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At the end of March, members of our Fedora Project team set out on the 2008 North American University Tour to spread the word about free software and Fedora. We want to make sure that the important principles of open source software are highlighted in universities around the world as they develop their computer science curriculums that will breed our future software contributors, so we decided to go directly to the source – students and faculty.
We made stops in Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, California and lots of places in between – see our full schedule. Basically, our aim was to raise the awareness of Fedora and open source software among the university communities with the hope that many of those that we touched will become active supporters and contributors to the Fedora Project.
We’ve gotten some great feedback from both students and faculty at the Universities where we stopped, and Jack Aboutboul, one of our Community Engineers that has been making the rounds, has some great anecdotes to share about some cool happenings, like Carnegie Mellon planning to install Fedora on computers in its Bill Gates building. Check out the blog about Jack’s travels for more.
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If you’re curious about what might be included in the next version of Fedora — Fedora 9 Sulphur, due out in late April 2008 — today’s Beta release gives a good glimpse into what’s ahead. The Beta release signals the feature freeze for the next release, meaning that all major features that we plan to include have to either be complete or in a testable state. It’s aimed at our developers and early adopters, but everyone in the community is given the opportunity to give feedback to improve our latest and greatest cycles. Testing of the Fedora 9 Beta release is really simple because with live media images, you don’t need to install anything.
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In the middle of the great discussions and conferences taking place at JBoss World, Orlando, Red Hat quietly leaked out the first cut of what is likely to influence the future of virtualization. Project oVirt. oVirt’s aim is to transform the host virtualization layer into a small stateless image which can be embedded on FLASH, or booted off a CD or PXE. No local disks needed. No installs. A physical server can become a virtual server just by booting oVirt.
oVirt also includes a new web management console which can manage any libvirt-based virtualization system. Whether that be one personal system, or the enterprise. It is no accident that oVirt is tightly integrating with the freeIPA project, so that administrators will be able to authenticate, authorize, and audit their virtual resources across the enterprise.
Not a bad week.
Free software is becoming increasingly popular with non-technical users and, as a result, good documentation is becoming more important. The greatest barrier to achieving good, free documentation has not been a lack of interested contributors, but the difficulty of the tools required to create and manage regularly updated and complex documents.
Thankfully things have just got a lot easier: Publican has arrived. Red Hat’s documentation team has been using this tool, which automates the process of creating all the files needed to begin a new document, as well as exports the finished content into many of the most common formats including HTML and PDF. Now they’ve opened it up to the world and it is being hosted by the Fedora Project, whose own documentation team is set to adopt it.
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As Fedora contributors, one of the most exciting parts of the development process of new Fedora distributions is determining which cool, new features are included in the next release. Fedora 9 (Sulphur) is due out at the end of April 2008, and we started making plans for it as soon as we released Fedora 8 back in November. We’ve been implementing the changes we want included in this release, and with the Fedora 9 Alpha release today, it’s time for the whole community’s input. Obtain your Alpha live spin here.
During each Fedora cycle, there is an Alpha release, a Beta release and a series of weekly snapshot releases. The Alpha release gives everyone the opportunity to provide feedback on the work that has been done so far as the first step in the testing cycle. It’s the first time that the larger Fedora community can get really involved in testing out the new features and is encouraged to provide input on what’s working, and what’s not. It’s easy to gain access to the Alpha release because you don’t have to install any software — everything you need is provided through live CDs. Then, to give us feedback, you can file bug reports and enhancement requests and make other recommendations.
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If you are a CIO, you may already be invested in open source applications at home. Or, like many, you may be a very busy person just using the applications that came with your personal computer, scanner, printer or camera and haven’t really considered the wealth of personal open source applications that are available and ready to use. If you fall in that second group, here are some candidates to get you started.
Now that we’re a few months past the Fedora 8 release, and we’ve produced another successful FUDCon, this time in Raleigh, NC, the time has come for our current Fedora Project Leader, Max Spevack, to hand off his role to a new advocate. We welcome Paul Frields, who will assume this role in February.
Max first joined the Fedora team two years ago, about one month before Fedora Core 5 was released. Only a few people within the Fedora community knew him, but he had been a Fedora user and working for Red Hat already for a year and a half in the Red Hat Network group. Now, he’ll remain involved in Fedora and Red Hat’s community efforts.
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From Friday, January 11 through Sunday, January 13, the Fedora Project will be holding its annual FUDCon event at Red Hat’s Raleigh, NC headquarters.
FUDCon is the “Fedora Users and Developers Conference” — a time when members of the Fedora community who usually only communicate via email or IRC have a chance to meet in person. FUDCon includes two full days of hackfests, in which specific technical problems are worked on in small group code sprints, as well as one day of talks, sessions and presentations that are of interest to a variety of users and developers.
The second meaning of FUDCon is to stand opposed to the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that opponents of free software often try to promulgate.
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Today, Fedora 8 is available for download. The newest release brings with it a developer spin, a games spin and an electronic-lab spin, in addition to the GNOME and KDE desktop spins that were first part of Fedora 7.
Fedora’s development priorities tend to come in cycles. If you think back to the Fedora Core 6 release cycle, you will remember that a significant portion of the engineering goals for that release were driven by the knowledge that Fedora Core 6 would be the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Everyone knew going in that Fedora Core 6 would be more “corporate” than “community.” And that was OK, because we also knew that once Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released, the Fedora Project would be able to spend its next several releases focused on its community-related priorities.
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Today LinuxWorld 2007 kicks off in San Francisco. We’re excited to be present at the conference through the booths of many of our partners as well as through the Fedora booth in the .org pavilion. Our participation this year focuses on solutions, products and technologies delivered by partners like Dell, AMD, IBM, etc. and through our open source community projects like Fedora and JBoss.org.
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