Fedora Weekly News 202

Pascal Calarco pcalarco at nd.edu
Tue Nov 17 02:57:47 UTC 2009


           o 1.1 Announcements
                 + 1.1.1 FEDORA ANNOUNCE LIST
                       # 1.1.1.1 F13 Naming: Leonidas -> Constantine -> 
<New Name>?
                       # 1.1.1.2 Nominations now open for December 
Fedora Elections
                 + 1.1.2 FEDORA DEVELOPMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS
                       # 1.1.2.1 Fedora 12 staged for mirrors, Rawhide 
moving on soon
                 + 1.1.3 FEDORA EVENTS
                       # 1.1.3.1 Upcoming Events
                       # 1.1.3.2 Past Events
           o 1.2 Planet Fedora
                 + 1.2.1 General
           o 1.3 QualityAssurance
                 + 1.3.1 Test Days
                 + 1.3.2 Weekly meetings
                 + 1.3.3 Fedora 12 release
           o 1.4 Artwork
                 + 1.4.1 Fedora 12 Media Art
                 + 1.4.2 Large Website Banner
           o 1.5 Security Advisories
                 + 1.5.1 Fedora 11 Security Advisories
                 + 1.5.2 Fedora 10 Security Advisories
           o 1.6 Virtualization
                 + 1.6.1 Fedora Virtualization List
                       # 1.6.1.1 Guest Bridge Configuration with libvirt 
and netcf
                       # 1.6.1.2 New Release libguestfs 1.0.78
                 + 1.6.2 Fedora Xen List
                       # 1.6.2.1 No Xen dom0 in Fedora 12 Hopefully 13
                 + 1.6.3 Libvirt List
                       # 1.6.3.1 Keeping Guest Configurations in Sync on 
Multiple Hosts
           o 1.7 KDE
                 + 1.7.1 New Soprano Backends coming to Fedora KDE
                 + 1.7.2 gtk-qt-engine retired, replaced with kcm-gtk

-  Fedora Weekly News Issue 202 -

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 202[1] for the week ending November 
15, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In Announcements, the always-popular name selection process for the next 
Fedora release is underway, and nominations are open for December's 
Fedora elections. Planet Fedora contributes a look at the new Fedora 
Community site, some benchmarks of improbably large filesystems and a 
guide to using the Sugar desktop on Fedora. From Quality Assurance we 
hear about some more AutoQA improvements and the last stretch of the 
Fedora 12 release process. The Design team has been working on media art 
and website banners for the Fedora 12 release. Security Advisories 
summarizes the security patches released for Fedora 10 and 11 over the 
past week. In Virtualization, we discuss creating network bridges for 
virtual machines when using NetworkManager, and a new release of 
libguestfs. There's also news on the state of Xen support in Fedora 12. 
Finally, the KDE section brings us up to date on some new backends for 
the Nepomuk semantic desktop system, and the replacement of 
gtk-qt-engine with kcm-gtk for Fedora 12. Enjoy the read!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see 
our 'join' page[2]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list at redhat.com

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

    1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue202
    2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NewsProject/Join

--  Announcements --

In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, 
including general announcements[1], development announcements[2] and 
Events[3].

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

    1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/
    2. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/
    3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events

---  FEDORA ANNOUNCE LIST ---

----  F13 Naming: Leonidas -> Constantine -> <New Name>? ----

John Rose, the Central US Regional Ambassador for North America, 
announced the beginning of the naming process for Fedora 13[1] F13 
Naming: Leonidas -> Constantine -> <New Name>? The full announcement:

"With Fedora 12 just a few days from release it is time to begin the 
naming process for the next Fedora release.

Contributors can make suggestions for the name for Fedora 13 by visiting 
[2] and following the instructions.

Remember there needs to be an "is-a" link between the name Constantine 
and the name you suggest and this link must be different than all 
previous links used to connect Fedora release names.

Full details of the release naming schedule are available on the above 
link but please note than the period for gathering suggestions begins 
now and runs through November 16.

