Autor: chris

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Announcing the Kolab Server 2.3.0

For the plane in the fog, the mountain is unforeseeable, but then it is suddenly very real, and inevitable.

Simon Forster, Minister for foreign relations [1]

And so is the release of the Kolab Server 2.3.0. It was a bumpy ride and I’d apologize for the delays, but now we made it!

Features

The new Kolab 2.3.0 server includes a lot of new features, namely:

  • Z-push synchronization for mobile devices
  • a reworked webadmin
  • the possibility to have multiple accounts with the same name.
  • modular packaging of the webclient
  • many updated core components
  • tons of bug fixes

A detailed list of changes is available in the release notes.

Upgrading

Because of the changes in LDAP, upgrading from 2.2.4 is not trivial and requires manual intervention. Please make sure you read and follow the upgrade instructions.

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. Support for Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (etch/oldstable) was dropped because it is no longer supported by Debian ether. As soon as they have synced, you can also use the 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

Notice

This release marks the end of a long development cycle. After over 2 years, the master and the stable branch are (more or less) in sync again. We introduced many new features and fixed a large number of bugs. We tested the release intensively but due to the massive code changes, we might have missed something or even introduced new bugs.

Before you use this release in a critical environment, we’d like you to test it. Please report any problems you encounter in our bug tracker.

Depending on the number and severity of bugs, we will issue an updated release soon. We already have a number of fixes in the queue such as the today’s Z-push 1.5.2 release, so Kolab 2.3.1 will come soon.

Credits

I’d like to thank a few people for their help, namely and in no particular
order:

  • Paul and Georg, for giving me the chance to work on a great project like Kolab
  • Bernhard for his coordination
  • Thomas and Sascha for their support, especially during this week
  • Bogo for the awesome new look of the webadmin
  • Jeroen for his input and providing me the infrastructure I need
  • Gunnar for responding so fast to the issues we spotted

Without these people the Kolab Server 2.3 would not be possible. Thanks everybody for your hard work!

[1] In the excellent movie „In the loop„

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Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2011 revisited

Banner at the entrance of Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2011

Last weekend I attended the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2011, one of the biggest community events here in Germany. The reason I didn’t blog about it earlier is simple: I didn’t know what to write except: It was like every year.

 

Banner at the entrance of Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2011
Banner at the entrance of Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2011. Photo by Jörg Simon

This doesn’t mean that the event was bad, by far not. It was just as great as every year. You really can rely on the CLT people, they have a fantastic group of volunteers to help out at the event. They take care of everything, no matter what it is. The catering was extraordinary once again, especially on the social event on Saturday evening.

I would have liked to party harder, but I had to give my Kolab talk on Sunday morning, so I went back to the hotel early. Why do I always get the slots on the morning after the social event? Happened to me at FOSDEM 2009 and OpenRheinRuhr 2010 already. 🙁

As every year I met quite a lot of people at Chemnitz, way too many to name them all. The Fedora team consisted of Jörg, Robert, Fabian, Sven, Jens and me (obviously). With Michael and Dominic two more Fedora contributors were helping at the Xfce booth but unfortunately our Czech friends from Red Hat Brno could not join us.

 

Exhibition and Fedora booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2011
Exhibition and Fedora booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2011. Photo by Jörg Simon

I managed to get rid of a lot of media. I had 7 boxes with me, roughly 700 discs. One box was picked up by Vinzenz for Augsburger Linux Info day next week and two are for Gerold for the Linux Days Graz in April. Fabian was so kind as to take them with him and drop them off at Gerold’s on his way home to Switzerland. The other 4 boxes were mostly distributed at CLT and the rest was given to somebody for another event. I like really this distribution method: Fast, effective and inexpensive.

On the negative side we have the „Battle of the distributions“ on Saturday. It was not really a battle because the different distros (Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Pardus and Ubuntu were not fighting but rather showing how to manage a particular task with their latest release. The first exercise was how to view YouTube. As we all know YouTube doesn’t run with gnash, so this means installing the proprietary Adobe Flash plugin. 🙁

I have to admit that it’s a typical problem beginners are facing, so it is a valid exercise, but it’s not really a good example to compare the quality of the distributions. If the first thing on a free software event is to install unfree software, something is wrong.

