F23 is Go! Plus, internships, Atomic job opening, a Fedora book, and … systemd total conversion.

Fedora 23 release is GO!

After last week’s schedule adjustment, and a last minute panic where we discovered that the installer wasn’t actually showing help when you pressed the help button (thanks everyone who scrambled to fix that!), we’re on schedule for a release on Tuesday, November 3rd. Check back here for the release announcement, or just go straight to http://getfedora.org after 10am US/Eastern (15:00 UTC).

Outreachy Internship deadline

Fedora is participating in Outreachy, an internship program targeted at women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups. The deadline for application is November 2nd — that’s Monday. Check our Outreach 2015 wiki page for more.

Red Hat is looking for an Atomic Community Lead

Interested in operating system container technology — and in the move to operating systems based around this? Take a look at Red Hat’s job opening for a Project Atomic and Container Programs Community Lead. As I wrote recently on the Fedora Cloud mailing list, I’m very excited about Atomic as an increasingly important part of Fedora. The person in this new position will work with Fedora, CentOS, and OpenShift. If this seems exciting to you and you’ve got experience in this rapidly-developing field, take a look at the job listing — or if you know someone who would be a good fit, forward it on!

Czech Getting Started with Fedora book

Several Fedora contributors in the Czech Republic have put together a book on Getting Started with Fedora, intended to be actually printed and handed out to students and other interested new users. Read Jiří Eischmann’s blog post about the book, and, if you’re a Czech speaker (or just curious), download the PDF. The creators are planning to translate this into English as a next step, and would like help from native speakers.

Full conversion to systemd startup scripts

Systemd is the first process that your Fedora system starts after the kernel boots, and it manages all the other processes — from system services to user shells. This replaces the earlier system we used, called System V initscripts — and in fact became our default way back in Fedora 15. Under the old system, each service had a shell script that controlled its startup and shutdown. The new system uses a simple key-value config file instead.

Systemd has a compatibility mode and can use the “legacy” System V scripts, although necessarily with reduced functionality (for example, services run this way can’t be configured to automatically restart if they crash). Fedora has long encouraged packagers to switch from the old-style scripts to the new one, but that’s never been enforced. With next year’s Fedora 24, though, FESCo — the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee — has decided that it’s time to make the migration complete. Read the announcement here. If you’re a Fedora packager, we have documentation specifically written to help make this easy — Packaging systemd services.

Note that the legacy SysV init support for third party applications isn’t going away. We’re just not going to use it for anything in the Fedora package collection anymore.

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6 Comments

  1. Claude

    Hi Fedora fans,

    I’m actually on Ubuntu Gnome. I’m an average Linux user.

    I would prefer to use Fedora for its more bleeding edge approached.

    I tested Fedora 23 beta. All is nice but one thing : Gnome Software Center. It’s fine and cool to install software. But updating via the GSC is often not a great experience. Asking the systmen to reboot, trying to update, failing at 23% of the process. Try again, same thing.

    sudo dnf update does a way better job ! And no rebooting.

    So, why the updating process with Gnome Software Center is a hit and miss scenario ? Is it just me ?

    Thanks.

    • Samuel Sieb

      The updating process is normally very reliable. If it’s not working, please file a bug report.

      If you are comfortable with using dnf update on the command line, then feel free to use that. As long as you are aware of the potential issues with libraries and plugins being updated underneath running applications and services.

      • Claude

        Thanks for your answer, Samuel.

        But, what do you mean by : “potential issues with libraries and plugins being updated underneath running applications and services” ?

        When I update trough the Terminal, I don’t run any Apps. I’ve never run into any trouble going with sudo dnf update. Yum Extender is also a good choice when it comes to updating. More reliable than the Gnome Software Center for me.

        • Samuel Sieb

          Even if you don’t have any graphical applications running, there are still system services running. In that case, the primary issue is that any security fixes in the libraries won’t be applied until the service is restarted or you reboot the computer.

  2. Greg

    Excellent news. Ready for this new F23 release!

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