Bad default error policy causes printing issues and BIG usability issues
by Valent Turkovic
Hi,
currently default error policy for printers in Fedora is "Stop printer" on
any error which is a really bad default. I have run across this issue LOTS
of times with regular Fedora desktop users who don't get why has their
printer stopped working, there is no UI queue to warn users, there is no
easy way to "Start printer" with one click after it has been stopped. It is
just a big mess.
Even worse, previous versions of Gnome control panel (if I remember
correctly) had option to change default error policy, now that option is
removed and you can get to it only by installing system-config-printers
tool, something regular users have no idea about even exists, and it is not
installed by default.
There are too many examples which are simple user errors but result in
priner going offline (stopped) and this is really bad, because after any
small error users can't print any more.
For example: user trying to print while he/she is not at home so his/hers
printer is not available, user trying to print but has forgot to connect
usb priner cable, user trying to print but haven't turned it on, user
printing to wifi printer but while connected to different wifi network...
Any of these actions is simple uses error but results in permanently
disabling of priner (Stops printer) and users can't print even when they
resolve issue that was stopping them from accessing the printer.
Now Fedora is what is stopping them from printing.
Who is responsible for user experience of Fedora desktop? To whom should I
point this issue to?
1 year, 10 months
F21 Self Contained Change: Replace Bacula with Bareos
by Jaroslav Reznik
= Proposed Self Contained Change: Replace Bacula with Bareos =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Bareos
Change Owner(s): Simone Caronni <negativo17 at gmail.com>
The powerful Bacula network backup solution has switched from being Open
Source friendly to being almost closed source. Originally the project was
conceived totally as Open Source, but since the creation of Bacula Systems and
its proprietary Bacula Enterprise Edition product, the Open Source (now called
"Community Edition") has received less and less updates and is mostly
abandoned.
== Detailed description ==
The most important points that are left "abandoned" are the following:
* Installation scripts and updates to makefiles are not updated anymore.
* New plugins and functionalities are not added anymore, except those in the
"core" daemons.
* Gaphical (and buggy) console has not received any update in almost two
years.
* Patches and bugs opened in the bug tracker are mostly left abandoned. Even
trivial fixes are not imported in the source.
* Windows binaries are no longer provided, nor the source for the clients has
been updated. Even if compiled with difficulties, there is no support for recent
Windows versions.
A former Bacula developer, frustrated by the situation created the fork Bareos
a long time ago from Bacula 5.2.x (the current Fedora and RHEL 7 version).
This version has now received '''a lot of bugfixes''' compared to the original
Bacula source. This makes compilation and installation a lot easier than it
was with Bacula.
On top of this, a '''lot of new features''' have been added; some unique to
Bareos but many available only in the closed source Bacula Enterprise.
Here is the list of new features compared to the current Bacula 5.2.13:
* http://www.bareos.org/en/whats_new.html
Some highlights include NDMP support for enterprise class storage (NetApp,
etc.), support for enterprise class tape libraries and Windows support
(including Windows Server 2012) with Bareos generated binaries.
For further details on why a Bacula fork was created please look at the
following links:
* http://www.bareos.org/en/faq/items/why_fork.html
Bareos can also be '''fully compatible with Bacula''' by setting a specific
configuration directive in the Daemon configuration files; thus providing the
option for RHEL 6/7 users to interoperate with Fedora systems.
* http://www.bareos.org/en/faq/items/bareos_bacula_compatibility.html
== Scope ==
To accomplish the goal, the following Bacula packages need to be replaced with
Bareos equivalents:
bacula
bacula-docs
Currently, the same Fedora packages can be rebuilt as they are, to work also
on CentOS/RHEL 5 and 6, upgrading the EPEL or official Bacula packages in the
distributions. This is to have a consistent backup infrastructure across all
the Fedora/CentOS/RHEL ecosystem.
To ease installation, a repository for installing those packages on a
CentOS/RHEL system do exist:
http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/slaanesh/bacula/README.txt
The idea is the same for Bareos: import into Fedora 21 packages that can be
rebuilt for all supported Fedora/RHEL/CentOS releases and provide a repository
that can upgrade any Bacula release currently installed in the system with the
new one. In detail; the upgrade scenarios supported when going from Bacula to
Bareos would be:
From Bacula 2.4:
* RHEL/CentOS 5 with EPEL repository
From Bacula 5.0:
* RHEL/CentOS 6
From Bacula 5.2.13:
* Fedora 18+
* RHEL/CentOS 5
* RHEL/CentOS 6
As written before, the change is impacting only Fedora 21, the list of
upgrades supported are only for users who want a consistent backup solution
across the enterprise.