So there isn't a lot of time, think up some good names, and get them 
added to the wiki."

    1. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-November/msg00003.html
    2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Name_suggestions_for_Fedora_13

----  Nominations now open for December Fedora Elections ----

John Rose announced that the nominations now open for December Fedora 
Elections[1]. Here is the announcement, "It is time to begin the process 
of nominating candidates for the open seats in the following bodies:

     * Fedora Project Board
     * Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee (FAmSCo)
     * Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo)

General Election Schedule:

     * November 10-16: Nominations are open.
     * November 17-23: Candidate questionnaires.
     * November 27 - December 3: IRC Town Hall-style discussions with 
candidates for the various elected positions will be arranged.
     * December 8-15: The elections will take place.

Nominations

You may self-nominate. If you wish to nominate someone else, please 
consult with that person ahead of time. Wiki nomination pages [2] carry 
additional details about the nominee which the nominee is expected to 
write. Simply update the respective wiki page with your nomination 
information.

Please thoughtfully consider how you can best contribute to Fedora by 
serving on one of these important committees or by encouraging someone 
you know who you think can make a difference to serve."

    1. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-November/msg00004.html
    2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections

---  FEDORA DEVELOPMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS ---

----  Fedora 12 staged for mirrors, Rawhide moving on soon ----

|Jesse Keating announced that the Fedora 12 staged for mirrors, Rawhide 
moving on soon[1]. Here is the full announcement: "I have just staged 
Fedora 12 for our mirrors. We're doing something a little different this 
time around. The releases/12/Everything/ tree will be open to the public 
as it gets staged. This will allow us to give people who have "Fedora 
12" installed now access to the "fedora" repo. We will then be able to 
move rawhide along to Fedora 13. The Fedora/ and Live/ trees will remain 
locked until our release date.

On this Saturday or Sunday rawhide will have Fedora 13 content. Users of 
rawhide right now do not need to do anything to keep on Fedora 12. 
Unless you have modified your /etc/yum.repos.d/ files, you will stay on 
Fedora 12 as we transition. Those of you that wish to move along to 
Fedora 13 rawhide will need to modify your fedora rawhide.repo file and 
keep it enabled, while disabling fedora and fedora-updates repos.

Thanks again to all of you who have helped make Fedora 12 the great 
release it is about to be!"

    1. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-November/msg00008.html

---  FEDORA EVENTS ---

Fedora events are the source of marketing, learning and meeting all the 
fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the 
following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

----  Upcoming Events ----

     * North America (NA)[1]
     * Central & South America (LATAM) [2]
     * Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)[3]
     * India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)[4]

    1. 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_2009.29
    2. 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_2009.29_2
    3. 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_2009.29_3
    4. 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#FY10_Q3_.28September_2009_-_November_2009.29_4

----  Past Events ----

Archive of Past Fedora Events[1]

    1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Events#Past_Events

--  Planet Fedora --

In this section, we cover the highlights of Planet Fedora[1] - an 
aggregation of blogs from Fedora contributors worldwide.

Contributing Writer: Adam Batkin

This week is an amalgamation of posts from the past two weeks. Two for 
the price of one!

    1. http://planet.fedoraproject.org

---  General ---

Andrew Vermilya Jamison took a look[1] at the new Fedora Community[2] 
(Beta) site. "This is a great hub for communication in the distribution 
and promises to add new features that will make it more useful to other 
non Package contributing groups in Fedora...I can very well see this 
becoming a portal for the average Fedora user to: Check forum replies to 
topic you create, Reporting bugs using the Bugzilla API (would make it 
far easier to report a bug), Search the Smolt DB for hardware that works 
on Fedora, Tracking Wiki discussions and pages you might be involved 
with. All that and so much more, this site has great potential."

