Recently the fedora-india list saw a raging debate on the legitimacy of Web sites like Fedora India, which try to distance themselves from the upstream project through disclaimers like:
"Copyright (c) 2008 Kulbir Saini. I am not related to Red Hat or
Fedora Project. The content on this site is my own views."
... and yet continue to use a domain and Web site name which suggest otherwise.

It all started when Kushal brought up the issue, sparking a few clarifications from the owner of the domain.

To me the issue is not about whether someone has taken permission to use the logo or not. Whether or not someone is employed by Red Hat or a part of the Fedora Project [1] also looks completely tangential to the discussion.

The point is can someone claim to use such a domain as his own personal space to write about a community supported project, when he is not even a part of the Indian Fedora community.

Can someone who is earning good money by working on Fedora [1] still claim that he is not part of it?

This reminds me of something too familiar, but I am not sure whether it will be good to have more of them.

--

[1] Kulbir Saini is part of the project since he is a GSoC 08 student

Here is some more: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/webcomics/

Thanks to the Fedora Project I have a paid subscription to LWN now.

I like this: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2008-March/msg00047.html.

I spent much of the extended weekend (Friday was Doljatra & Good Friday) trying to get the camera on my Intel Macbook to work on Fedora. You can find almost all the non-Fedora specific information is available at http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/.

So I went ahead and created a RPM (review request: #438561), spent some time fiddling with udev because I was not getting a /dev/video0 to represent the camera, and then discovered that the USB device ID (obtained from lsusb) had to be explicitly specified to ift-load to get the firmware to actually load on to the device.

As mentioned on http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/ Ekiga was a breeze to set up, but  Cheese was not. Cheese 0.2.4 which ships with Fedora 8 kept crashing with a SIGSEGV somewhere deep inside the GStreamer library. It was a classical case of strcpy(des, NULL). So one has to grab Cheese 2.22.x from Rawhide and update GStreamer accordingly. If you happen to have the gstreamer-plugins-bad packages from Livna then you might be in for a 350MB download. You have been warned. :-)

HTTrack is now going to be available as a Fedora package.

FDUPES is now back as a Fedora package.

FDUPES is in the EPEL wish-list and since I am not contributing to EPEL for the time being, it would be nice if someone else took care of it there.

Thanks to some help from Lennert Buytenhek, I have been trying out Fedora-ARM using QEMU over the last few days.

It seems that among all the pre-built kernel images provided at http://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/arm/fedora/qemu/, zImage-versatile-2.6.24-rc7.armv5tel has a bug which causes the kernel to panic the first time I run the virtual machine after preparing the root file system (ext2 or ext3). However on killing QEMU and restarting it again, it works fine and the problem does not occur again. The other images worked nicely though.

Other than that, I could not get X to work. xorg-x11-server-Xorg has a missing dependency in xorg-x11-drv-evdev. It turns out that xorg-x11-drv-evdev can not be rebuilt and is thus not present in the Fedora-ARM repository.

Here are some screenshots:

Booting Fedora-ARM.

Booting Fedora-ARM.

The login screen. Enter "root" as user name to log in.

# yum install emacs

# yum install gnome-desktop

Glade 3 is now going to be available as a Fedora package.

GNU Arch 1 (tla) is now back as a Fedora package.

GNU Archimedes is now going to be available as a Fedora package.

Some interesting statistics regarding delegate registrations for this year's FOSS.in: http://foss.in/2007/register/delegates/stats.php.

This year we have more people coming in from outside Bangalore (the venue of the conference), while there has been a substantial increase in the number of students who have registered as delegates.

Among the various project days the Fedora Project Day is at joint second with Mozilla, while Debian/Ubuntu is the most sought after of them all.

So head over to http://foss.in/2007/register/delegates and register yourself. Remember online registrations are cheaper than spot registrations.

PIDA is now going to be available as a Fedora package.

GNU Proxyknife is now going to be available as a Fedora package.

After the Games, Developer and Electronics Lab spins, it is time to create a Fedora Astronomy Live media spin.

If you are interested, then you can add yourself here; and consider packaging or reviewing some of these packages.

With not even a month to go for FOSS.in, it is time to register yourself as a delegate. This year's edition is bigger and better than ever before and the focus is entirely on encouraging and helping more and more people to contribute to various free software projects.

The Fedora Project Day has a bunch of great talks tailored for potential new-comers to the community:

Here is your chance to be with the renowned hackers of the world and be a part of the gang yourself.

Courtesy: Aamod Nerurkar

I hereby announce the second stable release of Opyum, the Fedora Offline Package Manager, version 0.0.3.

Opyum (pronounced 'opium') provides a set of tools to enable users, who do not have a good network (eg., Internet) connection at their ready disposal, to easily install new packages or update existing ones through the conventional package management system available in Fedora.

Tar ball: http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/opyum/opyum-0.0.3.tar.gz
MD5SUM: 693bc38845aaef5ecf599d7564483f09
SHA1SUM: c21186d6b1f31ff8e7a4b9b9fa57dba74f12adae

New features:
Installing or updating from Yum-Packs is easier now with the introduction of system-install-yumpacks. Apart from that, there is a new repository manager to let users to add, remove, edit, enable and disable repositories.

Installation instructions:
# yum install opyum

Documentation page:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DebarshiRay/Opyum

Project page:
https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/opyum/

Bug reports:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/

We are having a Fedora Project Day at this year's Foss.in. So if you are an existing Fedora community member and want to be a part of one of the most technical and exciting FOSS conferences in the world get yourself and your proposals registered before 8th October.

So my Olympus C370Z digital camera is again working with the latest Rawhide kernels. One of my earlier updates had broken it and it would refuse to import any photograph. I still do not know what the actual problem was, and how it got solved. On a probably unrelated front I find that gthumb --import-photos is getting invoked twice leading to two pop-up dialogs

The camera needs a fresh pair of batteries right now and I am really curious about this strange behaviour.

Libedit is now back as a Fedora package.