Alphatek – Steven's Tech Blog

Last Friday I handed in my Bachelor of Science diploma work, so I basically finished my studies! If all goes well (and it should), I’ll receive the title of “Bachelor of Science in media engineering, IT orientation” or something like that. I already got a proposition for a very nice job in the Open Source industry, but nothing is completely sure at the time. I really hope this turns out well

Maybe you want to know what my diploma work was about? Well, it was about setting up an industrialization process to create custom Fedora-based Linux distributions on the fly. Basically, Fedora appliances targeted at video surveillance.

• The first part of the diploma is targeted at analysing the Fedora package build process, or how to get from source code to an RPM in a repository. It’s a good guide for SPEC files, rpmbuild, Koji, Bodhi etc…the whole build process is detailed. For the job I had to package motion, for which I’m now a contributor and RPM package maintainer. There is also a comparative analysis between the different composition tools available in Fedora.
• The second part of the diploma is targeted at streamlining the whole development process in the company I was working for. As a result they are now using a version control system (SVN) and Trac as a bug tracking system.
• The third part of the diploma is targeted at creating custom Fedora remixes which are auto-installable and auto-configured with heavy kickstart usage. The end result are a couple of scripts which create custom Fedora remixes with Revisor.
• The last part of the diploma is targeted at setting up quality assurance (QA) on the produced Fedora remix.

The final workflow allows the developers to automatically create custom Fedora distributions containing all their code in less than 15 minutes (compared to 1-2 days before). All the configuration files, GUI code, kickstart files etc…are directly extracted from SVN and passed to Revisor.

Now I have time again to catch up with Fedora Marketing stuff, and there is plenty of interesting work going on…

Yesterday, the Fedora 11 Retrospective Meeting was held, I had the chance to be invited there as a member of the Marketing group. This meeting, done by phone, was a cross-group talk to see what went well and not so well during the Fedora 11 release cycle.  The goal is to gather feedback so we can learn from our errors to create an even better Fedora 12. People from the Ambassador group, Fedora Board, Design team, Marketing team, Documentation team, FESCo, Infrastructure team, Quality Insurance team, Release Engineering, Translation team and Website team were present, everyone had around 5 minutes to talk.

I found it very useful even if I didn’t talk too much; Jack, the Marketing team leader, did a good job of saying what needed to be said on our side :p

Long story short, it looks like Fedora 12 will be a “stabilization” release compared to Fedora 11. The main demands could be summed up with:

• A longer freeze period before release would be nice.
• More features need to be tested by QA.
• Testing periods should be longer.
• Last minute features should be pushed to rawhide for the next release instead of being squeezed in the current cycle.
• A better communication between groups is needed.
• In every group, more feedback is needed.

Hey all, long time no see

On the Fedora front I was busy doing marketing stuff for the Fedora 11 release. Overall, it went pretty well, it was a great release day and we had quite a lot of good press. Part of this job is also to follow user comments on all the websites we publish news to, on my side this means all the major French speaking IT websites. Doing this, I could see a few tendencies:

• People don’t have a clue which Fedora spin to download (KDE, Gnome, x86, x86-64 …), the actual download page REALLY confuses a lot of people. Too much choice seems to kill the choice.
• In the same vein, I’ve seen a lot of comments regarding the Live CD’s…comments like “Why does Fedora start to propose LiveCD’s as the primary installation source instead of the normal installation DVD?”.

Rant: I don’t have much to say on this front, but I don’t think it helps Fedora to multiply the installation medias in an exponential way (Note: specialized spins are something else). Personally I don’t like LiveCD’s because they are slow and have very few “cool” software on them due to space requirements, this defeats the “showcase for new users” argument. Anyway. the download page is broken IMO. Why do we provide a “Desktop Edition” and a “KDE Desktop Edition”? Shouldn’t we have a single “Desktop Edition” link pointing to a choice between Gnome and KDE? Or clearly put “Gnome Desktop Edition” and “KDE Desktop Edition” on the front page? Is KDE a second class citizen? How do you expect a new user to do the right choice?

Couldn’t we have some kind of “choice list” instead? A bit like Ubuntu/OpenSuse do:

We could help people chose the right installation media this way, by providing defaults and clearly explain the options. Wouldn’t it be clearer than having  KDE and PowerPC links on the right side of http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora ?

If you have anything to say about the way we marketed Fedora 11, please give feedback to the marketing group! You can leave a comment here, I’ll forward it. This really helps us.

In case you didn’t catch it from some other sources, there is a cool page with Fedora podcasts on the wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_release_podcasts These podcasts are aimed at the Fedora 11 release, talking about the distribution and what the novelties are. One new podcast should be published there every 2-3 days, so keep looking

Fedora 11: yummy!

If you have friends who want to see what Fedora 11 looks like, there is also a page with multiple screenshots from the installation process, the different desktop environments (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Sugar) and applications here.

Yes, here they are. Yes, this was my artistic moment.