Fedora non avrà più nomi in codice

La Fedora Board, dopo un discussione protattasi per diverso tempo, ha deciso che Fedora 20 sarà l'ultima release con un nome in codice. Si è infatti deciso di non usare più la procedura corrente per la scelta del nome; se parte della comunità ne sentisse il bisogno sarà sempre possibile proporre una nuova procedura di scelta.

Personalmente non ne sentirò la mancanza.

Fonte: Fedora Advisory Board List

Linux Day 2013

Stickers... Stickers everywhere.

Il 26 Ottobre torna il tradizionale appuntamento con il Linux Day ed è il momento di pensare alla promozione della nostra distribuzione.

Se organizzate o semplicemente vi piacerebbe mostrare Fedora all'evento a cui partecipate (in questo caso, ricordate che siamo sempre in cerca di nuovi Ambassador per il progetto, contattatemi per avere altre informazioni)
vi farà piacere sapere che anche quest'anno abbiamo un po' di materiale marketing (DVD, stickers, etc.) da distribuire ai partecipanti.

Se siete interessati  per favore riempite il form di richiesta e sarete ricontattati per tutti i dettagli

Le regole sono semplici:

• le richieste si accettano fino alle 24:00 del 5 Ottobre
• le richieste saranno soddisfatte secondo l'ordine di arrivo
• le richieste da parte di Ambassador del progetto avranno la priorità

Buon Linux Day a tutti!

Skype su Fedora 19 x86_64 (64bit)

C'è qualcuno che ancora si ricorda Skype? Se l'ultima volta che ne ho parlato avevo contatti che usavano solo quello ormai non lo apro praticamente più.

Tuttavia, se ne avete bisogno la procedura per l'installazione è rimasta sempre la stessa:

1. scaricare la versione più recente di Skype (ad oggi, 4.2.0.11)
2. installare le dipendenze necessarie con  'yum install qt-x11.i686 libXScrnSaver.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 libXv.i686'
3. installare skype con 'yum install --nogpgcheck skype-4.2.0.11-fedora.i586.rpm'

Ovviamente, sempre senza disattivare SELinux...

PS. Ho attivato l'integrazione dei commenti con Google+, fatemi sapere che ne pensate!

Linux e il supporto alle GPU - a che punto siamo?

Uno dei problemi più importanti per Linux è sempre stato il supporto alle schede grafiche recenti, anche se bisogna ammettere (onore al merito degli sviluppatori), che le cose negli ultimi anni hanno preso una piega decisamente migliore.

Ecco qual è attualmente la situazione:

AMD/Ati:
dal punto di vista funzionale il supporto a queste schede è migliorato tantissimo negli ultimi cinque anni, ottenendo un deciso aumento delle prestazioni.
L'unica, forte, pecca, rimane la gestione del risparmio energetico, che spesso porta la GPU a surriscaldarsi, causando nei casi più estremi lo spegnimento di emergenza per overheating.

Fortunatamente, spesso la chiamata di sistema vgaswitcheroo funziona a dovere e ci permette di spegnere letteralmente la scheda dedicata in modo da poter usare solo quella integrata, abbassando anche di 35° la temperatura e portando l'autonomia dei notebook comodamente oltre le 3 ore. Anche se di fatto questo ci esclude la possibilità di usare la scheda dedicata.

Una soluzione più elegante arriverà con il kernel 3.11 (in arrivo in questi giorni), il quale porta con sé un insieme notevole di patch per la gestione del risparmio energetico nelle schede Radeon.
La funzione, ancora in fase sperimentale, si attiva inserendo il parametro "radeon.dpm=1" al boot del kernel.

I primi test fatti utilizzando questa funzione hanno dato ottimi risultati, sia in termini di performance che in termini di risparmio energetico.

