Five Things in Fedora This Week (Christmas Eve Edition!)

Fedora Election results

Fedora’s leadership structure is a mix of appointed and elected positions, with many of the appointed ones selected by other project members active in a particular area. For example, on the top-level Fedora Council, we have two roles filled by general election, while the Engineering Lead is selected by FESCo (the Fedora Engineering  Steering Committee) and the Project Outreach Lead by FAmSCo  (the Fedora Ambassador’s Steering Committee). And, both FESCo and FAmSCo consist entirely of elected positions.

The Fedora Elections for December 2015 recently came to a close on December 15th, 2015, with roughly half of the positions for FESCo and the Council refreshed, and an all-new slate for FAmSCo. While there wasn’t much controversy, we had a lot of involvement, and this ranks at the fourth most participated election in Fedora history. After concerningly low turnout in the previous election, we’re happy to say that participation in the Elections has returned to  usual numbers.

Jan Kurik (jkurik) and Bee Padalkar (bee2502) helped put together a retrospective post looking over the entire Elections process. This report not only includes the results, but also evaluates participation trends in the Election and is full of other useful and interesting information. It’s definitely worth the read!

Fedora login page design changes

If you’re logging in to Fedora’s web-based services next month, and things look different, don’t be alarmed — this is a legitimate change. This topic was covered in its own Magazine article last Friday, but is worth mentioning again. A major design to our OpenID authentication page is landing on January 15th, 2016.

The Fedora Infrastructure team is hard at work getting it polished and ready to deploy. As web-based services like HyperKitty and the upcoming Fedora Hubs become more central to Fedora’s online presence, bringing modern design to the login page is increasingly important. So, again, when the page you are used to seeing suddenly changes after this date, don’t panic! It’s all part of the plan. And thanks to everyone who worked to make this happen.

Want to see screenshots? Read the full Magazine article to get more detailed info.

Fedora and the Linux 4.3 Kernel

This was also covered in an earlier Fedora Magazine post, but I’ve seen several questions asking about the 4.3 kernel in specific, for sound support on the Dell XPS 13, for bugfixes for Intel video, and even Thunderbolt support for 2015 MacBooks, so I figure it’s worth repeating — seems like this particular cycle seems to hit a lot of people looking for hardware enablement. So, if that’s you, the key point is that 4.3 should be coming to all supported Fedora releases in January. For more details, read kernel developer Josh Boyer’s blog post.

SELinux performance impact study by Phoronix

SELinux — Security-Enhanced Linux — is a feature where applications and users are restricted to certain actions — for example, if you’re running a web server, that web server is only allowed to access files that should be served, not given arbitrary access to anything on your system. Since this works at the kernel level, it even helps protect against buggy code and other software flaws. People are often concerned that this feature comes at a performance cost — generally, a tradeoff people are willing to make, but it’s interesting to put numbers on it. Linux hardware/graphics/gaming site Phoronix has done exactly that in the article Does SELinux Have Much Of A Performance Impact On Fedora 23? Spoiler: not much, so there’s one less excuse for making Dan Walsh weep!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Kwanzaa

And all the other celebrations and traditions you may have. (My daughter wants me to remind everyone that December 26th is, apparently, Candy Cane Day.) Don’t forget to mark your absence on the Fedora Vacation Calendar — and earn the Vacation Badge. Personally, I’m off all the way through January 7th (although I’m sure to check my Fedora email sometime in there!) See you in the new year!