FAD Niederrhein 2010
March 27 + 28
Mönchengladbach, DRK-Begegnungsstätte Wickrath

You don’t have to be a Fedora user or contributor to attend (Enrico isn’t ether). Instead, Fedora Activity Days are supposed to bring benefit to the upstream projects that we support, in this case Geany, LXDE and the OLPC. And maybe even your project, you just need to join us.

If you would like to attend, please add yourself on the wikipage. More workshops, hack sessions or talks are highly welcome. Lets make this event a truly successful one!

Via: Mether’s Fedora Blog

But we felt like we could make things better. Currently most decisions are made by the maintainers (Kevin, Adam and me) ether on IRC or by mail. Of course we listen to feedback we get from users, but we want decision-making to be more transparent. That’s why we now have a mailing list of our own: The Fedora Xfce List, a place where users and developers meet.

We also want to revive the Xfce SIG IRC meetings. We did that in the past but somehow we didn’t find the time to do it regularly. In order to find a time that fits everyone, I started a poll. If you are interested in joining our meetings, please respond here.

So if you are using Fedora and are interested in Xfce

• subscribe to the mailing list
• attend our IRC meetings
• join the SIG
• have fun!

I will continue to work on improving Fedora and I hope to succeed in that together with the other Fesco members. I will focus on improving cross-desktop interoperability and on simplifying the feature process and the workflow for co-maintainership of upstream developers. I’m looking forward to serve the Fedora Project as a Fesco member. Let’s get to work!

a lot of my customers have workflows that involve different people. Some of them have checklists, but this is a lot of paper work, it’s not searchable, not reliable and it’s just so 1987. To make these processes more transparent and traceable I am looking for a issue tracker/ticketing system/CRM.

A typical workflow looks like this:

1. Customer orders goods, services, whatever. There are several ways to order: Via website, telephone, fax or reseller.
2. Employee receives order. If there are open questions, employee sorts them out with customer or reseller.
3. Employee confirms the order and sends out a bill.
4. Customer/reseller makes a depsit.
5. Employee confirms deposit and sends out another mail with more info on product or service.
6. Customer/reseller pays the outstanding sum of money.
7. The deal takes place.

The thing I’m looking for should be lightweight because there already are dedicated systems for booking, accounting and so on that we cannot replace, but there is nothing that brings all these systems together. I only what to track the process and to do this, I’d like to have the following features:

• Web interface: I don’t want to install additional client software.
• Custom statuses: If possible, employees should be able to define them via web interfacel, but that’s not high priority
• Custom Workflows: If possible, the system should be able to define custom actions such as sending out an email when state X is reached
• Custom fields: I’d like to be able to add different fields to the tickes,
• Attachments: I’d like to attach files to tickets.
• Localization: If possible, because “… Es ist Deutschland hier.”

So far I have looked at Mantis, OTRS, Redmine (all nice and powerful bug trackers, but not really what I’m looking for need and lack some features need), Drupal with plugins (I haven’t found the right plugin and I don’t want to carry the cruft of a complete CMS when I just need a tracker) and the well known trac (currently my favorite although it was definitely designed for other purposes).

Dear Lazyweb, do you know any other systems that offer what I’m looking for?

Sorry it took so long. While the actual problems were solved within 2 days, it took a little longer to create the new ISO images. FESCo, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, had to decide how to proceed with the new images. The decision was scheduled for last weeks FESCo meeting, but due to Thanksgiving and the holidays the meeting was canceled. Instead, we voted in Trac, but as you all know a ticket system is not as fast as a real time IRC meeting.

After that Jesse composed the new images and we needed to test them to make sure we don’t hit any bugs again. Testing was positive and now we have the new images available for download at

http://spins.fedoraproject.org/lxde/

Grab them while they are still hot!

I apologize once again for the delay and would like to thank everybody for his patience. A big thanks goes out to Jesse for supporting me.

I now declare this bazar opened!

… hat die Qual. Wie bei dieser sinnigen Fehlermeldung.

This is probably the word’s largest error message. And of course it’s from Evolution. For more info, see Gnome Bugzilla, for info how to get rid of it (at least for 2 weeks), see the Evolution FAQ.

Thanks for your patience. I’ll keep you informed.

I have no idea why we didn’t spot this bug before. I have tested every nightly and they all were fine, but they were created on a different machine then the final images. Also installing LXDE from the package repositories works fine, so you can already install LXDE on Fedora 12.

There will be fixed images soon. I’d like to ask you for three more days of patience. Apologies for the inconvenience.