Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-05-13)

Wed May 14 00:07:10 UTC 2014

Reposted from
http://fedoramagazine.org/five-things-in-fedora-this-week-2014-05-13/

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 May 13th, 2014:

Pidora 2014: Fedora 20 for the Raspberry Pi
-------------------------------------------

I was going to put this at the top of the list last week, and somehow
missed it when it came to actually writing things up, so this is
actually last week’s news. But it’s pretty cool, so here it is at the
top of *this* week.

The Raspberry Pi is a very cheap (starting somewhere around $25)
credit-card-sized computer. Unfortunately, Fedora doesn’t work on it
without some modifications. But, fortunately, those modifications have
been made! The Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca
College in Toronto produces a Fedora Remix called Pidora, specifically
tailored for the Raspberry Pi. (A “remix” is different from a “spin” or
other variants of Fedora because it is produced separately from the
project itself and can contain software that in the official
distribution.)

This project has just released its fourth version, Pidora 2014. This is
based on Fedora 20, so you get all of the benefits of the new Fedora
release, plus some specific improvements, including better performance,
firstboot configuration tailored for the Raspberry Pi, enhancements for
“headless” mode where no monitor is available, and more.

  * http://www.raspberrypi.org/
  * http://cdot.senecacollege.ca/
  * http://pidora.ca/
  * http://pidora.ca/pidora/releases/20/release-announcement.txt

Big Data: Running Apache Hadoop in Docker on Fedora
---------------------------------------------------

Apache Hadoop is an open source software framework for processing big
data sets. Like, *really big* data — it powers Yahoo’s search engine,
and Facebook has a Hadoop cluster that was 100 petabytes two years ago.
Of course, you can use it for smaller projects, and Robert Radi has
written a nice little series of posts on getting started with Hadoop
using Fedora and Docker, covering:

  - Building Images,
  - Running Images,
  - Why It Works, and
  - Issues and Limitations.

Definitely worth a read if you’re curious about modern data processing,
and the last part presents some interesting problems waiting to be
solved.

  * http://www.infoworld.com/d/big-data/facebook-pushes-the-limits-of-hadoop-206108
  * http://rrati.github.io/blog/2014/05/06/apache-hadoop-plus-docker-plus-fedora-building-images/
  * http://rrati.github.io/blog/2014/05/07/apache-hadoop-plus-docker-plus-fedora-running-images/
  * http://rrati.github.io/blog/2014/05/08/apache-hadoop-plus-docker-plus-fedora-why-it-works/
  * http://rrati.github.io/blog/2014/05/09/apache-hadoop-plus-docker-plus-fedora-issues-and-limitations/

Preview of Bodhi 2, the new Fedora updates feedback mechanism
-------------------------------------------------------------

One of the most important jobs in Fedora is testing package updates
before they’re released to the general public. This makes sure that
fixes actually work, and that they don’t introduce new problems. (As
always, the help wanted sign is out!)

After testers check a package, they use a tool called Bodhi to provide
feedback to package maintainers, who use this information to decide
whether the update is good to go, either manually or through a preset
threshold of positive reports. This system has served us pretty well,
but has some pain points. Fedora hackers Luke Macken and Ralph Bean
have been working on an update (creatively named Bodhi 2.0), and this
week Ralph presents a video demonstrating one of the improvements, a
more fine-grained feedback system, which allows testers to list what
exactly was tested and which bugs are fixed, rather than just a big
“up” or “down”.

Ralph notes that there is a Fedora Activity Day (“FAD”) focusing on
Bodhi 2 and Tasktron (our upcoming QA automation system) in June, and a
lot of progress should be made on both — great news for both the people
directly involved in QA and all the rest of us who benefit from their
labor.

  * https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bodhi/2.0
  * http://threebean.org/blog/bodhi2-karma-system-preview/
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_Bodhi2_Taskotron_2014
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA

Running Vagrant on Fedora with Libvirt
--------------------------------------

Vagrant is a tool for creating and managing virtual machine images
containing software development environments. It’s particularly popular
in the DevOps world. It’s also something we’ve been missing in the
Fedora world, but the situation is getting better James, (from *The
Technical Blog of James*), has an article about getting Vagrant running
on Fedora.

Thanks to James for the clear, straightforward How-To. It ends with a
call for help — it’d be great to have the mentioned vagrant-libvirt
plugin packaged in in the distro, making it even easier for end-users.
See some discussion in the comments there. And also see this ticket
requesting an official Fedora Vagrant Base Box — so many great ways to
get involved here.

  * http://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/105516-Debois.pdf
  * http://ttboj.wordpress.com/2014/05/13/vagrant-on-fedora-with-libvirt-reprise/
  * https://fedorahosted.org/cloud/ticket/44

Fedora Magazine Authors Wanted
------------------------------

Speaking of ways to get involved: we’re looking for people interested
in writing for *Fedora Magazine* (the blog where I’m posting these
articles, if you happen to be reading this somewhere else). Doesn’t
need to be a big production number, but it’d be great to have a few
more regularly-occurring features. If you might be interested, don’t be
shy — join us in Fedora Marketing and we’ll get you what you need to
get started.

  * http://fedoramagazine.org/
  * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

-- 
Matthew Miller    --   Fedora Project    --    <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
                                                "Dockah! Dockah! Dockah!"