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.

Renaming an OpenShift application

The OpenShift service from Red Hat lets you easily start and build web applications with common languages and frameworks such as Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java.

For example, creating a new Django application is an easy 3 step procedure:

Create a python-2.6 application

rhc app create -a django -t python-2.6

Add this upstream repo

cd django
git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/openshift/django-example.git
git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master

Then push the repo to openshift

git push

So far so good.

Unfortunately, if you later decide to give your new application a more meaningful name you realize there is no command to do so directly. I've found this procedure quick and effective:

Create the new application with the correct name, using the -n option will not clone the new repo:

[giallu@novo django (master)]$ rhc-create-app -a newname -t python-2.6 -n

Note the git url it gives you in the output, then issue:

[giallu@novo django (master)]$ git remote set-url origin newurl

Push your repo to the new url

[giallu@novo django (master)]$ git push

Finally, remove the older repository:

[giallu@novo django (master)]$ rhc-ctl-app -a django -c destroy

Optionally, you can rename your top level directory to match the new application name.