FredPod 101128 – Fedora 14

FredPod Program 101128

 

Welcome to FredPod, a podcast about creativity and technology from the Fredericksburg, Virginia area

 

This podcast is available in MP3 format via iTunes and at marwalk.podomatic.com. You also can get this podcast in the open source Ogg Vorbis format; look for the Ogg Vorbis RSS link on the home page at marwalk.net.

 

FredPod is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

 

This is your host, Mark Walker.

Show notes for this podcast are available at marwalk.wordpress.com, under the category Podcast.

 

This program was produced on November 28^th, 2010. And today’s topics will include:

 

• Recent releases on SourceForge.
  
• Selections from “yum info recent” on the Fedora Linux project.
  
• The Latest from FredLUG.
  
• Today’s feature is Fedora 14, an overview of it’s features and some personal experiences with it.
  

• And we’ll close with a Creative Commons licensed work by
  Dolly heads to Texas entitled “Loves me not .”
  

   

→

 

 

 

Here are some projects with recent releases on SourceForge (links are in the shownotes):

 

 

• Stop Motion Capture—Stop Motion Capture animates a video from single frames. It uses your digi cam to capture these photos. Furthermore it contains various technologies, such as onion skin, bluescreen or export.
  http://smcapture.sourceforge.net

   

• eXtended Screenshot—This is a nice Windows and Linux screenshot tool for make, edit, share and exchange screenshots between people via the internet. This tool oriented for QA testers, programmers, designers, sales managers, support centers and other people.
  http://xscreenshot.com/
  
• NomNom—NomNom is an application for downloading videos from Youtube and other similar video websites that require Adobe Flash to view the video content. Video streaming or downloading can be started simply by dropping an URL onto the application window.
  http://nomnom.googlecode.com/
  
• Mercury Live DVD—Mercury is an acronym for Malware EnumeRation, CaptURe, and AnalYsis. A live DVD based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS containing a variety of honeypot technologies and malware analysis features.
  http://mercurylivedvd.sourceforge.net

   

  
  

 

→

 

Here are some recently updated items in yum at the Fedora project:

 

Name : evince

URL : http://projects.gnome.org/evince/

Description : Evince is simple multi-page document viewer. It can display and

: print Portable Document Format (PDF), PostScript (PS) and

: Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files. When supported by the

: document format, evince allows searching for text, copying text to

: the clipboard, hypertext navigation, table-of-contents bookmarks

: and editing of forms.

:

: Support for other document formats such as DVI and DJVU can be

: added by installing additional backends.

 

 

 

Name : fedora-easy-karma

Summary : Fedora update feedback made easy

URL : https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Easy_Karma

Description : Fedora-easy-karma helps you to easily and fast provide feedback

: for all testing updates that you have currently installed.

 

 

 

Name : geany

Summary : A fast and lightweight IDE using GTK2

URL : http://www.geany.org/

Description : Geany is a small and fast integrated development enviroment with

: basic features and few dependencies to other packages or Desktop

: Environments.

:

: Some features:

: – Syntax highlighting

: – Code completion

: – Code folding

: – Construct completion/snippets

: – Auto-closing of XML and HTML tags

: – Call tips

: – Support for Many languages like C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python,

: Perl, Pascal

: – symbol lists and symbol name auto-completion

: – Code navigation

: – Simple project management

: – Plugin interface

 

 

 

Name : geoclue

URL : http://geoclue.freedesktop.org/

Description : Geoclue is a modular geoinformation service built on top of the

: D-Bus messaging system. The goal of the Geoclue project is to make

: creating location-aware applications as simple as possible.

 

 

 

Name : man-db

Summary : Database cached manual pager suite

URL : http://www.nongnu.org/man-db/

Description : The man-db package includes five tools for browsing man-pages:

: man, whatis, apropos, manpath and lexgrog. man preformats and

: displays manual pages. whatis searches the manual page names.

: apropos searches the manual page names and descriptions. manpath

: determines search path for manual pages. lexgrog directly reads

: header information in manual pages.

 

 

 

Name : openjpeg

Summary : JPEG 2000 command line tools

URL : http://www.openjpeg.org/

Description : OpenJPEG is an open-source JPEG 2000 codec written in C. It has

: been developed in order to promote the use of JPEG 2000, the new

: still-image compression standard from the Joint Photographic

: Experts Group (JPEG).