The winner was Ubuntu here, they have patched the Firefox plugin finder to not only find the Flash plugin but also to install it through apt. On the other hand Ubuntu had some problems later when somebody asked how to revoke the sudo privileges of the first user (only possible on the console). Fedora also didn’t do that bad: I had to go to the Adobe homepage, but at least they offer a yum repository, so we could do a completely graphic click-through install and will get updates later.

 

The 'Battle of Distributions'
The 'Battle of Distributions'. Photo by Jörg Simon

Unfortunately this was not only the first but also the only exercise because things got a little chaotic afterwards. The Pardus guy managed to completely screw up his machine before the competition started, so he had to reinstall it while we were already doing the Flash exercise. We skipped him and when we all were finished, it was his turn. He still hadn’t finished his install, but he had all the time in the world to show their first-run wizard and configure icons, wallpapers and some more stuff, before the wizard crashed. So he went through it again and when he was done, there was nothing left to do because Pardus delivers all kinds of questionable proprietary software out of the box. They even package Windows Binaries for wine!

To me Pardus was clearly the looser, their X crashed every time when it was switched to the big screen, but the Pardus guy managed to turn failure into a win: The more problems he had, the more time he had for telling how great Pardus is. The presenter was to kind to interrupt him, so it became a Pardus show. Fedora at least got some extra attention when I was to tell something in SELinux and I was told that my presentations were pretty convincing, but other great distributions like Debian only had 5 minutes to show their work.

Apart from this Chemnitz was really great again – but you don’t expect something different.

(Thanks to Jörg for his blog posts and his photos and to Fabian for his event report)

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Finally!

Finally – and right in time for CLT – the Fedora 14 Media for EMEA have arrived!

Fedora 14 media for EMEA
The Fedora 14 media for EMEA

I was shocked 😯 when the guy opened his truck and revealed an euro 6 pallet. I didn’t expect 3000 media to be so much! Last time I got 1600, but they were in 4 parcels of 4 boxes each, much easier to handle.

Anyway, the delivery is huge and I want to get rid of it ASAP. I will start the primary distribution to several key points in different European countries this week.

If you are a Fedora contributor in EMEA and you are doing an event, please make sure it is listed in the wiki. Once you have a wiki page, file a ticket in the EMEA Swag Tracker and directly assign it to me (cwickert). I will either take care of the ticket myself or reassign it to the ambassador that serves as your closest key location. Make sure to mention

  • the event,
  • your shipping address,
  • the types and amount of media (we have GNOME desktop live CDs 32 bit, install DVDs 32 and 64 bit, 1000 pieces each)
  • and the latest date of delivery.

Have fun and spread Fedora!

Update: Actually it’s not 3000 but 3118 media, this means we got 118 for free. 😉

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Deemphasizing

From Fedora’s GNOME 3 feature page:

Where has the appearance capplet gone?
GNOME 3 is deemphasizing user customization, or ‚theming‘ in favour of a ‚just works‘ and ’slick out of the box‘ approach. Therefore, theme changes are no longer exposed in the core configuration UI, except for accessibility themes such as ‚High Contrast‘ or ‚Inverse‘, which are available in the ‚Universal Access‘ panel.

‚Deemphasizing‘ is a nice word, isn’t it? Makes sound things so friendly:

The Chinese government is deemphasizing ‚human rights‘ or ‚individual freedom‘ in favor of a ‚just works‘ approach.

Who said I cannot be diplomatic? 😉

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Xfce 4.8 for F14 now ready

I have updated my Xfce 4.8 repository at and it is fairly complete. Some packages however are now obsolete:

  • thunar-shares-plugin: dead upstream, would needed to be ported from thunar-vfs to gvfs.
  • xfce4-remmina-plugin: remmina now has a generic trayicon, however the new version is only available in F15 or my remmina backports repo.
  • xfce4-stopwatch-plugin: dead upstream, uses old panel API.
  • xfce4-volstatus-icon: dead upstream, uses HAL. I might revive it nevertheless because I find it useful and porting to exo-1 is not that hard.
  • xfce4-xfapplet-plugin: dead upstream, uses old gnome-panel API and handles only bonobo-based applets but not new dbus based ones. With GNOME 3.0 there is not much future for panel applets anyway.

