Chi love.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be heading down to the Richmond airport to head out for the world-renowned, forward-looking, future-proofing, often imitated, never equaled Red Hat Summit in Chicago.  I’m giving a talk on Wednesday afternoon on how Fedora fits into the overall Linux development strategy at Red Hat.

But I’ll also be spending a lot of time playing booth boy, and, as is often the case at events where there’s press around, running my big fat mouth. Thankfully there will be plenty of Fedora people there to share the love, like Fedora Ambassadors John Rose and Sandro Mathys, the fab-o “Mizmo” from Fedora Design, and the one and only Francesco Crippa!

(Shill moment, stand back.) The Red Hat Summit is consistently one of the most invigorating, informational, entertaining, and value-packed events I’ve been to. Before I was a Red Hat employee, I would attend these conferences to learn about desktop developments, system administration technologies, and how open source was making waves in the world of commerce. And sure, I’m not going to lie, the evening shindigs are always fantastic. But the key to the Summit is the ability to talk one-on-one with other open source strategists, developers, and technicians, and share stories.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to the event. But I might be harder to reach than usual because the Summit is literally packed with people who want to know more about Fedora! So if it takes me a little longer to get back to you on something this week, forgive me and I’ll make it up to you. See you in Chi-town, baby!

(By the way, don’t forget if you’re there to use the #rhsummit and #jbossworld hashtags in your various microblogs.)

The sweet sound of superfluous gigahertz.

Yesterday I received one of these. Fedora 11 installed beautifully on it, without a hiccup — I used the process I outlined in my last post, in fact.  The results speak for themselves:

I may be a bit gushing about it, but it’s the first truly performance-oriented, new computer I’ve had in a long time, after many years of hand-me-downs and Frankenboxes assembled from spare pieces. The first computer I ever bought for myself, as opposed to gifts, or things I used at the office, was a Dell. Nowadays my main laptop is a Dell XPS M1330, which is no slouch but definitely has to make a few compromises for size. So I’m happy to keep up the tradition with this (admittedly gargantuan) box.

The inside layout is incredibly clean and neat, and well-lit too, with a built-in LED lamp so you can see what you’re doing. For extra scratch, you get the case with the clear inserts so you can see the innards of the behemoth, which I didn’t particularly need. When you first turn it on it’s like an SR-71 warming up, but it quickly becomes surprisingly quiet for such a powerhouse. It is incredibly large though, so big that I can’t actually fit it on the raised platform under my desk. It’s now living to the side, and my mixer had to scootch back into the corner a bit to make room.

Nice extras: Came with a standard PCI 33MHz slot that accommodated my Echo Audio Layla24 PCI card quite handily. Also, as my wife noted, “the darn thing’s got wings” — extra supports that fold out at the rear to keep the box well balanced. And a umpteen-way media reader that reads, well, everything from SmartMedia to MemoryStick Duo Pro. Scary extra: Emits an unearthly glow from a set of front-mounted headlights when turned on, useful for distracting enemy ninjas but otherwise puzzling. I guess it’s designed to be a gamer’s system after all, but still.

It may dwarf every other box I own, but it’s a lot of fun to use, and of course Fedora is an incredible joy to use on such a performance monster. Time to go put it to good use!

Sneaky Pete, no. 71.

A few months ago I discovered a neat trick you can play in Anaconda, the Fedora installer, and thought I would spend time writing it up and passing it on. Imagine you have a USB hard disk with the release tree available. It doesn’t matter what release, but let’s assume it’s something new like Fedora 11 or Rawhide. You don’t have a DVD or CD images available, but you want to run an installation from the USB hard disk.

1. In the release tree you still have a boot.iso file, which is basically the same as the netinst disk that lets you use alternate installation methods. Write this to a CD, or use the livecd-iso-to-disk utility in the livecd-tools package to write it to a USB stick. (You knew that you could do that, right?)
2. Boot from the CD or USB stick, and choose the Hard Disk installation method. Go through all the normal Anaconda steps, until you reach the repository configuration screen.
3. Hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 to switch to the virtual terminal with a command shell. At this point, your hard disk is mounted at /mnt/source.
4. Make note of where your install tree is. Let’s say that the os/ directory where you’d normally find the whole release tree for the specific release and architecture is under the f11 directory. In other words, if you cd /mnt/source/f11, and then run ls, you should see the files for the GPL, the release notes and readme files, the Packages directory, and so forth. Most importantly, you should see the repodata directory here. In other words, it should look something like this.
5. Change directory to that directory described above, and run httpd. Yes, there’s a minimal web server available through the boot environment.
6. Now you can disable any existing repositories, and make a new repository describing the USB hard disk folder. Define it as HTTP with the address http://127.0.0.1/ and uncheck the Mirror list option if needed. Remember, since the web server is running directly in the /mnt/source/f11 folder, the webserver’s root is the same as the release tree directory and the repository metadata will load when you enable this repository.
7. Continue the installation as needed. If you have several repositories, like the original release tree and the updates, you can enable both of them and install with updates.

