Installing Fedora 16 pre-release.

I’m a little late this cycle to move my laptop to the Fedora pre-release. (Note the web site doesn’t yet feature the Fedora 16 Beta — that should change next Monday around 10:00 US Eastern time.) I had tried some Live USBs along the way and they were generally looking great, but before now I hadn’t had the spare time to do the installation and test to make sure my various workflow bits were all working normally. Today I finally took the plunge.

Unfortunately, there was one problem standing in my way — an Anaconda bug that pops up in certain pre-existing LVM configurations. Fortunately, the always beneficent Dave Lehman from the Anaconda team had kindly provided an update image for Anaconda that addresses the bug. He even reminds people in the bug how to use it live off the Web with an installation.

That was really helpful for me, because it should be noted I’m actually installing from the current development/16 tree, and not the Fedora 16 Beta RC4, which was declared gold yesterday. So the problem I ran into isn’t likely to happen to other people. The update fixing this problem is in the Beta, but because Dave published this image I could simply install from my local pre-F16 mirror. Which I proceeded to do.

The installation was completely unremarkable aside from this bug, with no extra surprises. I do know that the Anaconda team is working very hard with Máirín Duffy on a UI overhaul. That’s supposed to see the light of day in the next release, Fedora 17. For now we’ll have to content ourselves with the existing UI and things just working as always… ho hum!

After the installation completed, I rebooted. Weirdly the boot seemed a bit faster than it was before, particularly getting from GRUB to the point where I enter a passphrase for my encrypted filesystems. That could easily be some subjective bias, but hey, I was happy anyway. I went through firstboot, provided my user information, and after the SELinux labels and permissions were checked and restored and I finished firstboot, I got the new login screen.

The background picture with the little submarine is really sweet. Last release, Fedora 15 featured the standard GNOME 3 background in the default install, as a tip of the hat to a major milestone release for GNOME. This release, the Fedora Design team was back in action and did a nice job on a stylish background that’s interesting without overwhelming the desktop. And of course, it’s in several fetching shades of blue, my favorite color for many reasons.

But the login dialog itself, part of GNOME 3.2, is also really swank! With smooth animation and fading, it now feels so much more polished from the very beginning of the signon process. I know there are lots of other improvements and cool stuff in GNOME 3.2 and I can’t wait to explore them. I did run into some errors when I logged in, such as the “sad GNOME” even though the interface seemed to work fine. But it’s important to note when I installed, I didn’t include the latest updates of everything in the Beta, so it’s likely I’m seeing problems that are already resolved. I ran an update on the system shortly thereafter to get the latest packages from the updates-testing repository, and I also did a sudo touch /.autorelabel to make sure all the SELinux labels were restored properly on the system, and rebooted. As a result the problems I saw simply vanished.

For now, suffice it to say that I think people will be fairly impressed with the Fedora 16 Beta and can take the opportunity to report bugs as they find them. The most important part of having a free software release that’s done transparently is that it allows you to become part of the process. If you run into a bug, it really helps when you report it. It can be frustrating when something doesn’t work, but it’s important to remember a lot of people are working on this software as part of a gift culture. So help them out in return by politely reporting bugs and, if you have just a little more time to spare on top, work with them to test the solution to resolve it. Your gift will help countless others, just as developers’ gifts help you and me.

Enjoy your weekend!

Software Freedom Day in Fredericksburg.

The global Software Freedom Day was held Saturday, September 17th. However, as with previous years, the SFD organizers landed their event on the same day as Fredericksburg’s downtown Oktoberfest celebration. We love a good party as much as anyone, but we found in previous years that even though we had more foot traffic our SFD event, most passersby were not interested in software as much as beer and bratwursts. (Go figure!)

So this year we decided to move our local event a week later. Personally I think software freedom goes great with beer (and other beverages). If we’re going to man a table all day to promote software freedom, though, we should at least make sure we’re not fighting for audience. This probably means we’re not eligible for whatever “best event” competition is happening for 2011, but at least we believe our event will be more successful educating people this year.

Come by the Central Rappahannock Regional Library’s Headquarters branch this Saturday (the 24th!) to join the festivities. We’ll give away plenty of goodies and show off some of the best freedom software available.

Ohio Linux Fest 2011 report.

Following a truncated workday on Thursday, I quickly packed, threw my stuff in the car, and raced up the road as quickly as torrential rain would safely allow to Reagan National Airport. I took a short flight to Columbus, Ohio, where this weekend the Ohio Linux Fest 2011 was set to go. I got into the hotel around diner time and fortunately I was able to hook up with a variety of folks including Ruth Suehle from opensource.com, Jared Smith, Red Hat mega-architect and superstar Thomas Cameron, and Fedora Docs hackers John McDonough and Zach Oglesby for dinner at Bucca di Beppo. Yum!

