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 ;-))

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.

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?

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.

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