Recently, Jonathan Nadaeu and I sat down and discussed Fedora, GoOSe and a few other fun things on This Week in Fedora. The majority of the interview was about the GoOSe project and it covers a good bit of why we’re doing what we’re doing, how it works and how to get involved. Have a listen, and come hang out and help out the project!

In addition, I was asked to do a presentation this week on how to build RPMs at the Ogden Area Linux User Group (OALUG). While I teach this in my day job as a Red Hat Trainer, I’ve never given my own presentation. I’m really excited to share some very useful tips and tricks on how to build an RPMs and set them up in a custom repository for your company or for others to consume. It’s very cool and very easy to do most of this work.

So come on up to OALUG tomorrow night if you can.  I’ll make sure to follow-up here with the useful links for those interested.

Cheers,

Herlo

Even though I did attend several presentations on Saturday. My day was mostly taken up with something else…

I built rpm packages for salt!

If you aren’t sure what salt is, check out their site and read the authors blog. Essentially, salt makes it easy to run a set of commands on multiple machines all at the same time, returning results quickly and asynchronously.

If you are interested in trying out salt on your system(s) and run Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, etc. feel free to try out the rpms. I’ve currently got a review request on bugzilla as well if anyone is interested in providing a review.

Cheers,

herlo

Test fpaste-server

I’d like to get some folks to hit it and do some testing. If you have time, I would love it if you could take a moment, read below and help.

On the development server

To help, just point your browser to http://paste01.dev.fedoraproject.org/ and add some pastes. In fact, it should be pretty sturdy. If you do happen to find a bug, please file it on our fedorahosted.org Trac instance.

Roll your own

Another way to help is to install your own instance of fpaste-server. I’ve posted some simple installation instructions for anyone who is interested.

We are always looking for helpers to make fpaste-server better. Please contact me (herlo AT fedoraproject doT Org) if you are interested in helping improve or maintain this simple and fun project.

Cheers,

herlo

My point…

PASTEBINS ARE EVERYWHERE

One of the pastebins that has been in use for a very long time is http://fpaste.org and the focus of my post today. Essentially, the Fedora community tends to use fpaste.org over other pastebins as it has a bunch of nice features and it’s Fedora branded. About 2 months ago, I was asked by Jonathan Steffan (aka daMaestro) if I would be interested in packaging fpaste.org’s code and get it into Fedora infrastructure (FI). I accepted that challenge.

As Jonathan will tell you, the code was hacked together over a weekend at a coffee shop. Thus, it needed a bit of clean-up to make things work without including libs from other projects (a big no-no when packaging a Fedora rpm). After a few weeks of clean-up and back-and-forth with Jonathan, fpaste-server was born. That was the first big step to get fpaste-server into FI.

Fpaste-Server is comprised of many other packages. Since I wasn’t the maintainer on many of them, I worked with the amazingly awesome Dave Riches (dcr226) to get django-mptt, django-tracking, django-simple-captcha and django-dpaste into the EPEL repositories for both EL5 and EL6. Dave was not only helpful, but went above and beyond to complete these builds. Thank you, sir!

Over the past month, I’ve been really busy, prepping for my wedding and what not, but found some time recently to finish the package builds of fpaste-server. The packages are all approved, save for el5 which was submitted this morning. This was the second big step to get fpaste-server into FI.

This week, and after my honeymoon, I plan to finish up the work to get fpaste-server into FI. All that’s really left is to get django-tracking into EPEL6.

If you haven’t tried fpaste-server yet, you should. It’s a pretty cool and stable pastebin, it’s also very hackable. Changing out the background to fit your own logos and such is very simple. Please comment here if you find any bugs or issues, have questions or comments.

Cheers,

Herlo

It’s time again for the Fedora Classroom!!

If you aren’t familiar with the Fedora Classroom IRC sessions, we hold them about once a month in #fedora-classroom in irc.freenode.net.

This month’s session will be just on Saturday from 01:30 to 06:30 UTC (see this guide if you aren’t sure what times those are in your neighborhood).  We’ve got some good coverage of how Yum works, a little internationalization and updates on the new features in Fedora 11 (the Alpha just came out today).

I always find these sessions enlightening so come on by and participate!

Cheers,

Herlo

But one of the oddities I encountered while upgrading was the names of the packages. Mind you, this is just my twisted mind being interested in some of the funny odd or strange package names I found while the yum upgrade was taking place.

So here’s the list anyway, with a short description of each. Enjoy:

• gwenhywfar – A multi-platform helper library for networking and security applications and libraries.
• meanwhile – Lotus Sametime session functionality.
• neon – An HTTP and WebDAV client library.
• coolkey – Linux Driver support for the CoolKey and CAC products.
• rarian – Designed as a replacement for scrollkeeper; A documentation meta-data library.
• openjade – An implementation of the ISO/IEC 10179:1996 standard DSSSL.
• sox – (Sound eXchange) is a sound file format converter.
• cadaver – A command-line WebDAV client.
• booty – Small python library for use with bootloader configuration.
• orca – A flexible, extensible, and powerful assistive technology.
• zenity – Lets you display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts.
• eog – Eye of GNOME (EOG) is an image viewer.
• gok – Enables users to control their computer without relying on a standard keyboard or mouse, leveraging GNOME’s accessibility framework
• devilspie – A window-matching utility.*

This information was gathered using the command ‘rpm -qi <packagename>’.  This provided enough information to help understand at least the basics of each of these packages and whether to consider using them in the future.

The packages in italics above are packages that I consider interesting, and I plan to attempt to blog about each of them in turn as part of my POW series.

The devilspie package has a * which means that I’ve used this program before.  I quite enjoyed using the Devil’s Pie, and plan to take a look at it again in Fedora 8 as the previous package had some real limitations and lacked needed flexibility.

Please watch for the upcoming articles on these utilities.  Also, if there are packages that you found interesting during your upgrade, please comment and let me know what they are so I can learn and possibly use them as well.

Cheers,

Herlo