Reposted from http://fedoramagazine.org/five-things-in-fedora-this-week-2014-04-22/
Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. 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 April 22nd, 2014:
Making it easier to join Fedora -------------------------------
The Fedora Join SIG is our special interest group dedicated to improving the experience for new contributors. It’s been dormant for a while, but it’s back with a bang thanks to Ankur Sinha, Amita Sharma, Sarup Banskota, and others. A recent IRC meeting came up with a couple of immediate ideas, including a Fedora site inspired by What can I do for Mozilla?
If making Fedora more welcoming is interesting to you, join the mailing list and help keep up the momentum.
* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Join_SIG * http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-04-16/fedora_join_irc_m... * http://whatcanidoformozilla.org/ * https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-join
Fedora Docs “Beats” -------------------
Speaking of things you can do for Fedora… how about contributing expertise in your area for the Fedora 21 release notes? I know F21′s October release target seems a long way off, but there’s a lot to do and the summer is going to fly by. Docs team leader Pete Travis recently announced that F21 Beats are Open, noting:
If you’re new to Docs, Beat writing is a good way to get started. Simply choose a package, service, or functionality that interests you and do a little research to see how will change in F21. You can check rawhide package changelogs, read the software changelogs in /usr/share/doc/$pkgname, scrape upstream mailing lists and commit logs, and /reach out to package maintainers or developers.
As always, Pete also provides great, non-intimidating guidance for new docs contributors.
* https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/docs/2014-April/015583.html
Fedora Workstation, and an alternate view — both part of Fedora! ----------------------------------------------------------------
Fedora Workstation developer Christian Schaller wrote a long blog post explaining some of the mindset and background behind the upcoming Fedora Workstation. If you care about Linux on the desktop, this is an interesting read, whether you’re a GNOME fan or not (and whether or not you agree). And if you *do* disagree, remember that that’s absolutely okay too. Longtime Fedora contributor Stephen Smoogen (a self-described “411 year old Linux administrator”) has a great blog post responding to one particular Fedora Workstation decision and why he’s not worried.
Our “Fedora.next” efforts are additive rather than restrictive, and are centered around our Friends Foundation; we may disagree on details, but we can all work together to advance free software as a project.
* http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2014/04/16/preparing-the-ground-for-the-fedora... * http://smoogespace.blogspot.com/2014/04/why-i-am-not-worried-about-lack-of.h... * http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-present-and-future-a-fedora-next-2014-updat... * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations
Fedora Atomic? --------------
At last week’s Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced a new initiative called Project Atomic. This isn’t really new software, or a new operating system or distribution — it’s best described as a pattern for putting together some pieces we already have. Not surprisingly, a lot of these pieces were (and are) worked on by Fedora contributors, including rpm-ostree, Docker, systemd, and a new orchestration building-block called GearD (you can read more about GearD on the OpenShift blog and of course you can `yum install geard` to check it out).
So… (you may be thinking…) how does this fit into Fedora? Well, most of these are parts that we have already been talking about in the Fedora Cloud Working Group, and it may be that GearD provides one of the key missing pieces. We’ve filed a Fedora 21 change proposal for a specially-tailored Docker Host Image, and although we haven’t made any decisions yet, it - looks like the Atomic patterns are very well aligned with what we want to do (and overlap with what we are already doing anyway), so that may end up being our “Fedora Atomic” cloud spin.
One of the pieces of Project Atomic that the Cloud WG *hadn’t* looked at is Cockpit, a web-based server management GUI. The interesting thing is that this is one of the key features proposed for Fedora Server, and if we decide to include that part in our Docker cloud image, that will be a point of coherence across the products. (See the Project Atomic docs on what that might provide.)
* http://www.redhat.com/summit/2014/updates/ * http://www.projectatomic.io/ * https://www.openshift.com/blogs/geard-the-intersection-of-paas-docker-and-pr... * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Docker_Cloud_Image * http://cockpit-project.org/ "Cockpit Project" * http://www.projectatomic.io/docs/cockpit/
Automatic Weekly Data! ----------------------
If I had been paying attention and knew about http://thisweekinfedora.org/ before I started doing these posts, I might have named *this* something a bit less similar. Oh well! Names aside, though, these articles and that site are actually complementary. I pick out things to feature as they strike my attention, while This Week in Fedora presents automatically-collected statistics every Monday. You won’t really learn any *news*there, but you will find data on all sorts of contributor activities, from package builds to user creation to meetings logged. If you’re data-oriented, it’s an interesting way to get a feel for the technical pulse of the community.
* http://thisweekinfedora.org/
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 05:03:05PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: Reposted from
Fedora Workstation, and an alternate view — both part of Fedora!
Fedora Workstation developer Christian Schaller wrote a long blog post explaining some of the mindset and background behind the upcoming Fedora Workstation. If you care about Linux on the desktop, this is an interesting read, whether you’re a GNOME fan or not (and whether or not you agree). And if you *do* disagree, remember that that’s absolutely okay too. Longtime Fedora contributor Stephen Smoogen (a self-described “411 year old Linux administrator”) has a great blog post responding to one particular Fedora Workstation decision and why he’s not worried.
I was really eager to read of "...why he’s not worried..." but the long & short of the post:
<The Blog Post Start> Why I am not worried about the lack of a default firewall in F21 Workstation
So one of the proposals for Fedora 21 is that the Workstation Product will not ship with a firewall. Normally I would be up in arms about something like this (I expect someone can find my emails in the past) but not this time. It might be the mai-tais and my vacation talking, but I look at many of these changes to the Workstation as product differentiation points. If Fedora Workstation does X, Y, and Z then the Xedora product can aim at not doing those.
Maybe Xedora is an OS for people who are tired old grumpy system administrators who the world has passed by. Maybe it will come with E19 and FVWM2 desktops with a firewall and a E-toolkit configurator for firewalld, maybe it will be KDE and QT configuration tools for items that the Workstation isn't aiming at. Then both groups can get what they want without a lot of squabbling and wasted Email trying to convince each other items that the other side feels are strawmen arguments.
Anyway, my mai-tai has arrived. Have fun. <The Blog Post End>
Nothing much of an answer to the main question/concern except:
a) I look at many of these changes to the Workstation as product differentiation points
b) Maybe Xedora is an OS for people who are tired old grumpy system administrators who the world has passed by.
That summarizes the whole blog. So in order to create a "differentiation" between products, a security feature is being removed or rather put in a sleeping beauty mode & people concerned about it are "tired old grumpy system administrators who the world has passed by."
A typical main stream media negative reporting tactics based on tagging & gung-ho attitude on the assumptions that concerned people are Admins & not users since users are clueless dunderheads.
Well, in my opinion we should go further to make Fedora desktop user's OS experience smoother.
Remove Selinux or disable it by default.
PAM etc password/login checks shouldn't be bothered with especially with laptops etc since in majority of cases there is only one user.
Go even further. Put all file access to 777 so that there no access denied errors at any point of operations due to this ancient & cumbersome restrictive policy. The system may even run faster.
I have started wondering, why iptables/firewall & other securities were even invented & incorporated in the first place, what were their purposes???
A very negative blog not worth mentioning.
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Matthew Miller -
Vikram Goyal