FUDCon1 Flashback, Getting Involved, Sandboxed Apps, Fedora Planet, and Google Summer of Code

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. 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 February 18th, 2015:

FUDCon1 Flashback

Ten years ago today, we had the very first FUDCon — the “Fedora User and Developer Conference”. Check out this awesome video put together at the time, with a lot of familiar faces and good memories.

(And if you’re curious, read more about the Historic Event in our wiki archive.)

Get Invoved, with What Can I Do?

Fedora hacker Ralph Bean put together a slick new site http://whatcanidoforfedora.org/, in the style of Mozilla’s original. If you’re interested in getting involved as a Fedora contributor but don’t know where to begin, this site can help you find something that fits your interests and skills. Flip through until you find a match, and hit the “tell me more” button.

(Or, if you’re part of a Fedora subproject looking for help, you can add your own by submitting a pull request or filing RFEs on GitHub.)

Fully-Sandboxed App Proof-of-Concept

At the DevConf.cz conference last week, Alexander Larsson spoke about his work on a better way to ship apps — a model which allows applications to be securely sandboxed and also only loosely coupled to distro version. Now, on his blog, Alex demonstrates an actual program running in a real sandbox. We have a long way to go, but many of the technologies required to make this happen are coming into place, including kdbus and Wayland.

Docker and related container technologies are all the rage on the server side and in cloud computing. These efforts bring some of the same ideas and benefits to the Linux desktop — a very ambitious effort which is finally starting to become reality.

Fedora Planet Blog Aggregator

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the new Fedora Start Page. One of the key changes is that the new page focuses on content from Fedora Magazine, while the older one drew from the Fedora Planet Blog Aggregator. Sumit Bhardwaj asked about this change on the Fedora devel list, and some conversation followed.

I think the key thing is: since there are many times more users than developers, we are trying to keep the Fedora Magazine articles user focused, while the Planet presents a firehose of often very technical blog posts. We don’t want to overwhelm users with a torrent of insider, developer content, while at the same time, we do want users to know what’s going on and to feel a part of (and drawn into) the Fedora community. We’re still working on that balance for the Magazine, and for the Start page. In the meantime, if you like the firehose, suggest setting your start page directly to http://planet.fedoraproject.org/ — that’s not going away.

(Personally, I’m subscribed to it using rss2email, so all of your blog posts show up in my inbox next to all of my Fedora mail — speaking of information firehoses….)

Google Summer of Code Proposals (Hurry!)

This almost slipped through the cracks, but Stephen Gallagher and Kushal Das are picking it up just in time. Every year, Google offers stipends to students for contributions to open source projects; in order for us to be one of those projects, we need to apply as a mentoring organization. And to do that, we need to get our proposal in this week: which means, basically, if you have an aspect of Fedora which could benefit from a student code contribution, go here and add your name and prospective project right now.