FAB reprint.I was asked to reprint here on my blog a posting I made to FAB last week regarding the status of the target audience discussions and their place in the wider scope of improving the Fedora distribution. The Fedora Board’s discussions about target audience are meant not as an end but a means to an end. By setting down in black and white some of the answers to questions frequently asked by contributors, we can begin to share an understanding about where we are going in the future, and how we need to adapt the processes by which we make the Fedora distribution to reach those goals. I’ve seen this process cast as “figuring out what we’re doing” or “what we are” but those characterizations are somewhat missing the mark. The real question is “Where do we want to be in the future?” and “How can we get there?” The Board’s mission is to lead in those areas and contribute to the Fedora Project and distribution being the best they can be. Read the rest of this entry » |
Washing the car, no. 38.I had a couple items of particular note for those interested in Fedora 12 features. And be aware, you can already try these out in Fedora 12 Beta, available for download now. First, we have SystemTap 1.0 available, which has a variety of cool enhancements, including better C++ support, Eclipse integration, and expanded documentation to help developers put it to work right away making your code better. You can check out this article on Red Hat’s press blog and the in-depth feature profile on the Fedora wiki. The wiki page also features a podcast in which I interviewed Will Cohen, a SystemTap contributor and performance tools engineer at Red Hat. (We’re working on putting these interview podcasts into a feed as part of our upcoming Fedora Insight content system, and helping you find them everywhere you want to listen.) Second, there’s an interesting article at Phoronix concerning the updated experimental drivers for ATI Radeon cards now in Fedora 12 Beta. I’m running this experimental support on my new workstation, which has a R770-based ATI Radeon HD 4850, and it allows me to use compiz and the gnome-shell preview. The performance is not yet as good in some 3D games as the proprietary drivers, but it’s quite satisfying for general desktop usage. The big benefits are that more work is being done on this free software driver constantly by the maintainers, without the freezes and other negative side effects of a closed driver. I’m very pleased that Fedora is able to contribute to this effort through our stance on freedom. While we try not to get in the way of users making their own personal choices in software, we are also working hard at making proprietary bits more unnecessary. With every new release of Fedora, you can see the advances that are gained through those efforts. Of course, we still need help from the community at large. Not every card is fully supported yet, so if you are having a problem please file a bug. (You might also want to consult the common F12 bugs wiki page, on which we’ve been actively listing the issues we know about.) The drivers are constantly being improved, which is one of the things I really appreciate about the open source development process — rapid progress and results, out in the open where they can be seen and experienced. And having a quick Fedora release cycle means twice a year you can see the forward momentum in a distribution anyone can download and use. With this release, the Nvidia card in my laptop and the brand-new ATI card in my desktop both offer full kernel mode setting. Without any proprietary support I can suspend/resume and hibernate/thaw my laptop. I can experience the full pleasure of compiz and even try the early testing preview of gnome-shell, all on completely free software. I want to thank all the upstream contributors to the free desktop who have made this possible — you guys rule! |
FAD Fedora Talk 2009, Day 2.Today started with a bang — or maybe it didn’t. I don’t know, because for the first time in something like two years I managed to oversleep, missing my alarm clock by over an hour. That meant rushing around like crazy to get Ian up — actually Eleya did this, bless her heart — and get myself ready too. I ended up about a half hour late to pick up the folks for the FAD, although I did manage to SMS everyone to make sure that first, they knew I was on my way ASAP, and second, they let the folks on IRC know since I couldn’t get in front of a keyboard while making up any time. Fortunately, everything worked out OK — we were at BusinessPlayce by 9:30am, and since we had been able to leave some of our equipment there overnight, thanks to the awesome Paul Delagrange, we were able to spring right into action. Jeff Ollie and Jared Smith immediately got to work on