1. Document the new spins process in the wiki and implement it in Trac.
2. Finalize my draft of the new FAmSCo election guidelines.
3. Sign keys from the keysigning event and send them out to their owners.

Please bear with me if it takes me some time to get everything done because I am pretty busy with my dayjob.

1. Improve and simplify collaboration in the Fedora Community
2. Improve and encourage high-quality communication in the Fedora Community
3. It is extraordinarily easy to join the Fedora community and quickly find a project to work on.

While we all agree that these goals are worthy, we realized that are problematic:

1. They are too vague. There is no immediate action that results from any of them.
2. They are impossible to achieve. We can always improve and therefor never really reach them.
3. They are hard to measure. Even if we make progress, we cannot measure it.
4. They cannot be enforced.

I think I need explain the last one a little: In addition to the the individual goals we listed examples. In order to make it easy to join Fedora, all our teams should have some documentation about how to join them. It would be easy to have the Board reach out to all groups and say: “We decided you need documentation on how to join your team. Please have it written by next week and report back to us.” But that’s not how it works.

Instead of enforcing things, we rather need to encourage and enable people. This means that we need to provide tools and manpower to get things done. In this example we would try to liaise a new contributor with a volunteer from the Documentation project and somebody from the group in question. These three people make a perfect team: The new contributor will ask the questions, the group member can answer them and the documentation writer can document is all in nicely for future reference. A win-win situation for everybody: The group gets documentation and hopefully more contributors in the future. The docs writer gains more insight into other parts of the Fedora project and the new contributor can work on something useful right from the start.

Even if there may not have been much progress of the strategic goals in the last year, I think we learned some very important lessons:

1. Pick goals that can actually be achieved.
2. Make sure you have a way to measure progress.
3. Pick your favorite project and champion it.
4. Don’t enforce guidelines but encourage and enable people.

Security updates

• apache: Security update to 2.2.21 fixes CVE-2011-3192.

Bugfixes

• imapd: The build error in imapd was fixed.
• kolab-webadmin: The ActiveSync configuration is back again.
• kolab-z-push: New version with bugfixes for various Nokia phones.
• z-push: New upstream version with many bugfixes.

New features

• none

For a complete list of changes please refer to the release notes.

Upgrading

The upgrade form 2.3.1 is straight forward, there is nothing special you need to care about. If you are upgrading from 2.2.4, please follow the instructions to upgrade from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 as outlined in the 1st.README file.

Downloads

Documentation and OpenPKG packages are available as shown on the download page. Binary packages for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (Squeeze/stable) and 5.0 (Lenny/oldstable) on x86 platforms can be found next to the sources. As soon as they have synced, you can also use the mirrors.

You can check the integrity of the downloaded files by importing our file distribution key and verify the OpenPGP signature and SHA1 checksums:

$ wget https://ssl.intevation.de/Intevation-Distribution-Key.asc
 $ gpg --import Intevation-Distribution-Key.asc
 $ gpg --verify SHA1SUMS.sig
 $ sha1sum -c SHA1SUMS

Bugs

Please report bugs in our bug tracker.

Hotel in Milan: 145 EUR

Hotdog costume on Ebay: 15 EUR

Fun at FUDPub: priceless!

Beefy Miracle live at FUDPub

Security Updates

• apache: Security update to 2.2.20 fixing CVE-2011-3192
• imapd: Security update to to 2.3.17 fixing CVE-2011-3208
• openssl: Update to 1.0.0e fixing CVE-2011-3207 and CVE-2011-3210
• php / apache-php: Security update fixing CVE-2011-1148, CVE-2011-1938, CVE-2011-2202 and CVE-2011-2483

Bugfixes

• dimp: No more blank mails in the preview pane. If you still have problems, please make sure to generate all required locales in both ISO and UTF-8 and delete the webclient cache /kolab/var/kolab/webclient_data/tmp/cache_*
• horde: All attachments are displayed again, preference woes were fixed and the memory limit was raised to aviod large Kolab objects to cause a white screen.
• imp: Umlauts in System folders are displayed correctly
• Kolab_FreeBusy: Triggering with only the localpart of user works again
• Kolab_Server: Just like in horde, the memory limit was raised to avoid white screens with large Kolab objects.
• Kolab_Storage: *Lots* of fixes, most notably shared calendars and address books with the same name can now be distinguished.
• kolab-webadmin: The folder listing in the ActiveSync config and the domain maintainer’s welcome page were fixed
• kronolith: FreeBusy list of event organizers in their event attendee view is working again
• openldap: Update to 2.4.26 fixing some memory leaks in slapd

New Features

• turba: organizationalUnit (ou) is displayed in the global address book as “department”

For a complete list of changes please refer to the release notes.