=== External activities ===
Proposal owners: I'm the current Bacula mantainer in Fedora and will complete
the transition in time for the release.
Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
Release engineering: the release engineering team should make sure the new
Bareos packages are in place instead of the current Bacula packages for the
new release.
Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
_______________________________________________
devel-announce mailing list
devel-announce(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce
2 years, 3 months
F22 System Wide Change: Change xorg input stack to use libinput
by Jaroslav Reznik
= Proposed System Wide Change: Change xorg input stack to use libinput =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/LibinputForXorg
Change owner(s): Hans de Goede <hdegoede(a)redhat.com>
Replace the current (low-level) input xorg drivers with libinput using the
xorg-x11-drv-libinput wrapper.
== Detailed Description ==
Currently xorg uses different input drivers depending on the device type. This
makes it impossible to do things like middle button scrolling on the
trackpoint on laptops where the trackpoint buttons are software-emulated
buttons on the touchpad. Besides this the xf86-input-synaptics driver was
never really designed for multi-touch touchpads and this causes various
issues.
For Wayland we've been working on a new improved input stack, which is to be
shared by all compositors and lives inside libinput. We plan to replace the
current (low-level) input xorg drivers with libinput using the xorg-x11-drv-
libinput wrapper.
== Scope ==
Besides xorg changes, this will also require changes to the control panel
applets for mouse / touchpad configuration in the various desktop environments,
as those all are hardcoded to use the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics specific
interfaces.
* Proposal owners:
Package libinput and xorg-drv-input-libinput (done), make sure that xorg-drv-
input-libinput has the necessary config interfaces for control panel
mouse/touchpad config applets (wip). Write patches for gnome-control-center
mouse/touchpad capplet. Coordinate with other desktop environments.
* Other developers:
GNOME: merge the gnome-control-center patches. KDE: limits itself to standard
X11 mouse config interfaces, no changes needed. Other Desktop Environments:
adjust control-panel code to deal with xorg-x11-drv-libinput, merge these
changes.
* Release engineering: N/A
* Policies and guidelines: N/A
_______________________________________________
devel-announce mailing list
devel-announce(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce
2 years, 4 months
Configurable version of suexec in Debian but not Fedora?!
by Neal Gompa
So a friend of mine has been wrangling with suexec trying to configure it
for his needs, and he has become quite furious over the fact that suexec
isn't configurable.
Then he finds out that Debian actually has a version of suexec[1] that lets
you use a conf file to configure suexec. My question is, why the heck isn't
this in Fedora? How is it that Debian can offer both versions[1][2], but
Fedora cannot?
I'm honestly surprised that Fedora doesn't offer this little piece of
flexibility. I would think that this would be in Fedora and RHEL, because
of how useful this would be. So what's going on here?
[1]: https://packages.debian.org/sid/apache2-suexec-custom
[2]: https://packages.debian.org/sid/apache2-suexec-pristine
--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
2 years, 5 months
RFC: xserver update strategy in F21+
by Adam Jackson
Since the modular X repackaging in FC5, we have limited X server updates
such that the ABI does not change. F20 shipped with xserver 1.14.4, for
example, so we might update it to 1.14.7 but not to 1.15.0. With the
reduced driver set in F21 it's now much more reasonable to push updates
to older releases as well.
With that in mind, I ask for feedback on how we'd actually like that to
work. The kernel rebase policy seems like a pretty reasonable model:
F21 would stay on 1.16.x until there's an upstream 1.17.1 release, and
(if F20 were to be affected by this policy) F20 would wait until 1.17.1
had been tested in F21.
One thing we might have to play by ear is the interaction with binary
drivers. The nvidia legacy driver, for instance, does not always have
builds available for arbitrarily new servers, which means updating the X
server might change you to an nvidia driver that no longer supports your
hardware. Depending on how severe that cutoff is, it might be cause to
pin a particular Fedora release at a given server version. I don't
think this is presently a problem, but it could be in the future.
