Crash space needed!OK, Fedora community in and around Boston, MA: We still have a need for some crash space for people who are flying to Boston to take the charter bus to FUDCon. Many of these valiant travelers are traveling on their own dime because FUDCon is just that great. Especially in these tough economic times, it behooves all of us to dig a little deeper and help fellow Fedora contributors out. If you have crash space in your house, apartment, condo, etc. — whether it’s a bed, a sofa, a sleeping bag, spare floor space, or gravity boots (for the odd caped crusader who shows up) — please consider making room for a Fedora buddy or two. It’s also a great chance to get to know a fellow contributor and find new places to collaborate, learn, and share. In most cases, we’re just looking for one or two specific nights — Thursday night, December 3, and/or Tuesday night, December 8. To help out, simply go to the pre-registration list, and find someone who’s looking for space. Then contact that person and offer space. Or if you’re going to FUDCon also, you can put your crash space offer in the “Comments” field of the pre-registration table with your entry. It’s that easy. By the way, if you have the crash space you were looking for, you can remove any “Need crash space” comment from the table. (Similarly for people offering space, who have found Fedorans to take them up on the offer.) |
Constantine unites!The big day is here — Fedora 12 is released, uniting freedom, technology, and community. You can download the all-natural goodness at http://get.fedoraproject.org and read some of the highlights of the release. The official announcement text is here, and on the wiki as well. I’m a big fan of the new Abrt tool which can produce and file detailed information for developers in a Bugzilla bug with just a few clicks, and also the improvements to the SELinux Troubleshooter, which do essentially the same thing. Thanks to Fedora’s strong stance on freedom, this release features some of the best free video drivers yet. On all three of my home machines that use NVidia and ATI cards, kernel mode setting, the enhanced graphical boot display, and on-the-fly display setting work like gangbusters — no more proprietary drivers causing problems we can’t debug or fix. (Thanks Nouveau and Radeon guys.) The latest GNOME and KDE sparkle, Bluetooth tethering and audio are no-brainers, mobile broadband is dead-simple, PulseAudio happily converses and integrates with everything including your PlayStation3 and probably even your kitchen sink, PackageKit can install missing commands at the shell… Oh, and did I mention the virtualization features? It’s sheer heaven for sysadmins and techie types who love to try different distros; just install them in Fedora’s built-in KVM and go to town! And of course there’s plenty for developers, including the latest Eclipse and NetBeans IDEs, and an updated SystemTap that helps trace and locate opportunities to optimize code. And of course you can get compilers and tools galore, and all the frameworks, libraries, and modules you need to build powerful applications in any language you prefer, including cross-compiler support for building Windows executables on Fedora. Fedora 12 also features a nice helping of fit and finish on the Desktop, with fresh theming, easier to navigate panels and menus, tooltips that give you useful information while intelligently staying out of your way, and more useful notifications that are also reduced in frequency to keep the most important information in front of you at all times. In short, it’s our best release ever, and you should download it and give it a try today! |
F12 minus two days.I’m incredibly excited about the upcoming release. I’ve been running the pre-release of Fedora 12 for some time now and it’s really solid on all the hardware I have at home, including a netbook, a couple workstations, and my workhorse laptop. Such a great job by everyone involved, I’m truly impressed. As we near the release, I’ve been thinking about the idea of update discipline. This is just the term I happen to give to the idea of making sure that updates are solid and making life better for all users of Fedora, including our growing contributor base, consistently. One of the things it brought to mind was the way our community self-regulates. The connection I made mentally was that there are undoubtedly packages in the Fedora repository — probably several thousand of them — that are in the proverbial long tail of use. In other words, many packages probably have a limited audience and are fairly unique. These aren’t things like core libraries or even special frameworks, but things like one-off utilities or other “edge” packages. Heck, I probably maintain one or two of those kind myself, partly because they’re low-risk or don’t often change. We’ve got over 15,000 binary packages in Fedora 12, and it’s a vast assortment from the most basic functionality almost every piece of code needs, to highly specialized tools or libraries. We have the ability to self-regulate not only this package set, through continually including new and exciting software, but also the way we approach updates to that software. When edge packages have an upstream change, it’s often minor, or affects very few people. There are lots of perfectly good reasons for those packages to update in a stable release like Fedora 12. (Of course, we want any such changes to avoid any repository breakage, and it’s still important that Fedora provide the automatic tooling necessary to resist any such breakage.) But there are quite a lot of packages that are important