Friday was sort of an “early penguin” day, with fewer sessions organized into a couple tracks such as medical/open source crossover and a catchall track for other FOSS related talks. I got up at about 7:00am and took care of a few emails, which turned out to be a good idea since the rest of the day would be devoid of connectivity; any plans I had for productivity were killed by the complete lack of 3G and wifi at the convention center. There was a good amount of docs hacking that was rumored to take place back in the hotel, though.

Meanwhile, I spent most of my time meeting up with various acquaintances from around the FOSS world and attending early talks. I saw a good presentation on representing open source in economic models, for instance, and also caught Ruth’s talk in the medical track about tech advancements in open source and how they reflect the collaborative nature of health science. I didn’t catch much of the cloud talk but I understand there were some last minute changes. Hopefully people who attended that track still found plenty of worthwhile material.

A bunch of Fedora folks started appearing in a flood by afternoon, including my roomie Clint Savage. After dinner with Ruth and some new friends at BD’s Mongolian Grill, I met up with him, Christer Edwards, and Aaron Toponce and we headed to Barley’s for brews with Robyn Bergeron, Jeremy Sands, and a couple other folks. I helped Aaron get some printouts done for the GPG key-signing event at the Drury Inn’s complimentary business center, so he wouldn’t get robbed by the Hyatt’s ludicrous money-grubbers, while Robyn, Clint, John Mark, Zach and I played a game of poker in the lobby. We couldn’t actually finish before people were too tired to continue (but too competitive to throw in the towel). So we called it, and of course Robyn was in the lead, so she gets the pride and kudos this time. Clint and I finally hit lights-out around 2:00am.

Saturday was the full-on conference experience, and talks started with a 9:00am keynote. I attended talks in just about every track, including Klaatu‘s talk on the new Novacut project which was very interesting, a session on building job experience through work in the open source community (complete with testimonials from actual hiring managers), and one on password theory and encrypted file systems.

I also gave my own talk on PyGObject for beginners, which had a very robust and responsive audience. It was great to have so many people interested in a subject I enjoy talking about, and to get such great feedback and questions. Hopefully Ohio Linux Fest will have audio from this talk available in the future, since I understand it was recorded. I was happy with my performance although it was quite a lot of material to fit into a 50 minute period. If you attended and have feedback, feel free to comment here of course. The presentation is licensed CC BY 3.0, and it’s available on my fedorapeople.org space.

After Maddog’s final keynote, I went with a large group of friends (many of the above plus Eric ‘sparks’ Christensen, David Nalley and wife Pam, and several others) to the Spaghetti Warehouse. It was a fair walk from the hotel but it helped us all feel better about a pasta dinner, I think. We came back to the conference after-party but it wasn’t quite our taste, so we went back to Barley’s.

On Sunday, since my plane wasn’t scheduled to depart until almost 7:00pm, I got up in the morning and joined the Docs guys in a meeting room downstairs that was graciously donated by the Ohio Linux Fest organizers. What we did is already being reported and discussed on the Docs mailing list, so I won’t reiterate it all here. I definitely noticed there — and this is indeed not new, but rather a constant challenge — the importance of keeping a group session on track by focusing on specifics.

This is a characteristic of good sessions that I’ve many times seen Greg DeKoenigsberg or Max Spevack manage extremely well, and from which I’ve tried to learn. Sessions tend to produce lots of results by focusing on specifics, such as “We need to fix the following two things about our licensing statements, and here’s why.” It’s a lot harder when the problem you try to solve isn’t well articulated already, such as “We need to make contributors’ lives better.” When one doesn’t focus on those specifics, and driving to action as efficiently as possible, it’s easy for discussions to veer off into many different kinds of weeds, to the extent that you forget what problem you originally were trying to solve.

In any case, the Docs session went fairly well by focusing on specifics, and it was good to see friends from the team that I hadn’t met, or hadn’t seen in a while. Clint gave me, Zach, and Robyn a ride to the airport, where we proceeded to cool our heels for several hours (myself longer than most, I think, since my plane was delayed by local thunderstorms). I arrived home a little before 11:00pm, and basically dumped my suitcase out and went to bed so I could get up at 6:00 the next morning and start my workweek!

All in all Ohio Linux Fest was better for me this year as a speaker than as an attendee. In terms of the value I got from them personally, the quality of talks was not quite as good as what I’ve seen in recent years, but there were a few I definitely enjoyed and learned from. And of course it was fantastic was to see many Fedora contributors there, and collaborate and catch up with colleagues and friends. In closing, the organizers did a tremendous job with conference logistics and they definitely deserve a nice rest after all their efforts. Good work, folks!

Let’s not be too hasty.

In a recent post tech writer Sean Michael Kerner advocated moving the kernel to Github. Here’s why I think the evidence isn’t so clear cut. Note this is my personal opinion, since I’m not a member of the kernel developer community and thus have no real say in the matter.