Ujjwol Lamichhane examined[3] the Sugar desktop. "Most of you, Linux 
users have always been lim­ited to the two big desk­top names in Linux. 
GNOME and KDE today rep­re­sent the Linux desk­top. But there exist 
other desk­top envi­ron­ment along with these two; XFCE, LDE etc. All 
these desk­top environment was made with a nor­mal desk­top or lap­top 
in mind but one desk­top was made with small screen and chil­dren in 
mind. Yes, the Sugar; the XO’s desk­top from Sugar Labs...Though named 
as child's desk­top envi­ron­ment, I found Sugar as easy as GNOME, as 
plas­mic as KDE and as light­weight as XFCE."

Richard Hughes' GNOME Color Manager progressed[4] further with a 
website[5] and mailing list[6]. Feature-wise, the calibration process is 
now easier, and and there is initial scanner support[7].

Richard W.M. Jones performed a bunch of benchmarks using guestfish's new 
sparse disk file creation capability. First was a terabyte[8], but 
apparently that wasn't good enough. Next up was a Petabyte and an 
Exabyte[9]. Next up was an analysis[10] of the metadata overhead of 
various filesystems, then of the mkfs times[11]. And if you are "baffled 
by the 269 calls that libguestfs provides" check out the libguestfs API 
overview[12].

This past week, the new Fedora Planet Meme was apparently using[13] 
Fedora[14] 12[15] with[16] a[17] tablet[18].

Eric Christensen announced[19] that the Fedora Docs project material 
will all be licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA.

Dave Jones tried to clear[20] up a common misconception about how Linux 
handles announcing its hyper-threading status in /proc/cpuinfo.

Máirín Duffy and others have created[21] a set of media sleeves and 
labels for Fedora 12, as well as a one-page Fedora 12 Release Notes PDF[22].

And in preparation for Fedora 12, Charles Brej posted[23] detailed 
instructions for making Fedora icing. That you can actually eat. It's 
that awesome.

Harish Pillay pointed out[24] this week's Patent Stupidity, with 
Microsoft's new patent on what can only be described as the ancient and 
ubiquitous "sudo" command.

    1. 
http://blogs.andyjamison.com/andy/linux-trials/fedora-community-beta-looks-sweet/
    2. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
    3. http://ujjwol.com.np/sugar-the-cooler-desktop/
    4. 
http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/11/02/gnome-color-manager-progress/
    5. http://projects.gnome.org/gnome-color-manager/
    6. http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-color-manager-list
    7. 
http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2009/11/05/gnome-color-manager-and-scanners/
    8. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/terabyte-virtual-disks/
    9. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/petabytes-exabytes-why-not/
   10. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/filesystem-metadata-overhead/
   11. 
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/mkfs-compared-on-different-filesystems/
   12. 
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/easy-introduction-to-the-libguestfs-api/
   13. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/fedora-12-rocks-on-tablets/
   14. http://thefinalzone.blogspot.com/2009/11/fun-with-tablet.html
   15. http://www.braincache.de/wp/2009/11/13/kindergarden-drawing/
   16. http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/friday-fun-with-tablets/
   17. http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2009/11/kindergarden-drawing.html
   18. http://tatica.org/2009/11/13/dibujando-como-en-kindergarden/
   19. http://fedora-sparks.blogspot.com/2009/11/docs-going-to-cc-by-sa.html
   20. 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/2009/11/10/common-hyperthreading-misconception/
   21. 
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/getting-ready-for-f12-media-sleeves-and-labels/
   22. 
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/fedora-12-one-page-release-notes-pdf/
   23. http://brej.org/blog/?p=103
   24. http://harishpillay.livejournal.com/167485.html

--  QualityAssurance --

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

    1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA

---  Test Days ---

There have been no Test Days for the last two weeks, due to the 
pressures of the Fedora 12 release.

No Test Day is currently planned for this week. If you would like to 
propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact 
the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac[1].

    1. http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-qa/

---  Weekly meetings ---

As the QA beat was unfortunately not present for Fedora Weekly News 
#201, we will cover two weeks' worth of events below.

QA group weekly meetings[1] were held on 2009-11-02 and 2009-11-09. The 
full logs are available[2], [3].

