Schlagwort: Fedora

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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 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!

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Contributing to Fedora should be FUN

Policy proposal: contributing to Fedora should be FUN

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…

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Spins suck!

Life is hard when you are maintaining a Fedora spin. Why? Because spins suck, at least that’s what I was told. Instead of focusing on the spins, we should rather work on the installer and have a everything in there:

If I want KDE or LXDE, it should be part of the installer.

Actually Xfce and LXDE are already part of the installer, they are just not on the install media. But when you suggest to include them in the DVD, then the same person tells you that:

You’re only thinking about you and your images aren’t you? What happens when we put your stuff on the DVD?

As a spin maintainer, you can’t do right. 🙁

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A new start for the Xfce SIG

It’s not that the Xfce SIG did a bad job during the Fedora 12 development cycle. Far from it! We did very well: The F12 Xfce Spin is the best release so far and according to Christian, one of the Xfce developers, it’s the „most complete and most Xfce’ish Xfce live cd“ he has ever seen.

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