[Fedora-ambassadors-list] Report: LUGS April Meeting

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Wed, 2006-05-03 at 20:28 +0800, Eugene Teo wrote:
> Report;
> 
> I gave a talk on "All about Fedora Core 5" last saturday, and it went
> well. I did a short preview on SystemTap to illustrate it's kernel
> instrumentation capabilities. I also gave away Fedora Handouts.
> 
> There were about 8-10 attendees, out of which 2 are already Fedora
> users. Some questions (not in actual words though) asked were:
> 
> 1) Is yum still as slow, as compared to apt-get?

It has steadily improved in speed over previous versions and there is
ongoing work on this. Benchmarks have shown it to be faster on local
networks. On remote connections there is the unreliability of the mirror
(locality, load etc) which has to be factored. Since yum connects to the
repositories every time, it appears to be slower to a seemingly
equivalent apt-get connection. If you do prefer apt-get, it is available
in Fedora Extras.

> 2) How does beagle work internally?

Indexed searches based on a in-kernel file notification mechansim called
inotify. Different documents have additional filters to index and keep
track of data better. More information in
http://beaglewiki.org/Main_Page
 

> 3) What do you need to install, in order to run Xen?

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/Xen


> 4) Where can I get the kernel source rpm?

People who usually ask for this only need the kernel-devel package which
provides the headers for the third party modules to be build against the
current kernel.

There are instructions on using this as well as downloading the full
source code if you need it in http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-
notes/fc5/#id2917672


> 5) Does suspend and hibernation really work in FC5?

Hardware specific. We tested them on many of internal systems we could
get our hands on. 

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/HCL/Machines/Laptops

Overall feedback has been pretty positive. If there are systems that
this doesnt work out of the box, feedback in http://bugzilla.redhat.com
against the kernel with workarounds if any would be quite useful.


> 6) How does SystemTap work internally? How does the scripts look like?

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/

SystemTap is a higher level layer (awk like scripting language) over the
in-kernel kprobes/dprobes mechanism (C voodoo). It provides a safety as
well as guru mode for executing scripts based on check points and
finding out various interesting information on the system.


Examples: http://people.redhat.com/berrange/systemtap/bootprobe/ and we
have already used it effectively for OLPC to reduce memory consumption
and bloat. Patches flow back into Fedora as appropriate.

Caveat: Technology preview and more works need to be done on polishing
before it gets into production systems. 

> 
> Some feedbacks I got were (not in actual words of course):
> 
> 1) Fedora should include mp3 support, otherwise new users will not be
> able to play their favourite music. Some form of documentation on how
> to setup mp3 support would be great. It should be easily accessible to
> new users as well.

We are going to continue support only open formats while making it
easier for users to grab plugins for such codecs.

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc5/#sn-Multimedia
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems

> 
> You can download my slides at:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Presentations?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=EugeneTeo.Fedora.LUGS.Apr.06.odp
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Eugene

Good report. Thanks. 


Rahul