5tFTw: NetworkManager Feature Explosion, Waartaa Video Chat, Fedora Board on Fedora.next Products, Flock Planning, and Writing for the Magazine (2014-06-24)
by Matthew Miller
Reposted from <http://fedoramagazine.org/5tftw-2014-06-24/>.
Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series
highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week.
It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links
to each. Here are the five things for June 24th, 2014:
New NetworkManager Release Full of Features
-------------------------------------------
NetworkManager, familiar to many of us as “that thing that has a
taskbar icon for getting WiFi”, has always aimed to be much more than
that. With the 0.9.10 release (which will hit Fedora’s “Rawhide”
development tree later this week and be include in Fedora 21 this
fall), there’s a whole host of features to support those broader aims,
including server and cloud-focused improvements. Read more on developer
Dan Williams’ blog.
* http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2014/06/20/well-build-a-dream-house-of-net/
Waartaa gets Video Chat
-----------------------
Waartaa is an open source, web-based chat system — it describes itself
as “IRC as a service”. Since Fedora uses IRC (Internet Relay Chat) as
our chief means of real-time collaboration in Fedora, including for our
various team meetings, this might be something we could use to make our
communications more open and friendly. There is a session about Waartaa
and Fedora at our big Flock conference this fall (August 6-9, in
Prague).
I was interested to learn that there’s a Google Summer of Code project
supporting Fedora contributor Lalit Khattar in improving Waartaa, and
right now he’s working on adding video chat support. This is a long way
from ready, but maybe in the not-too-distant future it will provide us
with a viable alternative to proprietary video chat for high-bandwidth
collaboration.
* https://www.waartaa.com/
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_IRC
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting_channel
* http://flock2014.sched.org/event/ed91d63174a0b3bdd744491beb9824de
* http://flocktofedora.org/
* https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2014
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Dne0
* http://lalitkhattar.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/p2p-video-chat-gsoc-week-3/
Fedora Project Board Discusses Fedora.next Products
---------------------------------------------------
On Monday, the Fedora Project Board held a public IRC meeting. There
were two main topics: first, guidelines for third-party press releases
(which were approved); and second, general criteria for Fedora Products
— a continuation of a previous meeting on the topic. The criteria we
passed are:
- Addresses a new, relevant, and broad use case or user base
that a Fedora Product is not currently serving
- The use case should be something the Board sees as being a
long term investment
- The Product should be coherent with all of Fedora’s foundations
We also talked briefly about the Fedora Plasma Product proposal in
light of these criteria, but did not quite get to a conclusion.
Generally, there is broad Board support for better positioning and
promotion of non-product desktop spins. More discussion will happen on
the public board-discuss mailing list before a future meeting.
View the meeting minutes or, if you like full meeting logs.
* https://fedorahosted.org/board/ticket/3#comment:3
* https://fedorahosted.org/board/ticket/4
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Plasma_Product
* https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/board-discuss
* https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/meetingminutes/2014-June/001266...
* http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-06-23/board.2014-06-...
Flock Planning Meetings
-----------------------
Speaking of meetings and of Flock, the Flock planning team is holding
regular IRC meetings (on Tuesdays at 14:00 UTC in `#fedora-meeting` on
Freenode.) This week’s meeting was very short, but last week’s had a
lot of activity. (One interesting tidbit: we’ll reuse the open source
Android / Jolla / BlackBerry mobile app from Red Hat’s DevConf.cz
conference.) Anyway, if you’re interested in helping, stop by next
week.
* http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-06-24/flock_planning...
* http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-06-17/flock_planning...
* http://www.devconf.cz/
* https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.devconf
* https://openrepos.net/content/xmlich02/devconfcz
* http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/47010890/?countrycode=NL&...
Contribute to Fedora Magazine!
------------------------------
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<http://fedoramagazine.org/submit-an-idea-or-tip/> to send in
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* http://fedoramagazine.org/
* http://fedoramagazine.org/submit-an-idea-or-tip/
* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing
* https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
10 years
miracast support
by Robert Moskowitz
I am at the WiFi Alliance meeting and all the room projectors have
miracast as the perfered projecting method.
So I go looking for miracast and fedora via google and got a few hits,
mostly looking for support!
one project saying that Fedora 20 is 'too old'.
So is there any work for miracast support?
10 years
Fedora 20 K3B broken
by Paul Erickson
I don't know exactly when this happened, but today when I tried to use
K3B, I get the following error:
[paul@paul Desktop]$ k3b
k3b: error while loading shared libraries: libproj.so.0: cannot open
shared object file: No such file or directory
A search for libproj.so.0: reveals that it is on the system.
[paul@paul Desktop]$ whereis libproj.so.0
libproj.so: /usr/lib/libproj.so.0
[paul@paul Desktop]$
Any ideas how I can fix this? I have tried reinstalling K3B and the
problem persists.
Thanks in advance.
--
----------------------------------------------------------------
cheers, Paul - VA7NT - email: va7nt(a)telus.net
"Those who hear not the music, think the dancers mad."
"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil." - Thomas Mann
"That state which separates its warriors from its scholars will have its
thinking done by cowards and fighting done by fools"
- Thucydides - The Pelopenisia
"The Malice of the wicked is reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous."