the Asterisk streaming and recording bits, Ian was back at work on his web front end, Jon Stanley was cobbling away on the various problems we’d found in our troubleshooting docs, and John Poelstra and I started working on updating all the use cases linked from our game plan. By lunch we were well on our way to having on demand recording and streaming starting and stopping, along with reminders being issued in the call and to each new caller coming to the conference. This latter part is obviously useful since by law callers need to be aware that they’re being recorded not only at the beginning of a call, but also if they join partway through. Jared Smith also has customized Fedora Talk so that one can call an extension from a registered client to record a personalized name for one’s extension. We did encounter some bugs in the latest Asterisk, but thanks to the fact that Jared runs with their developer crowd, we already have bugs filed and hope to receive fixes in the next update that will take care of some of those issues. I worked quite a bit on trying to put together a more logical workflow for the Fedora Talk web site, and I’ve put a copy of that work — a little further along than the one Jon Stanley kindly posted earlier — at my fedorapeople.org space. (It’s also in the fad-ftalk branch of the fedora-web git repo if you’re interested in helping.) Today we started with one-hour blocks but again our hard time limits didn’t work as well in the afternoon as we cross-collaborated some. I think the blocks of time might be more effective in an environment where the various teams working on sprints at a FAD are separated from each other. That unfortunately lowers the ability to get ad-hoc questions answered quickly, but I suspect it would also allow people to be less distracted by different conversations. Personally, I like both ways of working and don’t think our output suffered badly, although I’d eagerly try a more rigorous approach just to compare and contrast them more easily as an experience. We have a large output of work to point to in the way of tickets opened, tickets closed, work done, and notes taken on our wiki. I think we probably went from a state of about 20% done on this whole system to something like 80%. One of the big pieces still left is to make sure everything on the asterisk2 server gets correctly “puppetized” so that it can be recreated from bare metal if required. Our Infrastructure team makes very extensive use of Puppet for just this reason. I found that hacking on the web site was quite enjoyable and I am feeling a little more familiar with git overall since I’m starting to use it more regularly. It’s nice to take some time to work on purely enjoyable technical work, but also to do it in a situation where people are collaborating and enjoying each other’s company too After the FAD ended at 6:00pm or so, we packed up quickly and headed to my house, where Eleya had prepared an unusually hearty meal for everyone — a big roast beef dinner in the best style of “low country” cuisine. She called it a warmup for Thanksgiving, I called it delicious! Then we took a semi-break from keyboards and LCD screens to play some Rock Band in the basement on the home theater, complete with a lot of smiles and laughs. I got everyone back to the hotel by 11:00 and then headed home to do a bit more web cleanup and write this blog. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be waking — on time! — to take Jon to the train station in Fredericksburg, Ian and Jeff to the airport in Richmond, and then John Poelstra to the Richmond train station since he’s heading to RDU for a few days before he heads home to the other coast. Hopefully I should be home by around 3:00, at which point I suppose I’ll stiffen my upper lip and plunge back into my inbox, which I’m pretty sure is overflowing by this point. It was another in a line of great Fedora Activity Days, and I want to thank Max Spevack of Red Hat’s Community Architecture team for giving us the funding to make it happen; John, Ian, Jeff, and Jon for traveling to Virginia to put in hard work on a precious weekend; Jared Smith for providing a ton of equipment, expertise, patience, and just plain good humor and good nature; Digium for their support in goodies and hardware; and Paul Delagrange of BusinessPlayce for hosting our hackathon. |