NVIDIA:
Le prestazioni delle nvidia con il driver open nouveau sono sufficienti per un uso normale del pc, anche se non si possono dire buone come quelle del driver radeon.
Questo è soprattutto dovuto al fatto che le condizioni di lavoro degli sviluppatori in questo caso sono peggiori rispetto al driver radeon (nouveau è fondamentalmente il risultato di un enorme sforzo di reverse engineering).

Tuttavia, la lacuna più importante forse riguarda il mancato supporto alla tecnologia Optimus (di cui difettano anche i driver proprietari su Linux).

Fino ad ora si è potuto parzialmente sopperire a tale mancanza tramite bumblebee, un software in grado di gestire manualmente lo switch tra scheda grafica integrata e dedicata, consentendo tra l'altro anche l'avvio specifico di alcune applicazioni con la scheda dedicata.

Anche su questo fronte comunque, ci saranno novità a partire dal kernel 3.12, il quale, grazie ad una patch di David Airlie, renderà possibile la gestione dinamica delle due schede tramite il kernel stesso.
Questo significa che sarà il sistema operativo e non più l'utente a decidere quale delle due schede usare (così come avviene normalmente sui sistemi Windows).

Questa funzionalità supporterà inizialmente le schede Nvidia, ma in futuro è prevedibile che il supporto venga esteso anche alle schede Radeon.

~p.l.

Flock 2013 - A great success

From August 9th to 12th, I had the chance to join Flock, the first Fedora Contributor Conference of a new kind, where about 200 people from 22 countries gathered to talk about the present and the future of Fedora.

Location was the nice city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the local college hosted our cheerful and motley crowd. So what did we do? Lot of stuff, really much more than I was able to digest!

Francis Marion Hotel

I will attempt here some recollection of what I saw and experienced, but before....

TL; DR; version

Flock was a great and productive experience, the best place you can be to share what you know and learn what you don't (cit.) with the Fedora community. I really look forward participating to the next one, to be held somewhere in Europe (bids will open soon).

I would like to thank Red Hat and all the other sponsors for making all of this possible, all the organizers team, and in particular to +Ruth Suehle, who spent an inordinate amount of time pulling all the things together to make the first Flock a resounding success. You made it!

Day 0.

I traveled with +Robert Mayr from Milan, the flights (we had to take three before landing in Charleston) were pretty uneventful, except in the middle of the ocean I started to feel sick and when we finally arrived at the hotel I just had time for a shower before collapsing in the bed at about 8pm...

Day 1.

Sickness was gone, but jet lag caught me with a 4.30am wake up :) Not to worry, I had plenty of time to shower, activate our USA SIMs (ReadySIM rocks!), sort some emails and prepare for the first day of Flock.

Everyone in the auditorium for the keynote

After the customary "State of Fedora Address" by +Robyn Bergeron I went to +Matthew Miller talk about Cloud and why Fedora should care about it (very well presented and informative), then +Jon Masters with 64 bit ARM goodness (but sadly, not the pile of devices I hoped to see :), and finally +Jiří Eischmann with the other Ambassadors for some updates on the program. In the afternoon, some more ARM related talk with +Peter Robinson where I could check a couple of XO laptops and finally the HyperKitty Hackfest with +Aurélien Bompard

XO laptops @ Flock

Day one ended at the Blind Tiger Pub, with lots of nice food and beer (if you picked the right one :P) and plenty of hallway chat.

Day 2.

SELinux for mere mortals. That's me!

The second day I picked very good sessions: after the fun keynote from +Aeva Palecek of +Lulzbot.com, I went to see +Thomas Cameron talking about SELinux and how to properly handle it: this was so interesting I will probably make up slides for the same talk but in italian. We will see...

The rest of the morning was devoted to OpenShift with talks from +steven citron-pousty and +Andy Grimm, if you see them around in any conference do not miss their talk!

In the afternoon I joined the OpenStack test event to see how I could install it on my laptop; regrettably, in the end I was not able to have have a working setup (the development version I installed was not playing well with SELinux enabled) and spent some time to track and undo all the changes to the system.