During the meeting of 2009-11-02, Adam Williamson reported that Milos 
Jakubicek had not yet followed up on his idea regarding an event to work 
on FTBFS problems. Jóhann Guðmundsson was also not present to report on 
his work on creating a test case for keyboard layout issues[4]. Will 
Woods was making good progress on the action items for AutoQA from the 
previous meeting.

The group reviewed the status of the Fedora 12 code base with regards to 
the then-impeding release candidate phase. It was generally agreed that 
the status was promising and it should be possible to make the release 
candidate phase on time, based on a review of the blocker bug list.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral reported on the progress of the AutoQA 
project. Will had been working on revising the AutoQA code to provide a 
Python library interface[5]. He had been moving all shared or 
potentially shareable code from all current AutoQA tests into the 
library. He hoped to have it merged into the master branch by the end of 
the week. He also noted that a newer version of autotest was currently 
being packaged and implemented into the AutoQA system, which may cause 
strange results if any bugs emerged.

Adam Williamson reviewed upcoming events. The release candidate date was 
Wednesday 2009-11-04 and the go/no-go date Monday 2009-11-09. Jesse 
Keating clarified that for an RC build to be done, the blocker bug list 
must be clear, but new issues that emerged during RC compose and testing 
could be resolved up until the date of the go/no-go meeting. James Laska 
promised to co-ordinate with the anaconda team to ensure there were no 
remaining blocker issues in installation.

The meeting of 2009-11-09 was held during the final run-up to the Fedora 
12 go/no-go meeting, so there was some last-minute blocker bug 
discussion. Jóhann Guðmundsson had not yet been able to work on creating 
a test case for keyboard layout issues[6]. James Laska had followed up 
with the anaconda team and verified no blocker bugs remained in the 
installation process. Adam Williamson noted that one of the anaconda 
bugs that definitely wasn't left had been fixed the previous day.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral reported on the progress of the AutoQA 
project. Kamil had added a check to rpmguard for the case where an old 
version of rpmdiff is installed. Will had the new python library ready 
but wanted more testing before merging it into master. The new Koji 
watcher (for running AutoQA tests on new builds as they hit Koji) was 
now functional.

James Laska pointed out that Matthias Clasen had asked the group to test 
Fedora 12 0-day updates by enabling the Fedora 12 updates and possibly 
updates-testing repositories and updating their systems. James thought 
it would be a good idea to create a test case for testing the update 
repositories for a release before they were generally enabled.

A Bugzappers group weekly meeting[7] was held on 2009-11-03. No meeting 
was held on 2009-11-10. The full log is available[8]. Richard June 
reported that he was continuing to work on kernel triage. He had not 
been in touch with Jeff Hann regarding his volunteering to help out yet, 
but would attempt to co-ordinate via the mailing list.

Adam Williamson asked if anyone had concerns about unaddressed issues 
for the Fedora 12 release, and no-one did. Adam asked Matej Cepl how he 
was coping with X.org triage while François Cami was mostly unable to 
help, and he said it was difficult to stay on top of the large number of 
bugs. Adam promised to continue to try and manage the nouveau driver 
bugs, and Thomas Janssen volunteered to help out with others. Matej said 
he would work with Thomas to bring him up to speed on X triaging.

Edward Kirk reported that he had worked on outstanding Fedora 10 bugs, 
and managed to update some and close others. He also reported that the 
maintainer warning email for the upcoming Fedora 12 housekeeping 
Bugzilla changes had been sent out. John Poelstra was ready to do the 
Rawhide bug rebase (moving open Rawhide bugs to Fedora 12) and Fedora 10 
bug end-of-life warning operations.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-11-16 at 1600 UTC in 
#fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-11-17 at 
1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

    1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings
    2. 
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-11-02/fedora-meeting.2009-11-02-16.01.log.html
    3. 
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-11-09/fedora-meeting.2009-11-09-16.00.log.html
    4. http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=530452
    5. 
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=autoqa.git;a=tree;f=lib/python;hb=wwoods-autotest
    6. http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=530452
    7. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings
    8. 
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-11-03/fedora-meeting.2009-11-03-15.03.log.html

---  Fedora 12 release ---

Much of the group activity in the last two weeks was centred around 
Fedora 12 release testing and validation. James Laska posted a recap[1] 
of the final blocker bug review meeting for Fedora 12. James, Adam 
Williamson and Will Woods worked with the release engineering team 
throughout the final week before release to continuously monitor blocker 
bug status, test fixes, and monitor for newly identified blocker bugs 
and regressions.

