Fedora 23 Alpha — release set for Tuesday

We had a late-breaking problem with the cloud image and some drama with desktop wallpaper and with booting KDE on ARM, but the various groups involved in release logistics wrangled solutions and workarounds, so at today’s “Go/No-Go” meeting, we approved the Tuesday release. If you’re curious, see the meeting minutes for the process that Fedora goes through to make sure the release is ready.

In any case, come back next week for download details!

Evening Events for Flock

Also next week: Flock, our big annual developer and contributor conference, this year in Rochester, New York. Organizer Ruth Suehle announced the official evening events:

Wednesday: free night for teams and informal meetings (possibly with board games later in the evening — see below). Need ideas on where to go and what to see? Fedora hacker and Rochester resident Ralph Bean offers a helpful blog post highlighting ten things to do in the Flower City.

Thursday: The Strong National Museum of Play, with reception at the Boardwalk Arcade.

Friday: Reception at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and film.

Also! Board game night, either Wednesday or Saturday night (still waiting on details).

Read Ruth’s mail for more details. Hope to see you there!

Notes on Firefox pdf.js vulnerability

Earlier this week, Mozilla reported a serious Firefox vulnerability, with a nasty exploit found in the wild. We have an update in testing, and that will be available soon — a prompt update is recommended.

In the meantime, you can use the advanced about:config preferences to disable the internal PDF renderer — search for pdfjs, and double-click

pdfjs.disabled

to toggle it from

false

to

true

.

Check out the upcoming Fedora Developer Portal

Petr Hracek and others have been working on a new website for software developers doing their work on Fedora (as opposed to developing Fedora itself). Check out the prototype version, and read Petr’s blog entry on the why and who.

More on Rawhide

I periodically encourage brave souls to try using Fedora Rawhide — our development branch — as a daily desktop system. I do, and it’s only occasionally trouble. Usually, once you’re up and running, that consists primarily of dependecy problems which prevent updates. In order to keep up with what might be wrong, I recommend staying in touch with the Fedora devel list and blogs like Kevin Fenzi’s “This week in Rawhide”. And, Kevin has a new entry there this week, with a focus on how we could make Rawhide consistently updatable and installable — and notes that anyone interested should come to his Rawhide workshop at Flock

My schedule (and therefore 5tFTW schedule)

Next week is Flock, of course, and I’m planning on skipping 5tFTW and talking to human beings face-to-face instead. The next week is LinuxCon, and I’d love to see you at my talk, Connecting Vision to Action in a Community Project on Tuesday, August 18 at 4pm. It’s not about Fedora specifically, but I’ll be viewing things through a Fedora lens and giving Fedora examples. I’ll try to post a 5tFTW that week sometime, with notes from Flock and LinuxCon and the F23 Alpha — but no promises!

After that, for the rest of August, I’m on vacation, visiting my family and friends in the Pacific Northwest. I’ll likely be offline for good chunks of that — for emergencies, contact Paul Frields — or any member of the Fedora Council.

Hope to see many of you in person soon at one conference or the other, and then back online in September!