I’ve done this numerous times, because I have a useful little 80 GB USB hard disk that I don’t want to fill up with extra CD and DVD images, when I can just use the existing “Everything” repo and the updates for that release instead. Have fun!

Moblin in Fedora 12 pre-releases.

Yes, you heard it right — among the other cool features in F12 Alpha, you can now take a look at Moblin directly in Fedora proper, regardless of your hardware platform.

To check it out, refer to this posting from Peter Robinson, ace maintainer from the Fedora Mini SIG (special interest group). If you’re running Fedora 12 Alpha or you’ve been keeping up with Rawhide, our bleeding-edge development branch, you’re in prime position to check it out.

As you’ll hear from quite a number of Fedora users (not to mention this guy) we have fairly good coverage of mini systems and netbooks in Fedora, but we’re always looking to improve. With Moblin software in Fedora proper, we have the chance to offer a very interesting derivative to people on sub-laptop equipment, and show the flexibility and functionality of free software. In the future it should be pretty easy to extend those offerings through a custom spin or other provision.

Nice work by Peter and the Mini SIG here. I’m off to try this out on a virtual machine right now, courtesy of our excellent virtualization support through KVM.

Fedora 12 Alpha!

Today marks the Fedora 12 Alpha release, hot off the presses! You can pick up a copy to try all the latest technologies here:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

I’ve been running the Alpha version for about a week or so on one of my home machines. While there are some minor foibles here and there, most of it seems to be working like gangbusters — and better than ever. The PackageKit “command-not-found” plugin is pretty cool, and I’m also enjoying some of the other sweet new features like the new Virtualization Manager upgrades.

Not everything is guaranteed to work perfectly, because there are some pretty new bits in there. But we do encourage people to at least grab a Live ISO image and run it from a CD or USB stick. And of course, it’s very important that you FILE A BUG if you find something that’s wrong! Remember kids, Twitter and Identi.ca are not substitutes for good open source practices — they’re a good way to encourage people to check your work, though, if you’re looking for a second opinion. I hope everyone trying F12 Alpha will blog a little bit about the bits they find that they like — and if you don’t like something, tell us about that too, and let us know how it can be made better. Then file a bug about it!

You can tell I’m big on the bug filing today. That’s because we seriously want your help in testing the release. Yours, and everyone you know! The more problems we can find and knock out before the Beta, the better Fedora 12 “Constantine” will shine in November! I, for one, started using the command-line bugzilla client for doing this quite often, and it’s very convenient when I’m in a terminal or otherwise not using a Web browser. You just run bugzilla login and bugzilla new — the latter with a bunch of required options — and you’ll get a reply with your bug number assigned.

I hope you enjoy this very early sneak preview of what’s coming Fedora 12! And thanks as always to our awesome Release Engineering and Infrastructure teams for their usual fantastic job at getting Fedora out the door into the hands of our millions of users.

Speaking of which: Only 10 weeks into our release, our latest stable offering, Fedora 11 “Leonidas,” has surpassed one million registered updating IP addresses, as noted on our statistics page. That’s almost 40% higher than our uptake from the previous and very well-regarded Fedora 10 release. I also see that our number of completely unique IP addresses registered for updatesm from Fedora 7 through Rawhide is now at slightly over 15 million for the first time. There’s some helpful information floating around about how that might translate to user numbers, but for my part, I just love being able to just look up these numbers in our completely open and transparent infrastructure — another reason to enjoy being part of a project dedicated to building 100% free software for you and yours.

Sad daily confessional: I meant to have this out in the morning but the upcoming Red Hat Summit has me hopping more than usual. Sorry about the delay and hope to see you in Chicago next week!

Update: Fixed the “sweet new features” link above, thanks Rahul!

Credit where it’s due, No. 23.