If you can live without these plugins, you are invited to upgrade your F14 installation to Xfce 4.8. Please note that you will have to remove the plugins before you upgrade because Thunar and xfce4-panel do not yet obsolete them. We will do this for F15 Beta and then do more upgrade tests in order to provide a smooth upgrade.

Have fun and don’t forget to provide feedback. You can do this here in the comment section or – even better – on the Fedora Xfce mailing list.

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FUDCon Tempe day 2

Day 2 of FUDCon was just as busy as day 1.

  • AppStream and 10ish Things You Didn’t Know about Yum / Florian Festi and James Antill
  • Writing SELinux Policy / Dan Walsh
  • The Next Big Fedora Engineering Project / spot

In the afternoon we continued with the lightning talks. Some notable ones:

  • Eclipse Fedora Tools / Andrew Overholt
  • The Dreyfus Model: how do novices think differently from experts?
  • Fedora Medical / Susmit Shannigrahi

After the talks we started hacking (yay!), I helped Susmit to get some of his medical packages reviewed and thought some people good packaging practices. I regret not having the time to work on additional desktop test cases with Adam or working on Xfce with Kevin, but at some point security kicked us of out the Brickyard Artisan Court building.

I am just about to head to Memorial Union for FUDPub. After two days of FUDCon I am looking forward to have some beers with my fellows.

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FUDCon Tempe day 1

It’s already the second day of FUDCon and I am writing about yesterday. I was just too busy to blog.

We have way more sessions than we have slots, so many talks were merged. Yesterday I attended

  1. Fedora on ARM / Paul Whalen — Fedora on OLPC / M Langhoff: A very interesting talk. ARM will definitely become more important in the near future, not only for OLPC but also for Fedora. Just think of all the tablets out now.
  2. Future Fedora and Reducing Bureaucracy / Max Spevack and the Fedora Board: A productive session, we identified a lot of problems, but unfortunately we did not come to solutions how to reduce red tape.
  3. What have you done for me lately? / Pam Chestek, Richard Fontana: A talk on Red hat legal. I was really interested in this one because when I think of Red Hat legal, there are not many things coming to my mind that they have done for us lately – except helping to destroy Fedora EMEA e.V. and presenting us with an unacceptable Trademark License Agreement. Best quote in this talk was from Pam: „I am not allowed to answer that one“. Not the answer and the level of transparency I do expect in a free software community project, but as Richard explained we need to keep in mind that a lawyer has to serve his clients and the client of Red Hat Legal is not Fedora. Sad but true. On the positive side I’d like to mention that both Pam and Richard have already adjusted some parts of the TLA and are very open to more changes.
  4. The Future of Spins / Jared Smith: For me as maintainer of two spins, this one was important, especially now that there is a proposal to switch to  a full anaconda environment for the default installation. The scope of this proposal is still not quite clear, but it will impact the the spins in some way. And even with this proposal there are enough problems with the spins at the moment. Most problems can be addressed on a technical level, say in anaconda, but others are problems in governance and we will have to look into our spins process and give the spins SIG a more powerful mandate.

My preliminary schedule for today  looks like this:

  1. AppStream and 10ish Things You Didn’t Know about Yum / Florian Festi and James Antill
  2. Writing SELinux Policy / Dan Walsh
  3. The Next Big Fedora Engineering Project / spot

After lunch we will start our hackfests. Looking forward to start because there is plenty of work for Xfce 4.8 in Fedora 15.

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FUDCon here we come!

Me and Jörg just arrived at Phoenix. It’s still some hours until we can check in at the Four Points Sheraton, so right now we are sitting in the lobby of the Courtyard Tempe Downtown, the primary FUDCon hotel. There are quite a few Fedora people here already and it’s nice to see some good friends again and I am excited to meet more people that I only know by IRC or mail or SCM commits.

Me hacking at the Red Rocks. Of course this photo is totally faked, it's not even my laptop. ;)I arrived in the US late on Tuesday but just slept one night at Phoenix before we left for Sedona. On the first day we did the Red Rock State Park and yesterday we made a trip to the Grand Canyon National Park. The views were really impressive. but only so much fresh air a man can take. Now I can’t wait until FUDCon. Let the hacking begin!