Upgrading

The upgrade form 2.3.2 is straight forward, there is nothing special you need to care about. Only if you are compiling packages yourself you need to recompile some due to the OpenSSL update as described in the 1st.README file.

If you are upgrading from 2.2.4, please follow the instructions to upgrade from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 as outlined in 1st.README.

Downloads

Documentation and OpenPKG packages are available as shown on the download page. Binary packages for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (Squeeze/stable) and 5.0 (Lenny/oldstable) on x86 platforms can be found next to the sources. As soon as they have synced, you can also use the mirrors.

You can check the integrity of the downloaded files by importing our file distribution key and verify the OpenPGP signature and SHA1 checksums:

$ wget https://ssl.intevation.de/Intevation-Distribution-Key.asc
 $ gpg --import Intevation-Distribution-Key.asc
 $ gpg --verify SHA1SUMS.sig
 $ sha1sum -c SHA1SUMS

Native packages

The native packages for Fedora, EPEL and Debian will be updated to 2.3.3 within the next week.

Bugs

Please report bugs in our bug tracker.

I arrived at St Augustin on Friday around 7 p.m.. A lot of people were already there and it was nice to meet a lot of friends and many of the typical suspects again. Unfortunately we could not yet build up the booth as Robert, who had the event box and the banners with him, was stuck in heavy traffic jam. When he finally arrived at half past 8 we quickly prepared the booth before we left for dinner with our friends from Xfce.

We decided to go to Bonn because Christian lives there and he recommended an Ethiopian Restaurant. Of course we were a little skeptic and made bad jokes (“Ethiopian? We’ll go home hungry!” and alike) but Roha Café has completely proven us wrong: Nice atmosphere, friendly people and awesome food that is eaten just with the hands by wrapping it in bread. We were nine people and ordered 3 different plates for 3 people each but we didn’t manage to finish them because we were completely filled up. Each of us had 2 drinks, some also had a delicious Ethiopian coffee after dinner and in the end the bill was ridiculously cheap (less than 14 EUR per person). So if you ever happen to be in Bonn, go to Roha Café.

Some of us wanted to go wild afterwards and decided to go for more drinks, but as FrOSCon opens doors at 8:15 a.m. on Saturday, most of us decided to go back to the hotel. I went to Cologne with Enrico because I stayed at a friend and commuted to St Augustin.

On Saturday we had a German Translation team leaders of GNOME, Xfce and LXDE. We had Hendrik Richter and Christian Kirbach from GNOME, Fabian Nowak and me from Xfce and me again for LXDE. Even though the meeting was a little short I consider it very successful. Our goal is to have consistent translations throughout the different desktops and it was nice to see we agree on so many things, even on tiny details. There is still a lot of work to do but harmonizing our translation guidelines is a first step in the right direction.

Saturday was the better of the two days: The number of visitors was lower than last year (somebody even said it was all time negative record) and Sunday was even worse than Saturday. I don’t think it was that bad, we had visitors at the Fedora booth most of the time, but Sunday definitely could have been better. Not only the exhibition, but also our FAD.

The FAD began at 10:00. Benedikt gave a talk about his “Fedora Home Server”. The title mimics the “Windows Home Server” and so does the feature set of the server. Of course you can add more services and the audience came up with interesting ideas. After that Robert delivered a talk about SELinux. It seems SELinux still causes people a lot of headache and thus a lot of people came to Robert’s presentation.

Not many seats were left when Robert gave his SELinux Talk at FrOSCon 2011

Next up was Anreas with a talk about Func, the Fedora Unified Network Controller. It was perhaps the most entertaining talk because Andreas made a dry topic a lot of fun, especially when he started showing stuff on not on a demo machine but a real production environment.

After a short lunch break I gave two more talks, one about remixing Fedora and the other about RPM packaging. I hardly had the latter prepared, I just used the slides from one of my many previous talks about packaging and we made it more like a workshop. People liked this a lot: It definitely makes a difference if you just go through some slides or if you have a RPM package or a live CD ready at the end of the workshop. The audience was very experienced, most of them already were Fedora users or had at least used it, so we could even address advanced topics.

