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After I moved my previous Fedora 14 installation to Fedora 16 (Beta) I noticed clicking URL links in Thunderbird do not open Firefox (or any other browser I have installed) anymore.

It was not easy to find a fix (there are many results in google for variations of the same problem) but in the end I found out why I am experiencing this, so I m leaving a note here for reference.

In Fedora 14 I installed Firefox 5 from Spot s personal repository, so I had to change the default command to run on URL clicks from “firefox %s” to “firefox5 %s”. The problem is that I ported the /home directory to the new installation, so it inherited that settings that is obviously wrong now.

Unfortunately, I could not find anything in the GNOME 3 interface to fix it, so I had to resort to the command line:

This shows the issue:

$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command
firefox5 %s

And this is the fix:

$ gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command -t string "firefox %s"
$ gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/https/command -t string "firefox %s"

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Today, I ve got this error from an ssh command:

$ ssh qbert
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
c5:f1:e3:66:81:2f:6e:e1:6a:41:1b:21:a2:05:45:f3.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /home/giallu/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending key in /home/giallu/.ssh/known_hosts:84
RSA host key for qbert has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.
lost connection

The key changed because I reinstalled that machine so there is not really anyone trying nasty things, I just need to get rid of that line (84). In order to open the file in vim at that line I used:

$ vim +84 /home/giallu/.ssh/known_hosts

followed by “dd” (delete line) and “:wq” (save and exit)

That s all for today s vim trick…

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So, we managed to do it!

The Fedora 15 Release party (my first one) was held last Saturday and it was fun indeed. But let s start from the beginning…

Fedora in my area is pretty much undervalued (the local LUG is basically Ubuntu/Debian based and I know very few people using Fedora outside my friends/colleagues circle) so I thought organizing a release party would be a though but exciting challenge.

Marketing the event was done on Facebook, twitter, blog posts, LUG and other relevant mailing lists; we also did direct marketing through a flier we designed and put up on some computer shops and University bulletin boards. Finally, we sent some kind of “press release” to local news websites, and a few picked it up and published the news.

The event was planned at the Evonove Coworking Space, so we had a room with projector,  some space for an install party and another smaller room for food and beverages.

We asked for some media and swag but unfortunately the former is not yet ready and the latter was not available, so we were left with some laptop stickers we previously had; so we decided to stick with burning Live CDs and DVDs as needed and do few “I Love Fedora” t-shirts to use them for a little “contest”: the friends from Red Hat offices in Brno sent me the web application used in their release party (a trivia game about Fedora) and we got it (mostly) translated in Italian so the plan was to give away the t-shirts to the best performers.

The Event

The day of the event we gathered a bit earlier and prepared the location: tables, power cords, signs in and outside, food and beverages, etc. Then waited and just before the planned time for the start we already greeted about 20 people! At the end I think there were between 20 and 30 people in the office so we began with the planned presentations.

Michele Bursi, a friend and nearby Ambassador kicked off his presentation about FOSS and licensing, then I followed up with a talk about the Fedora Project, features in the last release and a quick overview of GNOME 3.

There was quite a bit of curiosity about the Shell and most questions were about it, including the common ones “where is the minimize button?”, “doesn t it look very similar to Unity?” and “what about applets?”

After the talks we encouraged people to try out the Fedora contest and gathered in the install room where we continued the discussion about Fedora. There were a couple of PCs with Fedora 15 pre-installed to try it out, and some wanted to attempt the installation on their PCs with our assistance.

In the meanwhile, we burned and gave away about a dozen Live CDs and DVDs to those willing to install Fedora at home.

Before closing the event, it was time to assign the prizes for the contest: we checked the results and it turned out the questions were really hard, and the winners answered correctly just half of the questions. We also gave a special prize to the farthest participant (he drove 140+ Km to join us to the party!)

A complete photo gallery is available

Lessons learned

• work for more coverage on news websites
• measure which marketing channel worked best
• be sure to have swag and media
• find help for the install party

Credits
I would like to thank all that helped me to make this happen, in particular the ambassador Michele Bursi, Massimiliano Pippi and Alessandro Veracchi of Evonove, Jiri Eischmann and Ivana Varekova from Red Hat

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After four editions, this year the Javaday event changed and become Codemotion, opening to all languages and technologies.

I trusted the advice of my newest colleague (thanks Luca!) and decided to participate. Additionally, I took the chance to propose a talk about RPM packaging and spread some Fedora love there. To be honest, I did not expect them to pick my proposal but then the email come and I was very excited by the prospect of talking in such a big event (some 2000+ people were expected).

The event was really successful, a lot of people showed up (of course that was somewhat an easy call since it was completely free-as-in-beer) and the organizers did a great job at handling the crowd; queues were very quick (except the one for the coffee, I did not manage to get any) and everything looked very professional and carefully planned.

