Announcing Fedora 11 Beta
by Jesse Keating
This is the part where I usually come up with something clever to say
before the useful information regarding a development release. I had
something great, I really did. In fact I had the most clever statement
in the world. Only you see, my cat jumped on my keyboard, right when I
was testing emacs (I don't even use emacs!) and the darn X session just
got zapped! All my cleverness gone, and this, well this is just a
tribute.
When Fedora 10 was released, users and press alike gushed: "Slick and
stable... has a rock solid feel." "Fast and easy." "A great release."
What's next for the free operating system that shows off the best new
technology of tomorrow? You can find out at:
http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease
We also hope to repeat the crazy success of Fedora 10's Beta contest!
Test five things in the Beta that are important to you as a user. If you
find a bug *and* report it, you get the free attention of a package
maintainer on a problem personally important to you! Do your part to
make Fedora 11 that much better.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/
Among the top features of this ground-breaking release:
* Automatic Fonts & Mime Installer - Allows programs on the
desktop to automatically install applications, fonts, multimedia
capabilities, and clipart.
* Fingerprint Readers - Better experience for systems with
fingerprint readers, including support through the graphical
Authentication Configuration tool and gnome-about-me.
* Intel, ATI, and Nvidia kernel modesetting - Fedora 10 provided
the first steps by a major distribution in using the kernel
modesetting (KMS) feature to speed up graphical boot. Fedora 11
has increased the video card coverage of the KMS feature, with
more to come.
* Virt Console - Fedora 11 provides more accurate mouse pointer
positioning and higher screen resolutions for virtual machine
consoles, along with other improvements such as simpler use of
USB devices.
* MinGW Cross-compiler - Build and test full-featured Microsoft
Windows programs, from the comfort of a Fedora system, without
needing to use that "other OS."
* Volume Control - The multimedia experience of Fedora users is
improved by an easily understandable and much more flexible
volume control.
But wait, there's more! For developers there are all sorts of goodies:
* Python 2.6 - This new version in Fedora is a precursor to Python
3000 (3.0), including many compatibility measures to help
developers get their code prepared for the next generation of
Python.
* NetBeans 6.5 - NetBeans IDE 6.5 is a significant update of
NetBeans IDE 6.1 that includes improved JavaScript, AJAX, Ruby,
and database support.
* gcc 4.4 - The gcc compiler suite has been updated to the latest
version, featuring better error detection for the latest in
safety and execution.
* Eclipse profiling tools - Add the power of various native
profiling tools into the Eclipse IDE and integrate with the rest
of the development environment.
Peek under the hood and there is still more:
* Desktop Environments - Updates to Gnome 2.26 and KDE 4.2.1 bring
the latest innovations and functionality to desktop users. Xfce
and Sugar have also been updated.
* Anaconda Storage - New storage code for the Anaconda installer
improves the ability to handle new types of storage. The rewrite
does not change the user interface.
* Minimal Platform - New installer features make it much easier to
create very small installations for embedded applications, such
as for a server or desktop appliance.
* Control groups - Allows system administrator to partition the
system resources into different sub groups, and dedicate these
sub groups resources to different applications' need.
* DeviceKit - A simple, modular system service to manage devices
and designed to partially replace HAL. Users gain a graphical
disk management application that integrates nicely into the
desktop.
* DNS Security - DNSSEC (DNS SECurity) is a mechanism that can
prove integrity and authenticity of DNS data.
* ext4 filesystem - ext4 is the new default file system for Fedora
11 (replacing ext3) allowing for larger file system support and
better performance by providing real-time fragmentation
prevention and smarter data allocations.
* sVirt MAC - sVirt integrates SELinux with the Fedora
virtualization stack to allow Mandatory Access Control (MAC)
security be applied to guest virtual machines
* Power Management - Fedora 11 includes new power monitoring
utilities and a new system daemon that automatically adjusts
power settings to reflect the current system use. There is also
a facility to review the system and make suggestions on
improving power consumption.
* IBus input method - Ibus has been rewritten in C, and provides a
simple, clean default system for changing the way international
users input information into a Fedora system.
And that is only the beginning. A more complete list and details of each
new cited feature is available:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList
For release information, including common and known bugs, please refer
to the release notes:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes
Since this is a Beta release, there may still be some rough spots still
in the polishing phase. Some of them are already known and in the
process of fixing. If you find a problem, please check the list of known
issues and then file a bug:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes#Known_Issues
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
14 years, 8 months
Fedora 11 early branch now available.
by Jesse Keating
For those of you that wish to separate Fedora 11 stabalization work from
future development, we are now ready to process branch requests for
F-11.
