Finally – and right in time for CLT – the Fedora 14 Media for EMEA have arrived!
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. 😉
The spin-kickstarts repository is no self-service where you can just check in any random kickstart. If you want your kickstart file to be included in spin-kickstarts, please follow the spins process.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
After lunch we will start our hackfests. Looking forward to start because there is plenty of work for Xfce 4.8 in Fedora 15.
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.
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!
Yesterday I came back from Cologne, where I stayed a night at Enrico’s before taking the train back to Münster. After I arrived home, my customers kept me busy, but now I have some time to blog about the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (Chemnitz Linux Days) last weekend.
Let’s start from the beginning: On Friday I took the train to Dortmund where I met Bert, Yakoov and Gregory. Bert gave me a ride to Chemnitz. When we checked in at our hotel, we met Jörg, but he was in a hurry to get back to his parents, who live not far away from Chemnitz. After the check-in we met with Sven and his friends at the Ratskeller to have some delicious food. Thorsten called me and showed up just a little later and half an hour later the Xfce people arrived too. While I already knew most of them because I met Enrico last year at OpenRheinRuhr and Dominic, Michael and Simon happen to be Fedora contributors too, I was very pleased to meet Fabian Nowak. I know him for quite a long time, but we never met in person.
After finishing our meals we walked over to the Turmbrauhaus (Tower brewery) for some beers. There were quite a lot of people from different projects there, CentOS, Debian and the FSF just to name a few. They all were sitting around a really long table, chatting, drinking and having fun. In another room Jörg Schilling had dinner with two lawyers friends.
The next morning we arrived at the university where the CLT takes place. Robert and Jörg already built up the booth on Friday, so there was not much left for us to do. I decided to have breakfast first. The catering at CLT is really impressive, people even call it the “Chemnitz Catering Days with Linux talks“.
The Fedora booth at CLT 2010
The Fedora booth was pretty busy all day, so I didn’t manage to attend any talks or help the at the Xfce booth. I talked all day long, it was loud and crowded, and in the evening at the social event I nearly lost my voice. The problem was that I had to give my LXDE talk on Sunday. So I left the social event early and got back to the hotel with Jens to cure my voice.
On Sunday I was much better again. Although speaking loud was exhausting, I managed to do my talk and it seems people liked it. After the talk a lot of the visitors came up to the Fedora booth in order to get the Fedora LXDE spin on a USB key. Next year we should also do an Xfce talk to gather more attraction.
After the first round of people was served with USB keys and live media, I burned some Xfce media and headed over to the Xfce booth. I felt really bad because I could not spend that much time on Xfce, but I know that they had enough people to do well. Nevertheless I would have liked to spend more time with Enrico, Fabian and the people from the Fedora Xfce SIG.
Later that afternoon I had to repair the display connector of the Fedora video beamer and I needed a tong. Instead of asking all kinds of people for a tong I went straight to the debianforum.de booth and of course, they had what I was looking for. Debianforum.de never disappoints you! It was also nice to meet the guys from Debianforum.de again. The first time I met Sebastian in person was last year at Chemnitz and I owe him and his forum so much.
Another person that I was happy to meet is Sirko. He used to be part of the CLT organization team, but last year they had some disagreements. I cannot comment on that, I was just lucky to see Sirko again.
As you can see: Chemnitz Linux Days are a place to meet the German Linux community. I even think it is the best Linux community event in Germany. I enjoyed it last year, I enjoyed it this year and I will definitely go there again next year:
But there were also two things I did not like:
Simon’s talk about OSSTMM and the Fedora Security Spin was rejected although it would have fitted perfectly into the forensics track.
The German Federal Foreign Office rejected Hiemanschu‘s visa for no reason. It would have been awesome to have Hiemanschu at the event because then the three people involved in the F13 Security Spin (Jörg, Hiemanschu and me) would have been gathered at one place.
Anyway, there is nothing we can do about these problems, so let’s focus on the positive aspects. For me the two most important things are
Fedora had a very strong presence at CLT: If you count in all the people (even the ones not doing official booth service or the ones serving at the Xfce booth), we were 13 Fedora contributors (in alphabetical order): Bert, Christoph (myself), Dominic, Gregory, Jens, Jörg, Marcus, Michael, Robert, Simon, Sven, Thorsten and Yakoov.
The Xfce community at CLT 2010
The large number of Fedora contributors at the Xfce booth also proves that we are doing a good job with the Xfce SIG. The number of Xfce users in Fedora is growing and so is the number of Fedora users in the Xfce community, for example in the IRC channels. I’m looking forward to Xfce 4.8 because I’m sure the new release will help us to make Xfce even more attractive.
Looking forward to rock Chemnitz next year with Fedora and Xfce. Maybe we will even haven an LXDE booth, who knows?
This may seem like a joke, but it is not I kindly ask of FESco to seriously take this under consideration.
I would like FESco to codify into a policy that contributing to Fedora should be Fun, and that to further that goal any existing and new procedures for Fedora should be balanced in how much they negatively impact Fun versus how much gain is expected from them to further the goals of Fedora.
This is going to become an interesting FESCo meeting on Tuesday i think…