Four release candidate builds were produced by the release engineering 
group with the help of testing and feedback from QA. Liam Li 
co-ordinated the planned installation testing through the test compose 
and release candidate process[2] [3], and maintained the test results 
matrix[4]. He also sent a post mortem on the testing process[5]. Many 
members of the group contributed valuable test reports to the matrix. 
Several group members, including Gianluca Cecchi, Gene Czarcinski and 
others posted test installation reports which helped identify important 
issues that were fixed or documented during the release process.

    1. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-November/msg00266.html
    2. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-November/msg00080.html
    3. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-November/msg00235.html
    4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_12_RC4_Install
    5. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-November/msg00585.html

--  Artwork --

In this section, we cover the Fedora Design Team[1].

Contributing Writer: Nicu Buculei

    1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork

---  Fedora 12 Media Art ---

After Luya Tshimbalanga started last week working on media art, he 
figured out[1] the sleeves do not list the minimum system requirements, 
so added this information[2]. However, Nicu Buculei noticed[3] the info 
from Release Notes[4] is obsolete "I am not sure we still support '200 
MHz Pentium-class or better'" and Bill Nottingham chimed in[5] with the 
correct data [6]. As a last step, Máirín Duffy added final polishing to 
the design[7]: "I took 4 hours today to finalize the sleeve and label 
designs since I've been asked by a number of people where they are, and 
that they need them yesterday," and also announced it in a blog post[8].

    1. 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-November/001353.html
    2. 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-November/001359.html
    3. 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-November/001375.html
    4. http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f12/en-US/html/
    5. 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-November/001382.html
    6. 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-November/001405.html
    7. 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-November/001424.html
    8. 
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/getting-ready-for-f12-media-sleeves-and-labels/

---  Large Website Banner ---

Máirín Duffy posted[1] a couple of polished designs for the large 
website banner, one featuring the Fedora 12 release slogan "Unite"[2] 
and another without any text. Paul Frields objected to a banner with 
English-only text "Any reason for us not to use the 'notext' version, 
that you know of?", and looked for ways to translate it[3] - "maybe we 
should see if we can get localized text out of the translations for the 
'Unite' wording on the website".

    1. 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-November/001388.html
    2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F12_release_slogan
    3. 
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2009-November/001393.html

--  Security Advisories --

In this section, we cover security sdvisories from fedora-package-announce.

http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

---  Fedora 11 Security Advisories ---

     * ocaml-camlimages-3.0.1-7.fc11.3 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00319.html
     * dhcp-4.1.0p1-4.fc11 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00340.html
     * libvorbis-1.2.0-9.fc11 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00369.html
     * wordpress-mu-2.8.5.2-1.fc11 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00375.html
     * ocaml-mysql-1.0.4-8.fc11.1 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00381.html
     * ocaml-postgresql-1.12.3-1.fc11.2 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00389.html
     * texlive-2007-46.fc11 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00507.html
     * java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-30.b16.fc11 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00544.html
     * qt-4.5.3-9.fc11 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00549.html 


---  Fedora 10 Security Advisories ---

     * libvorbis-1.2.0-7.fc10 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00315.html
     * ocaml-mysql-1.0.4-3.fc10.1 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00325.html
     * ocaml-camlimages-3.0.1-3.fc10.3 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00342.html
     * wordpress-mu-2.8.5.2-1.fc10 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00395.html
     * ocaml-postgresql-1.12.3-1.fc10.2 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00397.html
     * texlive-2007-46.fc10 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00505.html
     * qt-4.5.3-9.fc10 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00546.html
     * java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-23.b16.fc10 - 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-package-announce/2009-November/msg00548.html 


--  Virtualization --

In this section, we cover discussion of Fedora virtualization 
technologies on the @fedora-virt, @fedora-xen-list, and @libvirt-list lists.

