I've just been to the keynotes from J, J & J, after which I went out for a smoke and meet with some people that just arrived for FUDcon...

It's amazing how little people know who's who, but then again these events are all about meeting people, and not just people you know already, of course. We already met a few people first night we were here, in the bar of the Sheraton which BTW is LOADED with Red Hat Summit attendees, visitors, speakers, etc - and most of the FUDCon people still have to arrive, I imagine.

Tonights plan is to go to Fenway Park, a baseball stadium even the baseball-ignorant Dutchmen know -that's how famous it is ;-) I'm curious whether just a badge (whether for FUDCon of for the Red Hat Summit) will get you inside as one of us, Jonathan Steffan, originally wanted to register for the Summit but didn't -now it turns out some of us do have all-access, like me being the European RHCE of the Year, he's about the only one without registration. Either way though, we'll be drinking beers and chat no matter whether we all get into Fenway Park ;-)

Another amazing thing is I'm about the only one in a Fedora Ambassador polo, some other people have Fedora shirts, and some more people (like, the rest) all have Red Hat T-shirts and caps and stuff.... I'd like to see that change when FUDCon really takes off; we'll have gotten everyone who pre-registered for FUDCon the Official FUDCon Boston 2008 T-shirt, so secretly I hope the amount of Red Hat vs. Fedora T-shirts goes 180 ;-))

Did you ever find yourself in trouble because an update to an application would cause your users to fail in whatever it is they do? Note that this ranges from actual users with business applications all the way to girlfriends having bought a book written for a specific version of the GIMP or Blender. Or did you ever find that certain systems just won't boot "kernel du jour" as I like to call it -although obviously Fedora does not release yet another kernel every day? Or, would you just like to have an inventory system to see what applications are installed on any given system -and manage the updates? Sick and tired of coming up with wrapper scripts around the rsync command so that you can sync a complete mirror?

I'd like to share this idea I have, with you. The SUMS Update Management System (SUMS). Being named SUMS for several reasons I won't go into right now, here's the basic idea:

1. A webinterface let's you configure (for those with ITIL: IMACD) a number of distributions
2. With these distributions you configure (same IMACD here) a number of repositories
3. These repositories have a (set of) baseurl(s) and/or a mirrorlist for clients to use, and some setting that let's the backend know where it can sync data from
4. It polls for new packages every once in a while and let's you specify the acceptance level (in testing, approved, blocked)
5. Clients report what they have (so that you could potentially optimize syncing), and hence you have inventory
6. Clients poll for updates or package actions (in the "to be installed" or "to be removed" category)

I've played with this idea for some time and actually came up with a web interface in TurboGears using Kid that would sync repos and let you move packages to testing, and approve or disapprove them. To take it to the next level, I need your help.

I'd like to think about:

1. Letting the web interface actually serve the packages (either http redirect to a mirror upstream or by syncing and serving the actual RPM files)
• with regards to the status of said package
• with regards to the "access level" of the client system
  
2. Integrating the web interface with a Source Control Management system to be able to sync YUM .repo files you can then roll out with puppet (sorry, don't like CFEngine)
3. Getting in a patch for MirrorManager to enable it to return lists of mirrors by protocol (sorry Matt, we've briefly discussed this during FUDCon in Raleigh, I know; I just haven't come around to actually do it)

If you have additional ideas about what it can do I urge you to drop me a line stating what idea you have, and if you have some vague idea of how this could work, again, let me know.

I'll be at FUDCon in a few days, and at the Red Hat Summit also (for obvious reasons) - if you are there too, come and walk up to me and share ;-)

Now that the official announcement is out, I can share with all of you that I've been selected European RHCE of the Year!

Being a Red Hat Certified Engineer, you get an email reminding you to register for the contest of RHCE of the Year; allow me to quote from that message:

"There are any number of accomplishments that could catapult you to this great distinction--maybe you're administering an impossible number of boxes, maybe you solve an insurmountable problem, or maybe your business card just looks cool with an RHCE logo on it. No matter what the reason, we want to hear about it."

So I thought "I'm upstream, let's sign up and give them my fedoraproject.org wiki page". A few weeks later, I get a phonecall. You know the rest.