 

 

Name : openssh

Summary : An open source implementation of SSH protocol versions 1 and 2

URL : http://www.openssh.com/portable.html

Description : SSH (Secure SHell) is a program for logging into and executing

: commands on a remote machine. SSH is intended to replace rlogin

: and rsh, and to provide secure encrypted communications between

: two untrusted hosts over an insecure network. X11 connections and

: arbitrary TCP/IP ports can also be forwarded over the secure

: channel.

:

: OpenSSH is OpenBSD’s version of the last free version of SSH,

: bringing it up to date in terms of security and features.

:

: This package includes the core files necessary for both the

: OpenSSH client and server. To make this package useful, you should

: also install openssh-clients, openssh-server, or both.

 

 

 

Name : policycoreutils

Summary : SELinux policy core utilities

URL : http://www.selinuxproject.org

Description : Security-enhanced Linux is a feature of the Linux® kernel and a

: number of utilities with enhanced security functionality designed

: to add mandatory access controls to Linux. The Security-enhanced

: Linux kernel contains new architectural components originally

: developed to improve the security of the Flask operating system.

: These architectural components provide general support for the

: enforcement of many kinds of mandatory access control policies,

: including those based on the concepts of Type Enforcement®,

: Role-based Access Control, and Multi-level Security.

:

: policycoreutils contains the policy core utilities that are

: required for basic operation of a SELinux system. These utilities

: include load_policy to load policies, setfiles to label

: filesystems, newrole to switch roles, and run_init to run

: /etc/init.d scripts in the proper context.

 

 

Name : policycoreutils-gui

Summary : SELinux configuration GUI

URL : http://www.selinuxproject.org

Description : system-config-selinux is a utility for managing the SELinux

: environment

 

 

 

 

Name : policycoreutils-newrole

Summary : The newrole application for RBAC/MLS as in Role based access control on multi-level secure sytems

URL : http://www.selinuxproject.org

Description : RBAC/MLS policy machines require the SELinux utility “newrole” as a way of changing the role or level of a logged in user.

 

 

 

Name : xorg-x11-server-Xdmx

Summary : Distributed Multihead X Server and utilities

URL : http://www.x.org

Description : Xdmx is proxy X server that provides multi-head support for

: multiple displays attached to different machines (each of which is

: running a typical X server). When Xinerama is used with Xdmx, the

: multiple displays on multiple machines are presented to the user

: as a single unified screen. A simple application for Xdmx would

: be to provide multi-head support using two desktop machines, each

: of which has a single display device attached to it. A complex

: application for Xdmx would be to unify a 4 by 4 grid of 1280×1024

: displays (each attached to one of 16 computers) into a unified

: 5120×4096 display. Now, that’s getting the big picture!

 

→

 

You can find additional information on these, and many other recently updated packages, by typing yum info recent at the command line.

 

The Fredericksburg Linux Users Group, will be meeting primarily online for the rest of the calendar year. We are working on a new website, which we hope to have online in the near future.

• You can find the FredLUG email list at http://calypso.tux.org/mailman/listinfo/fredlug. Feel free to join the list.
• Besides the FredLUG email list, you’re also welcome on the IRC channel pound FredLUG on irc dot freenode dot net.

→

 

Today’s feature is Fedora 14, an overview of it’s features and some personal experiences with it.

 

[ Source of info includes:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/14/html/Release_Notes/sect-Release_Notes-Welcome_to_Fedora_14.html#sect-Release_Notes-Overview ]

 

From the fedoraproject.org website, the following are major features for Fedora 14:

• Spice – as in The Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments. Spice aims to provide a complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktops and provides high-quality remote access to QEMU virtual machines. The Spice project deals with both the virtualized devices and the front-end.

Currently, the SPICE project’s main focus is to provide high-quality remote access to QEMU virtual machines. SPICE is used for client-server communication. Spice adds a QXL, as in (XML Query Language), display device to QEMU and provides drivers for this device for both X and Windows.

Features supported in the protocol are:

• Accelerated 2D graphics
• “Hardware” cursor support
• Audio playing
• Audio recording
• Image compression, both lossless and lossy (for WAN support)
• Video detection with MJpeg streaming
• Encryption
• Client side mouse pointer support
• Drivers for: X, Windows (xp, vista, win7)

Red Hat acquired Spice together with kvm when it aqcuired Qumranet, and has invested significant effort into opening it up, cleaning up dependencies, etc.