I talked in the "OS & Hacking" track and was very happy to see about fifty people in the audience. The slides went on smoothly and I got some interesting questions, also after the talk, including the customary "is there any PPA like system in Fedora?"…

Later on, I found a Fedora and planet CCRMA avid user that was really surprised to hear I was doing that as a volunteer; I gave him my Fedora branded business card in case he wanted to start contributing in some way.

All in all, it was a great experience and I look forward to bringing even more Fedora (pun intended…) to this event next year.

Finally, I really need to thank Tom spot Callaway for making some great starting material and to the Fedora Design team for a beautiful presentation template.

The slides (in Italian) are available in my fedorapeople space

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Git has the concept of “tracking branches“: a local branch can be linked to a remote branch so pull and push commands have a default destination on the remote repository.

As an added benefit, you will get an informative message on top of “git status” output telling you which one of the two ends has new commits, like this:

$ git status
# On branch master
# Your branch is behind  origin/master  by 11 commits, and can be fast-forwarded

Now, this works by default with the master branch but if you created a local branch like:

$ git checkout -b new_branch
Switched to a new branch  new_branch 

then decided to push it to origin (or any other remote), tracking will not be active unless you use the command:

$ git push --set-upstream origin new_branch
Counting objects: 40, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (25/25), done.
Writing objects: 100% (25/25), 3.25 KiB, done.
Total 25 (delta 19), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:giallu/testrepo.git
   dcdb736..643a3f2  new_branch -> new_branch
Branch new_branch set up to track remote branch new_branch from origin

If you forget to use the –set-upstream option during push you can also do it later (from version 1.7) with:

$ git --set-upstream origin new_branch

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New Mantis issue tracker packages for Fedora 13, 14 and EPEL 5 were just pushed in the updates-testing repository.

They fix a couple security issues recently found so if you are a Mantis administrator please consider testing them and give karma so we can move them to stable sooner!

To install the update use:
yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update mantis

To add karma go to:

• Fedora 13
• Fedora 14
• EPEL

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I had the chance to handle the requests for Fedora Media from LUGs and other organizing committees for the upcoming Linux Day, which is an important event in Italy scattered in more than 100 cities.

The Italian ambassadors team received a dozen direct requests for support with marketing material, which is nice given (as far as I know) we did absolutely nothing to promote the availability of such material.

Even if we favoured the events where Ambassadors are going to be present, we were able to send a small sample of what we had available (32 bit KDE Live CDs, 32 and 64bit DVDs) to all the requesters. 

Next year I definitely hope to improve by covering more events with our own ambassadors and by making sure we have a solid event kit in their hands!

Lesson learned:

• We need to allocate Media and other material earlier
• We need to understand how to request and use budget locally
• We need ambassadors from souther regions (two candidates identified already!)

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I was not the only one noticing there are not many features in Fedora 14 compared to the former releases, but I wondered how much this is anecdotal and how much it s reality.

So I actually counted them from the Feature pages and here is the results:

Fedora  8     21 Features
Fedora  9     30 Features
Fedora 10     28 Features
Fedora 11     52 Features !!!
Fedora 12     42 Features
Fedora 13     38 Features
Fedora 14     20 Features

So it is true Fedora 14 is the least feature equipped release we had since Fedora 8, and it s even worse if you compare side by side the features list and note how many features in the current release are just updates to (admittedly important) packages like boost or python.

So why did it happen? I think it all boils down to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6:  the exact date for the release is not known but surely it should be nearing by now; add to this the notion most features we have in the distro carry a @redhat.com owner and the result starts to be less surprising.

So, how bad is this? Surely, other distributions could potentially move on and improve while we are “distracted” in another direction, raising the bar for us to really “lead the advancement of free, open software and content“.

However it is also true more and more reports indicate Red Hat employees as leading contributors in upstream projects so, in a way, we can afford being lazy for a release because upstream would slow down as a result and we could catch up easier.

So what s the truth? I am not sure, but if it is the latter, maybe RHEL 6 also delayed GNOME 3, or at least contributed to…

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As part of my translator work for Fedora I noticed a page with a stylistic issue with an Italian word, obbiettivo which is better spelled as obiettivo . Now, I quickly edited the page and the few other found by searching for the term, then realized there were a lot more with the plural form, so it was not practical to do the work manually.

Fortunately, Mediawiki (the program powering Fedora s wiki) has a very good API, which is accessible with python; in particular in Fedora we ship python-mwclient and it turned out I could search and replace all occurrences in 10 lines of code. Magic!

If someone is wondering, here is the script I used:

#!/usr/bin/python
# Wiki Search And Replace

for pagedata in pages:
    page = site.Pages[ pagedata['title'] ]
    text = page.edit()
    newtext = re.sub( r'([o|O])bbiettivi', r'1biettivi' , text )
    page.save( newtext, summary='Obbiettivo->Obiettivo', minor=True)

I found the mwclient documentation a bit lacking so the hard part was figuring out the value for some parameters in the function calls. At the end, I mostly relied on the help(mwclient) content, available from the python interpreter, in conjunction with the Mediawiki API reference you get by pointing the browser to http://fedoraproject.org/w/api.php

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