
Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for June 24th, 2014:

New NetworkManager Release Full of Features

NetworkManager, familiar to many of us as “that thing that has a taskbar icon for getting WiFi”, has always aimed to be much more than that. With the 0.9.10 release (which will hit Fedora’s “Rawhide” development tree later this week and be include in Fedora 21 this fall), there’s a whole host of features to support those broader aims, including server and cloud-focused improvements. Read more on developer Dan Williams’ blog.

Waartaa gets Video Chat

Waartaa is an open source, web-based chat system — it describes itself as “IRC as a service”. Since Fedora uses IRC (Internet Relay Chat) as our chief means of real-time collaboration in Fedora, including for our various team meetings, this might be something we could use to make our communications more open and friendly. There is a session about Waartaa and Fedora at our big Flock conference this fall (August 6-9, in Prague).

I was interested to learn that there’s a Google Summer of Code project supporting Fedora contributor Lalit Khattar in improving Waartaa, and right now he’s working on adding video chat support. This is a long way from ready, but maybe in the not-too-distant future it will provide us with a viable alternative to proprietary video chat for high-bandwidth collaboration.

Fedora Project Board Discusses Fedora.next Products

On Monday, the Fedora Project Board held a public IRC meeting. There were two main topics: first, guidelines for third-party press releases (which were approved); and second, general criteria for Fedora Products — a continuation of a previous meeting on the topic. The criteria we passed are:

  • Addresses a new, relevant, and broad use case or user base that a Fedora Product is not currently serving
  • The use case should be something the Board sees as being a long term investment
  • The Product should be coherent with all of Fedora’s foundations

We also talked briefly about the Fedora Plasma Product proposal in light of these criteria, but did not quite get to a conclusion. Generally, there is broad Board support for better positioning and promotion of non-product desktop spins. More discussion will happen on the public board-discuss mailing list before a future meeting.

View the meeting minutes or, if you like full meeting logs.

Flock Planning Meetings

Speaking of meetings and of Flock, the Flock planning team is holding regular IRC meetings, on Tuesdays at 14:00 UTC in #fedora-meeting on Freenode. This week’s meeting was very short, but last week’s had a lot of activity. (One interesting tidbit: we’ll reuse the open source Android / Jolla / BlackBerry mobile app from Red Hat’s DevConf.cz conference.) Anyway, if you’re interested in helping, stop by next week.

Contribute to Fedora Magazine!

If you’re reading this on the Fedora Magazine site, you’ll notice a new “submit an article idea” link in the right column. If you’re not, go to https://fedoramagazine.org/submit-an-idea-or-tip/ to send in suggestions — either for full articles or for 5tFTW tips.

Fedora Magazine has had a very successful last few months and we’re looking to build it up even more. Writing articles is an easy way to help. It doesn’t need to be a big production — just a little bit on something you find interesting in Fedora, or something exciting you’re working on or thinking about. Join the Fedora Marketing Team‘s email list or jump into the #fedora-mktg Freenode channel to get access and any help you might need.
{"cc_re__cc_re__cc_by_sa_4_0": ["an><a class='sd-link-color'></a></div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"clear\"></div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t</div> <!-- /post-content -->\n\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"post-meta-container\">\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"post-author\">\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"post-author-content\">\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<h4>Matthew Miller</h4>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p>Matthew is the <a href=\"http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Project_Leader\">Fedora Project Leader</a>. You can find him on the Fedora mailing lists or Freenode as \"mattdm\". Matthew's content on this site is made available under the <a href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/\">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International</a> license \u2014 share all you like, give credit, and let others share as well.</p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"author-links\">\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<a class=\"author-link-posts\" title=\"Author archive\" href=\"https://fedoramagazine.org/author/mattdm/\">Author archive</a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<a class=\"author-link-website\" title=\"Author website\" href=\"http://mattdm.id.fedoraproject.org/\">Author website</a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t</div> <!-- /author-links --"]}