State of Fedora 2016, F24 Schedule, Flock notes, Wayland, and Outreachy

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. I know I’ve been absent with these for a little while now — holidays, and travel, and… well, no more excuses. Here are the five things for February 19th, 2016:

State of Fedora talk at DevConf.cz

DevConf.CZ is an annual free software conference in Brno, Czech Republic (near Red Hat’s large engineering office there). We’ve always had a large Fedora presence, and this year was no exception. We had a “Fedora Day”, with a full track of Fedora-related talks, and I opened that day with a joint session with Red Hat Vice President Denise Dumas.

Denise presented an update to her What Does Red Hat Want? talk from Flock last year in Rochester, and I gave a quick version of updated Fedora metrics from 2015 along with a very rushed look into the crystal ball for 2016. Video for the session is below; if you’re interested in longer and more detailed version of my parts, see the Director’s Cut Versions I recorded separately on my web site.

 

Fedora 24 status

As mentioned in the “release train!” slide of the talk above, we’re on track for a June release for Fedora 24. The next milestone is the branch from Rawhide, which is scheduled for next week. “Rawhide” is the always-moving master development version of Fedora, each numbered release starts its life as Rawhide, and then is split into its own track. So, after next Tuesday, changes that go into Rawhide will be aimed at next November’s Fedora 25 release, and Fedora 24 development (and stabilization) will happen on its own branch.

The detailed F24 schedule is here.

Flock to Krakow in August

Flock is Fedora’s big, annual contributor conference, with a focus on development and planning. As announced here, this year we will be in Krakow, Poland, from August 2–5.

If you’re planning on attending (and I hope you are!), there are several things to be aware of.

First, please register at https://register.flocktofedora.org/. You can log in with your Fedora account. Accurate preregistration helps us significantly with planning.

Second, talk submissions are now open, and can be filed at the same link. Submissions are due by April 8th.

And third, see https://flocktofedora.org/location/ for hotel information. Unfortunately, the venue does not allow online booking, and requires reservations by FAX, including a credit card number. Please plan ahead for this extra hoop — and book early, because apparently the week before is World Youth Day, and Pope Francis will be in Krakow along with crowds estimated to be in the two millions.

Wayland Readiness

Wayland is the next-generation replacement for Linux’s venerable X11 graphics stack. Fedora has always  been in the forefront of Wayland development and adoption. In Fedora 23 Workstation, the default graphical login screen is Wayland, and although X11 is used for actual user sessions by default, you can choose Wayland as an option.

Once that option is working seamlessly enough, we plan to switch that around, so that Wayland is the default for all. If all goes well, this will be a very subtle change from an end-user point of view — but it will enable better multi-monitor support, video without tearing and glitches, and eventually better security for sandboxed applications.

Right now, the Fedora Workstation Working Group is looking at potential blockers and will make an official decision soon.

Outreachy 2016: Help make the Fedora kernel great

Thanks to generous funding from Red Hat (above and beyond our normal community budget) Fedora is participating in the upcoming cycle for the Outreachy internship program. Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. Fedora Kernel developer Laura Abbott will act as mentor for the Outreachy kernel project — read that link if you’re interested, or know someone who might be, along with the Fedora Outreachy Kernel Application 2016. If you have any questions, the #fedora-outreachy channel on Freenode IRC is a good place to get them answered.

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6 Comments

  1. Andy Bear

    Yay for Fedora! Great to be back :).

  2. Honigmelone

    It is a bit sad that the audio quality in the video is not so good and its badly cut. There are 10 min of silence at the beginning and the video ends before the talk ends.

    • Yeah, that’s often a problem with conferences. It’s not like there’s highly-paid sound production engineers — it’s usually just a (volunteer?) AV tech setting up the room and then off to something else. That’s why I did the “Director’s Cut” versions you can find on my website. (Doesn’t include Denise’s talk, unfortunately, but you can hear the Fedora 2015 metrics in more detail, and a lot more on the 2016 Crystal Ball.)

  3. Leslie Satenstein

    With Wayland, I am looking forward to being able to issue issue /usr/sbin/gparted /dev/sdb. Being able to run Wayland based programs from the command line is what I am looking forward to being able to do.

    • Sebastiaan Franken

      You do know that’s already possible, right? If you run this, it’ll create a new gparted window:

      $ gparted /dev/sdb

      Unless you mean in a headless environment? Because I doubt that will work either way. And you can sort of fix that with display redirection

      • Leslie Satenstein

        switch to wayland as login mode. and try It. It does not work (F23)!!

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