Five Things in Fedora This Week (2014-03-25)

[Matthew Miller]

Reposted from
http://fedoramagazine.org/five-things-in-fedora-this-week-2014-03-25/

Fedora is big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This new feature
will highlight interesting happenings in five different areas every
week. It won’t be comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries
with links to each. So, here we go for March 25th, 2014:

Snapshot support in virt-manager
--------------------------------

Virt-manager is a GUI for managing virtual machines on your local
system or remotely. It’s handy for intermediate/advanced users or for
sysadmins who are not in the mood for the command line. With version
1.0, now in Rawhide and updates for F20, virt-manager now supports
snapshots. Developer Cole Robinson has a blog post with details and a
walkthrough of the new GUI. (A similar feature may come to Gnome Boxes
in the future via Summer of Code work.)

 * http://virt-manager.org/
 * http://blog.wikichoon.com/2014/03/snapshot-support-in-virt-manager.html
 * http://zee-nix.blogspot.com/2014/03/boxes-312.html


>From upstream code to packages in a repo, automatically every day
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Fedora’s new Copr system lets any Fedora contributor easily maintain
and publish a repository of whatever software you want, as long as it
falls within our legal guidelines. (*cough* Fedora PPAs *cough*) But
what if that’s not automatic enough? What if you want to track a
fast-moving upstream without having to update source RPMs constantly?
Prolific Fedora hacker Pierre-Yves Chibon (“pingou”) presents dgroc,
for “Daily Git Rebuild On Copr”. It basically does just what it says —
takes care of the updating and building in Copr, so you can focus on
the software rather than the packaging.

 * http://copr.fedoraproject.org/
 * http://blog.pingoured.fr/index.php?post/2014/03/20/Introducing-dgroc


Fedora Plasma? A proposal from the KDE SIG
------------------------------------------

The Fedora KDE SIG has been working on a proposal for a Fedora Product
based on KDE Plasma Desktop, with a primary focus on education and
scientific users. Contributor (and board member) Rex Dieter sent the a
request for feedback to the Fedora Advisory Board today; if accepted,
this will join already-planned Cloud, Server, and Workstation products.
The discussion around this will be interesting to follow. Most people
in the project agree that products in the Fedora.next framework should
be held to a high standard, and that we shouldn’t have endless
proliferation, but how, where, and when we draw that line is not
settled.

 * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE
 * https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2014-March/012449.html

FPL Robyn Bergeron on Fedora, Red Hat, and the Future
-----------------------------------------------------

Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron has a new blog post,
_Fedora, Red Hat, and investing in the future_, with thoughts on Red
Hat’s investment in our project, Fedora’s value to Red Hat, and the
Fedora.next plans.

 * http://robyn.io/2014/03/25/fedora-red-hat-and-investing-in-the-future/


Fedora Atomic
-------------

Since this week has been a little slow, I’m going to cheat a bit and
pull something big from the backlog. Fedora developer Colin Walters has
launched a new project called Fedora Atomic. This system constructs
git-like trees from existing official Fedora RPMs, and moves
operating-system deployment from managing packages to managing these
trees, with (as the name suggests) fully-atomic updates and rollbacks.
It’s still in early development, but moving quickly, and the Fedora
Cloud SIG is considering using it for some special-purpose images
(including a minimal Docker host). Sound interesting — or scary? Learn
more at the links below....

 * http://rpm-ostree.cloud.fedoraproject.org/
 * http://rpm-ostree.cloud.fedoraproject.org/#/background

*****

Thanks to Stephen Gallagher for content suggestions this week, and Joe
Brockmeier for proofreading. If you have tips for the next week, please
send ‘em to me.

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