This would also want some coordination with the various desktop
environments; the version of KDE in F21 might have latent bugs only
exposed by switching to F22's X, for example. I have a reasonable idea
of how to test Gnome for that kind of thing, but for the others I'd need
some pointers.
So what do we think? Good idea? Bad idea? Other things to watch for?
- ajax
2 years, 5 months
Cinnamon Spin
by Dan Book
Hello,
I have put together a basic Cinnamon Live spin, and was wondering if this
is something people would like to see become official. It's not ready for
submission quite yet, there is a bit of a hack to change the default
gtk-theme to Zukitwo, as the Adwaita gtk-theme messes up title-bar and
desktop icon colors (something that should probably be fixed upstream, this
happens for any Cinnamon install by default in F21). I'm not a Fedora
packager nor do I have a whole lot of time to put into this, but I am
willing to update and maintain the spin as necessary.
I have the kickstart files in this github repo:
https://github.com/Grinnz/spin-kickstart-cinnamon
And resulting images, which I have briefly tested and installed in a VM:
https://grinnz.com/public/spins-cinnamon/
I added a skeleton wiki page as well:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cinnamon_Spin
-Dan Book
2 years, 5 months
Re: python-dateutil update
by Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
On Mon, Dec 08, 2014 at 09:10:59AM -0700, Pete Travis wrote:
> On Dec 8, 2014 8:51 AM, "Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek" <zbyszek(a)in.waw.pl>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, Dec 07, 2014 at 04:45:12PM -0700, Pete Travis wrote:
> > > python-dateutil is old[0]. Fedora is carrying version 1.5, and upstream
> > > is up to 2.3 . If you're receiving this mail directly, you are a
> > > maintainer of a package that depends on python-dateutil, and we need
> > > your help.
> > It seems that calibre is fine with the new version. I wanted to update
> > pyton-dateutil to check if calibre works, and it seems that I
> > installed python-dateutil-2.3 with pip --user couple of months ago and
> > calibre didn't seem to mind. There's some dateutil usage in the installer,
> > which I didn't test but which we probably don't care about.
> > https://github.com/dateutil/dateutil/blob/master/NEWS also doesn't seem
> > scary.
> >
> > So I think it's fine it python-dateutil is updated as a calibre dep.
> >
> > Zbyszek
>
> Great, thanks for responding. I'm a *light* calibre user, but I'd be
> happy to help test with a newer dateutil when it becomes available if
> that's the direction you are going.
You can just install the python-dateutil-2.* package and test away ;)
Looking at the list and your annoucement mail again, I wonder if it
might be better to bump python-dateutil to 2.2 again as soon as the
updated python-dateutil15 is available, and simply modify packages
which either explicitly depend on dateutil < 2 or exhibit problems to
depend on python-dateutil15. Proven packagers can do that trivially if
necessary. Otherwise this could drag on for months.
fedocal and python-django-tastypie are the only packages which
explicitly require python-dateutil < 2. If you wish, I can volunteer
file bugs to change the dependency for F21 and rawhide for those two
packages and do it myself after a week if the maintainers don't
respond or are fine with the change (got to use those provenpackager
privs for something :)).
Zbyszek
2 years, 6 months
Best way to use zram in Fedora 21?
by Juan Orti Alcaine
Hi, I know how to manually configure the zram, but what's the best way
to do it?
I've seen the unit zram.service of anaconda-core, and it gets activated
when booting with inst.zram=on, but it looks like very anaconda-centric.
Should something like [1] be packaged and included in the distro? or
maybe we should spin off the anaconda zram.service and do it more
generic.
I think this is a very interesting feature for memory constrained VMs
and other devices.
[1] https://github.com/mystilleef/FedoraZram
2 years, 6 months
5tFTW: Fedora 21, 22, and 19, firewall discussion, and holiday break
by Matthew Miller
Reposted from <http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-12-17/>.
Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that
goes on. This series highlights interesting happenings in five
different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just
quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for
December 17th, 2014:
Fedora 21 Retrospective: What was awesome? What wasn’t?
-------------------------------------------------------
While Fedora 22 is already rolling into the target zone, we do want to
make sure we look back at this previous cycle and identify things we
can improve — ideally, specific and actionable changes. In the end, we
came out with (another!) great release, but there is always something
to learn. In particular, we ended _yet again_ in a last minute scramble
to get a release we could feel good about signing off on out before the
holidays, and next time around it would be nice to put less stress on
all of our contributors (including the quality assurance team and the
developers needed to make those late fixes.)
