Fedora Weekly Report: 24th - 30th March, 2008

The week that has just passed brought us the first - and last - Beta of Fedora 9, some security advisories and a new way of contributing to the development of Fedora.

In fedora-announce-list, Jesse Keating announced the launch of Fedora 9 Beta: "The Beta release is the point at which we really want and need the wider community's help with testing. Beta is a point of much greater stability in Fedora's development branch, but some fixes continue to occur to improve

usability, performance, and stability. This release is great for early adopters and Linux enthusiasts! The Fedora 9 Beta boots on the majority of systems, and gives you an idea of how the final Fedora 9 will look and feel. Most importantly, we absolutely need community assistance to check features and provide feedback and bug reports, to help ensure that Fedora 9 is our best release ever."

He also added, talking about the Rawhide snapshot that's available for testing: "As part of our development schedule, we are releasing a snapshot of Rawhide in ISO and Live form." For the moment, there are no PPC spins of the snapshot, but in case someone is interested in such a version, the developers could make one. Anyway, future snapshot releases will include PPC spins, as Josh Boyer noted.

A new mailing list was born, the Fedora Project's Python SIG's one, and Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams invited everyone, from those who are starting off with programming to the hardcore hackers.

Thanks to the new Fedora Updates System (bodhi), you can now easily help packagers to test updates, give them feedback and prevent faulty packages from getting into the repositories. It integrates with the Fedora Build System (koji), allowing everyone to give feedback on a specific update, from updates-testing or in the stable repository.

The system is simple: if a testing package worked fine with your system, you can give it +1 karma by selecting the "Works for me" button, thus hurrying up its release; in case the package didn't work, you can give it -1 karma, by choosing "Does not work". This system doesn't allow packages with a karma level that's lower or equal with -3 to get into the stable repository.

The security advisories of this week for Fedora 8 are:

• php-pear-PhpDocumentor-1.4.1-2.fc8
• Miro-1.1.2-2.fc8
• yelp-2.20.0-8.fc8
• epiphany-2.20.3-2.fc8
• gtkmozembedmm-1.4.2.cvs20060817-19.fc8
• ruby-gnome2-0.16.0-21.fc8
• gnome-python2-extras-2.19.1-13.fc8
• epiphany-extensions-2.20.1-6.fc8
• liferea-1.4.13-2.fc8
• galeon-2.0.4-1.fc8.3
• devhelp-0.16.1-6.fc8
• gnome-web-photo-0.3-9.fc8
• openvrml-0.17.5-4.fc8
• chmsee-1.0.0-1.30.fc8
• kazehakase-0.5.3-5.fc8
• firefox-2.0.0.13-1.fc8
• blam-1.8.3-14.fc8
• namazu-2.0.18-1.fc8
• Perlbal-1.70-1.fc8

And the ones for Fedora 7 are:

• chmsee-1.0.0-1.30.fc7
• devhelp-0.13-15.fc7
• epiphany-2.18.3-8.fc7
• epiphany-extensions-2.18.3-8
• firefox-2.0.0.13-1.fc7
• galeon-2.0.3-16.fc7
• gtkmozembedmm-1.4.2.cvs20060817-16.fc7
• Miro-1.1.2-2.fc7
• gnome-python2-extras-2.14.3-9.fc7
• kazehakase-0.5.3-5.fc7
• liferea-1.4.13-2.fc7
• openvrml-0.16.7-4.fc7
• ruby-gnome2-0.16.0-22.fc7
• yelp-2.18.1-10.fc7
• namazu-2.0.18-1.fc7
• Perlbal-1.70-1.fc7

Download Fedora 8 right now from Softpedia.
Download Fedora 9 Beta right now from Softpedia. Please note that this is a development release and SHOULD NOT be installed on production machines.