Having a FAD or a FUDCon as part pf another event is always a difficult decision. On the one hand a lot of people there, both contributors as well as visitors. The contributors don’t need to pay for travel again and you reach an audience that you would not reach with a Fedora-only event. On the other hand people get distracted by the main event. There are many other talks and so much to see. Because all contributors want to attend either the Fedora event or one of the other talks, it’s difficult to have enough booth personnel all the time. So if you you are hacking on something special and you just want to get things done ™ it is maybe better to meet somewhere in the middle of nowhere to not be disturbed.

Nevertheless I think this FAD was worth it: It was not a hack fest but more like a one day mini-FUDCon full of talks and as such it makes perfectly sense to have it at FrOSCon: FrOSCon is famous for it’s talks while the exhibition is secondary. We managed to address a new audience and raised awareness for Fedora.

I’d like to thank all Fedora contributors who helped us to make FrOSCon 2011 a successful event, namely (and in no particular order)

• Benedikt for his 1st Fedora talk
• Raphael for doing booth service
• Dominic for his dry humor and for delivering Fedora swag to Hamburg for Software Freedom Day
• Christian who also is part of the FrOSCon team and helped us a lot with the organization
• Sven for doing endless hours of booth service while we held our FAD
• Jens for coming to St AUgustin and helping out even though his spare time is very rare
• Sirko for the FAD posters and the Inkscape workshops
• Gerd for showing up so I finally had the chance to finally meet my sponsoree in person after 2 years
• Andreas for his brilliant and entertaining talk about Func
• Robert for bringing all the booth material to St Augustin and delivering his SELinux talk
• Sandro and Marcus for showing up although they were not officially part of the Fedora team this year
• Zoltan for sending us flyers and Cheat Cubes

Leonie is playing with a Fedora Cheat Cube. It's never to early to start with Fedora!

F15 Multiboot DVD with GNOME and KDE

As some of you might know I started writing for the German Linux Magazin in April. I am now in the lucky position to know quite a few people at Linux New Media and one of them asked me if I had an idea for the DVD they ship with their magazine. Of course I had: A Fedora Multiboot DVD.

First the editors were a little skeptic: Fedora is not that popular in Germany and many people still think it’s too bleeding edge, so Linux Magazin usually ships with save bets like Ubuntu or OpenSUSE. But when I told them about the new amazing features of our Multiboot media such as automatic detection of the CPU architecture and offered them to do a custom German spin, they agreed. So I made a prototype and it has taken a shine to them. 3 days later they asked for an English version, so it now ships not only with the German Linux Magazin but also with the English Admin Magazine. Look out for it in

• Germany: Linux Magazin is in stores as of today.
• UK and other European countries: Admin Magazine 04/2011 to be released on July 17th.
• North America: Admin Magazine to be released on August 12th.
• Australia and New Zealand: Admin Magazine to be released on September 12th.

I was told not to mention the exact number of media but trust me, it’s huge. It’s more media than the ambassadors produced for the last 3 or 4 Fedora releases worldwide.

And yes, I am fully aware that this media violates several guidelines and policies.

• It is a re-spin with updates included. We usually don’t to this but to conform to legal requirements, I uploaded the list of source packages to the correcponding-source git repo.
• It is a custom spin because the package selection is slightly different from the usual GNOME and KDE spins: It includes LibreOffice and for space reasons I had to leave all games out.
• The isolinux background is the Fedora 15 one but branded with the logo of Linux/Admin Magazine. However this only affects the DVD but not installed systems.
• I dared to call GNOME “GNOME” instead of “Desktop” in the boot menu. I guess I should just have called it “Desktop” and tell confused people to mail advisory board list to complain.
• I didn’t ask the Spins SIG but as the Spins Wrangler I ‘approved’ it myself. There really was no time for discussions, the images had to be ready and shipped to Munich in less than 36 hours.
• I didn’t ask the board either. I know how discussions on a board level tend to become and there really was no time.

Speak up if you think I have done harm to the Fedora Project!

New GNOME haz no friends

Me said it before and the internets have proved me right: New GNOME haz no friends, only old GNOME haz.

P.S.: Bad troll post, I know but SCNR!