Contributing Writer: Dale Bewley

---  Fedora Virtualization List ---

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-virt list.

----  Guest Bridge Configuration with libvirt and netcf ----

Andrés García thought[1] he read somewhere that "with Fedora 12 there 
was going to be a way to configure virtual network bridges 
automagically," but was only aware of the manual[2] means of configuration.

It is possible in to configure bridges using virsh thanks to the Network 
Interface Management[3] feature and image:Echo-package-16px.pngnetcf[4]. 
However, the process is manual and not in the GUI. Dale Bewley 
blogged[5] about how to manually create a bridge in Fedora 12 using virsh.

Support for image:Echo-package-16px.pngvirt-manager integration is 
targeted[6] for Fedora 13.

    1. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-November/msg00002.html
    2. 
http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Networking#Bridged_networking_.28aka_.22shared_physical_device.22.29
    3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Network_Interface_Management
    4. 
http://linux-kvm.com/content/netcf-silver-bullet-network-configuration
    5. http://tofu.org/drupal/node/86
    6. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Shared_Network_Interface

----  New Release libguestfs 1.0.78 ----

Richard Jones announced[1] version 1.0.78 of 
image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibguestfs[2], the library for accessing and 
modifying virtual machine filesystems.

New Features:

     * FUSE support so you can mount guest filesystems in the host [3]
     * Support for btrfs, gfs, gfs2, hfs, hfs+, nilfs2, jfs, reiserfs, 
xfs[4]
     * Support for huge (multi-exabyte) sparse virtual disks[5]
     * New partitioning API, supports GPT and more[6]
     * New tools:

         * virt-ls[7]
         * virt-tar[8]
         * virt-edit[9]
         * virt-rescue[10]

     * Windows Registry support, tools and library[11] [12]
     * OCaml bindings for virt-inspector
     * RELAX NG schema for virt-inspector
     * New APIs: utimens, vfs_type, truncate, truncate_size, lchown, 
lstatlist, lxattrlist, readlinklist, case_sensitive_path, find0, mkfs_b, 
mke2journal, and more ...
     * New program: OCaml viewer[13]
     * Allow stdout to be redirected when running guestfish remotely 
(Matt Booth).
     * Remove requirement for vmchannel support in qemu (horray!) and 
the tricky main loop code.

    1. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/virt-tools-list/2009-November/msg00023.html
    2. http://libguestfs.org/
    3. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/browsing-guests-using-fuse/
    4. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/filesystem-metadata-overhead/
    5. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/petabytes-exabytes-why-not/
    6. http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#guestfs_part_add
    7. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/new-tool-virt-ls/
    8. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/new-tool-virt-tar/
    9. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/virt-edit/
   10. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/virt-rescue/
   11. 
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/virt-win-reg-get-at-the-windows-registry-in-your-windows-guests/
   12. 
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/libhivex-windows-registry-hive-extractor-library/
   13. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/graphical-virt-df/

---  Fedora Xen List ---

This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-xen list.

----  No Xen dom0 in Fedora 12 Hopefully 13 ----

Zhang Enming was disappointed[1] to learn[2] the pv_ops dom0 support[3] 
for hosting Xen guests, dropped in Fedora 9, is still not present in 
Fedora 12. Zhang referenced numerous videos documenting success in 
creating "a fully working Xen pv-ops dom0 Fedora 11 host operating system."

While there are experimental patches which may be applied[4] [5] to the 
kernel to enable support for dom0, they are not yet in the upstream 
kernel which forms the basis the Fedora kernel package.

