Dell #1 system vendor on smolts.org

Smolts.org is an open source project started by the fabulous Mike McGrath, Fedora Infrastructure leader, which lets users opt-in to provide information about their hardware and OS.  Perhaps you’ve seen the opportunity during Fedora‘s firstboot to submit your hardware profile, and wondered what that was.

Fedora firstboot smolt screenshot

Fedora firstboot smolt screenshot

Users can use the statistics gathered by smolt to see which systems are popular, and to rate and see the ratings other users give.  The Dell Latitude D630 currently shows as the top-rated name-brand system, noting that everything “just works” – just like I like it.

Smolt statistics can also be used to influence companies to invest in Linux.  I’m pleased to see Dell ranked as the most popular system vendor listed (see Vendor tab).   This isn’t simply people expressing their opinion and wishes, but people voting with their wallets.  This reflects the commitment I and my teams have made for the last 10 years to ensure Linux “just works” wherever we can.

Smolt Vendor List

Smolt Vendor List

Smolt is available for Fedora, Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, openSUSE, and perhaps your other chosen distribution as well.  If not, visit the project page (above) to help include it.

Conference season is upon us

Got a good idea, and are looking for the perfect audience to present it to?  This year there are a lot of choices in North America.  This list isn’t complete, but is just a taste of the speaking opportunities available.

Note: many have proposal deadlines this month, even though the events are 6 months away.  So get cracking now…

FUDConF11 Videos are up

Videos for 11 of the FUDConF11 sessions are now available.  On the schedule page, they are denoted by a small speaker icon.  In addition, seven of the videos have been converted to Flash format and are available on the Linux Foundation’s video site.  Thanks to Chris Tyler and Clint Savage for their audio and video work at the conference, and to Brian Proffitt for getting them posted on the LF site.

GPG Keysigning at FUDConF11

As in past years, I’ll run a GPG Keysigning session at FUDConF11 in Cambridge, MA on Saturday, January 10.

Meet Fedora people face-to-face. Taunt each other over their passport/driver’s license photos. Add yourself to the Web of Trust or increase your ranking.

To Participate

Pre-registration is preferred.  I’ll try to accommodate people who don’t follow the procedure below and still want to participate on the day of the event, but that may be difficult.

  • Mandatory: Create a GPG keypair for yourself (if you haven’t already)
  • Optional: add your user@fedoraproject.org uid to your keypair
  • Mandatory: Send your key before the event to the subkeys.pgp.net keyserver. Get your KEYID from your keyring as the part following the 1024D/ as follows:
gpg --list-secret-keys | grep ^sec

For me, this is 92F0FC09. Yours will be different.

Then send your key to the keyserver with:

gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --send-keys KEYID

and send me your key fingerprint with:

gpg --fingerprint KEYID | mail -s "<your-fedora-username> key" fudcon-keys@domsch.com

Right Before FUDCon

  • Mandatory: If you pre-register for the keysigning, print out your key fingerprint once and bring it. If you don’t pre-register, print out your key fingerprint 20-50 times, and bring it with you. You’ll hand one of these out to each other person at the keysigning, so bring enough. The program ‘gpg-key2ps’ in the pgp-tools RPM can do this for you quite nicely.
  • Mandatory: run md5sum and sha1sum on the fudcon-keysigning-fingerprints.txt files (to be generated shortly before the event – you’ll get an email notification), print at the results, and bring them to the meeting. It should match the corresponding files on the web site.
  • Mandatory: Bring a government-issued picture ID of yourself

Note: this means you will have at least 2 pieces of paper (your key fingerprint and the sha1sum and md5sum results) that you bring.

At the Keysigning

For those who pre-registered, you can find the keyring, the fingerprint file we’ll use, and the md5sum and sha1sum hash of the fingerprint file, all at http://domsch.com/linux/fedora/fudconf11/. We will read these values, for everyone to confirm they all match.

After the Keysigning

Following the keysigning, you’ll need to actually sign people’s keys. The easiest way to do this is to use caff which is conveniently packaged in the Fedora pgp-tools package. caff lets you sign a number of keys at once, and will then email each recepient their signed key, encrypted with their key (actually, it sends one email per UID on the target key, so those people with 10 UIDs on their key will get 10 emails from caff, but that’s OK – it makes sure they control that email address too). They must know their own passphrase to retrieve their signed key, which they can then import into their gpg keyring and upload to the keyserver subkeys.pgp.net.

Fedora Election – I voted

I Voted Fedora

With one week to go in the Fedora election cycle, I encourage all Fedora account holders to participate in this semi-yearly election.  This round, 2 seats on the Fedora Board (including mine), 4 seats on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, and all 7 seats of the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee are being elected.

I’m very pleased with the nomination process this time.  We have 7 extremely capable people who volunteered their time to serve on the Fedora Board for the next year.   Each of the other elections also had more candidates than open seats – a sign of strength and depth for the Project.  Good luck to every candidate!

Fedora Election Town Halls – Come one come all!

Fedora is gearing up for its next round of elections.  Three groups are electing members over the next several weeks:

  • Fedora Project Board is electing two members
  • Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) is electing four members
  • Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee (FAMSCo) is electing all seven members

As requested by several Fedora members, the candidates in these elections are participating in a series of Town Hall discussions on IRC.  This is your opportunity to ask them as a group anything you would like.  Want to hear what they think is Fedora’s biggest challenge, and how they will solve it?  Join us and ask!

Schedule is as follows:

  • Friday December 5, 2008 02:00 UTC (9pm US Eastern on Thursday) Fedora Board
  • Friday December 5, 2008 15:00 UTC (10am US Eastern) Fedora Board
  • Friday December 5, 2008 17:00 UTC (12pm US Eastern) FESCo
  • Saturday December 6, 2008 17:00 UTC (12pm US Eastern) FAMSCo

To attend, join the #fedora-townhall and #fedora-townhall-public rooms on irc.freenode.net.   A moderator will be on hand in both rooms to help the conversation flow.  Candidates may speak in #fedora-townhall, while everyone may ask questions in #fedora-townhall-public.  The moderator will copy questions from the -public room into the -townhall room.

Please use these opportunities to educate yourselves about the candidates for office, so that you may make an informed vote.

Voting begins on Sunday, December 7 and runs through Saturday, December 20.

Further details, including the list of candidates and their backgrounds, are available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections.

Fedora 10 Metalinks

As of tonight, metalinks are available for all Fedora CD and DVD ISOs.  Metalinks provide a list of servers which have the same content, as well as checksum information to validate the download is correct.  Tools such as aria2 can be used to retrieve content pointed to by a metalink.

For example, to get the Fedora 10 i686 LiveCD:

$ sudo yum install aria2
$ wget -O metalink.xml \

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?path=pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Live/i686/F10-i686-Live.iso

$ aria2c -M metalink.xml

I’ll work with the websites team to get single-click metalinks added to the get-fedora pages.

How many social networking sites do you use?

Daily I look at Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, LinkedIn, Yammer, and probably a few more I use far less often.  But what do you do when a friend or colleague invites you to use YASNS (yet another social networking site)?

I’ve been sitting on an invite to Namyz for ages.  It was sent by a friend of mine, and I don’t want to snuff his enthusiasm for this particular site, but I don’t really want yet another of these to keep track of.  Same goes with Plaxo.  I’m sure they’re wonderful, but really, how many can one person be expected to use?  What’s the etiquette for saying “no thanks to Namyz, but if you’d care to send me a LinkedIn invite, I’d accept that?”