Fedora™ status report, June 2006

edited by Max Spevack

The Fedora Status Report is an edited version of recent issues of Fedora Weekly News at fedoranews.org. The fedoranews site is edited by Thomas Chung and accepts contributions from anyone in the Fedora community. Articles are reprinted here with their permission. New contributors are always welcome.

In this issue:

• One Laptop Per Child: An Education Project
• The K12 Open Source Interview Series Has Begun
• OSCON Day 0 - Freedom 2.0
• On-Disk.com Donations and Big Developer Payouts
• Use Fedora Directory Server For Manageable LDAP
• Book review: Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed
• Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-24
• FC6 Test2 Freeze Slip
• End of Life times for FC1, FC2, RHL7.3 and RHL9
• Introducing Fedora Women
• Fedora at O'reilly OSCON 2006
• Kernel Privilege Esclation Exploit for CVE-2006-3626
• NewsForge: New Fedora test lead begins work
• Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-17
• FC6 test2 freeze slipping by a week
• Packaging Committee Information
• How was NECC 2006?
• SELinux blocks local privilege escalation vulnerability
• Linux Magazine: AppArmor vs SELinux
• New Linux Hardware Compatibility List Launches
• Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-10
• Open Video Contest Deadline Extension
• FC6 test2 freeze slipping by a week
• New FWN Column: Ask Fedora Project
• DejaVu fonts Testing for Fedora
• Fedora Core 6, Test 1 Review
• CNET: Microsoft bends on OpenDocument
• Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-03
• Fedora Core 4 and 5 Updates
• Contributing to Fedora Weekly News
• Editor's Blog

One Laptop Per Child: An Education Project

Red Hat recently launched a special promo site with many useful information for OLPC project.

Nicholas Negroponte announced the One Laptop per Child initiative at the World Economic Forum in January, 2005. Today, the mission to provide every child in the world with a rugged, Internet-ready laptop isn't just feasible. It's inevitable. But the movement isn't about the laptop. It's not even about technology. It's about making knowledge open, so the next generation of children can learn from it, build upon it, and use it to create.

The K12 Open Source Interview Series Has Begun

Steve Hargadon announces in fedora-education-list:

Last night Miguel Guhlin and I interviewed Dr. David Thornburg on the use of Free and Open Source Software in schools. This was the first of a series of webcast interviews we will be conducting on this topic, to be broadcast live each Thursday night at 5:00pm Pacific Time and then made available in recorded form.

OSCON Day 0 - Freedom 2.0

Jack Aboutboul points out in his blog:

Michael expanded on this by relating a story of how while working with NOAA, they successfully rolled out a new platform which allowed them to track weather changes and patterns for windows as small as five minutes. The severity and likely damages of Hurricane Katrina were predicted two weeks in advance and we still failed miserably on the most important level of the game....Michael closed the talk by revising his earlier answer. The next big thing in technology will be when we can effectively democratize action based on the information which we have become so adept at processing. This is the true promise of a technologically advanced society.

On-Disk.com Donations and Big Developer Payouts

Karlie Robinson announces in NewsForge:

To quickly understand how On-Disk.com and it's anniversary donations have and will continue to effect Independent thinking, just one Fedora Core 5 CD set will generate $6 for both FSF and OSI and will include a Sponsorship for someone on the Fedora Free Media waiting list.

Use Fedora Directory Server For Manageable LDAP

According to recent article published in EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:

FDS scales nicely from tiny test systems to huge enterprise systems, which comes as no surprise to anyone who knows its history. It began life as the Netscape Directory Server (NDS), then became the iPlanet Directory Server, and then the SunONE directory server. You'll find all of these ancestral LDAP servers still in service, handling very large loads with ease. To quote the FDS Web site: "The Fedora Directory Server is hardened by real world use, full featured, scales like a banshee, and already handles many of the largest LDAP deployments in the world." So you could start your LDAP education with FDS, and stick with it as your needs grow.

Book review: Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed

According to recent book review in LWN:

While it is based on FC5, this book has much useful information that will be applicable to future versions of Fedora, and to other versions of Linux as well. I expect this to be a good reference book long after the included DVD becomes nothing more than drink coaster.

Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-24

We have a new effort in place to report The Board news as well as Meeting Minutes from each sub-project for Fedora community to gather information on the happenings in the Fedora universe in a easily digestible and referenceable format.