Kerner writes, for example, “Having Linux on Github also means that Linux benefit[s] from the security, management and infrastructure that Github already has.”

While Github may be a fine service (I don’t use it so I can’t say one way or the other), it’s also a commercial service. Github has no incentive to report security problems, whereas kernel.org is run in a more transparent fashion. Even though the kernel.org administrators were unaware of the attack for some time, once they did discover it, they acted quickly and with full disclosure to the community. That transparency is an important part of the open source process, and it cannot be automatically expected from Github — which makes moving the kernel project there a non-starter for the community as far as I can tell.

That’s completely aside from there being no factual information on which to base any assertion of Github’s level of security. Github may have a fine security record, or perhaps it’s not spotless. Without any transparency in the management of the system there’s no way to tell. One can’t definitively say things would be better there than on kernel.org, so part of the reasoning for a change doesn’t hold water.

He also argues that the interface on Github makes the code easier to browse and work with for normal humans. My question is, how many normal humans really work on the kernel? And maybe another question is, how many normal humans do we want working on the kernel? I’m really happy that the people who work on the kernel are crazy space aliens with ten fingers on each hand and three extra brains where most normal humans have a left lung. Well OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but they do all seem to be somewhat beyond human when it comes to dealing with the minutiae needed to understand, write, and fix kernel code. So again, I don’t see how a move is necessary or helpful.

Regardless, I’m glad people are interested in the security of the kernel. What’s great is that Linus and friends built exceptional security right into git itself. Because every object, every commit, and every step in the history of the repository is represented by a cumulative cryptographic one-way hash, it’s about as easy to insert bad stuff into the kernel as it would be to suck the entire atmosphere of your office building into the next one over with a soda straw.

As long as websites have visibility or high profiles, they’ll be targets for evil system crackers. (By the way, boo hiss to the ones responsible for the evildoing in this case.) Moving from one place to another doesn’t mean cracking attempts would stop. The only thing I can see happening is that the kernel community would have less insight into their security footprint. I believe you need better reasons to move a big FOSS project somewhere other than the place you’ve accumulated thousands of contributors, and I just don’t see those reasons in Kerner’s post.

Disclosure: I’ve met Sean Michael Kerner, have spoken to him on many occasions, and find him to be a good writer and a nice human being. So this post in no way impinges on his professional standing. I sometimes agree with him, but not in the case of this particular article.

Fedora and RHEL network configuration files.

It’s not as well known as it should be, but there’s a great source of documentation for the ifcfg-<interface> files that provide network settings in some configurations. NetworkManager has the ability to interpret these settings as well.

If you look in the online documentation for the initscripts package, you’ll find a file called sysconfig.txt that has a listing of all the parameters in ifcfg files that are parsed by your system’s startup (init) scripts. This can be really helpful when you have to write a network configuration file from scratch, or you want to know what the legal values are for a specific variable. For instance, on my Fedora 15 system, this file is found at: /usr/share/doc/initscripts-9.30/sysconfig.txt

Hopefully this information is helpful to some readers, since it came up today in a conversation with someone at Ohio Linux Fest whom I consider to be highly skilled and educated sysadmin.

Fedora 15 adds ThinkPad x220 touchpad toggle.

I was really happy to see that the latest round of Fedora 15 updates brought something for which I’ve been yearning. On my new ThinkPad x220, the Fn+F8 toggle for turning off the touchpad now works. YAY!

My right palm often hits the touchpad when I’m typing, causing the mouse to jump elsewhere and occasionally change the focus. Now that I can hit a simple keystroke to turn off the touchpad, my life will get that much better. I have a feeling this change came in with the update of libXi, but I’m not sure. So thanks to the developers for bringing this fix to Fedora 15, whether that was Peter Hutterer or someone else.

Cheers!

Ohio Linux Fest 2011.

Just wanted to note that I’m going to Ohio Linux Fest 2011:

For a long time, Ohio Linux Fest has been one of the great community shows in the nation. This year I’m proud to be selected as a speaker, doing a talk on PyGObject for beginners. I’ll also be happily catching up with some friends from Fedora and many other cool communities, and taking in some of the spectacular talks. (For example, I can’t wait to catch Klaatu’s talk on the emerging project Novacut — but how am I going to reconcile that with another good talk at the same time by Mel Chua?)

Notable members of the free software community will be abundant, with lots of ways for you to meet and collaborate with like-minded freedom lovers from all around the region and the country. The registered supporter package for Ohio Linux Fest is extremely cheap, especially considering the days of awesome content you’ll find at the conference. Plus, you get some cool gifts and a swank t-shirt to show that you put your money where your mouth is.

I’m very much looking forward to the show and a great weekend of Linux and free software. See you there!