It was decided[6] two years ago this month that Fedora "simply cannot 
spend more time forward porting Xen kernels" and "the plan is to 
re-focus 100% of all Xen kernel efforts onto paravirt_ops." See FWN#137.[7]

Pasi Kärkkäinen noted[8] "pv_ops dom0 kernel has only recently started 
working for many/most people, so it was too late for F12 release" and 
"There are still some missing features, most notably missing blktap2 
support for tap:aio: file-based images."

    1. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-November/msg00019.html
    2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats/Virtualization
    3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0
    4. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue190#Dom0_Kernel_Status
    5. http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps
    6. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2007-November/msg00106.html
    7. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue137#kernel-xen_is_Dead
    8. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2009-November/msg00020.html

---  Libvirt List ---

This section contains the discussion happening on the libvir-list.

----  Keeping Guest Configurations in Sync on Multiple Hosts ----

Thomas Treutner asked[1] "is there any best-practice how to keep VM 
definitions in sync across a couple of hosts? Is it reasonable to put 
<code>/etc/libvirt/qemu/ on a NFS share?"

Matthias Bolte explained[2] "No, it's not safe to share 
/etc/libvirt/qemu/", but also didn't find it necessary to keep the 
configs in sync. "A migrated domain stays defined on the source node and 
is transient on the destination node. A transient domain has no 
persistent config on its node and is lost when destroyed."

Matthias mentioned a patch[3] to the virDomainMigrate[4] function by 
Chris Lalancette which will be in image:Echo-package-16px.pnglibvirt 
0.7.3. The patch adds a new flag which will allow domains to be migrated 
persistently. Version 0.7.3 is targeted[5] for release on November 20th.

    1. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-November/msg00495.html
    2. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-November/msg00498.html
    3. http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-October/msg00318.html
    4. http://www.libvirt.org/html/libvirt-libvirt.html#virDomainMigrate
    5. 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2009-November/msg00480.html

--  KDE --

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora KDE Special 
Interests Group[1].

Contributing Writer: Ryan Rix

    1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE

---  New Soprano Backends coming to Fedora KDE ---

Mary Ellen Foster has been working on packaging the Java based Sesame2 
backend for Nepomuk to replace the Redland backend. Unfortunately, 
Sesame2 is dependent on many other Java packages which must first be 
packaged for inclusion in Fedora. There are many packages that still 
need to be packaged for this backend to make it into Fedora[1]. Mary 
Ellen has been working hard to package many of these dependencies, but 
this has recently fallen in priorities to personal business. Now that 
she has more time to put into this packaging,[2] she has realized that 
many of the packages on her wiki page were either unnecessary or already 
under review in Fedora.

After Sebastian Trueg wrote[3] on his blog about getting Soprano and 
Virtuoso to work together, Rex Dieter began work on packaging the 
virtuoso backend as virtuoso-opensource. The Soprano plugins will not be 
stable until the release of KDE 4.4; however, Dieter has packaged 
snapshots with working virtuoso support in the kde-redhat unstable 
repository[4] as virtuoso-opensource 5.0.12-1 and soprano 
2.3.67-0.1.20091102. After installing these packages, follow steps 5-7 
outlined on Trueg's blog post[5] and you should be up and running. 
Please report any issues to the Fedora-KDE mailing list[6]. This is, 
however, extremely early software, and may have many bugs blocking 
regular use.

    1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MaryEllenFoster/SopranoSesame
    2. http://mairi-ruadh.livejournal.com/62989.html
    3. http://trueg.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/virtuoso-for-real/
    4. http://kde-redhat.sf.net/
    5. 
http://trueg.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/virtuoso-once-more-with-feeling/
    6. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-kde

---  gtk-qt-engine retired, replaced with kcm-gtk ---

Rex Dieter has decided to orphan the gtk-qt-engine package in favor of 
replacing it with the kcm-gtk package for Fedora 12+. The packages are 
for all intents and purposes identical except kcm-gtk doesn't ship the 
Qt style for gtk. The Qt style has been problematic[1] and, for the most 
part, unmaintained upstream.

    1. http://osdir.com/ml/fedora-devel-list/2009-10/msg01109.html

- end FWN #202 -




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