
thoughts and opinions about what you really want from Red Hat magazine.
The more responses, the more accurately we can deliver a more personalized product
so please take a few minutes of your time and fill out the survey (http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/96255/2988/).

Fedora Project Wiki Policy Change Update

Patrick Barnes (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PatrickBarnes) announces in his list message (http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2006-February/msg00128.html):

We have completed the shift to our new wiki policy.  The Contributor License
Agreement is now required for wiki editing privileges.

The EditGroup (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EditGroup) is no longer frozen.  EditGroup members who have already
completed the CLA do not need to do anything.  They should be able to
continue editing normally.  All former EditGroup members who have not
completed the CLA have been moved to the new UnlicensedGroup (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UnlicensedGroup) page.  They
will be unable to edit the wiki until they have completed the CLA and have
removed themselves from the UnlicensedGroup.  Once they have done so, they
can contact someone currently on the EditGroup to get themselves added again.

More details about these changes can be found on the WikiLicenseTalk (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/WikiLicenseTalk) page.
As always, wiki editing details can be found on the WikiEditing (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/WikiEditing) page.

OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Base Software

Christopher Blizzard (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ChristopherBlizzard) reports in his blog (http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/?p=177):

I’m a firm believer in the “release early, release often” mantra.
And in that capacity, I would like to share some of the work that
Red Hat has done on some of the base software for the OLPC hardware platform.
We’ve been focused on a couple of things so far:

o Building an emulator so that people can have a playpen for testing and feel some of the experience
o Building tools to generate system images from existing Fedora packages.

On a related note, Daniel Berrange (http://people.redhat.com/berrange/) has posted a document for OLPC: Software Development Kit (http://people.redhat.com/berrange/olpc/sdk/) and a video for QEMU Admin (http://people.redhat.com/berrange/olpc/sdk/olpc-qemu-admin-demo.html) which is a tool for setting up virtual machines graphically.

Tools to roll your own distribution - Kadischi

Rahul Sundaram (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram) points out to LWN.net's article (http://lwn.net/Articles/171176/) on Kadischi. In the article:

Fedora fans now have the Kadischi (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Kadischi) Fedora Live CD Project, which has recently created (http://lwn.net/Articles/170856/) Fedora Core 5 Test 2 live CDs.

Kadischi (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Kadischi) is an application for Fedora-based LiveCD generation. It is still in the early stage of development, but has basic functionality and can be run successfully.

Must-have Firefox and Thunderbird extensions

Here is an interesting article found from NewsForge (http://internet.newsforge.com/internet/06/01/03/2210257.shtml?tid=144). In the article:

By now, you've probably installed the latest versions of Firefox and Thunderbird.
The most recent releases include a lot of new and interesting features (http://internet.newsforge.com/internet/05/11/30/0455238.shtml?tid=144), but do they have
all the functionality you're looking for? If not, that's where extensions come in.
The Mozilla applications have too many extensions to try to write about them all,
but I wanted to share some of the extensions that I find most useful for day-to-day browsing and email.

Extensions can add, modify, and remove functionality from Thunderbird and Firefox. Most users are
already familiar with extensions, but you might not know just how many useful extensions are out there.
The Firefox Add-ons (https://addons.mozilla.org/) site has an extensive list of available extensions.

Google Windows apps coming to Linux

Here is another interesting article found from DesktopLinux (http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS9556554213.html). In the article:

The free Linux Picasa download will include a runtime version of CodeWeavers's modified
Wine, so that users can simply download the package from Google and run it on their
Linux system. Users will not need to download and install Wine, or to purchase
CodeWeavers's commercial version of Wine, CrossOver Office.

New CMS for FedoraNEWS.ORG

In case you haven't noticed, we just rolled out a new CMS for front interface. Here is the announcement earlier this week:

I'm happy to announce that we're launching a new CMS (Content Management System) for
FedoraNEWS.ORG based on your feedbacks.

It is based on Drupal (http://drupal.org/) and it has so many new features (http://drupal.org/features) our readers requested including:

1) Self-registration to submit story
2) RSS Feeds for Stories
3) Calendars for Fedora Events
4) News Aggregator for Fedora Updates and Fedora People
5) Blogging for Registered Users.
and many more.   

Fedora Core 4 Updates

During the week of February 13 - February 19, Fedora Project released 10 Fedora Core 4 Updates (http://fedoranews.org/cms/FC4) including 1 Security Advisory.

Contributing to Fedora Weekly News

Would you like to contribute your article to Fedora Weekly News?

Editor's Blog

Let's see anything interesting happened in Editor's Blog (http://fedoranews.org/cms/blog/ThomasChung) besides Fedora Weekly News

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