- Churchill
10 years
BackupPC - a brief rant
by Timothy Murphy
Many applications give unhelpful error messages,
but I've never met any quite as useless
as the invariable message from BackupPC:
"Unable to read 4 bytes"
If only it could sometimes say
"Unable to read 3 bytes"
or even "Hooray, was able to read 1 byte".
What 4 bytes did it want to read, incidentally?
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
10 years
Changing boot options through kickstart
by CLOSE Dave
Documentation tells me that kickstart allows an --append switch to the
bootloader command to add additional text to the GRUB2 boot line. I
haven't experimented with this and it is unclear to me if the change
goes only into /boot/grub2/grub.cfg or if it is also put into
/etc/default/grub. But adding things is not my objective.
I want to delete "rhgb" and "quiet" on the boot line, preferably in both
places. Is there any way to do that through kickstart or do I have to
use a post-install step?
--
Dave Close
10 years
Fedora 20 on Dell Precision M3850
by Ranjan Maitra
Hi,
According to FedEx, my new machine is on a truck speeding to my
local distribution center for delivery tomorrow. So hopefully it will
be here tomorrow. I had two questions:
1) It comes with Windoze 7 (with an upgrade option/disc for W8). Not
sure if I want to wipe it off (ideally, I would have liked to have not
paid for it) but I was wondering if I wanted to do a dual boot, is
there a set of instructions somewhere that I could follow? I have had no
problems with earlier windoze xp unProfessional dual installs, but not
with W7 or W8 (have not even seen a machine with this one). I do wonder
about keeping an OS I am likely to only use when I am talking to some
technical support for some service. Somehow the ones that require
contacting technical support always want you to use IE. I bluff my way
through on these ones.
2) This laptop has touchscreen abilities. While I could in general care
less about this feature, again I did not have an option to get rid of
it. So, I wonder if it is possible to use the touchscreen features with
Fedora 20?
Am I better off trying CentOS on this machine because of the two
questions above? I would however like to stick to Fedora.
Many shanks,
Ranjan
--
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10 years
SFLPhone / Mic
by Pal, Laszlo
Hi,
I'm trying to use SFLPhone as IAX softphone on my FC20 laptop and with
my Logitech Clearchat USB headset. The output is fine and perfect, but
the input is terrible (glitches, really can't hear anything. In the same
environment Skype is perfect... The only difference I can see in the
configs Skype using pulseaudi, but SFLPhone config looks like this:
Sound manager: PulseAudio
Input: alsa_input.usb_Logitech....
do you have any idea what should I change to make it work?
Thanks
Vlad
10 years
numeric keypad craziness
by Mike Wright
Hi all,
I have a bunch of Xen VMs running an assortment of Fedora versions and I
connect to each of them via VNC. Each occupies an individual workspace
in Domain-0. Everybody shares the keyboard and mouse. Works great.
However, on one VM the 10-key part of the keyboard, when NumLock is on,
doesn't work correctly. The behavior is different depending upon
whether it is in single keypress mode or whether it has gone into
auto-repeat mode, where it behaves correctly.
The craziness starts in single key press mode where there are various
behaviors depending on whether it is typing into a console, an xterm, or
a GUI window, such as this Thunderbird, and whether it is an arrow key
or one of the named keys (Ins, Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn).
In all cases the named keys perform their non-NumLock action. In GUI
apps and the consoles the arrow keys perform their arrow action but in
an xterm the arrow keys type a letter: 8->A, 2->B, 6->C, 4->D.
This survives reboots (the whole system) and restarts (just this VM).
For the record, each VM keyboard is set to Generic 105 key international
layout and the NumLock key is on.
I know almost nothing about how the keyboard subsystem works. Anybody
have any idea where to go from here?
Thanks,
Mike Wright
10 years
[FIXED] Cntrl-Alt-F[2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] do not work
by JD
I had to remove a few ancient lines in my .profile (I am a user of the old
ksh) for changing a couple of keys using
a xmodmap. To wit:
# xmodmap -e "keycode 22 = BackSpace"
# xmodmap -e "keycode 107 = Delete"
# xmodmap ~/.xmodmap
As you can see I commented out those lines
and I regained the funcitonality I wanted.
Those keycodes were for an external keyboard
that died recently, and so keymaps of the internal KB of
the DELL laptop were probably getting clobbered
in an unexpected way.
The xmodmap codes have been obviated by the settings
of the gnome-terminal's Edit -> Profile settings.
Thanx to all who tried to help.
10 years
Dell Wireless 1397 WLAN Mini-Card for Dell Inspiron 1545: How to Drive It!
by Temlakos
Everyone:
I have a three-year-old Dell Inspiron 1545. It came with the Dell
Wireless 1397 WLAN Mini-Card.
The current output of lspci -k |grep -iA5 wire gives "Dell Wireless 1397
WLAN Mini-Card" as a subsystem. The relevant kernel module is "ssb."
Currently this card will not connect. Nor can I force it to connect by
directly editing the network interface. I've tried several times, but I
can't get to a MAC address for it.
What driver(s) or other kernel module(s) should I install, and where can
I get them?
Broadcom has a 32-bit and a 64-bit tarball for what they say is a driver
for this card. Should I install that on my system?
Please advise. It seems a shame to operate any laptop without wireless
connectivity.
Temlakos
10 years