The evening event was at +Mynt Charleston, a nice and trendy disco bar that was really, really appreciated by most people.

Tasting Moonshine at Mynt

Day 3.

Stairs to the auditorium

Started up by a keynote from +Dave Crossland, initial author of the Cantarell font used by default in GNOME3, the third day got into gear with +Tom Callaway and his proposal to revamp how we deliver updates by default. Discussion was vibrant and productive, I think we will do much better with a revised system. I ended the morning with the ambassadors related talk by +Christoph Wickert, where we drafted the plan for running a census of active ambassadors and encourage new ones to join the program.

In the afternoon, I joined +Luke Macken for the Bodhi hackfest and this turned out as one the most productive sessions: in fact, thanks to Mathieu Bridon I was quickly able to install the dev environment and start hacking on the filtering code, and the next day I had my pull request merged in the repository!

The last evening event was at the +South Carolina Aquarium, with a spectacular dinner surrounded by fishes and other wildlife animals, I think an evening most people will hardly forget.

New Cooper River Bridge (4023m)

That's it, more or less. See you at next Flock!

Flock 2013 Charleston (SC) Report (Robert Mayr)

Flock was hold from august 9th to 12th and was the first Conference in a new format, replacing the FUDCons we all appreciated over the last years. It was attended by nearly two hundred Fedora Contributors and although it was the first very big event it was a great success. But let's start from the beginning.
The journey to Charleston was as expected, very long but without problems, with Gianluca I got there through Frankfurt and Atlanta, where we met also Jiri, Sirko, Patrick and Gergely. Once arrived Josh offered us a ride to our hotel (thank you again)
The first day, after registration, we followed Robyn's keynotes and took the group foto.

Then the sessions started; we mainly had a lot of talks in the morning and longer sessions or hackfests in the afternoon. Perhaps we had too many talks (up to seven or eight) at the same time, and often it was really difficult to choose one, because they were all interesting. I decided to attend most of the talks about Cloud computing, Openshift and ARM.
Matthew introduced all the attendees to the Cloud and it was really interesting for me; I didn't know so much about it and therefore appreciated his simple explanation. We have to focus much more on Cloud in the future, and the talks I saw at Flock about Cloud confirmed it giving me also concrete numbers.
Another interesting talk held by Steven was about Openshift (once in your life you have to attend a talk of Steven, awesome), and as a web developer I really liked his presentation. I never used it before, but in the meanwhile I got an account and will run my first application soon :)

 
In the evening we had cool parties, a lot of discussions with other contributors about Fedora while drinking beer or eating hummus.
The second day I attended Christoph's talk about alternative Desktops, it was very well done although unfortunately Dan or other guys were not there to discuss more about Mate or other Desktops. Actually we have a lot of DE, and some of them perhaps don't have a really future, but on the other hand there are a lot of people using a specific DE in certain parts of the world, so let's see what happens in the next two years.

The third day was dedicated to the ambassadors, Jiri talked about the actual state and the FAmSCo activity, Tuan about the budget and Christoph about some old stats, comparing them with actual numbers.
From all these talks started a discussion about what to do with inactive ambassadors, a horse we have beaten to death in the last years. We decided to not remove them but to mark them as inactive, as the activity of an ambassador can't be measured easily. Ambassadors also should be part of other Groups and contribute, which should increase the probability they will remain active. We also agreed on the ambassador census, to be done with a small form we already created at the EMEA FAD last year, and which now will be extended to the other Regions.
We also talked about a new application, where we'd like to locate all ambassadors on a map, same for the events and parties we have around the world. In a second step this app should also take over the content of fedoracommunity.org, giving the local communities more visibility. Fedocal could be included easily and for sure will help us to manage the events better. Stay tuned, I hope we can have soon an instance running on Openshift (yes, my new account..).

