Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-04-08)

[Matthew Miller]

Reposted from
http://fedoramagazine.org/five-things-in-fedora-this-week-2014-04-08/


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 8st, 2014:

Heartbleed vulnerability (and fixes)
-----------------------------------

At #1 with a bullet… the OpenSSL “Heartbleed” vulnerability,
technically identified as CVE-2014-0160. This is an exceptionally
severe security issue. The good news is that, thanks to heroic
overnight work of many Fedora contributors, updated packages are
available. More on this in a separate Fedora Magazine post, and watch
for more info soon. The release engineering push to the mirror networks
is in progress.

Special thanks to Robert Mayr, Kévin Raymond, Dennis Gilmore, Robyn
Bergeron, Paul Frields, Major Hayden, Kurt Seifried, Kevin Fenzi, William
Brown, Nick Bebout, Adam Williamson, Joachim Backes, Pádraig Brady, Lokesh
Mandvekar, David Strauss, Joop Braak, Michael Cronenworth, Till Maas and
others for effort in making these updates available quickly. And apologies
if I missed any names which should be on this list — it's been a long night
and day!

  * http://http://heartbleed.com/ "Heartbleed Bug"
  * http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2014-0160
  * http://fedoramagazine.org/status-on-cve-2014-0160-aka-heartbleed/


Vote for Flock Talks
--------------------

The call for submissions for talks at Flock (our annual development
conference) is over. Later this week, voting will begin. There is a
list of 128 potential talks which all look worth attending, but
there’s a goal of having less going on at once this year, so the voting
process is going to be extra-important.

And of course, even if you are not speaking, this is an important event
where we work on our strategy and direction, get some work done, make
the personal connections which help a community run smoothly, and (of
course) have a lot of fun.

There is some funding available for travel and hotel subsidies; it’s not
guaranteed, but we want as many contributors there as possible, so if
you have a need, there is a box to check at registration time.

  * http://flocktofedora.org/ 
  * https://flock-lmacken.rhcloud.com/proposals
  * https://register.flocktofedora.org/


Considering Gnome 3.12 as an F20 update
---------------------------------------

As mentioned last week, Gnome 3.12 is available in the Rawhide
development repository and as an add-on “Copr”. This release is
inspiring very positive reviews even among initial Gnome 3 skeptics.
(Disclaimer: I was certainly one of those skeptics, having never run
Gnome even in the old days, but I’m happily running it now. Your
mileage may vary, but I do recommend a fresh look!).

This has inspired some discussion about possibly including the whole
thing as an update to Fedora 20. This would be a large exception to the
general policy of avoiding incompatible or user interface changes
mid-release, but if the technical hurdles can be solved and user pain
minimized, FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) might
consider it, especially since F20 has a longer-than-normal schedule.

And speaking of followups to last week, Jasper St. Pierre has a nice
blog post on Xwayland landing in the X server and what that means for
you. That has a lot of technical detail, but the short version is that
now this compatibility layer is available on more hardware (not just
Intel graphics), allowing more early experimenters and, in the future,
a smoother transition for everyone.

  * http://fedoramagazine.org/five-things-in-fedora-this-week-2014-04-01/
  * http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/27/gnome_3_12_review/
  * http://www.techrepublic.com/article/gnome-3-10-has-resurrected-what-was-once-the-darling-of-the-linux-desktop/
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/21/Schedule

  * http://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/


Website Refresh for Fedora.next
-------------------------------

Although she posted it on April 1st, Fedora designer Máirín Duffy’s
“proposal for Fedora’s website (considering Fedora.next)” is no joke. I
mentioned this effort [last month][], but there’s a lot more detail
here, with sections on the brochure site, a user support site, and the
“community hub”. Worth a read — and we’d love your input, especially on
how we might make this idea succeed now when somewhat similar efforts
have faltered in the past.

  * http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2014/04/01/a-proposal-for-fedoras-website-considering-fedora-next/
  * http://fedoramagazine.org/five-things-in-fedora-this-week-2014-03-18/

### Red Hat Summit

Red Hat’s annual showcase conference is taking place in San Francisco
next week (April 14–17, 2014), and as usual, Fedora will have a
presence. Tom (“spot”) Callaway and Ruth (“Ruth”) Suehle will be
running the booth, and I’ll be there showing off tech-darling
containerization technology Docker and the Fedora Atomic Remix, which
we are considering using as a base for one of our official cloud
offerings. Of course, I’m happy to talk about anything else across the
Fedoraverse as well. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of familiar
faces and meeting many of you I haven’t yet.

  * http://www.redhat.com/summit/
  * https://www.docker.io/
  * http://rpm-ostree.cloud.fedoraproject.org/
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Docker_Cloud_Image

5tFTW note
----------

Thanks for your feedback last week, everyone. Looks like many people
appreciate the explanation of project details and jargon. And overall,
I’m glad you’re finding this useful — that makes it much easier to keep
it up.

As always, tips on what’s going on in your part of Fedora are
appreciated — e-mail them to me directly, or ping me on IRC.



-- 
Matthew Miller    --   Fedora Project    --    <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
                                  "Tepid change for the somewhat better!"