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 ;-)

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/

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.

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.