Heartbleed and Fedora, Flock proposal voting, Gnome 3.12, Fedora.next website refresh, and Fedora at Red Hat Summit….
Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. 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 April 8st, 2014:
Heartbleed vulnerability (and fixes)
At #1 with a bullet… the OpenSSL “Heartbleed” vulnerability, technically identified as CVE-2014-0160. This is an exceptionally severe security issue. The good news is that, thanks to heroic overnight work of many Fedora contributors, updated packages are available. More on this in a separate Fedora Magazine post, and watch for more info soon. The release engineering push to the mirror networks is in progress. Update: Previous post superseded by Update on CVE-2014-0160, aka “Heartbleed”. Fixed packages are on the mirrors now.
Vote for Flock Talks
The call for submissions for talks at Flock (our annual development conference) is over. Later this week, voting will begin. There is a list of 128 potential talks, which all look worth attending, but there’s a goal of having less going on at once this year, so the voting process is going to be extra-important.
And of course, even if you are not speaking, this is an important event where we work on our strategy and direction, get some work done, make the personal connections which help a community run smoothly, and (of course) have a lot of fun. Register now!
There is some funding available for travel and hotel subsidies; it’s not guaranteed, but we want as many contributors there as possible, so if you have a need, there is a box to check at registration time.
Considering Gnome 3.12 as an F20 update
As mentioned last week, Gnome 3.12 is available in the Rawhide development repository and as an add-on “Copr”. This release is inspiring very positive reviews (The Register, Tech Republic) even among initial Gnome 3 skeptics. (Disclaimer: I was certainly one of those skeptics, having never run Gnome even in the old days, but I’m happily running it now. Your mileage may vary, but I do recommend a fresh look!).
This has inspired some discussion about possibly including the whole thing as an update to Fedora 20. This would be a large exception to the general policy of avoiding incompatible or user interface changes mid-release, but if the technical hurdles can be solved and user pain minimized, FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) might consider it, especially since F20 has a longer-than-normal schedule.
And speaking of followups to last week, Jasper St. Pierre has a nice blog post on Xwayland landing in the X server and what that means for you. That has a lot of technical detail, but the short version is that now this compatibility layer is available on more hardware (not just Intel graphics), allowing more early experimenters and, in the future, a smoother transition for everyone.
Website Refresh for Fedora.next
Although she posted it on April 1st, Fedora designer Máirín Duffy’s proposal for Fedora’s website (considering Fedora.next) is no joke. I mentioned this effort last month, but there’s a lot more detail here, with sections on the brochure site, a user support site, and the “community hub”. Worth a read — and we’d love your input, especially on how we might make this idea succeed now when somewhat similar efforts have faltered in the past.
Red Hat Summit
Red Hat’s annual showcase conference is taking place in San Francisco next week (April 14–17, 2014), and as usual, Fedora will have a presence. Tom (“spot”) Callaway and Ruth (“Ruth”) Suehle will be running the booth, and I’ll be there showing off tech-darling containerization technology Docker and the Fedora Atomic Remix, which we are considering using as a base for one of our official cloud offerings. Of course, I’m happy to talk about anything else across the Fedoraverse as well. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of familiar faces and meeting many of you I haven’t yet.
5tFTW note
Thanks for your feedback last week, everyone. Looks like many people appreciate the explanation of project details and jargon. And overall, I’m glad you’re finding this useful — that makes it much easier to keep it up.
As always, tips on what’s going on in your part of Fedora are appreciated — e-mail them to me directly, or ping me on IRC.
Matthew Miller
PS: I didn’t initially forget Luke Macken — he was just pulled in after I wrote this message. I’ve edited it to add him. 🙂
Leslie Satenstein
Good Morning Matthew
Regarding a BOF meeting for Fedora in Montreal, here are a few reasons why it may be a great choice.
a) There are 7 universities in the area, one of which specializes on Computer Science Engineering.
b) There are 3 CGEPS that specialize in Networking and Computer Science preparation. A CGEP (See JEP) These CGEPS include the first year of university.
c) There is a square mile technology area in the city which houses many technical centers
d) Multilingualism, (French, English, Spanish, and many others).
e) Home of Aviation Electronics companies, (CAE, MDA, Matrox, Bombardier,BAE)
f) Home of games and telecommunication companies (10 Biggest Video Game Developers in Montréal (eg UBISOFT)
g) Low cost accommodations, low cost food.
h) High level of Open Source participation with gurus(?) who use Linux in server mode.
i) Driving time from New York City (5.5 hrs), From Toronto (5.5 hours) Buffalo (6.hrs), Ottawa (1.5 hrs), Quebec City (2 hours), Plattsburg or Burlington, (1.5-2 hours).
I could go on and on about the technological and food feasts you could have in coming here. We could combine the Fedora Linux BOF with some tours of high tech companies. Ubuntu has an office in our city.
I am retired, and would dedicate some time to this kind of project and would like to promote this great Fedora opportunity.
Regards
Proud Montrealer and Linux biggot.
Leslie
Matthew Miller
So, if you want to schedule a Fedora-related meetup, you can pretty much do it at any time. The group you probably want to contact is Fedora Ambassadors.
If you want to do something more grand (and that would be awesome), you might consider a proposal for next year’s Flock conference, which will be somewhere in North America. See this wiki page for the process used in selecting the location — it’s not updated for 2015 yet, but I think the sooner you start laying the groundwork, the better. It’s hard to find a low-cost venue for 200+ people, but Montreal would be a great location for all the reasons you outline and more.
guest
When might we learn whether Fedora 20 will have Gnome 3.12 as an update?
Matthew Miller
The Gnome developers are gathering feedback now. If they decide they want to do it, they’ll ask FESCo for an exception. I’ll probably post about that here, but you could also watch the Fedora Devel mailing list for FESCo meeting minutes with that as an item. We’ll make a decision then.
In the meantime, I encourage you to try out the Gnome 3.12 Copr as outlined in this article. Not only does it get you there faster, any test reports you make help the overall idea be more possible.
Chris Gibbs
Thanks so much for these updates. It really helps to feel like part of a community when someone like you goes the extra mile to keep us informed of the latest goings on of our favourite distro. Keep up the good work!