The third evening was at the Aquarium, a great place where we could finally see the Atlantic Ocean and the long caracteristic bridge of Charleston.

The last day was dedicated to hackfests, I signed my GPG key and attended the Infra hackfest. At the end we had time to get an awesome sandwich and before returning back to Italy we also did some shopping for our family at home.
Many thanks to all the organization team, Flock was a very nice event and I'm looking forward to Flock 2 in Europe next year. Perhaps it would be a good idea to limit the talks to max 4 or 5 at the same time and to organize more practical sessions and hackfests.

And yes, I got my badge too, cool :)

Fedora 19 Release Party

Last Friday we had a Fedora 19 release party in Perugia and it was loads of fun. 

The event was hosted with the local LUG in small but cute Pizzeria in the suburbs of the city. About 20 people showed up and, while most already knew me and the Fedora Project from past events, there were few new faces so I spent some time specifically with them discussing what Fedora is all about.

I think I'll go for the blue pill...

Brand new Fedora 19 DVDs were distributed (thanks Jiri!) and we also attempted (and succeeded :) an installation in a laptop so we could have a look at how the liveDVD works (very well!), appreciate how anaconda is still confusing in the manual partitioning (but getting better overall) and missed a few strings in the Italian translation (we need a more active l10n group!), and finally enjoy Gnome 3.8.

After the dinner, I run a small raffle with three prizes: a Fedora t-shirt, a baseball cap and a mug. Everyone enjoyed the prizes and appreciated the great quality of all the swag I had.

First prize: a Fedora mug

Finally, my friend Riccardo made a presentation/hands-on of OpenShift, showing how you can quickly build and deploy a Flask/MongoDB app in the cloud serving open geodata.

OpenShift presentation

All in all I think we spent a great evening talking about Fedora and Linux in general. Let's do it again for Fedora 20!

Thanks to +Riccardo Vianello for the great introduction to +OpenShift, and all the +Associazione GNU/Linux User Group Perugia crew for the support. Special thanks to +Jiří Eischmann for handling the swag shipment so we could enjoy it at the party.

Gnome Terminal 3.8

Se siete utenti di Gnome e usate il terminale, probabilmente avrete notato che quando si apre una nuova tab (ctrl-shift-t) o una nuova finestra (ctrl-shift-n) queste vengono automaticamente posizionate nella directory corrente della finestra iniziale.

In Gnome 3.8 questo non succede più.

Prima che vi venga la schiuma alla bocca, questa mi sembra una ottima occasione per evidenziare alcune problematiche relative al (rapido) sviluppo di Gnome.

Prima cosa, gli utenti possono essere informati meglio: la modifica, di cui ho rintracciato il commit, è del Giugno 2012. Il bug relativo, di Maggio. Quindi perchè viene fuori solo ora?

Sebbene non sia un grosso problema, penso che una modifica del genere andrebbe meglio pubblicizzata perchè la maggior parte degli utenti comuni magari neanche se ne accorgerà, ma tutti quelli avanzati di certo non mancheranno di notarlo e lamentarsene ad alta voce.

Detto questo come si fa ad avere il comportamento precedente? Molto semplice, basta aggiungere al file ~/.bashrc la linea:

export PS1='\[$(__vte_ps1)\]'$PS1

Fatelo subito, non perderete tempo a cercare questo articolo quando la 3.8 arriverà sui vostri PC :)

Fedora 18 Release Party Naples

This is a "guest" post from Ambassador candidate Francesco Daria who organized a nice release Party in Naples. Well done, and I hope he will be accepted in the Ambassadors group very soon.
------------------

On March 5th, 2013, the NaLUG in collaboration with the Italian Fedora Community hosted the Fedora 18 Release Party; location of the event was the Faculty of Engineering "Federico II" of Naples.

To promote and discuss the new version of Fedora "Spherical Cow" the day was split in two phases:

-The first was held in the atrium of the faculty, a strategic position able to catch the attention of all the people and promote the events of the day; we delivered the program and invited the curious to try and install Fedora distributing the DVD.