across the board. Recognizing this, our release engineering team has been working for some time on the definition and application of critical path. That is, packages so important to Fedora that a special level of care should be taken to ensure they function as well as possible throughout a stable release. Somewhere between this critical path group, and the entire universe of Fedora repository packages, is a line we might be able to use as a community for some self-discipline when it comes to updates. Maybe that line is at or close to the critical path; maybe it’s a little further out toward the edge than that. One way to think of that line is that it separates “stuff that lots of people are likely to use” from “stuff that relatively few people are likely to use.” But wherever we draw that line, as a community, we could find a comfortable spot on one side of which we’d be careful about pushing updates that aren’t fixing specific problems such as bugs or security issues for Fedora 12. In my mind, this could go hand-in-hand with the re-working of Rawhide as a non-installable tree. If Rawhide is simply another repository from which you can update packages, it’s easier to think of it as a place for regular upstream rebases, offered to users who always want the latest and greatest regardless of regressions or changes. Now certainly there are cases where upstreams issue new releases that fix a single, specific bug or security issue. In those cases, releasing the new upstream to a stable Fedora can make perfect sense. But that’s often not the case, so I’m hoping that each of us packagers (including myself, since I maintain a few too) can look carefully at our updates over the next few months, and renew our dedication to quality in the updates we provide. We’re starting with an exceptional release in Fedora 12; let’s see how we can do the best job possible of keeping it delightful for each other, and all our millions of users worldwide. I’m looking forward to working with FESCo and our packagers more over the coming weeks on ways we can enhance Fedora’s stability while still continuing to keep the best of free software in front of our users and contributors. Our community has done a tremendous amount of self-improvement over the years, so I have high expectations for the future, and hope you will too. Two days until Fedora 12! |
Nominations.Worth a separate post — nominations are still open for various spots in the upcoming Fedora elections until the end of the day tomorrow. Officially that’s 2359 UTC on 2009-11-16. I wanted to thank all the folks who have thrown their names into a ring, for being willing to take on a potential leadership role in the Fedora community. To all of you, good luck! |
FUDCon status.OK, this post obviously didn’t make it out of Australia before I did. It was a pretty grueling travel day, with a 13-hour flight from BNE to LAX, followed by Customs (a thankfully brief wait) and then a four-hour layover followed by another five-hour flight back to IAD, then home. It’s been a weekend partly spent in jet lag recovery, and partly in catching up to a few writing jobs I had left over from my week Down Under. One of the things I wanted to mention was our FUDCon status. Here are the high points, bulletized for easy reading:
We continue to have weekly meetings for FUDCon at IRC Freenode, #fudcon-planning, and also use the mailing list for planning discussions. All are welcome! |
Down under, part 1.Spot and I are in Australia all week, and I wanted to give a brief accounting of events thus far. I left home Friday around lunch time, flew from Washington/Dulles to Los Angeles, and arrived there in the evening. The flight was uneventful and on a comfortable Airbus A320. I met up with Spot at the airport; we had dinner together and discussed Fedora stuff, The flight out of LAX was unfortunately a notoriously uncomfortable Boeing 777, made marginally better by the upgrade I bought to an exit row. (For a 14-hour flight, the price was reasonable.) We landed at 6:30am in Brisbane, and made it easily to our hotel, thanks to the tips that Nigel Jones had given us regarding the train and the stops we needed. Thankfully the hotel was perfectly amenable to a very early check-in, so Spot and I could both get cleaned up and changed, and thus feel a bit more human. Since we now had a full Sunday in front of us and jet lag to battle, we decided to spend our day outside in the beautiful weather (~70s F and sunny) as much as possible. (Also, Internet at the hotel was exorbitantly priced so that we’ve had to wait for office hours here to get online.) We ended up at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary where we took full advantage of the chance to see a huge variety of native wildlife including not only koalas but kangaroos, wallabies, crocs, Tasmanian devils, colorful cockatoos, and so on. Because the sanctuary is set up more like a ranch than a zoo, in a lot of cases — remarkably including the ‘roos and wallabies — you could walk right up to the animals and feed and pet them. (Yes, I have pictures, and yes, I will get them posted, although time is short at the moment!) We got back to the hotel near late afternoon, and although Spot fell victim to a short 20-30 minute nap, we mainly soldiered right on through dinner by going out for a walk and getting a great sushi dinner near the Queen St. Mall. Back to the hotel once more, and although I gave out a little later than Spot, we were both comatose by about 8:30pm local time. In the morning it was easy to find the office, only about 2 blocks from our hotel, and a set of meetings began with the groups in Red Hat’s Brisbane office (and from other international locations like Beijing, Tokyo, and Pune) that work on internationalization and localization (i18n and l10n) engineering and processes, and content services like documentation. The meetings have been a great chance for me to meet a number of Red Hat people — many of whom are also Fedora contributors — whose names I can now match to faces, including:
