fedora

Ring. Ring. It's Fedora calling

Red Hat's Fedora Project has announced several cool things this week. The first was Intel's defection from Ubuntu to use Fedora in its Moblin (Mobile Linux Internet Project). Intel's Dirk Hohndel billed it as driven by the project's preference for Fedora's RPM-based packaging system, but it's still significant, given Ubuntu's momentum in mobile.

But the most interesting Fedora announcement may well have had nothing to do with its code, and everything to do with the process that creates that code. I'm referring to Fedora Talk, a voice-over-IP system that "allows Fedora … Read more

A new virtualizer for Red Hat

I spent the past couple of days at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Good-sized crowd--over 1,500 and more than Red Hat expected I gather. The two major topics that I found most interesting at the event were Real-Time Linux and embedded KVM-based virtualization. I'll cover Real-Time in a future post; here's my take on Red Hat's KVM announcement.

CNET News.com's Andrew Donoghue has more details, but basically Red Hat is releasing--into beta test--a small (< 64 MB) standalone hypervisor based on the KVM project. The idea is that users (or system makers) will … Read more

Fedora + soccer = Ronaldo-esque technique

I recently helped my son take third-to-last place in the Pinewood Derby. Reading this, I clearly should have powered his car with Fedora.

Fedora is the operating system of choice for AllemaniACs' winning robot in the RoboCup, a soccer tournament played between robots. Fedora has fueled AllemaniACs' victories in 2006 and 2007, and appears to be poised to raise the cup again in 2008.

The RoboCup sounds fascinating. There is no human intervention in the games beyond coaches yelling instructions to the robots, and the robots responding in kind. Hopefully they respond better than my five-year old does on her mob ball team....

AllemaniACs' robot is mostly powered by off-the-shelf Fedora, with some modifications that have been contributed back to the Fedora core. Importantly, these modifications and the work done for Fedora's RoboCup success aren't limited to the electronic dreams of RoboCup's Ronaldos:… Read more

Red Hat lives on the edge with Fedora 9

Red Hat on Tuesday released the ninth incarnation of its enthusiast version of Linux, making a move that rival Ubuntu couldn't: the inclusion of the KDE 4 user interface.

That's because Fedora and Ubuntu have different approaches to new projects such as KDE 4, which is new, significantly different from KDE 3.5, and not yet settled down.

Red Hat has two versions of Linux, the free Fedora that's designed as a proving ground that can get new projects into the hands of early adopters while helping those projects to mature, and the subscription-fee-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux … Read more

NASA runs Fedora...lots and lots of Fedora

From its countdown server to the video streams behind NASA TV, NASA runs a lot of Fedora (and Red Hat Enterprise Linux), as Jack Aboutboul was privileged to see on a recent tour of NASA's facilities in Jacksonville, Florida.

I suppose it's not surprising that an organization like NASA would use free software like Fedora, in addition to its commercial cousin, RHEL. After all, NASA is powered by rocket scientists (pun intended) that want maximum control over their IT. Fedora gives that to them. No, they don't get commercial support for it, but they likely don't … Read more

Fedora and the art of creating an inclusive community

Earlier this year Fedora got a new community project leader. In February 2008 Paul Frields replaced Max Spevack, bringing a different perspective to Fedora's community management. Paul, you see, is not a developer. Nor is he based in Raleigh (Red Hat's headquarters). His background with Fedora has been mostly on the documentation side, and he's been working remotely.

This gives Paul an interesting perspective on Fedora and its community, and how Fedora connects with Red Hat.

I spent a half-hour with Paul today and probed into Fedora and the art of community, as well as some of the innovations in the pipe for Fedora 9.

What is your background? How did you get involved in Fedora?… Read more

Red One: The HD Camera

CES 2008 is over and now it's up to us to figure out which gizmos are next on our list of Must Have items. Even though I've been a life-long Canon customer, I was sorely tempted by the Casio Exilim Pro EX-F1 that the company says can shoot 60 still images per second with 6MP resolution. Wow! But what if the action lasts more than a single second? And what if you want 2x the resolution so that you can show off the full capabilities of your new 150" Panasonic TH46PXZ850, with it's 4K by 2K resolution? You need a 4K camera, and that's been hard to find in a consumer-sized format. Until now.… Read more

Fedora gets a new project leader

Max Spevack is resigning from his role as Fedora Project Lead, handing over the reins to Paul Frields, who has been active in Fedora since 2003 with Fedora's documentation, packaging, marketing, news, and artwork teams. He'll be joining Red Hat as part of his assumption of the Fedora Project Lead duties.

In Max's announcement, he also noted that Jack Aboutboul will be taking a full-time role in Fedora marketing, community building, and Ambassadors. Congratulations to both Jack and Paul.

Isn't it interesting that someone could have such a big impact on Red Hat as Paul has...… Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Marc Fleury dings Apache Software Foundation -- JBoss founder says Apache should get over the BSD license and work with other Java projects such as JBoss or Sun Microsystems' OpenJDK rather than replicate its own. Harald Welte leaves OpenMoko -- He's getting back into GPL enforcement after "quite a bit of internal friction" at OpenMoko, an attempt to make an open-source mobile phone that began at Taiwanese company FIC. Ulrich Drepper: Energy saving is everybody's business -- A call to arms for programmers to make their code interrupt the CPU less often, and a hint that … Read more