I first started playing with Linux back in 1998 - I was barely 15 years old. Of course that was all play, and no work. Ever since I've been hooked, and ended up making a living doing what used to be my hobby - and it still wasn't enough. Hence I finally joined the great Fedora community (I think it was in 2005 or 2006?), and immediately had enough to sink my teeth in -and I still have. Now, compared to when I started, it's completely vice-versa; all work and no play... I just can't tell the difference anymore ;-))

Thank you Red Hat, for rewarding me this great honour, and thanks to the many great people in the community that make my hobby/work so enjoyable! I'll see some of you at the Red Hat Summit / FUDCon next week in Boston. We'll have a beer, or two, or more, to celebrate ;-)

LinuxTag 2008 is now over. I hope everyone got home OK, and got a chance to relax and rest a little.

I need to apologize for not keeping my promise; I was supposed to blog a little every day, but I didn't. There's no real excuse, but you gotta imagine these events are very busy -and exhausting. So many people to meet, so many people to talk to, so many things to pursue, so many talks to attend (and in my case give), so many patches to sources to enable giving out localized spins, so many beers.

On average, I think I had 3 hours of sleep a day -and so did many others. As there were 26 of us, give or take, you're never finished talking to all of your fellow Fedorians. Of course, alcohol was involved ;-) It was very nice to see everyone and meet some new faces.

My personal highlights for LinuxTag include the bathrobes, and especially the entrance we made at the LinuxNight Social Event. I think there was about 300 exhibitors, speakers and VIPs wondering how cool they were, and where they could get one - instead some of them asked us a few questions (Why? Isn't it hot? - no, it's cool!). I'm sure there's many, many pictures floating around the web that can give you a good impression.

Another highlight is, there was this one person at the booth whom I've met at last year's LinuxTag as well, and whom was using Revisor for all kinds of stuff. We talked a little about some brokenness that had been in Fedora 9 (the GUI wasn't starting) which luckily I had fixed already, and some of the use-cases he is trying to get done with Revisor. Long story short; he saw a bunch of Fedora T-Shirts go past us and he showed interest. I gave him one in his size and I got a "Linux Inside" coffee mug in return; Thanks again ;-)

I'll upload some photos I made when I'm back home.

We're 10 minutes away from entering the Ambassadors meeting so I'll keep it short. The flight was short (Amsterdam to Berlin Tegel). You take off and almost immediately start descending ;-) It was nice and smooth though. Going off to have a smoke, and enter the Ambassadors Meeting which will definitely involve a lot of talking about Fedora EMEA.

Only one day left before we all get together at LinuxTag in Berlin. I'm excited! I'm going to try to blog a little about LinuxTag every single day.

There's about 28 Fedora enthusiasts getting together at LinuxTag, which makes it the single largest event besides the official FUDCon's. Most of them I've already met in person, others I'll meet for the first time. It's always interesting to speak to someone in person and see what vision that someone has, what drives him within Fedora, and if I can help -or know someone that could help- to achieve these goals -even if just by talking, which I'd like to think helps someone get the idea he's not alone and can ask for help. Either way, it's still fun to share ideas, vision and ambition -preferably over a beer (or two).

LinuxTag is one of those events that gives you the chance to do just that. It spans 4 days, instead of the usual 2 or 3, and everyone arrives a day or so in advance, and leaves one day after the event is over. That makes it an exhausting event as well, but then again, who in Fedora ever gets tired of doing more with Fedora? It'll mostly be work and no play, but then again there isn't all that much difference between work and play when it concerns Fedora.

More coming up over the next few days!

To Mike McGrath's and Karsten Wade's blog posts, I just wanted to say:

Some people choose Fedora as their hobby or even just operating system for the reasons that make Fedora Fedora. Other people choose Fedora because Fedora is what Fedora is -and might become part of the first group after a while, but then again could become valuable contributors from where they are right then as well.

