This. Is. ALPHA!

[This post was supposed to be out yesterday, but somehow I managed to brush my touchpad the wrong way and... well, the dog ate my homework. Or WordPress did. Either way, sorry about the lateness of the hour, and all that. Revised now for more contemporary enjoyment. -- Ed.]

Yes, that 300 joke isn’t getting any funnier. But it’s not getting any older either! Well OK, maybe it is, but remember that “beta” works just as well there, so you may have to endure it one more time, sorry.

Anyway, yesterday our Fedora 11 Alpha release hit the wires, and they are humming hotly even as we speak with flying bits. We’ve provided a brief set of release notes where you can see some of the major changes called out.

I often get questions from people asking, what’s the point of an Alpha anyway? Well, essentially it’s to ensure we can effectively compose a Fedora release that can be installed by most people, and once that’s done, to give our community a chance to test the current state of features from a known starting point. Testing is, in fact, our focus once an Alpha release of Fedora is out the door, and every bug you file can make a big difference in the quality of the final Fedora release.

Typically people will install Fedora 11 Alpha on a test machine, and then update to the latest Rawhide packages. You see, Rawhide, our development branch of Fedora, keeps moving after we’ve started working on an Alpha release, so some bugs might be fixed with that update. On the other hand, you might also see totally new ones. It’s very early in the development cycle, so don’t expect a Fedora 11 Alpha system to necessarily be ready for your daily non-testing use (although I do know people who essentially run on the development branch almost all the time, and my hat’s off to them).

The point is, once you have your system running, we’d love to receive bug reports from you. That helps us eradicate problems early and provide a better release by the time the Beta, Preview, and final emerge.

Interestingly, there were hardware-specific bugs in previous releases reported by numerous people that could have easilly been found, had someone taken time to test an Alpha installation or boot on their hardware. So by testing, you really can be a big help to the overall Fedora community! You can often file bug reports straight from the installer, for instance, if your network hardware is supported. You can also use our helpful wiki page to learn how to file a bug. By the way, if you find a problem on that page, you can use its discussion page to tell us what needs improvement.

Basically, it’s a great time to try out the beginnings of Fedora 11 with our Alpha release, and let us know how you fare. And when you do, you’re part of the enormous (and still growing) Fedora community.

Classrooms ’round the world.

Fedora has been running IRC classes for some time in the #fedora-classroom channel on IRC Freenode. Classes are scheduled for this weekend, and they’re at a convenient time for people in the APAC (Asia/Pacific) region to hold informative sessions with Fedora contributors.

The classroom “days” for both Saturday and Sunday run from about 0400-0900 UTC, which for example in Beijing is 12:00noon to 5:00pm, and for Brisbane is 2:00pm to 7:00pm. That leaves plenty of time for other weekend activities. I’d like to encourage you to look at the Classroom page on the wiki and sign up to teach a topic near and dear to your heart.

The topics can be as simple or specific as you like. Want to teach people how to use PackageKit or yum to update their systems or find software? How about showing people ways to keep their life organized using free software tools found in Fedora? Or demonstrating how easy it is to translate software?

All these topics make it easier for people to use Fedora, and then hopefully get involved in the Project. When people learn new skills or accumulate knowledge, they feel more confident. It makes them better and more informed advocates for free software, and more self-assured in promoting it to the people in whose lives it can make such a big difference. In short, you can use the classroom as a way to contribute, and that in turn makes it possible for others to do the same.

The classroom does travel around the timezones from month to month, and I also see that in March it will be running from about 1800-2300 UTC, or at a good time for much of the USA and even Europe (depending on your personal schedule). I’m going to sign up for a class in March right now, as a matter of fact.

Also remember that the logs for classrooms are posted, so the audience you reach by teaching there isn’t limited to just the people that show up at that time. Other people regularly look at the logs later and can learn from the sessions after the fact. So you can keep spreading knowledge essentially for free (in the beer/resources sense) after you’ve finished and left the keyboard!

Wherever we are in the world, we have the opportunity to spread Fedora knowledge through the Fedora Classroom in the next month or so — let’s each grab it!

FUDCon survey available.

Yes, it’s a little late because of some fumbling in the wake of a great event, but we have a survey available for the FUDCon that happened in Boston from January 9-11.

In the case of this survey, there are a number of important data points we’re capturing, such as the timing and organization of events. For instance, which days are most effective for scheduling the BarCamp versus the hackfests? How do people prefer our technical talk day to be organized? There was some informal feedback that some attendees wanted more formal talks, but also other feedback indicated that other attendees liked the volume and breadth of topics offered by the BarCamp style. Capturing people’s feedback more formally gives us a more complete view of what community members prefer.

In the future, I’d like to see post-activity (or even during-activity) surveys becoming a regular part of every Fedora event. I’d expect that for each survey we’d be capturing some identical information that was more demographic in nature, and some custom, specifc data relevant to future events as seen from that vantage point in time. We did a survey back in January 2008 after FUDCon in Raleigh, NC, for example, that helped us tune this FUDCon a bit, although we still see room for improvement — and the answers to this survey will help us plan those improvements.

To become a regular part of our activities, though, I’d also like to see these surveys done using a free application. Preferably we’d have them available through some sort of Fedora-owned web property as you’d expect. I haven’t looked into this much yet, but I’m interested in whether the content management system into which the Docs Project is doing research could serve this need. Certainly this is a fairly common type of application for a CMS, and I think everyone would prefer that we be doing this work with a free application that shows off FOSS virtues. It also frees us from having to depend on an internal Red Hat resource, and puts the capability in the community’s hands where it belongs.

I’ve asked the Community Architecture team to consider using these surveys to improve our event offerings in the future. My hope is that they can simply become one of the items on the checklist of things to do when setting up an event, and that there will be raw material available on which anyone can build an appropriate survey for their event.

So if you attended FUDCon in Boston last month, or even if you didn’t but want your input to be counted, please visit the survey and give us your feedback. We’ll report back the results and raw data through a wiki page as always.

Keeping up with exFAT.

It’s good to see that the kernel developers as always are seeing that we get the latest file system support. The exFAT format is apparently something that Microsoft is pushing for large removable media. Of course Linux will be there to provide compatibility for those of us who prefer freedom. Thanks for your attentiveness, kernel genii.

Support like this was crucial in my last job, where we used Linux to perform all sorts of analyses on computer storage media. It was impossible to use Microsoft operating systems for this work because there were far too many undocumented hooks running behind the scenes that could affect the process. Hopefully we’ll see this support coming to a kernel near you shortly.