Reminder: the Future of Fedora release names meeting tmrw!

Hi, we are planning the first meeting on %SUBJ% tomorrow - so Friday 15th 5PM UTC (1PM EDT, 7PM CEST for us Central Europeans ;-). You can find it on Freenode - #fedora-meeting-1 channel.

What's the goal of this meeting? I hope not to have a meeting for meeting but to move forward with the discussion started by Toshio (as it got stalled). I think the best thing we can do for now is to try to get interested people to meet together, to check if there's real demand for the change and if so, to start with the real proposals to create a new naming scheme.

The meeting is open for everyone, if you're interested in - please join us! Btw. it's still a discussion and the result of this discussion is an advisory for Board

Fedora 17 KDE Plasma Workspaces Test Day today!

This blogpost is just a quick reminder for people who knows about our Fedora 17 Plasma Desktop Test Day but also invitation for the "rest" - users, testers and developers - you're welcome to join us ;-)

The main goal is to test Plasma Desktop integration in Fedora but I expect users will be reporting not only Fedora related issues. We will try to redirect these issues upstream but the test day is open for upstream developers too and would be great to have more hands to help.

The main topics are Desktop Effects enabled by default (as upstream already enables it by default, Gnome Shell is also accelerated only desktop and we think it's time give it a chance :) We disabled the initial LLVMpipe software rendering support.), Fedora KDE spin theming support, GDM integration - GDM switched from ConsoleKit to systemd, we have an initial support by Kevin Kofler (to be upstreamed) and hardware integration (Solid, Power management, bluetooth). Also the freeform essential applications testing.

It's held today (2012-04-10) at FreeNode #fedora-test-day channel!

Test Day Wiki with the recommended LiveCD image (with 4.8.2), brief overview and actual test cases and results.

Btw. if you are going to use KVM as found in Fedora 16/17 - change the video options to qlx/spice as cirrus/vnc is currently broken by the cirrus change to 16 bpp - see rhbz#810161.

See you today :)

Be Active - KDE SIG FAD at DevConf Brno

The last week and the whole weekend was really demanding but also one of the best of all while being Active in Fedora community. The Developer Conference is for developers and it was held by developers - the Red Hat, Fedora and community ones. A great opportunity to meet very nice (looking) people. You could meet one third of current Fedora Board, one (now former) FPL, the base OS guys who serves you a lot of Fedora updates, the core system developers and of course - nearly the whole Fedora KDE SIG (me, Rex Dieter, Lukas Tinkl, Kevin Kofler, Radek Novacek) with special guests (Christopher Wickert, Martin Klapetek, Dan Vratil and Lukas Karas). It was nearly impossible to talk to everyone, to attend every hackfest/sprint, to listen to all talks. And over six hundred people arrived the first day! It was Active.

Well, this is my quick summary - mostly from our Fedora KDE SIG lands and the Activity Day. We set quite high standard and level of achievements for the FAD (see the plans on FAD wiki) and I'm really glad we met them (at least partially).

• Christoph was working on LightDM packaging for Fedora, he started at FUDCon EMEA Milan and after the real fight he was able to get the beast log him in, even with Qt greeter and I'm really looking forward to try the KDE greeter with all the neat QML stuff there!



• Me and Radek Novacek were finishing the Plasma Active stuff - so that's all the Be Active stuff in this blog. We hit several build issues and we were trying to figure out how to integrate PA2 to Fedora. Finally we decided that we will aim on a Fedora Active spin, containing only touch enabled applications (the core PA stuff, Bangarang with touch support etc.) as on tablets the desktop stuff is not very usable and on the other hand - we don't have enough space on Plasma Workspaces spin to include the touch bits in. Also we will skip the Fedora 17 as a target for spin, we will try to prepare unofficial images during the development, waiting for Plasma Active 3 that should be consumable by end users (as it targets the Spark tablet release). Imagine Fedora on Raspberry Pi with touch screen and Active on top of it (yeah, I know, it's ARM so more work will be needed, for now we aim on Atom based tablets like WeTab/ExoPC and check the photo of Lenovo IdeaPad running it) :)





• Rex was working with Martin, the KDE Telepathy upstream guy, on the packaging with the aim to replace Kopete and make Telepathy bits default in Fedora 17. We will see but the progress is nice, Kopete is not anymore maintained... Rex also committed the package splits to comps.





• Martin finished the sprint with the Firemuk, check his blog post to see nice Nepomuk coolness.





• Kevin was working on his colorized system tray icons, yep, I should get them soon! and updated of git-cola in Fedora to latest upstream.



• Lukas was finishing his uDisks 2 support in Solid and the first batch of patches is already upstreamed! Great achievement! Hero Trophy earned.