In the ignorance-is-bliss category, there's people who might just choose Fedora because Fedora just so happens to be whatever Fedora is to them, and then start shouting it doesn't do what they expect it to do, obviously overdoing on the ignorance part -causing us to shift our focus again and again with discussions about making it easier to install codecs, linking to third party repositories, firmware, etc. while in fact the real problem remains -non-free software. I'm sure trying to gain understanding here is less valuable then continuing the work and maintaining our focus. Having said that, of course there's other audiences in our society where gaining an understanding is the primary focus in way more valuable ways.

Then, in the, substantially overdoing the ignorance, dont-know-dont-care category there's people that might choose another operating system or Linux distribution, but who cares.

Which of these groups would be Fedora's Market?

I have a couple of home servers, some of which will eventually be abused. That's just inevitable, I think, no matter how hard I try to secure them. I never thought I'd be abusing them myself, though. Continuing on the previous blog post about pratical uses for FUDCon Wristbands, I introduce to you another door being kept open against the wind, with help of blue elastic stuff:

This definitely is server abuse. I don't mind though; It's my own doing. Besides, they are not running since they make too much noise (I should have thought of that when I bought them).

Especially during this time of year, I like to open all the windows and doors of my apartment so that a cold breeze blows through the living room. To keep the balconey door open however, I need something to prevent it from being closed by the wind -which usually happens if I leave it unattended and includes a loud bang and possibly some broken glass.

So, how does one do that? I have no clip or anything like that, as there is another door where a clip should go onto a wall. Well, I've found a practical use for the FUDCon wristbands:

Fedora Unity is proud to announce the release of the Fedora 9 Everything Spin!

Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!

The Everything Spin includes everything available at the time of the release of Fedora 9. It is the same, really, it is. Just more. Way, way more! And the more Fedora, the better!

The i386 as well as x86_64 Fedora 9 Everything Spin is rather large, yet sized a fashionable 4 DVD's. You can imagine carrying those around as your complete, instant, bootable and installable mirror of everything Fedora has to offer -at the moment Fedora 9 was released. Of course you could just use a USB Harddrive, or even USB thumbdrive (16GB), but that wouldn't make the Everything Spin any more fun now would it?

Fedora Unity normally includes a CD version "for those of us that do not have DVD drives", as we use to say in our Re-Spin release announcements, but not this time;

This time Fedora Unity includes a 23 (!) CD version of the Everything Spin, *just for kicks* ;-) With Fedora 8, the Everything Spin was just 19 CDs, so there's 4 discs of extra, new, shiny software! You can see how this looks when you're installing from it:

I'd like to see these discs piled up at every booth showing off the enormous amount of available Free and Open Source Software :P

Undoubtfully, some people will give away the CD version of the Everything Spin as a birthday present. Also, it reminds people why it is they need to upgrade their CD-ROM to DVD players ;-)

Have fun ;-)

P.S. In the screenshot, the numbering a little off for Unknown Reasons(TM) - installation completes though

The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins (DVD and CD Sets) of Fedora 8.

These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 8 installation media and include all updates released as of May 1st, 2008.

The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64 and PPC architectures via Jigdo and Torrent starting Monday, May 5th, 2008.

Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!

CD Media Included

We have included CD Image sets for those in the Fedora community that do not have DVD drives or burners available.

Bugs solved in this Re-Spin

With this particular Re-Spin, fixes for the following bugs are included, like on our last Fedora 8 Re-Spin releases[1,2]:

• #372011, "depsolve hang in F7 to F8 upgrade"

We have incorporated the updates image made by Jeremy Katz (comment #11 in the bug), and we have verified that a full Fedora 7 installation upgrades to Fedora 8 without issues.

• #367731, "anaconda fails on Via VPSD motherboard"

On i586 hardware, the installation media wouldn't boot and thus renders itself unusable. We have backported the fix for this issue from anaconda development to the Fedora 8 stock anaconda, as anaconda is not updated during a release.

• #369611, "yum upgrade with selinux-policy-strict installed fails"

A dependency problem in selinux-policy-strict during upgrades is resolved in an updated selinux-policy-strict package, which is included in the Re-Spin

• #404601, "anaconda crashes on 'cdrom' line in kickstart"

Updates to pykickstart incorporated in the rebuilt installer resolve this issue.