 

• Mobility options – This release includes software from the MeeGo™ project which is designed to support platforms such as netbooks, nettops, and various embedded devices.

• Amazon EC2 – For the first time since Fedora 8, Fedora will release on the EC2 cloud. This incorporate kernel patch to allow upstream kernels to work on the EC2 infrastructure

• D Compiler – Support for D, a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python.

Some other features include:

• Updating Perl to version 5.12,
• Python to version 2.7,
• Boost to version 1.44, which provides peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries
• Netbeans to version 6.9, which is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Java and other languages
• KDE to version 4.5,
  
• Eclipse to the Helios Release. Fedoraproject.org notes that many Eclipse projects release annually in June. The 2010 version of this simultaneous release is known as “Helios” and is made up of about 39 projects and 33 million lines of code. The foundation of these projects is the Eclipse project itself, producing the Eclipse SDK which contains the Eclipse Platform, the Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT), and the Eclipse Plugin Development Environment (PDE).

  This Fedora feature encompasses the updating of the Eclipse packages in Fedora to be their Helios versions. Note that not all “eclipse-*” packages in Fedora are hosted at eclipse.org, which coordinates the simultaneous release so this feature does not include them (notable examples include PyDev which is shipped in Fedora as eclipse-pydev).

   

• Sugar to version 0.90, which is used for the One Laptop Per Child project that provides powerful learning environment for young children. This version of Sugar includes an enhanced activity set to provide an stable demo environment for Sugar, as well as an environment for developers. Users curious about the Sugar interface can test out Sugar on an existing Fedora system by selecting the Sugar environment from their display manager.

  Developers interested in working on the Sugar interface or writing activities can have a development platform without needing an XO laptop.

   

 

Other features included in Fedora 14 are these:

• Update of Erlang to the upstream R14 release. Erlang is a general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime system. It supports hot swapping, thus code can be changed without stopping a system. While threads are considered a complicated and error-prone topic in most languages, Erlang provides language-level features for creating and managing processes with the aim of simplifying concurrent programming. Though all concurrency is explicit in Erlang, processes communicate using message passing instead of shared variables, which removes the need for locks.
  
• An easy-to-use fully-featured IPMI server management utility. That’s IPMI as in Intelligent Platform Management Interface
  
• Another feature of interest to system administrators is Fedora 14’s implementation of systemd, which is System and Session Manager. Systemd is a next-generation replacement for Upstart and System V init. Turn this feature on with just a few simple commands, and experience improvements such as parallel and on-demand starting of services, faster boot times, and the ability to track processes, daemons, sockets, and even take snapshots of your system state.

 

I have upgraded my three Fedora 13 machines to Fedora 14. The 32-bit laptop I have upgraded with no problem at all. One of my 64-bit machine needed some tweaking before the X-server would start, but it’s functioning perfectly now.

 

My other 64-bit Fedora machine would not upgrade directly. It complained that my two-disk logical volume had bad metadata. That’s not a disaster for me, as I have a nightly cron job on that machine that backs up my home directory and some other folders. So for that machine I did a fresh install, created an identical user name, and copied my home directory from the latest backup. I decided to reinstall my apps fresh from the yum repositories. The interesting part was trying to restore my configurations. Specifically important were the data and configurations for the Thunderbird address book, gnupg, and the history and bookmarks for Firefox, and Chrome. Finding the particular “dot” files used for Firefox was a particular adventure. My bash prompt also changed from the familiar user name and path to a more cryptic line that said “bash-4.1.”

 

But it all turned out well, as I’m recording and producing this podcast on that machine right now.

 

Like car models, Linux users have their favorite distros. Mine is Fedora. I’ve tried Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, SuSe, and some others. But I keep coming back to Fedora. Life is good. I’m sure whatever you’re using, it’s good for you too.

 

→

 

Today’s podcast will close with a Creative Commons licensed work by Dolly heads to Texas entitled ”Loves me not;” from Mevio’s Music Alley. Check it out at ‘music.mevio.com’.”

 

Enjoy.

 

→

 

Thanks for joining us for today’s FredPod podcast.

This is Mark Walker.

Enjoy life, and we’ll talk with you next time.