If I forgot a name, I sincerely apologize! There have been so many cool people to meet and talk to here, I can’t keep them all straight — a nice problem to have. On Monday night Spot and I got to hang out with Nigel Jones, and Spot and Nigel swapped some funny stories about being on the front lines of support for Red Hat. The other nights here we’ve spent with the whole crew (or as many of them as could settle on a single cuisine!) at various wonderful restaurants in the area. I’m thinking there’s a couple hours of extra gym time in my future when I return to the US, but it was worth it, especially the Punjabi Palace last night in the West End. I’ve tried while here to keep up with some of the FUDCon matters, and I think we’re in good shape for a great event. I’ll probably blog a status report on that separately, and if I’m lucky I can get that out before the end of the day here (or overnight for you folks in the States). Ta from Australia, mates! |
Every once in a while I’ve been able to be on phone calls with people on this side of the planet, but it’s so much more valuable to be able to meet face to face and eliminate all the delay and barriers that email and phone conference calls can induce. The frequency of meetings has been pretty high, but I’m very pleased about that, because it means that the money spent by Red Hat to get me here was well spent. But as a result, it’s Thursday morning here already and I’m just getting this blog post out!
Upside down.I’m getting on a plane in a few hours that’s going to take me from Washington DC to Los Angeles, and then just a couple hours after landing, another one from LAX to Brisbane in Australia. Thanks to the timezones crossed, plus the international date line, I leave LAX late Friday night, and arrive in Brisbane near dawn on Sunday morning. I’ll be there (along with Spot) until next Friday, when we fly back to the USA. With the timezones the other way around, I think I get back around last Tuesday, meaning plenty of time to work on more Fedora bits before the release! Well, I think that my numbers may be a bit off there, but in any case, I’ll be on Down Under time for the next week or so. I’ll definitely have access to email but obviously it will be a bit harder to catch everyone during the day on IRC. Let’s all be focused on getting out the best Fedora release yet. I want to give my most sincere and awe-struck thanks to everyone in our community who’s contributed to the upcoming Fedora 12. I’m using the pre-release now, and it’s been fantastic! With new virtualization features, desktop polish, and developer goodies, I think many people are going to like what they see. OK, off to check weather in Brisbane, and then pack. |
FUDCon signups.As of this writing, we have 120 people signed up for the FUDCon Toronto 2009 event, and it’s still a month away! I’m so excited to be holding the first North American event outside the USA. I’m also looking forward to seeing many good friends there, such as the illustrious Chris Tyler, who has done so much for this event already to make it a success. We’ll have many new friends joining us as well, and plenty of content that will be of interest to general users, developers, system administrators, and other open source enthusiasts and professionals. (You’ll find all the lowdown on the wiki page, of course.) The weekend of December 5-7 might be cold in Toronto, but there will be lots of energy flowing from ideas, collaboration, and fun. Now, as part of each FUDCon we have a pre-registration process, which is where I got the number 120 above. We never require anyone to pre-register — you can simply show up at a FUDCon and you will be warmly welcomed to attend and participate as much as you like! But pre-registration gives you a little bonus, in return for letting us know you’re coming. Of course you’ll find a name badge (and a smiling registrar) waiting for you, and also a shirt in your size. And you’ll get a paid pass to FUDPub, our social event on Saturday night, which entitles you to free eats and non-alcoholic beverages. Here’s the catch: there’s a pre-registration cap, so that we know we’ll have enough of everything to go around. The cap is 130, which means we’re getting pretty close at this point! Now, don’t get too worried — if you don’t decide to come until later (even the day of the event!), you are still welcome at FUDCon. You’ll be able to participate in the technical sessions, the hackfests, the roundtables, and so forth. We just won’t be able to guarantee that there will be free goodies left at that point. (Pssst — at past FUDCons, though, people often show up on the last day and score goodies that are left over!) Something tells me that there will be plenty of free Fedora 12 media to be had, though. After we pass the magic number, we’ll still feature a signup at the pre-registration area, and that way we’ll still know which rooms we need for the beginning and ending sessions on Saturday, where everyone gathers together. We have what we think will work at this point, a 160-seat auditorium, but it’s always good to be prepared. So if you’re on the fence, let me remind you that FUDCon is — as always! — completely and 100% FREE! Just like the wonderful distribution that comes from our fabulous community members, it’s no cost, all freedom. Freedom to look around, freedom to learn, freedom to teach, freedom to get involved, freedom to participate in our community of contribution. Please join us from December 5-7 in Toronto for a wonderful event. We look forward to seeing you there! |