If you branch your package early, builds from your new F-11 branch will
continue to go to the Fedora 11 targets. dist-f11 for now, and
eventually dist-f11-updates-candidate. Builds from devel/ will be sent
to dist-f12 and will be held for the Fedora 12 rawhide once we get
Fedora 11 out the door.
To request a branch, please continue to use the cvsadmin request method:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/CVSAdminProcedure
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
14 years, 8 months
Qt 4.5 coming to Fedora 9 and 10, license changing to LGPL
by Kevin Kofler
Hi,
We are working on providing Qt 4.5.0 as updates for Fedora 9 and 10. The updates
have already been built. They will be tagged into the buildroots for Fedora 9
and 10 shortly after this announcement is sent, in order for KDE 4 packages to
get rebuilt against it, as some KDE modules are highly dependent on the Qt
version used to build them and check the Qt version at build time. (Therefore,
we timed the Qt upgrade to coincide with the KDE 4.2.2 update, which we will be
packaging during the next few days.) From there, the Qt 4.5.0 updates will be
pushed to updates-testing and eventually the stable updates together with
KDE 4.2.2.
If you maintain any Qt-4-based package, please:
* check if your package needs patching or rebuilding to fully work with Qt 4.5.
The update is normally backwards-compatible, so almost all packages are
expected to work with no changes. However, due to bugs in some applications
and bugs in Qt 4.4 which were being worked around, there are some rare cases
where patches are needed. If you are aware of any such patches, please apply
them to Rawhide immediately if not already done, then to Fedora 9 and 10 as
soon as Qt 4.5 is in the buildroots. Once you have the patched or rebuilt
version built, please talk to us on #fedora-kde or the fedora-kde mailing list
to have your package included into the Qt 4.5 update group.
* check if your package can benefit from getting rebuilt against Qt 4.5 for some
other reason, e.g. new features which require Qt 4.5 at build time, or a new
upstream version requiring Qt 4.5 to build. If so, please proceed as above.
* make sure you DO NOT push out an update which was built against Qt 4.5 before
Qt 4.5 itself (as the compatibility is only unidirectional, i.e. packages
built against Qt 4.5 will most likely NOT work with Qt 4.4). If you need to
build and push an urgent update to a Qt-4-using package (e.g. a security
update), please talk to Rex Dieter (via e-mail or IRC) to get Qt 4.5
temporarily untagged from the buildroot so you can build it against Qt 4.4.
We are pushing this update to the stable releases of Fedora for 4 reasons:
* some packages benefit vastly from the improvements in Qt 4.5, in particular
Arora hugely benefits from the major improvements in QtWebKit,
* it fixes several bugs in the Qt 4.4 series,
* it will be required for KDE 4.3 (and some other software) and
* at least one package in a third-party repository is waiting for the license
change (see below) for license compatibility reasons.
As it is a backwards-compatible update, we do not expect major disruption.
Compatibility issues with Qt 4.5 have already been identified and fixed during
the weeks Qt 4.5 has been in Rawhide, so they should all be resolved by now.
Please also note that, as already announced when the new version hit Rawhide,
the license has changed from:
GPLv2 with exceptions or GPLv3 with exceptions
to:
LGPLv2 with exceptions or GPLv3 with exceptions
which is more permissive.
For the Fedora KDE SIG,
Kevin Kofler
14 years, 8 months
Fedora 11 Beta Freeze lifted
by Jesse Keating
We have composed our Beta images, and thus I'm lifting the beta freeze.
Tomorrow's rawhide will have all the pent up changes. March on toward
final!
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
14 years, 8 months
2009-03-26 - Fedora Test Day - Nouveau graphics driver
by James Laska
Greetings testers,
Adam Williamson and Ben Skeggs have lined up an exciting Fedora Test Day
topic. This Thursday, March 26 will focus on testing the new nouveau
graphics driver. If the Intel graphics test day [1] was any indication,
this will be a busy event.
As outlined in the NouveauAsDefault feature page [2], the nouveau driver
will be replacing the previous 'nv' driver for nVidia chipsets. There
are several notable improvements including RANDR 1.2 support and
accelerated XRENDER support. To determine if you have the required
hardware, run the following command:
# /sbin/lspci -d 10de: | grep -iq VGA && echo "Join Nouveau Fedora Test Day"
So come join #fedora-qa this Thursday, March 26, 2009 to share your
Nouveau graphics test results. A Fedora live image will be available to
aid testing. Stay tuned for more details are available at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-24.
Thanks,
James
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-12
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NouveauAsDefault
14 years, 8 months
Announcing Transifex 0.5
by Dimitris Glezos
Indifex and the Transifex Community are proud to announce the newest version
of their flagship translation platform, Transifex 0.5.