There will be more to it than this, but to get started, we have a F21
Retrospective wiki page, to help collect comments and ideas.
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_21_Retrospective
Fedora 22: Coming up fast!
--------------------------
FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, the elected
organization which oversees technical decisions in the project) has
indicated that we’re back to aiming for the traditional May/October
Fedora release cycle, and although the F22 schedule isn’t finalized yet,
we have a tentative plan calling for a release about 6 months from
now. When you work back from that, it means that there’s really not much
time to think about change proposals for F22, especially if we
subtract out holiday time. So, if you’re thinking of working on
something big, please start getting your proposal formalized — the
tentative deadline is January 20th, 2015.
Fedora 19: End of Life
----------------------
And on the other end of the cycle: it’s time to say farewell to Fedora
19. If you’re running this release, please plan to update before January
6th, 2015, when the last updates will go out. After that, there will be
no further security fixes. The good news is that Fedora 20 was a great
release, and Fedora 21 is *even better*, and I think you’ll be happy
with the upgrade.
* http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-19-eol-01-06-2015/
Fedora Workstation firewall discussion
--------------------------------------
This week’s big devel-list thread concerned the default firewall
settings in Fedora Workstation. The Fedora Workstation Working Group was
not happy with the user experience offered by blocking incoming “high
ports” by default. Out of the box, nothing is listening on these, but if
one installs software that expects to, it won’t work, and because we
don’t have a good way yet to tie *attempts* to access ports to listening
applications and communicate that to the user, the resulting failure is
invisible.
On the other hand, if you install something and it starts listening and
you didn’t know that, that’s *also* invisible. So, pretty much everyone
recognizes this as a not ideal situation. Everyone involved in the
discussion also is concerned with enhancing user security in practice —
the question is just how to best get there from an imperfect state.
Originally, the Workstation WG asked to disable the firewall entirely.
FESCo asked instead that it be left available, possibly with a
less-restrictive out-of-the-box configuration — the path taken for F21.
If you’re not running Workstation, this doesn’t affect you. If you are,
and would like a different configuration, run the firewall configuration
tool and either edit the Fedora Workstation zone or change the default
zone. (There’s a long list of options, but “public” is a
generally-restrictive choice.)
You can also change the per-network zone. Unfortunately currently wired
networks are all considered as one per interface, but wireless networks
are distinguished individually. This can be done in a number of ways,
but the easiest is to run the network configuration tool (in GNOME
control center — press the overview key and start typing “network”),
select the wifi network in question, press the little gear icon next to
it, go down to Identity (?!), and choose the appropriate firewall zone.
(Again, there’s a long list — go back to the firewall config tool to see
exactly what they all do.)
This is clearly, not the most friendly approach; it’s my understanding
that the desktop designers, network tools team, and security team are
going to work together to develop a better overall solution for Fedora
22 and beyond.
Overall, the mailing list thread stayed relatively positive and
constructive and avoided personal attacks, although there were some
accusations of bad faith actions which do not seem warranted based on
the actual history. It is, however, a case where more transparent
discussion and communication could have helped; that’s something we’re
continually working at making better and might make for a good component
of the F21 retrospective mentioned above.
* https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-December/205010.html
Christmas break
---------------
Of course things in Fedora never really stop, but it’s vacation time for
many of us. Before I was a Red Hat employee, I was used to seeing
extended days off as ideal for getting in some serious work on Fedora.
Now, things are strangely inverted, and I’m going to use the time to
unplug a bit. I’ll be back in January all recharged, and will catch up
with everything that’s happened in the meantime — FtFTW will resume the
week of January 15th — or possibly the week before, but let’s save the
hard-to-keep resolutions for New Year’s Day. :)
Check out the Fedora vacation calendar to see who else will be away,
and make sure to add yourself if you will be too. (There's even a
Fedora badge for doing so!)
* https://apps.fedoraproject.org/calendar/vacation/
* https://badges.fedoraproject.org/badge/vacation
--
Matthew Miller mattdm(a)mattdm.org <http://mattdm.org/>
Fedora Project Leader mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org <http://fedoraproject.org/>
2 years, 6 months