• #420281, Cannot find kickstart file during unattended installation

The kickstart file name searched for after booting from CD or DVD with option "linux ks" and using a dhcp and nfs server is wrong.

Attention: Changes in this Re-Spin

Also, we would like to let you know that NetworkManager is now installed by default, and for people doing minimal installations; this service will need to be disabled before the network starts to work.

Thanks to

We would like to give a special thanks to the following for testing this Re-Spin:

- Harley-D                        Dana Hoffman Jr
- zcat                                Jason Farrell
- iWolf                               Jeffrey Tadlock
- vwbusguy-                      Scott Williams
- baard1973                     S.A. Hartsuiker
- Southern_Gentleman     Ben Williams
- nirik                                Kevin Fenzi
- kanarip                          Jeroen van Meeuwen

Testing Results

A full test matrix can be found at our Test Matrix

A full list of bugs, packages and changelogs that have been updated in this Re-Spin can be reviewed on http://spins.fedoraunity.org/changelogs/20080501/

Previous Re-Spin (20080331) will expire

Due to limited resources, this spin will immediately obsolete 20080331, which will be deleted from our mirrors in the next few days.

Fedora Unity has taken up the Re-Spin task to provide the community with the chance to install Fedora with recent updates already included.

These updates might otherwise comprise more than 2.05GiB of downloads for a full install.

This is a community project, for and by the community. You can contribute to the community by joining our test process.

Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!

Assistance Needed

If you are interested in helping with the testing or mirroring efforts, please contact the Fedora Unity team.

Contact information is available at http://fedoraunity.org/ or the #fedora-unity channel on the Freenode IRC Network (irc.freenode.net).

To report bugs in the Re-Spins please use http://bugs.fedoraunity.org/

Like with the last two Fedora releases, I'm planning on releasing a Fedora 9 Everything Spin. With Fedora 8, I gave you a sneak preview of what it would be like to install Fedora, selecting everything, using the CD version.

Today I've created a rawhide Everything spin just to see what a Fedora 9 Everything Spin would look like. Again, there's a CD, a DVD, and a DVD Dual Layer version, and of course you'd want to use the CD version, just for kicks. Here's what it would look like:

If Fedora continues like this, and IT WILL, I'll need to log a bug against anaconda in the Fedora 10 development cycle, because the list won't fit on any screen, and hence the buttons to confirm or cancel won't be available.

Someone blogged about how he feels uncomfortable with some of the Fedora tools being released, since it appears to him they are not tested, and I quote:

"I'm sure that they are not tested, at least not enough, or not by normal people." - Davidson Paulo

The rest of the blog sounds like he's doing a number 2, and all he gets is a red face. I gotta admit he's right though. I never test enough, and I'm not a normal person. Anyway the real question remains: Are the tools developed by the Fedora team tested?

I think I can answer that, but first let me set the record straight:

1. I am the main Revisor developer (just so you know, remember that while reading the rest of this blog post),
2. I am the Revisor packager as well,
   
3. I'm with Fedora (duh, wearing the Ambassador Polo Shirt right now),
   
4. I love Fedora being, (and I quote) "a beta-testing distro by some developers/packagers". If that's how you see it, then that's what I love.
5. I'm not getting paid anything other then the gratitude of users like you </sarcasm>

That being said let's get back to the real question at hand: "Why this wasn't fixed before packaging Revisor? Were Revisor checked by its packager? Were Revisor tested by its developers?"

Why wasn't this fixed?

The current version of Revisor in Fedora 8 is 2.0.5-15.fc8. Use:

yumdownloader --source revisor

and download the Source RPM, or navigate to the Source Tree for this version.

Either way, you won't find $releasever, $arch or $basearch anywhere in the package other then commented out in sample kickstart files, and in the cfg.py where we so subtly replace all occurrences with the proper values, should they appear in 'repo' directives in the kickstart you supplied. So, Revisor ships with valid configuration files.

If anything, it's the packaging guidelines that prevent us from replacing old (possibly bad) configuration files in /etc/ with new ones. I know I had released Revisor once or twice with bad configuration files. You may have had Revisor installed previously, and have a couple of .rpmnew files in /etc/revisor/conf.d right now.