FWN 200.A special thanks and congratulations to the marvelous folks working on the Fedora Weekly News project. They’ve reached another milestone with Issue 200 this week! FWN works in a highly collaborative way, organized into “beats” — much like any real newspaper. Each beat focuses on a specific area or team in the Fedora Project, and has a principal reporter who summarizes the week’s work for that team. The beat writer does a short summary of any major issues that might be of interest to the larger community, and provides links for people who want to dig deeper. There are beats on the list that are open for new editors, or if you’re interested in collaborating with another editor, the list of beats makes it easy to connect with one who’s covering your area of interest. It takes only a little bit of time each week and it’s a gift to the community that helps thousands of people, every single issue. FWN was started some time ago by the illustrious Thomas Chung, and has had many editors in chief over its nearly five years of history. Currently it has two co-editors in chief, the fabulous Pascal Calarco the seemingly omnipresent Adam Williamson, who keep the FWN well-oiled so its numerous contributors can bring the freshest news to readers each week. The FWN is widely read around and outside the Fedora Project, and I want to give a warm, personal thank-you and a hearty congratulations to everyone who works on the FWN team. The work you do makes it much easier for a community member to stay abreast of the latest developments across the Fedora Project, and you and your work are greatly valued and respected. Rock on, FWN, and thanks for 200 great issues — and counting! |
The juice works.During the time before and following Beta release I actually took some of my limited spare time and found and filed some bugs. A couple ended up as duplicates, of course. Any time you have a Linux distribution with millions of users you’re bound to have a few people running into the same problem. Hopefully one of them takes the time to file a bug, knowing that will help developers track down the problem, and make life better for their fellow users. It’s easy to say, “Well, I don’t need to file this, because someone other than me will get around to it.” But of course, if everyone says that, then no one files the bug and nothing gets better. This time around I actually stumbled on some reasonably meaningful bugs. One of them was a problem in the kernel’s tg3 network interface driver. It apparently doesn’t affect too many models because only one other person has commented on the bug. But I still felt pretty good about reporting it, if for no other reason than it already generated a workaround and attention from kernel rocket scientist Chuck Ebbert, and hopefully the upstream Broadcom driver maintainers as well. That means my few minutes of effort will save other people hours of hair-pulling. The point is not that somehow I’m special because of doing this — it’s just the opposite, I’m just like thousands of other Fedora users who can make a difference just by taking a few minutes to file bugs. Can we fix 100% of the bugs 100% of the time in Fedora? Probably not — but in my experience well-reported bugs do get attention and fixes. But how to report a bug well? There’s an answer for that too — we have a bug reporting primer page on the wiki that shows how to make bug reports and feature requests. It outlines the steps to gather good information that will help your bug become actionable so it can be used more effectively to fix issues. Because we follow a policy of staying close to upstream projects, those fixes can benefit everyone — not hoarded just to make Fedora better, but shared with the community at large. That’s the whole idea on which free software is based. Now I’ll be the first to admit that this late in the cycle there are probably not too many new issues that we can tackle before release of Fedora 12, but certainly any bug we can identify is something we can stomp out early. And it won’t be more than a few months before we’re ready to start trumpeting for testing and bug reporting for the next Fedora release. So why not try out the latest Fedora right now? You can download the latest pre-release, Fedora 12 Beta, and then update to the newest packages, but I’m also a fan of just downloading the boot.iso for 32-bit or 64-bit architecture, and then installing straight from Rawhide, which is a big time saver. Since the Rawhide tree, our latest development branch, is getting pretty darn near release candidate state now, it’s a great way to preview the release. I personally keep a separate /home partition so installing a new release is easy. On a personal note, this weekend at the FredLUG meeting we had several people wanting to test the latest Fedora on bare metal, so we had a mini-installfest. By far the most popular new features was the new b43-openfwwf package, which offers open firmware for a bunch of popular Broadcom wireless network cards. Without any of the pesky fwcutter nonsense, people were finding that their wireless “just works” in the Fedora 12 pre-release to a greater extent than ever. The package currently covers Broadcom 4306, 4311-rev01, 4318, and 4320 wireless, so if you’ve one of those, you’re in for a treat! |