Transifex is a web application written in Python using the Django web
framework that gives translators a web interface to various version control
systems. Files to be translated can be downloaded, translated files can be
uploaded directly to the source repository, and various translation statistics
can be read at a glance.
Transifex is already in use by the Fedora Project to translate its interfaces
to an audience of more than 5 million users.
What does it offer?
===================
Transifex currently supports the following Version control systems:
- Concurrent Version System
- Subversion
- Bazaar
- Mercurial
- Git
For statistics generation, Transifex supports static gettext message catalogs
and intltool-based ones, used by the vast majority of open source software
projects.
What's new in 0.5?
==================
A full list of the features offered in this release can be found in the
release notes:
http://docs.transifex.org/releases/0.5.html
This release represents a significant advance in Transifex development since
the Transifex 0.3 release in November 2008. Here’s a 40K-foot view of the
release in numbers and most important feature categories.
243 files changed, 14027 insertions(+), 319 deletions(-)
- Complete re-write of the source code on top of the Django Web framework
- New data model supporting multiple repositories per project (eg. branches
or domains of files), and project collections (eg. Fedora, GNOME, etc.)
- Calculation of a project’s translation coverage (statistics)
- Submission support of files to a variety of version control systems
- Support for serving translation files to users for easy access to them
- User registrations and authentication (including OpenID)
- Simple workflow support
What does it look like?
=======================
The Fedora Project is currently running an instance of Transifex at:
https://translate.fedoraproject.org/tx/
For some eye candy, check out the screenshots on our site, at:
http://transifex.org/screenshots
How can I get it?
=================
Project and community managers who want to deploy Transifex for their
own community can get Transifex in a variety of ways.
A tarball of Transifex 0.5 is available at:
http://transifex.org/files/
For full installation instructions, refer to the documentation section:
http://docs.transifex.org/intro/install.html
RPM packages for Fedora 9, Fedora 10, and Fedora Rawhide are or will
soon be available via yum:
yum install transifex transifex-extras
RPM packages for RHEL 5, CentOS 5, and Scientific Linux 5 will be
available in Fedora EPEL:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
Regards,
The staff of Indifex and the Transifex Community
http://transifex.org/
http://www.indifex.com/
14 years, 8 months
Fedora 11 Beta slip
by Jesse Keating
Today we have decided to slip the Beta release by 7 days. There are a
number of reasons,
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=476774&hide_resolved=1 has gory details, but essentially:
* Late discovered PPC breakage
* LiveCD installation fallout due to anaconda storage rewrite
* More time for anaconda storage rewrite to settle
This is in no means a pointing of fingers, many factors led to the
current state we're in now. Our task now is to determine the best way
to get a valuable Beta release out to our users with as little effect to
the final release schedule. As such, Release Engineering in
coordination with QA and maintainers who are working on the above issue
have agreed to enact a 7 day slip. The final release date will not
change, we will absorb the lost week into the time between beta and
final freeze.
Rawhide freeze will remain in effect. Only critical changes will be
tagged for the Beta, in order to maximize our changes at fixing the
current issues without introducing new ones.
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
14 years, 8 months
Upcoming Fedora Test Days ... DeviceKit and XFCE
by James Laska
Greetings,
With Fedora 11 Beta looming [1], I'd like to invite folks to help test
several upcoming release Features.
* DeviceKit [2] - Tuesday, March 17, 2009
* XFCE-4.6 [3] - Thursday, March 19, 2009
= DeviceKit =
Ever notice how the graphical disk management functionality present
during a Fedora installation is not available after you've installed
your system?
<Enter DeviceKit on stage left>
DeviceKit adds a graphical disk management utility (provided by
gnome-disk-utility) and provides the backend for gnome-power-manager.
If you have some time to spare, and removable media or USB/fireware
attached storage ... I invite you to join #fedora-qa this Tuesday, March
17, 2009 to help make sure your unique hardware works when Fedora 11 is
released.
Developers Tomas Bzatek and Matthias Clasen, along with testers Radek
Biba and Ondrej Hudlicky, will help guide test efforts and analyze
failures. Additional information and test cases are landing in
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-17.
= XFCE-4.6 =
Already a seasoned XFCE user? Or, tired of the same old desktop and
looking for something different? Fedora 11 will feature XFCE-4.6 which
adds a number of improvements [4] including a redesigned configuration
manager and power management integration.
XFCE maintainer Kevin Fenzi and our very own Adam Williamson are looking
for your input to help craft test cases [5] and ensure a smooth
transition to the latest upstream release. Come share your findings
this Thursday, March 19 in #fedora-qa.
Stay tuned to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-19 for
more information.
Thanks,
James
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/Schedule
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DeviceKit
[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Xfce46
[4] http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.6/general-info
[5]
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-February/msg00555.html
14 years, 8 months