FAD Fedora Talk 2009, Day 1.After a very late night return from picking everyone up at Richmond and a hotel dropoff, I returned home (Ian Weller in tow) and crashed. Five hours later it was time to hit the bricks! My dog and I woke Ian, who, in the fine tradition of high schoolers everywhere, was difficult to wake but once having done so, immediately sprang into action. We picked up the other folks, including Jon Stanley, John Poelstra, and Jeff Ollie for a fine Southern breakfast, where we joined up with Asterisk guru Jared Smith (to fight crime!) and then headed off to BusinessPlayce to get started. We met the owner Paul Delagrange, who saw our haul of equipment and immediately upgraded us to their larger conference room which happened to be empty. Thanks for your kindness, Paul. I also have to thank SupaWife (Eleya) for making us freshly-baked, homemade goodies — a bag of amazing chocolate chip cookies and another bag of biscotti. Hopefully the BusinessPlayce folks were munching off them too, since we put them in the communal food area for people to take.Yum! (Or rather, yum install cookie.) The BusinessPlayce office is clean, well kept, well stocked, and easy to get comfortable in. In no time, we had a bunch of different phones and network equipment set up, and got to work. John Poelstra, Jon Stanley and I worked on the user enablement tasks, including the talk.fedoraproject.org website and the materials we have for leading users through the steps of connecting to the system. Meanwhile, Jared Smith, Jeff Ollie, and Ian Weller worked on both the guts of our Asterisk server, to get it ready for stream recording, streaming, and publishing; and an application that will be used to expose more functionality to logged in users via a web interface. I had a short rocky stretch at the beginning of the day where I tried to get some easy documentation of Empathy’s sofiasip-based client underway, but was stymied by what seems like a buggy implementation. Jared Smith confirmed that the telepathy-sofiasip code doesn’t appear to be responding properly to responses from the Asterisk server. Bug filing on the way. Following that, though, I had a much more productive day working on the web pages, getting back into the groove of Git, the world’s greatest source code management system, and putting together a better page flow in a fad-ftalk experimental branch. It was a highly collaborative day as our user-page group tested each other’s pages, rewrote wording, helped each other understand genshi templates, using git to work more productively, and even debugging some strange HTML problems at one point. In all honesty the work that Jared, Jeff, and Ian were doing was mostly beyond me, but we did spend some time whiteboarding a design for a simple conference room booking app which Ian then mocked up in HTML and is now working on coding in Moksha so it can become part of the Fedora Community portal. The initial release will be using dummy data but once it has proper connectors in place it will be able to show information about running conferences, start and stop recording, and so forth. Tomorrow we’re going to dive into the GStreamer and icecast pieces, and hopefully make real headway on the streaming and publishing pieces of the puzzle. We’re hanging out in IRC Freenode #fedora-fad, and also have a conference line open on the Fedora Talk system itself. We may switch conference rooms tomorrow so that we’re using the “official” FAD room, which all of us forgot was there. Maybe we’re all just dunderheads, or maybe we can make that information more visible or obvious. Day 1 has been pretty productive and I think tomorrow, with preliminaries out of the way, our 9:00 a.m. start time will be followed by a much faster acceleration! Everyone is working hard at the FAD and I’m really proud to be surrounded by such brilliant people. It’s one of the perks of being part of the Fedora community that I try never to take for granted. Great work today, folks! |
FAD Fedora Talk 2009 Day 0.This afternoon, I’m picking up the first of several attendees of the Fedora Activity Day for Fedora Talk, where we’ll spend the following two days hacking on the Fedora Project’s VoIP systems in pursuit of a more featureful way for community members to communicate with each other. Fedora Talk is based on Asterisk, the open source PBX, and we’ve been using it successfully for well over a year to facilitate high-bandwidth conversations between community members while maintaining transparency. The features we’re hoping to provide are laid out in our game plan, as are use cases that we’re hoping to completely tackle, and document on the website for easier use by our community members. Ace organizer John Poelstra wrote about our planning efforts earlier, which have themselves been a very worthwhile enterprise. You’ll find us in IRC on #fedora-fad throughout the event, and we’ll be providing status reports as we go in the hopes of inspiring other future FAD organizers! I’m looking forward to the opportunity to bring together some talented people face to face for this sprint. My hearty thanks to each person involved for the willingness to give your time to participate, including our remote attendees and Fedora Infrastructure sponsors for their invaluable assistance. More news coming soon… |
