Pidora, Hadoop in Docker, Bodhi 2.0 improved testing feedback system, Vagrant on Fedora, and Magazine authors wanted….
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 May 13th, 2014:
Pidora 2014: Fedora 20 for the Raspberry Pi
I was going to put this at the top of the list last week, and somehow missed it when it came to actually writing things up, so this is actually last week’s news. But it’s pretty cool, so here it is at the top of this week.
The Raspberry Pi is a very cheap (starting somewhere around $25) credit-card-sized computer. Unfortunately, Fedora doesn’t work on it without some modifications. But, fortunately, thos
e modifications have been made! The Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca College in Toronto produces a Fedora Remix called Pidora, specifically tailored for the Raspberry Pi. (A “remix” is different from a “spin” or other variants of Fedora because it is produced separately from the project itself and can contain software that isn’t in the official distribution.)
This project has just released its fourth version, Pidora 2014. This is based on Fedora 20, so you get all of the benefits of the new Fedora release, plus some specific improvements, including better performance, firstboot configuration tailored for the Raspberry Pi, enhancements for “headless” mode where no monitor is available, and more.
Big Data: Running Apache Hadoop in Docker on Fedora
Apache Hadoop is an open source software framework for processing big data sets. Like, really big data — it powers Yahoo’s search engine, and Facebook has a Hadoop cluster that was 100 petabytes two years ago. Of course, you can use it for smaller projects, and Robert Radi has written a nice little series of posts on getting started with Hadoop using Fedora and Docker, covering
Definitely worth a read if you’re curious about modern data processing, and the last part presents some interesting problems waiting to be solved.
Preview of Bodhi 2, the new Fedora updates feedback mechanism
One of the most important jobs in Fedora is testing package updates before they’re released to the general public. This makes sure that fixes actually work, and that they don’t introduce new problems. (As always, the help wanted sign is out!)
After testers check a package, they use a tool called Bodhi to provide feedback to package maintainers, who use this information to decide whether the update is good to go, either manually or through a preset threshold of positive reports. This system has served us pretty well, but has some pain points. Fedora hackers Luke Macken and Ralph Bean have been working on an update (creatively named Bodhi 2.0), and this week Ralph presents a video demonstrating one of the improvements, a more fine-grained feedback system, which allows testers to list what exactly was tested and which bugs are fixed, rather than just a big “up” or “down”.
Ralph notes that there is a Fedora Activity Day (“FAD”) focusing on Bodhi 2 and Tasktron (our upcoming QA automation system) in June, and a lot of progress should be made on both — great news for both the people directly involved in QA and all the rest of us who benefit from their labor.
Running Vagrant on Fedora with Libvirt
Vagrant is a tool for creating and managing virtual machine images containing software development environments. It’s particularly popular in the DevOps world. It’s also a thing we’ve been missing from the Fedora world, but the situation is getting better. James, from The Technical Blog of James, has an article about getting Vagrant running on Fedora.
Thanks to James for the clear, straightforward How-To. It ends with a call for help — it’d be great to have the mentioned vagrant-libvirt plugin packaged in in the distro, making it even easier for end-users. See some discussion in the comments there. And also see this ticket requesting an official Fedora Vagrant Base Box — so many great ways to get involved here.
Fedora Magazine Authors Wanted
Speaking of ways to get involved: we’re looking for people interested in writing for Fedora Magazine (the blog where I’m posting these articles, if you happen to be reading this somewhere else). Doesn’t need to be a big production number, but it’d be great to have a few more regularly-occurring features. If you might be interested, don’t be shy — join us in Fedora Marketing and we’ll get you what you need to get started.
