New Slogan?

New Slogan?

I was thinking that sometimes when a Linux distribution claims to have a target audience, it can be a bit discriminatory. For example, Exherbo claims it is not for you. Perhaps we need a new slogan to show how inclusive Fedora is. For example:

Fedora - Linux for Humans and Space Aliens.

Fedora 11 Presentation at WPLUG

Fedora 11 Presentation at WPLUG

As seen on the WPLUG Mailing List:

Hello WPLUG! (and other wplug-announce subscribers)

It's that time again! This Saturday, at the Wilkins School Community
Center, there will be a General User Meeting and presentation on
Fedora 11 by Yaakov Nemoy from Red Hat.

Doors open at 10:30, meeting starts at 11:00, presentation at 11:30,
lunch at 12:30.

"Yaakov Nemoy will talk about what features are new in the upcoming
Fedora 11 release. Many of these features are upstream contributions
and are also showing up in many other distributions. Come find out
what the next six months have in store for Linux. "

Yaakov is obviously a big fan of Fedora. But if you're not a Fedora
user, you will still probably find his presentation interesting.
Yaakov doesn't hate Ubuntu - in fact he has a picture of Ubuntu
founder Mark Shuttleworth on his wall* (though the picture is in front
of his dart board.)


http://www.wplug.org/wiki/Meeting-20090509


Sign up to help out by adding your name to the "Meeting Staff" section
of the page listed above. Don't expect someone else to help if you
are able, though they probably will.

Best,

Mike Semcheski
WPLUG Chair


*OK, I made that up.

Fedora Devshell is now packaged in Fedora

Fedora Devshell is now packaged in Fedora

Tonight, Fenzi filled my cvs request to put Fedora Devshell in Fedora, so for all those of you who have been waiting so long to use it, (all three of you), there are builds available in koji.

Pick your poison^Wrelease here

Are all Fedora developers Contributors?

Are all Fedora developers Contributors?

I'm watching this video hosted by the Linux Foundation of a panel at the LF Collaboration Summit on why we want to measure community contribution. One of the issues that gets discussed is the need for better testing. In some ways, this is as important as code contributions itself.

I was thinking about how Fedora tends to take the more experimental route. Every Fedora release really pushes what we can do with Linux each time, in order to get the widest use of it possible. PackageKit, Pulseaudio, KMS, Ext4 and Btrfs are all perfect examples of this. Here's an open ended question. Does using Fedora in some way automatically make you a contributor? Obviously you need to report on it, even if everything does just work. But when you consciously make the decision to use Fedora in order to make sure the latest and greatest technology works for you, does that count as a de facto contribution?

(Better yet, if you do use Fedora, participate in a Test Day. It's simple, and it gives you a good heads up about future versions of Fedora.)

You can watch the video here.

Fedora Devshell packages

Fedora Devshell packages

After learning my way around setuptools making packages for EKG, i decided the tool that deals with packaging should be packaged. I've spent the past couple of hours making some broad changes to Devshell in order to work better with setuptools. I used to not really get entry points that well, but now having worked with them a bit more in depth, i can really see how they can be useful. If nothing else, i'm going to have to fix my module importing and detection code sometime in the future. Alot of the base code needs some massive overhauls, so it's almost time to say goodbye to the original code Luke Macken wrote.

In order to work with the new and improved Devshell, i've updated the wiki documentation. The usage guide is roughly the same. Installation and usage has been simplified though. Technically you have to run a few more steps, but they are very standard in the Python world, so anyone familiar with Python programs will have little trouble working with them. You can check them out here.

There is also convenient API Documentation if you want to know something about the internals and how things are organized.

There is an RPM waiting for review, so hopefully there will be a package you can just install in the future. If anyone wants to have a look, the review is here.

Recently one of our very own, Christoph Wickert, mentioned Devshell in an interview he gave on the upcoming LinuxTag and FUDCon Berlin. It was an inspiration to focus on making it available to the masses and i'm hoping that we can ramp up Devshell development a bit more before the upcoming 'Messe' and 'Konferrenz'. The interview is in German, so you've been warned. I guess someone in the community will provide a translation in the next couple of days, it's an excellent interview. If not, i might have to have a stab at it myself, to make up emotionally for getting such a poor grade in German this semester.

Something i might miss

Something i might miss

I've said it before, and i'll say it again. One thing i won't miss about Pittsburgh is the hills. One thing i will miss though is the way the wind rolls into these hills right before it rains. First the sky gets dark and cloudy, and the air picks up this electric energy. The wind comes bursting in little puffs which send pretty much every piece of debris around the neighbourhood at least once or twice. Then it builds up further pushing you and the trees around, and you can see it just in the way everything around you is moving. You feel all these drops hitting you from nowhere, even though the rain's not really falling.

Then it stops, the heavens crack open, and it starts raining.

Then you're just in time to watch people get caught on the main road get caught in the rain while you sip an espresso from the comfort of a cafe.

Packaging EKG

Packaging EKG

Today i packaged my first python egg, or what ever they are called. I reorganized EKG to be a bit more like a module, and less like a bunch of scripts, and packaged it up. The SRPM is available for review if anyone wants it here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498073