FWIW, I agree with the packaging guidelines in this aspect as well as the other aspects and I'm not going to change the location of the configuration files, nor am I going to bluntly replace existing configuration files with a newer copy as these files may hold customized configuration such as the inclusion of third party packages. I can only assume someone spent a little time crafting them.

Was Revisor checked by it's packager?

Since I am the packager, this one lands right in my lap. Yes, I do check things before I release them. Yes, things will slip through the cracks. I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience it may have cost you, seriously.

Was Revisor tested by it's developers?

Since I am the developer, this one lands right in my lap also. Again, all I can say is that I test stuff. Again, yes, things will slip through the cracks. You can imagine there's some cracks in developing software in one's free, spare time. Between my 40-hour dayjob, my life, my family, my girlfriend and the occasional getting-drunk-friday-night, there's a couple of "not-seeing-$releasever-or-$basearch" moments and if I happen to be releasing Revisor at one of these oblivous moments, it ends up on your PC (and then later on your blog).

So, now that we've gotten the questions out of the way...

Would you mind logging a bug against the appropriate package? I'm too ignorant to Google the web in search of bugs reported in blogs or newsgroups or any other location then http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ You neglected to file one against Revisor.

Last but not least, another quote: "Software testing is not an obligation of end-users.", and again I can only say you are so right. It is not an obligation to you, me, or anyone else. Neither is using or developing software. I consider using or testing new software to be a chance, a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Writing new software is a challenge. Getting bugs reported properly is a motivator. Reading blogs like yours is hilarious.

So, what I'm trying to say is: Thank you, additional 40 voluntary seeders! And thank you, 45 original seeders! In 4 days after my original blog post requesting additional seeds, you doubled the amount of seeds and took some weight off my shoulders. I can breath again! The torrent tracker is also the master mirror for the release via Jigdo, the primary compose host for our Re-Spins and Revisor development, and my workstation -the load average makes me work on my laptop instead.

Vlad Dolezal writes in his blog on anamzingmind.com about the real reason we use Linux. He says although we might be telling people it's because it's secure, gratis, customizable or free, which are all valid reasons, supposedly the real reason that we use Linux is because it's fun. That's true, it is fun, but it's not the real reason.

Imagine you get to choose between two programs that do the same job, more or less.

One program is used a lot by the general public. How it works is obscure and you don't know exactly what it does if you press a button, but you do know that, in general, the program just works -duh, lots of people are using it. You may find documentation on how to use the program -which is often very conceptual and superficial- but still it doesn't give you any insight in the programs operations -the exact how, when and why fact sheet. Although I actually do know, let's assume that I don't; A user will think that it's all vague and obscure but it works.

The other program is made by a bunch of people that are extremely passionate, it's broadly used, it's well-documented, it has the proper fact sheets, and you can join news groups and mailing lists with any questions, problems and ideas you might have, and even talk to the developers directly. If push comes to shove you can also track down what it is the program is doing exactly -hence where things go wrong, behave differently from what you expect or where you need it to do something different. Not that you need to, but a huge number of other people to do it either because they're just as passionate, or they need a specific piece of the program to do what it is they need it to do -or because someone like you requested something that made them dig through all the code and fix something for you.

The principles on proprietary and freedom put aside, ask yourself;

If you're a user: Which program would you trust to work now and improve in the future?

If you're a developer of course the question for users applies as well, but also: Which one would you care most passionately about -bug tracking/solving, hacking, developing? Which poses the bigger challenge (greater reward)?

Some of you may think... "pico"? Didn't we get rid of that a long time ago? Yeah... I usually symlink it to any editor available I'm just so used to typing pico.

[jmeeuwen@bofh005 ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
737 git
490 ssh
435 svn
302 ll
261 ls
255 pico
252 sudo
163 ln
143 rm
95 autoreconf

Like I stated in a previous blog post, Torrent is a real bandwidth consuming way of distributing things. I'd rather use Jigdo, which is very light-weight for both the client and the server. Better yet, clients could use our own version, pyJigdo, and give us feedback so that we can improve it.