Fedora 12 Beta released!The Beta release of Fedora 12 “Constantine” is out today! To get the latest bits, start by visiting our prerelease site and choose your architecture and download method. Remember that we have BitTorrent available, and we encourage everyone to give back a little to the community by seeding whenever possible. But wait! There’s more! Yup, we have documentation:
We have about four weeks at last count to the final release of Fedora 12, and this is a great time to download, install, and try out the Beta! I’m installing it right now to an Asus EeePC 701SD that I just bought from a buddy, as a matter of fact. It’s also running on my Dell XPS M1330 laptop, and my Dell XPS 730x workstation, and humming right along on all of them. I love this time in the development cycle because just like anyone else, I can run the latest release before it’s out. I can find all the improvements and little things that make daily work and life easier, and show them off to friends and colleagues. And of course, like other community members, I can beat the bushes to identify lingering problems here and there where I see them, and file them as bugs. And since I know that Fedora has a strong relationship with upstream communities, when we find fixes, we can work with those communities to ensure that the solutions are made available to everyone. That’s how free software’s supposed to work, right? Anti-hoarding, and pro-helping. The whole Fedora community has really been knocking themselves out getting all sorts of fixes done and worked through the upstream. I’m really proud of how you guys uphold the principles of collaborating with the communities that make our distribution — heck, any distribution — possible. And I want to give a hearty pat on the back in particular to the Fedora QA team, for a sustained, exceptional effort on making this release as good as humanly possible. The whole Fedora community owes you guys a $BEVERAGE, which means FUDPub may take you a while to get through. So grab a bitstream of Fedora 12 Beta, burn it to disc or USB, pop it in a spare machine (or virtual guest), and let the magic begin! The countdown to the final release of Fedora 12 starts now…. |
EeePC 701SD and Fedora 12 Beta.Just got a ASUS EeePC 701SD which I picked up from Mark Clanton, after he told me at UTOSC 2009 that he was selling it. Sure, it’s not the newest, latest, greatest netbook out there, but it was a plum price and I don’t have any sort of netbook currently. Tonight I installed Rawhide onto it and everything seemed to work well, except the wireless, which is a RTL8187SE based card. Here’s how I went about enabling it.
I think there may be some work yet to do in the RTL8187SE driver and that’s why it’s not part of the stock kernel yet. My hope is that it will be enabled in a later build so that RTL8187SE-based EeePC wireless will just work out of the box on Fedora. In the meantime, I’m committing this helpful cookbook doc to the googlemind. |
FUDBus update.Update on the bus to FUDCon Toronto 2009:
We currently have 26 people signed up for the 36-seat bus, meaning that we’ll be closing the bus sign-up shortly! If you intend to go to FUDCon on the FUDBus and haven’t done so already, please visit the (FUD)wiki and do the (FUD)following: And while you’re at it why not put a technical session on the list? Or a hackfest? Remember that people outside the Fedora community will be reading these lists and using them to decide whether to come to FUDCon. The more we can show in advance what a worthwhile and valuable event this is, the more people will take advantage of the opportunity to learn about Fedora and free software. |
Broadcom brightening.I saw something interesting in my email today — apparently Rawhide (which is rolling toward next week’s Beta release of Fedora 12 even as we speak) and Fedora 11 have received the b43-openfwwf package, which supports a bunch of Broadcom wireless models. You can find out more information about b43-openfwwf at the OpenFWWF website, including a list of models supported and expected results. What this means is that if you’re one of the folks who either (1) doesn’t have a choice of a more free software-friendly wireless in your computer, or (2) didn’t make the sustainable choice of a free software-friendly wireless, you’re no longer stuck with having to drag out fwcutter to slice firmware out of another driver. Although there might be some limitations in the modes that b43-openfwwf supports, your out of the box experience in Fedora 12 — and in Fedora 11 if you install directly with updates — will be quite improved! Thank you to Peter Lemenkov for getting this package into Fedora! |