FC6 Test2 Freeze Slip

Jeremy Katz announces in fedora-maintainers:

With the update to a 2.6.18-rc based kernel, Xen requires some more effort to get to working. Given that Xen is one of the big features for Fedora Core 6, trying to ship the second test release (and thus the feature freeze) without Xen seems like a less than ideal situation.

Therefore, after discussion within the Fedora Board, we have decided to slip the freeze for test2 until Xen is working again with current kernels. Based on current estimates, it looks like this should hopefully be Monday, 24 July. We'll continue to provide updates as more information is available.

End of Life times for FC1, FC2, RHL7.3 and RHL9

Jesse Keating announces in fedora-legacy-announce:

With Fedora Core 6 Test 2 set to be released July 26th, it is time we announce the End of Life of our various Legacy supported releases.

After much discussion on fedora-legacy-list and the #fedora-legacy IRC channel on the freenode network, we have decided to end of life the following releases when FC6 Test2 is released: Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core 2. This will leave us with supporting just releases 3 and 4 of Fedora Core.

As to our Red Hat Linux releases (7.3 and 9) the following has been decided: New issues (bugs) will be accepted until October 1st of this year. No new bugs will be accepted after that mark. All existing bugs will be resolved to the best of our ability by December 31st of this year. What hasn't been completed by then will not be completed by the Fedora Legacy project. This will be the end of Fedora Legacy's support of the Red Hat Linux line of distributions.

Introducing Fedora Women

Patrick W. Barnes announces in fedora-announce-list:

In an effort to support the women who use and develop Fedora, the Fedora Women program was launched last week. This new program provides a forum for communication between the women of Fedora, and it will eventually offer additional support to the women that help make Fedora what it is.

Fedora at O'reilly OSCON 2006

Jack Aboutboul announces in fedora-announce-list:

All are invited to join the Fedora Project at the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON 2006) on July 24-28 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Fedora will be proudly exhibiting in the .org pavilion and running a Birds of a Feather sessions.

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2006/

Kernel Privilege Esclation Exploit for CVE-2006-3626

Mark Cox points out in his blog:

On Friday 14th July an exploit was widely posted for a vulnerability in the Linux 2.6 kernel, CVE-2006-3626, which attempts to allow a local user to gain root privileges. The exploit relies on the kernel supporting the a.out binary format.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora Core 4, and Fedora Core 5 do not support the a.out binary format, causing the exploit to fail. We are not currently aware of any way to exploit this vulnerability if a.out binary format is not enabled. In addition, a default installation of these OS enables SELinux in enforcing mode. SELinux also completely blocks attempts to exploit this issue

NewsForge: New Fedora test lead begins work

According to recent article at NewsForge:

"I really want people to think of testing as part of development," Woods says. "That's a common theme in proper software engineering. Once something matures to a certain point, you have to start doing rigorous regression testing and things of that nature. I think the open source community needs some of that. It's not that I really need to tell people -- people know that testing is important. My real goal is to make testing easier." By integrating Red Hat's internal testing software into Fedora and bringing rigor to Fedora's testing, Woods hopes to bring some of that ease not just to Fedora, but to free software in general -- and, incidentally, to silence Fedora's detractors once and for all.

Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-17

We have a new effort in place to report The Board news as well as Meeting Minutes from each sub-project for Fedora community to gather information on the happenings in the Fedora universe in a easily digestible and referenceable format.

FC6 test2 freeze slipping by a week

Jeremy Katz announces in fedora-announce-list:

(I sent this to fedora-maintainers last week, but forgot to cc the larger audience)

Due to a desire to integrate the DT_GNU_HASH changes for binutils and glibc (which provide an ~ 50% speedup for dynamic linking) and the necessity of doing a rebuild for these changes, we are going to slip the freeze for FC6 test2 by one week. The new freeze date will be Wednesday, 19 July 2006. This should also allow a few other things that are straggling time to be tested a little bit more in time for the feature freeze at test2.

Packaging Committee Information

Toshio Kuratomi reports in fedora-packaging-list:

I've started a page for packaging committee with the date and time of the meetings and other information. If you want to find out about the packaging committee go ahead and read it. If you're on the Packaging Committee and want to hack it, go ahead. If you don't have permission to edit the page but want something added or modified, send mail to fedora-packaging or hop onto #fedora-packaging on IRC.

How was NECC 2006?