There’s a very nice story in the News & Observer about John McLean, the recipient of this year’s Fedora Scholarship. This award, we hope, will allow John not only to advance his studies — computer science and religion at Duke University starting this fall — but also to maintain a presence in the free and open source software community.

It’s our feeling in Fedora that focusing on growing a community of contributors creates the highest amount of influence on future audience for free software. Basically, by nurturing the people who will be movers, shakers, and taste-makers in their peer groups, we can help generate fertile ground for FOSS. One of the ways we do that is by encouraging young people who have shown an interest and an aptitude for open source development practices, through the Scholarship program. John’s a worthy recipient and I wanted to take the opportunity once again to commend him and recognize his efforts and exceptional attitude of teamwork, learning through doing, and giving back to the community around him.

Firmware goodness.

Richard,

Yes indeed — I installed a fresh system with Fedora 11 just a month or two ago, and was totally surprised when PackageKit offered to go get firmware for my EchoAudio Layla24 PCI card. A couple clicks and a reboot later (so the kernel could load the appropriate stuff without my having to intervene), it was humming right along. I admit I’m something of a PackageKit groupie, but hey, it’s pretty awesome.

FUDCon Toronto 2009.

Today we announced FUDCon Toronto 2009, our North American event for this year. FUDCon, as always, is free and open for everyone to attend. This year some excellent contributors in Toronto stepped up to deliver a great location and some logistical support that will help us put on an awesome event.

We’re going to try something new at this event, by adding a track or two of technical sessions on Saturday aimed squarely at end users. We’re also working on some ideas to offer even more improved content for developers and other contributors, and as we work those out, we’ll be delivering additional news through the announcement list and the FUDCon wiki page. Registration and other logistics information will be forthcoming, stay tuned!

Notable notables.

Fedora’s very own John Rose is among the winners of the 2009 RHCE of the Year award bestowed by Red Hat. I wanted to extend a very hearty congratulations to John and the rest of the winners, and thank him for all the fine work he does in the Fedora Project.

Is it too early in the morning to raise a toast? Well, let’s stick with coffee or tea for now, Monday’s just begun!

Cosmetic surgery you can be proud of.

I had a great time on Friday collaborating with Máirín Duffy on a new look for fedoraproject.org. This is somewhat related to the changes we’re making to the get.fedoraproject.org (also called “get-fedora”) and spins.fedoraproject.org sites. For those of us who are involved in Fedora all the time, it’s easy to take for granted how easy and fun Fedora can be to use and get involved in. Our page should capture the spirit I see every day in our diverse and talented community, and make it easy for people to get started.

Although my Westford visit was overall quite enjoyable, this was by far the highlight of my visit. I love getting involved in design, as long as there are other people around to bounce ideas around with me (and occasionally wave me off from silly ones). Máirín is really great at this work, not only because she’s about ten times faster at Inkscape than anyone I’ve seen, but also because she’s great at listening for subtext. I sometimes use lots of adjectives to describe an experience, or I’ll go off on a tangent about emotions we want the viewer to have. She was able to pick up on that context really quickly, understand the concepts behind the emotions, and refine it into something concrete. Not only that, but she came up with the rockin’ panda.

You can look at the mockups for the full story. Some of the ideas we tried to capture in the design (don’t shoot me if this gets too gooey):

• The emotional lift of freedom, starting with the top banner. Lots of happy, smiling people enjoying free software and feeling good about their choice.
• The one huge download button that yells, “Click me, I’m awesome!”
• A simpler way of telling people what they’re getting, without getting in their way.
• A showcase for simple, fun things that anyone can do with Fedora, and a link to how to do them. (“Anyone can do it.”) The Hulk thing was Mo’s idea, I swear!
• A way to showcase different people in the Fedora community and how they got started. (“You can too.”)
• Reducing the “link farm” feel by demoting the less important stuff to the bottom of the page, while making it more neatly organized.

As someone commented on the FAB mailing list, our pages should feel like invitations to become part of our community. There’s no better way to do that than by showing how fun and exciting Fedora can be, and by making it as easy as possible for people to get it. Something not shown on Mo’s blog is what happens after you click the big download button. The afterpage is so much easier to understand than our previous pages, and makes it a snap for people both to get the help they need, and to learn more about our community and how to get involved.

From the comments on Mo’s page, I think a lot of people are as excited about this redesign as we are. Laissez les bon temps rouler!