About 3,000 students every day come to the University and we were able to attract, through this space, the focus of about 1/3 of these, which curiously asked information about topics ranging from "What is Fedora?" to more specific technical problems.
To entice newcomers to try Fedora, we gave them the MultiDesktop DVD with the possibility of a "help desk" support.

-The second was held at the home university classroom where we carried out the following activities:

-Fedora contest, which consisted in fixing errors in a simple bash script (you can find it at http://www.nalug.net/contest/FRPcontest), the winners were awarded with the new Fedora branded baseball caps and cups.

- A Talk by Giuseppe Del Vecchio (aka Virus on the Italian comunity of Fedoraonline.it), who with his great know-how and communication skills was able to engage participants on the following themes:

- What is Fedora?
- The history of Fedora releases
- The Fedora Project
- The Italian comunity fedoraonline.it
- Install / upgrade to Fedora 18
- Introduction to SELinux and systemd

At the end of the talk, which lasted about an hour and a half, we gave the attendees the opportunity for discussion, further clarifications and details. This choice led to a pleasant and interesting discussion.

- Coffee break: to make the day more "appetizing" and to stimulate thoughts, we offered all attendees free croissants and drinks.

-Install party: after the presentation we obviously gave support to all those who wanted to install Fedora 18 or upgrade their system from Fedora 17.

It was a great day, many people learned about Fedora, others were able to deepen their knowledge of the Project and the community, so I can say, not without a touch of pride, that our goal has been fully achieved. I take this opportunity to thank again Giuseppe Del Vecchio and the NaLUG's team for the possibility to introduce people to Fedora.

I hope this was the first of a long collaboration.

Francesco Daria

Photos of the event

RDKit 2012.12 RPM packages

I just uploaded to my fedorapeople space RPM packages for RDKit newest release. These are for Fedora 18 and EPEL 6, 64 bit only. Just ping me if you need 32 bit or Fedora 17 builds.

PLEASE NOTE
This package is in the Fedora review queue since some time so if you are a packager please consider helping to finish the review. Of course I can review something for you in return.

Anaconda "fun" moment

I suspect Anaconda was not ever run by anyone in a non-English language during the Fedora 18 cycle, otherwise I can not explain this:

Riconoscimento testi (OCR) in Fedora

Una delle esigenze che si hanno spesso nell'utilizzo di un computer, riguarda il riconoscimento automatico dei testi a partire dalle immagini digitali (OCR).

Per Linux esistono diversi strumenti che permettono l'OCR, alcuni di essi anche molto potenti.

La combinazione "engine-frontend" che per l'esperienza che ho avuto funziona meglio su Fedora, è questa:

L'engine: Tesseract
Installazione: yum install tesseract tesseract-langpack-ita

Tesseract è un software inizialmente proprietario e sviluppato anni fa dall'HP, ora è distribuito con Licenza Apache ed è sponsorizzato da Google. E' un engine molto potente e versatile, permette il riconoscimento dei testi con una miriade di lingue, tra cui anche l'Italiano.
Limitazioni: così com'è, può essere utilizzato solo da riga di comando e permette solo la lettura di immagini Tiff, difetto risolvibile con la gui giusta.
L'altra limitazione è il mancato riconoscimento del layout delle pagine.

Il front-end: gImageReader
Installazione: scegliere la versione più recente e scaricare l'RPM da qui (va bene anche quello per F15).

gImageReader è una semplice interfaccia grafica per Tesseract la quale, tra l'altro, permette di utilizzare anche immagini che non siano in formato Tiff.
Il programma è minimale, ma permette di fare il riconoscimento dei testi senza troppe complicazioni.
L'immagine sorgente può essere manipolata direttamente dal programma per migliorarne il riconoscimento (tramite contrasto, luminosità...), l'output infine può essere salvato su un file di testo.