Steve Hargadon reports on fedora-education-list:

It was great...Except for one or two sessions, our lab area was almost always packed. At one point our email garden tables had lines two or three people back--I think they were actually trying to see over the shoulders of those on the computers, who were following along with the lab talks.

SELinux blocks local privilege escalation vulnerability

James Morris points out in his blog:

Joshua Brindle has analyzed the recent /proc local privilege escalation vulnerability, CVE-2006-3626, and posted that SELinux targeted policy prevents exploitation. It'd be an interesting and useful exercise to go back through historical vulnerabilities and determine how many of them would be mitigated by SELinux and similar technologies (Exec-shield, PIE etc.). Mark Cox wrote an interesting paper, Risk Report: A year of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, which mentions that SELinux blocked the Lupper worm (also noting that that the policy version shipped by default would not have blocked a modified version of the worm).

Linux Magazine: AppArmor vs SELinux

Hans-Jörg Ehren, Product Manager of Linux Magazine repots via email:

We at Linux Magazine wanted to inform you that we have posted our article covering "AppArmor vs. SELinux" in our Online Archive. Please feel free to link to it from your site or post the link to related forums and community sites. The article is available as a PDF and can be downloaded and printed for private use without charge.

New Linux Hardware Compatibility List Launches

According to LinuxToday:

Phoronix has today announced the creation of Phoronix LCH. Phoronix LCH is designed to be a community-driven indexing system for computer hardware under Linux. This system allows you to post Linux information on hardware as well as sharing your own personal experiences when it comes to Linux compatibility.

Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-10

We have a new effort in place to report The Board news as well as Meeting Minutes from each sub-project for Fedora community to gather information on the happenings in the Fedora universe in a easily digestible and referenceable format.

Open Video Contest Deadline Extension

Mike Linksvayer, CTO of Creative Commons announces in his weblog:

Due to requests for additional time we're proactively extending the deadline for the Fedora/CC Open Video Contest by one month -- you now have until August 20 to submit a 30 second video on the subject of openness.

FC6 test2 freeze slipping by a week

Jeremy Katz announces in fedora-maintainers-list:

Due to a desire to integrate the DT_GNU_HASH changes for binutils and glibc (which provide an ~ 50% speedup for dynamic linking) and the necessity of doing a rebuild for these changes, we are going to slip the freeze for FC6 test2 by one week. The new freeze date will be Wednesday, 19 July 2006. This should also allow a few other things that are straggling time to be tested a little bit more in time for the feature freeze at test2.

New FWN Column: Ask Fedora Project

Paul W. Frields announces in fedora-marketing-list:

Fedora Weekly News, in association with the Fedora Documentation Project, is soon to start a new regular column devoted to giving answers to common user problems. The result would be similar to "Ask Shadowman" in Red Hat Magazine -- somewhat like a weekly FAQ, with the significant difference being that it's completely Fedora-centric, and we have the ability to be a bit more current through dipping into the input stream in real time.

DejaVu fonts Testing for Fedora

Damien Durand points out in his blog:

Today, I've tested DejaVU fonts and it's great. What're the characteristics of DejaVU fonts? In a few words it's derived of popular Bitstream Vera font. They are the main Desktop fonts on all FLOSS Desktops, used by a lot of Distributions, Debian, Suse, Ubuntu ... and soon Fedora.

Fedora Core 6, Test 1 Review

Rahul Sundaram points out in fedora-marketing-list:

More of a short look rather than a comprehensive review. I am inclined to believe than Fedora Core 6 is bound to be a release that is less focused on feature changes. More on that later.

CNET: Microsoft bends on OpenDocument

According to recent article published in CNET News.com:

Although Microsoft Office document formats are the most widely used, OpenDocument has emerged as an alternative with significant vendor backing and with high-profile government customers in Massachusetts and Belgium. OpenDocument is an XML-based format developed under the standards group OASIS, or the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.

Fedora Weekly Reports 2006-07-03

We have a new effort in place to report The Board news as well as Meeting Minutes from each sub-project for Fedora community to gather information on the happenings in the Fedora universe in a easily digestible and referenceable format.

Fedora Core 4 and 5 Updates

During the week of July 03 - July 09, Fedora Project released 01 Fedora Core 4 Updates including 01 Security Advisory.

During the week of July 03 - July 09, Fedora Project released 21 Fedora Core 5 Updates including 02 Security Advisory.

Contributing to Fedora Weekly News

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Editor's Blog

Let's see anything interesting happened in Editor's Blog besides Fedora Weekly News