Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. 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 January 28th, 2015:

February Conferences: FOSDEM 2015, DevConf.cz, SCALE 13x

There are several conferences with a big Fedora presence in the next month.

First up, FOSDEM, on January 31st and February 1st. Originally, the name stood for Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting, but as far as far as I can tell it’s really just stand-alone word, now — although the conference does have a strong developer audience. I’ll be speaking on Sunday in the distributions devroom (filling in for Stephen Gallagher, who couldn’t make the trip this year). There will also be a Fedora booth — I’ll see many of you there!

The following week, it’s DevConf.cz, a free conference organized by Red Hat Czech Republic. Sunday (February 8) is dedicated to Fedora and CentOS — check the schedule and join us (and about 1000 other sysadmins and developers) if you’re in the area. (Brno is easy to get to from Vienna or Prague.)

And then, almost halfway around the world, SCALE 13x in Los Angeles, California, from February 19-22. On Thursday, there will be a general Fedora Activity Day, and another one focused on Project Atomic and Fedora Cloud on Sunday. There are many talks from Fedora contributors: maker extraordinaire Ruth Suehle will be presenting the Sunday keynote, Brockmeier has a talk about solving packaging, or making it worse, Tom Callaway will explain FOSS licenses for non-lawyers, Ian McLeod gets into release engineering (or how the distribution sausage is made), and at the very end of it all I’ve got a talk on Fedora.next (so, save some energy and don’t take off too early)! Let me know if I’ve missed anyone’s talk — it’s a huge schedule with a lot to do, and looks to be a great conference overall.

Offline Updates Bug

If you’ve been experiencing problems installing updates via GNOME Software, or with Apper in KDE, please read this guide to solving the F21 software update glitch. Unfortunately for GUI-only users, it requires a few manual steps at the command line, but it’s not very complicated and you should be back to having a securely-updated system in no time.

Flock Dates!

Every year, we hold a big contributor-oriented conference, Flock. This alternates between Europe and North America, and this year, it will be in Rochester, New York. More details to come, but we have the dates and venue: August 12-15 at the Hyatt Regency Rochester. Hope to see you there!

FUDCon Pune

In addition to Flock, we also run several other Fedora premiere events, including FUDCons — that is, Fedora Users and Developers Conferences — in Asia/Pacific and Latan America (or, APAC and LATAM). While Flock focuses on project development and planning, FUDCon is a more general showcase for both contributors and end-users hoping to learn more. We’ve just announced the location of this year’s APAC FUDCon — Pune, India in June.

New Start Page

If you’re reading this on Fedora Magazine, you may have come here from the new Fedora Start Page, and in the past week you may have noticed a nice new look for that. Thanks to the Fedora Websites team and particularly to Robert Mayr (a.k.a. “robyduck”) for work on this.

Meanwhile, though, as people’s use of the Internet and web sites evolves, browser designers have deemphasized the idea of a portal-like “home page”. One of my focuses as Fedora Project Leader is increasing connectivity and communication across the project — that’s a reason I write 5tFTW, for example. This start page, common to most of the web browsers we ship as a default for new users, is one of the few ways we have for bringing everyone together to a common online space. The mailing lists are another, of course (with devel, test, and users serving as the biggest “hubs”), but not everyone likes to subscribe to lists, and no one has time to keep up with all that. And for very active contributors, IRC is a constant connection — but for most users and casual contributors, we don’t really have much else.

So, as this evolves to the next version, where start pages will be less and less prominent, how can we bring useful, dynamic news, features, and help to our whole community without being out-of-sight, out-of-mind — or overly pushy — all with a shoestring budget? What are your ideas?

Postscript

Sorry about missing 5tFTW last week. I’d planned to wrap it up on Friday, and then my kid brought home a very dramatic stomach bug, and I spent the day… let’s just say… graphically indisposed. Better now, and mostly dug out from the blizzard….