5tFTW: FUDCon1 Flashback, Getting Involved, Sandboxed Apps, Fedora Planet, and Google Summer of Code (2015-02-18)

[Matthew Miller]

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. 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 February 18th, 2015:


FUDCon1 Flashback
-----------------

Ten years ago today, we had the very first FUDCon — the “Fedora User and
Developer Conference”. Check out this awesome video put together at
the time, with a lot of familiar faces and good memories.

(And if you’re curious, read more about the Historic Event in our wiki
archive.)

  * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMaOcweyNo4
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Archive:FUDCon:Boston_2005


Get Invoved, with *What Can I Do?*
----------------------------------

Fedora hacker Ralph Bean put together a slick new site
http://whatcanidoforfedora.org/, in the style of Mozilla’s
original. If you’re interested in getting involved as a Fedora
contributor but don’t know where to begin, this site can help you find
something that fits your interests and skills. Flip through until you
find a match, and hit the “tell me more” button.

(Or, if you’re part of a Fedora subproject looking for help, you can add
your own by submitting a pull request or filing RFEs on GitHub.)

  * http://whatcanidoforfedora.org/
  * http://whatcanidoformozilla.org/
  * https://github.com/fedora-infra/asknot-ng/tree/develop/questions


Fully-Sandboxed App Proof-of-Concept
------------------------------------

At the DevConf.cz conference last week, Alexander Larsson spoke
about his work on a better way to ship apps — a model which allows
applications to be securely sandboxed and also only loosely coupled to
distro version. Now, on his blog, Alex demonstrates an actual program
running in a real sandbox. We have a long way to go, but many of the
technologies required to make this happen are coming into place,
including kdbus and Wayland.

Docker and related container technologies are all the rage on the
server side and in cloud computing. These efforts bring some of the
same ideas and benefits to the Linux desktop — a very ambitious effort
which is finally starting to become reality.

  * http://devconf.cz/
  * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-2a_XYJPEY
  * https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2015/02/17/first-fully-sandboxed-linux-desk...
  * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7Lbvmt2Wt4
  * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVVT6Lo7fGI
  * https://www.docker.com/
  * http://www.eweek.com/cloud/red-hat-reimagines-openshift-3-paas-with-docke...


Fedora Planet Blog Aggregator
-----------------------------

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the new Fedora Start Page. One of
the key changes is that the new page focuses on content from Fedora
Magazine, while the older one drew from the Fedora Planet Blog
Aggregator. Sumit Bhardwaj asked about this change on the Fedora
devel list, and some conversation followed.

I think the key thing is: since there are many times more users than
developers, we are trying to keep the Fedora Magazine articles user
focused, while the Planet presents a firehose of often very technical
blog posts. We don’t want to overwhelm users with a torrent of insider,
developer content, while at the same time, we *do* want users to know
what’s going on and to feel a part of (and drawn into) the Fedora
community. We’re still working on that balance for the Magazine, and
for the Start page. In the meantime, if you *like* the firehose,
suggest setting your start page directly to
http://planet.fedoraproject.org/ — that’s not going away.

(Personally, I’m subscribed to it using rss2email, so all of your blog
posts show up in my inbox next to all of my Fedora mail — speaking of
information firehoses….)

  * http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2015-01-28/
  * http://start.fedoraproject.org/
  * http://planet.fedoraproject.org/
  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-February/207899.html
  * https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/rss2email


Google Summer of Code Proposals (Hurry!)
----------------------------------------

This almost slipped through the cracks, but Stephen Gallagher and
Kushal Das are picking it up just in time. Every year, Google offers
stipends to students for contributions to open source projects; in
order for us to *be* one of those projects, we need to apply as a
mentoring organization. And to do that, we need to get our proposal in
this week: which means, basically, if you have an aspect of Fedora
which could benefit from a student code contribution, go here and add
your name and prospective project *right now*.

  * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2015-February/003255.html



-- 
Matthew Miller            mattdm(a)mattdm.org             <http://mattdm.org/>
Fedora Project Leader  mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org  <http://fedoraproject.org/>