Mittwoch, 11. November 2009

What questions would you like to ask the Candidates for the Fedora Board, FESCo, and FAMSCO?

As you may have heard already, several seats of the Fedora Board, FESCo, and FAMSCO are up for election soon(¹). Right now we are in the nomination period, which will be followed by a "Candidate Questionnaire." That means we'll give candidates a list of questions to answer by private mail within one week after the nomination period closed; the results will be publish soon after that to make sure they are available to the public before the Town Hall meetings on IRC happen.

Candidates may choose to answer (or not) those questions as they see fit. Voters can use the answers to get an impression of what the candidate think or plan to do while serving for the committees they are nominated for. That should help to get a interesting discussion running during the IRC Town Hall meetings; furthermore, those people that can't or don't want to participate in the IRC meetings can use the answers to make a more informed vote.

Hence we need to prepare a few good questions that we can send to the candidates once the nomination period ends. And that's where I need *your help* now:

If you have one or more questions you'd like to send to the candidates simply go and add them to:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections/F13_Questionnaire

It just takes a minute or two, so best to do it right now -- otherwise you might get distracted and forget about it. ;-)

I'll take care of the remaining work to review, sort, and clean up the questions(²); after that I'll send them to the candidates soon after the nomination period ended. Hence, I need your question suggestions by around the 15th November 17:00 UTC latest to get a chance to prepare everything in time.

So please go to the wiki now and add at least one hard question! The answers will help Fedora contributors to chose whom to vote for! Thanks in advance for your help .

CU
knurd

(¹) If you haven't read about it yet see
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections for details.

(²) If you want to get involved or review the questions before I send them please drop me a line and I'll try to get that arranged; maybe we can arrange a quick, informal IRC meeting on Sunday evening if there is interest

P.S.: This blog post is mainly meant to get spread via planet.fedoraproject.org ;-)

Sonntag, 1. November 2009

New RPM Fusion packages: nvidia drivers for F12, staging drivers for F11 and F12

Just FYI:
  • the nvidia graphics drivers finally showed up again in the RPM Fusion repository for rawhide (the current public rawhide to be precise, e.g. what becomes Fedora 12 soon)
  • Most drivers from the linux-staging tree are disabled in the kernels that Fedora ships (among them a few wifi drivers like rtl8187se) . That's a good thing, as they are often of highly questionable quality (¹, ²). But some people nevertheless what them, as they own hardware that needs them(³). Those people from now on can get them easily for Fedora 11 and Rawhide/Fedora 12 by installing kmod-staging from RPM Fusion.
    Please note that:

    • the drivers for Fedora 11 are in rpmfusion-free-updates-testing currently and build for the kernel that is in Fedora's updates-testing repo; thus to use them you need to run something like "yum --enablerepo='*testing' install kmod-staging" and reboot into the kernel that is installed to use them
    • you need to install kmod-staging-PAE if you use a PAE kernel on your x86-32 machine
    • there are no akmod-staging package at this time
    • the package doesn't contain all the drivers from the staging tree; in case you miss one just file a bug in bugzilla.rpmfusion.org and tell the packager to enable it
Also note that it might take some hours till the mirror yum chooses for you offers the packages, as they were uploaded to the master repo just a few minutes before this blog posting got published.

We thank you for your attention and we wish you a pleasant flight.

(¹) that's the long story short

(²) don't expect the drivers to work well; NetworkManager for example will in have problems with some of the WiFi drivers in staging-kmod. In most cases that will be the fault of the driver and not NetworkManager, thus filing NetworkManager bugs that occur with staging drivers is likely a waste of your time.

(³) friends don't let friends buy hardware which need's staging (or even worse: proprietary) drivers on Linux