I also gave a talk about Qt 5 - the Qt Project, now under open governance, what's new in the fifth version, with a quick QML and Qt Quick tutorial and the response from KDE community. And it wouldn't be me without some wow effect - so the whole talk was written in Qt Quick using QML Presentation System on top Qt 5 using OpenGL Scene Graph. With all examples embedded in slides. Even Kevin thinks it's abuse of QML I still like it - there's no easier way how to create interactive presentations, one minus is export. I'd try to capture it and publish it somewhere. Also check my branch - I'll commit the changes needed to get it running on current Qt 5. And as winter already came, and alpha is coming from the north and behind the wall - we were talking about how to provide the packages for Fedora. Stay tuned!

And spending the Sunday's afternoon with Red, Jared and Dennis was ... priceless...



So I'd like to thanks to all people, all developers who were working really hard to get this event ready, thank you!

Thank you (for release party)!

I have to say, Fedora 16 Release party was a huge success - at least for me. But I expect everyone who attended it, can agree. This time it was impossible to count all people. We had only 65 seats as our Tower Big meeting room is not as big even with Small one together. And all there held with about another 65 people staying around, eating, chatting etc. For Beefy Miracle Jirka was joking about renting the first league football stadium next to the office ;-)



We had some refreshment and junk food. As always - we feed people first to make them happy and to complain later ;-)



There were several talks scheduled - aiming mainly users - so desktop ones, we were asked for Fedora Cloud offering one. Also I should mention Fedora QA and systemd.



I'm really happy how Jirka Eischmann restarted Czech Fedora community after the clinical death (caused by lack of ambassadors here, Ubuntu hype) - especially in the country, where all the old true Linux guys started on Red Hat Linux. You can read his article in Czech on our new Fedora.cz portal. And I'm really happy I can help him :)

Fedora 16 Verne, the Plasma one and marketing

Fedora 16 Verne is out for more than one week now and of course it contains the latest Qt and KDE Plasma bits. And when I say latest, I mean really THE latest. This time we were probably too overhyped with Qt 4.8, so you'll find RC1 and you know, the nerves waiting at least for it (rc1).... I hope it will change with Open Governance and we will get public release schedules. There are also zero-day 4.7.3 updates available for F16. It's something you can expect from Fedora. But Lukas Tvrdy reminded me one thing we usually fail, especially our KDE SIG team. Marketing. Yeah, I know - we can't compete with you, Krita guys - the Comic book with DVD is really awesome (/me wants more, thank you Timothee!!! Btw. your website is broken, no links are working). But we should work on it, make more KDE Plasma appearance in release notes, announcements, over Internet, reviews and blogs ;-) Well, let's make it better.




The Fedora KDE SIG team and Jules Verne are proud to announce Fedora 16, the KDE Plasma Edition is available for download (for over week now :). Please, visit the spin homepage.

The most visible change for users and the most notable one is probably change of our packaging schema - as we want to stick to upstream as close as possible, we provide split packages now.



I've found one review, nice reading, called "Fedora 16 KDE: Improving Perfection". Please, if you like Fedora and Plasma, write more, help us with marketing. Also I'd like to react to this review - why two media players? We'd like to have only one - most of people prefer Amarok and we think it's the one everyone is looking for. For now we gave an excuse to JuK. Or should we try Bangarang?

Also we're preparing Fedora 16 release party in Brno, everyone from this area is welcomed to join us. It's also being my birthday party - 23rd November at Red Hat's Tower Meeting Room. Please, sign up. I'll show you again the shining Plasma bits. Hopefully with Plasma Active running on top of Fedora (we're currently working on).

Run for Fedora chair!

Take this blogpost more as reminder than urging you ;-) but as probably many of you know, there are another (the years and Fedoras are passing faster and faster...) elections coming, with nominations opened. It's going to close soon on Nov 5 (the midnight) and it seems there's a lack of interested. At least for Board and FESCo - more seats free than people nominated... And listening to some people complaining how bad FESCo or Board is, it makes sense to do your part!

Well, visit http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections and you'll see what to do!

Fedora Booth @LinuxCon Prague

Just a quick blogpost and another LinuxCon Prague reminder (thanks Lennart for knocking me to publish it)...



There will be Fedora Booth too!!!

What will you see (and get)?

• Exo PC running Fedora 16 with Shell on top of it

• Lenovo Ideapad S10-3t running Plasma Workspaces, both Desktop and Netbook (Fedora 16 too)
  

• talk to Brno's Fedora/Red Hat guys (Jiri called it "Ask an Expert", there will be a schedule and these people will be available only for you)

• a free stuff - like (still) Fedora 15 medias

I think both examples are great and proves, that Fedora can be used on desktops, has a nice netbook offering and is capable running on tablets too!

So, if you're coming to LinuxCon/ELCE/whatever ;-), stop by at our booth!

PS: as an Openmobility member, I have to remind you, that almost everybody from our group is attending too!