Now with 25% more pontification.

Whoa, looks like opensource.com has posted a Q&A interview with yr. humble narrator. If you've got a few minutes free please check it out — and more importantly, look through the site to find truly and deeply insightful stories about and by other great thought leaders in open source areas. The fact that my woolgathering appears on a site with people like Jim Gilmore, Michael Tiemann, and Jim Whitehurst is a real honor.

Thanks to Jason Hibbets for the fabulous opportunity!

Schedule change.

As seen on the official announcement list, the final release of Fedora 13 will be postponed by a one-week slip. As the announcement notes, the blocker bug list is not empty, which means that according to our F13 final release criteria, we slip the release.

It's always disappointing when we don't hit our original target, but these criteria allow us to focus on objective markers to measure our readiness. It was a pleasure sitting in that readiness meeting tonight with some very smart people, because it was focused on the worthy goal of dispassionately measuring our status based on the ruler we've set for ourselves.

I suspect as we go we'll need to tune release criteria in certain areas where we want more detail. Tonight, for intance, we found there was at least one place where the written criteria could be clearer about their intent. There is a retrospective scheduled for QA after the release of Fedora 13, at which we can note some of the discrepancies and tune as needed.

This iterative approach has worked very well for our release schedule, which I'd really like to see us let stand for a few releases, as we consider other changes. Thanks to all of the people who participate in the process — the teams of people working on QA, Release Engineering, Anaconda, kernel, and countless other packages for our release. The collaboration that's gone on this release has been tremendous, and Fedora 13 is shaping up to be spectacular as a result!

Never a dull moment, no. 98.

So much going on today!

At 10:00 am US Eastern time (1400 UTC), Fedora 13 Beta is released. The Beta is our last milestone before the final release of Fedora 13. We’d like to have as many people test it as possible. It’s available in a “Live ISO” format you can write not only to CD DVD, but also to a USB key, and boot off the USB key. I really prefer the USB key, because you can update the key with fixes as you use it using the “persistence” feature. It also gives you nifty options we created along the way, like an encrypted user data area, very fast booting, and very fast installation to hard disk as well. Who loves ya, baby?

The Beta announcement will show you where to get the pre-release, see a list of known problems, and file any new ones you might encounter. You can find instructions for Live USB creation on our wiki.

Also, today starts our Graphics Test Week, beginning with the Nouveau NVidia driver. Graphics drivers affect almost everyone who uses Linux, so this is a fantastic opportunity for you to help make a difference. We’re having one today for Nouveau, tomorrow for the Radeon ATI card driver, and on Thursday for Intel graphics cards. How do you do it? Very easily, it turns out — you join IRC Freenode at #fedora-test-day to participate. Just about anyone can help, because all the tests are fully documented already. You just follow a simple set of instructions, and if you encounter a problem, the QA crew will help you get a bug filed.

But what if you don’t run Fedora? No problem! There are Live ISO images available for the test day as well, meaning you don’t have to install Fedora to participate. And why would you want to help if, heaven forfend, you don’t use Fedora? Because even if you use another distribution, your time is still worthwhile — because Fedora works hard to send changes upstream to the driver developers, so the entire Linux community benefits. That’s how collaboration and open source work. It’s not about hoarding, it’s about sharing.

Adam Williamson, a Fedora QA contributor and seemingly unstoppable force in community testing and quality, wrote more about the Video Test Week here. (There’s also a Phoronix article here and a LWN article here as well.)

By the way, to see what kind of graphics card you have, you can open up a terminal and type or copy/paste this command:

/sbin/lspci | grep -i vga

And be sure to download and try out the Fedora 13 Beta today. You can find the downloads here, and the announcement here.

UPDATE: The ever-helpful Josh Boyer reminded me that the Fedora 13 Beta, Live Desktop edition, needs a DVD because of size reasons, although this won’t be the case for the final release of Fedora 13. Seriously, use the USB, it’s awesome.

Karma made easy.

Till Maas constructed a truly useful Fedora Easy Karma script in Python. There’s a wiki page about it already, and it’s very easy to use. I just used it to test and give karma to a handful of packages in the pre-release Fedora 13 updates-testing repository in just a few minutes. It’s a great enabler for our community. You do need to have the latest fedora-packager package installed (currently in updates-testing) to use it.

Nice work, Till!

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:

• A draft copy of the Fedora 12 Release Notes
• The release announcement, containing a short summary of important changes
• A listing of known issues in Fedora 12 Beta

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….

Try installing F12 Alpha early.

According to this posting to the fedora-test-list by Liam, there’s going to be some installation testing for the Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha candidate next week, on Wednesday July 29. This is a chance to shake out some of the new features in the Anaconda installation application that have come in over the past couple of months. The more testing we can get on the installer early, the more bulletproof we can make it for our final release by the time code is frozen in the fall.

I find that the easiest way to do installation testing is to maintain a local Rawhide mirror — a copy of the Rawhide repository on a machine on my home network, shared out via the Web. But there are complete instructions on the wiki for the many ways you can test Rawhide, specifically a section on doing a direct daily installation. You don’t even have to have a local mirror. You can download a small-ish boot.iso image for either 32-bit or 64-bit architecture, and install directly from the Internet if you have a broadband connection.

It’s easy to get involved in testing, and there’s even a matrix of results that we’ll be filling out on July 29 to see what works, and what needs work. This is a great opportunity for anyone to become a contributor to Fedora by helping with Anaconda, which is used not just in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but also in CentOS, Scientific Linux, and many other derived distributions. See you on the 29th for an awesome installer validation day!

New tricks for the old dog, No. 439.

I participated in yesterday’s building of unit tests for pykickstart, and it was a great learning experience. Like many contributors, I’m not a coder. But I have done very simple scripts in Python and it turned out I didn’t need much more, other than a helping hand from James Laska, camaraderie from Adam Williamson, and polishing by Chris Lumens. Hm, three people to support the work of one? Maybe I wasn’t that helpful.

But the guys were nice about it, and by the end of the day I’d contributed two unit tests, one for the keyboard command and one for the reboot command. Admittedly, these are just about the easiest commands for which one can write unit tests, but I figure I still saved someone about 5 minutes of coding and 15 minutes of various other piddling around. Now if only I could write 143 more of those modules, assuming I’d need much less help by that point, that would be an entire workday saved for some poor soul.

OK, shoddy math and ROI projection there. But the point is, I felt like I was contributing to the QA team a little bit, ensuring that as Anaconda changes we can avoid breaking things here or there by accident. QA really can be fun, whether it’s bug triage or writing little unit tests like these, so I hope more and more people will continue to take advantage of the learning process.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to work on a simple instructional page on the wiki for people who want to try their hand at these unit tests. (Then I’ll cajole someone more skilled like James into reviewing it.) Some of it is actually just rote work, and the rest you can glean by reading just a little bit of Python. At this point, I’d again encourage people to install one or more of the diveintopython packages in Fedora — and buy the dead-tree book if you’re not opposed, it’s great and the author, Mark Pilgrim, deserves more than whatever royalties he gets, I assure you. It’s a lot easier than you think to learn Python, and way easier than you think to help with these unit tests.

Thanks to the pykickstart maintainers and the QA guys for letting me horn in on an hour or two of their work.

True stories, No. 37.

Thank you to the kind folks at Neowin, particularly Matthew Hopson, for the opportunity to do a lengthy Q & A with their community about Fedora. I was able to work in a couple not-so-sneaky plugs for the Fedora 11 Alpha that’s due next Tuesday, February 3. (That just happens to be almost exactly a year since I started this job, wow!)