Anyway, we do want our Re-Spins to be available to as many users as possible, and as it seems, Torrent is popular, still. Because Fedora Unity only has so much fast seeds (one that can handle the amount of disk space and traffic involved, actually), I'd like you to seed some, if you can. Right at this moment I have 154 peers (and growing) wanting to download one or the other Re-Spin, and I could certainly use your help seeding it to them. Check http://spinner.fedoraunity.org:6969/ to see which spins are most popular, and please note that most of the seeds you see are actually duplicates ;-)

Of course you are also welcome to consider becoming a Jigdo mirror for us, carrying about ~20GB of data, serving around 1GB/day.

Here's the Torrent files,

and here's the primary torrent seed:

Thanks, in advance,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins (DVD and CD Sets) of Fedora 8.

These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 8 installation media and include all updates released as of March 31st, 2008.
The ISO images are available for i386, x86_64 and PPC architectures via Jigdo starting Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008.

We have included CD Image sets for those in the Fedora community that do not have DVD drives or burners available.

During the Testing phase the following was found:

1) a full x86_64 install with many optional packages or languages requires at least 768MB of RAM rather than the recommended 512MB.

2) the ftp utility in rescue mode will not work (missing libreadline.so.5) -which doesn't affect FTP installations.

With this particular Re-Spin, we address the following problems experienced by many community members, in addition to the problems we've resolved in previous Re-Spins[1]:

- #420281, Cannot find kickstart file during unattended installation
The kickstart file name searched for after booting from CD or DVD with option "linux ks" and using a dhcp and nfs server is wrong.

We would like to give a special thanks to the following for testing this respin in 2 days

- Harley-D         Dana Hoffman Jr
- zcat             Jason Farrell
- iWolf            Jeffrey Tadlock
- baard1973        S.A. Hartsuiker
- Southern_Gentleman     Ben Williams
- kanarip         Jeroen van Meeuwen

Fedora Unity has taken up the Re-Spin task to provide the community with the chance to install Fedora with recent updates already included.
These updates might otherwise comprise more than 1.33GiB of downloads for a full install.

This is a community project, for and by the community. You can contribute to the community by joining our test process.

A full list of bugs, packages and changelogs that have been updated in this Re-Spin can be reviewed on http://spins.fedoraunity.org/changelogs/20080331/

Go to http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins to get the bits!

If you are interested in helping with the testing or mirroring efforts, please contact the Fedora Unity team.
Contact information is available at http://fedoraunity.org/ or the #fedora-unity channel on the Freenode IRC Network (irc.freenode.net).
To report bugs in the Re-Spins please use http://bugs.fedoraunity.org/

Kind regards,

The Fedora Unity Team

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2007-December/msg00008.html

There's now a Special Interest Group (SIG) for Fedora Community Spins. From the initial proposal by Jef Spaleta, here's what the SIG's responsibilities are:

The purpose of the Spin SIG is oversee the development of an evolving set of technical best practises to be applied to all community spin concepts. The Spin SIG will also oversee the continued maintenance of approved community spins in the Kickstart Pool, and will regulate the use of any infrastructure as it becomes available for use for the Spins SIG. For example webspace at spins.fedoraproject.org will be made available for spin descriptions and links to externally hosted binaries. New spin concepts first come to the Spins SIG for discussion and technical review. Once the Spins SIG comes to a consensus as to technical merit of a proposed spin, that spin concept is passed to the Board for trademark approval.

I'm volunteering to get this show on the road. If you have interest in a Fedora Community Spin, whether it be an existing, new or localized version, sign up and/or attend the first meeting Tuesday April 8th, 21:00 UTC, in the #fedora-meeting channel on the FreeNode IRC Network.

Hey there,

this is a personal message to you! Fedora EMEA is looking for Free (as in Libre) Accounting software that fits the need of an non-profit organization. Do you know what software your local soccer-, football-, hockey-, ice-skating- or computer hobby club is using? If you do -or if you can find out-, would you then please be so kind to drop us a note with the website of that piece of software so that we can give it a good close look?

You can email all of your ideas, specs, URLs and such to board@fedoraemea.org. Thanks, in advance!

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen