From what I have seen in this blog post looks like Ubuntu has gained option to have transparent GNOME windows.

I hope this feature goes upstream as fast as possible so that Fedora gets this great feature as soon as possible, maybe for Fedora 14? Anybody has some insight regarding Fedora and transparency?

LinuxMint is considered by many the best Linux desktop distribution, it is a Ubuntu based distribution and has some really great additions for desktop users on top of Ubuntu features. LinuxMint team has worked hard on porting mintMenu to Fedora.
 
mintMenu is currently stuck in review process, but hopefully it will come to Fedora repositories soon so everybody can test it and start using it.
 
We at Community Fedora Remix are looking into making mintMenu default Gnome menu for our next release.
 

We would like to announce live DVD/USB release of Community Fedora Remix 12.3
 
* 100% compatible with Fedora
* Compiz Fusion compositing window manager
* KDE + GNOME desktops
* multimedia support out of the box (mp3 playback)
* additional XFCE desktop
* GNOME Do – intelligent application launcher (http://tinyurl.com/yntg9l)
* OpenOffice 3.1
* Inkscape, Scribus and GIMP 2.6
* Blender
* Evolution with native Exchange support (mapi)
* Thunderbird 3.0
* better hardware compatibility for broadcom wireless cards
* better printer hardware compatibility
* better games selection
* Educational and astronomy software installed
* Google Chrome Internet browser + Firefox
* wireless security tools (aircrack-ng and kismet)
* GPS and location apps (TangoGPS and tools)
* Nautilus in browser mode by default
* enabled clicking via touchpad by default
* optimized smaller iso image (1.7GB vs 2GB)
* many other enhancements
 
If you have any suggestion on how to make this Remix better and to get involved feel free to join us and make this Fedora Remix even better on our mailing list community-fedora-remix@googlegroups.com or via comments on this blog.
 
Torrent download: linux tracker and demonoid
direct download: coming soon
 

 
Tom “spot” Callaway Spot has been mainataining Fedora Chromium repo, but now it is gone and there is no explanation on Tom’s Spot’s blog :(
 
UPDATE: But there is an explanation in README.txt file.
 
It looks like Chromium won’t be making its way to Fedora repos anytime soon because of Googles non-cooperation :(
 
To make things worse Community Fedora Remix included chromium repo by default and now updates are broken for lots of people because of that :(
 
Is there some new Chromium repo or is the only solution to install Google Chrome instead?
 
Tom Spot congrats to your wife and you on baby! Also on moving to a new house, I hope you continue maintaining chromium repo.
 

 
We would like to announce live CD release of Community Fedora Remix 12.2
 
* 100% compatible with Fedora
* Compiz Fusion compositing window manager
* KDE + GNOME desktops
* multimedia support out of the box (mp3 playback)
* additional XFCE and Enlightenment desktops
* GNOME Do – intelligent application launcher (http://tinyurl.com/yntg9l)
* OpenOffice 3.1
* Inkscape, Scribus and GIMP 2.6
* Blender
* Evolution with native Exchange support (mapi)
* Thunderbird 3.0
* better hardware compatibility for broadcom wireless cards
* better printer hardware compatibility
* better games selection
* Educational and astronomy software installed
* Chromium Internet browser + Firefox
* wireless security tools (aircrack-ng and kismet)
* GPS and location apps (TangoGPS and tools)
* Nautilus in browser mode by default
* enabled clicking via touchpad by default
* optimized smaller iso image (1.7GB vs 2GB)
* many other enhancements
 
If you have any suggestion on how to make this Remix better and to get involved feel free to join us and make this Fedora Remix even better.
 
Download links:
direct download: http://iso.linux.hr/fedora-community-remix/
 

 
After seeing lots of buzz about Virtualization improvements in Fedora 11 and 12 it was time to give it a try. I have experience using desktop virtualization over 10 years; mainly VMWare in beginning and in last few years mostly VirtualBox, but also qemu with kqemu via command line. VirtualBox is the preferable one because of it’s ease of use for desktop virtualization.
 
After installing virt-manager in Fedora 12 I hit first speed bump on the road to native linux virtualization – it failed to install libvirt (bug reported). Without libvirt virt-manager GUI just sits dead in the water. How such an obvious thing got unnoticed so far? Is anybody actually using virt-manager after installing Fedora 12 from live cd?
 
It was a simple thing to install libvirt and start the service, but something that basic should be done automatically. After starting virt-manager I was pleased with it clean looking UI.
 
The idea was to install Ubuntu and see how it performed in this virtual environment, but virt-manager only offers root partition as storage location of virtual image. That is just not acceptable for various reasons.
 
On my system root is used only for Fedora, also usually reformated on every new Fedora release. Root partition on my system is 10GB – plenty of room for Fedora but not for additional virtual images. There is no reason why virt-manager shouldn’t have a choice where to save your virtual images, I guess that I’m not the only one who would like to save virtaulization storage images in /home partition (bug reported).
 
After consulting qemu wiki it was a simple step of issuing qemu-img create -f qcow2 .virt-manager/ubuntu.img 6000M and choose that image in virt-manager. Installation went flawless, resizing VM display to fit my window worked great.
 
One thing that is missing are tools similar to VirtualBox Guest Additions that enable mouse to be used in both VM and on Fedora without VM needing exclusive right to use the mouse, and then pressing CTRL+ALT keys to ungrab the mouse to make is available on Fedora desktop again. And also clipboard sharing.
 
Native linux virtualization for desktops looks closer and closer to being a really nice experience, I know that virt-manager guys will fix these issues so go ahead and try it out and share your experience with it.
 

 

 
Nautilus + Tracker tags integration
 
After viewing this video I tried enabling Fedora (Gnome) to have these semantic desktop features.
 
yum install nautilus-python tracker-search-tool tracker
 
After restarting nautilus I enabled nautilus sidebar but didn’t see this feature there. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?
 
You can read about this feature more in this article: A Metadata Enabled GNOME
 
I also posted a bugzilla bug report regarding this issue and there is also a Fedora forum post also (not posted by me).
 
UPDATE:
After reading blog post from Debarshi some things got much more clear, so what we need is newer version of tracker in Fedora, this could be a cool new feature. Fedora 13 should have semanatic desktop features if it is possible, all Fedora users would surely appreciate that.

 
There are some really cool gps applications and tools in Fedora repositories, but where are they located in Gnome menu once you install them?
 
I found some in Education (Viking), in Graphics (xgpx, xgps speed) and in Internet menu (Gpsdrive, gpsman, TangoGPS, VIking).
 
Surely GPS apps could be better grouped? Maybe they should even have their own menu? What are your thoughts on this?
 

 
Some time while jailbreaking and unlocking process iPhone refuses to boot in normal mode and every time you restart your iPhone it enters in Recovery mode. This situation is named as recovery mode loop. If you are in a recovery mode loop (i.e. your phone enters recovery mode on every reboot).
 
To get the rid of recovery mode loop we use iRecovery, iRecovery is a libusb-based command line utility for Mac OS X and Linux (perhaps Windows too). It is able to talk to the iBoot/iBSS in Apple’s iPhone/iPod touch via USB. If you are on Windows then you need to install LibUsb-Win32 in order to run iRecovery.LibUsb-Win32 is a port of the USB library libusb the Windows operating system. The library allows user space applications to access any USB device on Windows.
 
There are a few gotchas on Fedora so here are step by step instrucions.
 

 
There is a bug in irecovery.c code so in order to make it compile I needed to delete line 323 containing this code:
signal(SIGINT, irecv_quit); // Close USB on ^C
 
Use vim, gedit or any other text editor or your choice and delete this line, because it won’t compile if you don’t remove it, and you will get this error:
irecovery.c:323: error: ‘SIGINT’ undeclared (first use in this function)
 
Now we can continue the compilation process:
 

 
Now you have iRecovery installed and can use the instructions on how to use it to Get Rid of iPhone from Recovery Mode Loop on Restart.
 

 
i-gotU GT200 GPS is the greatest pocket GPS gadget you can find, if you are a geek then this is one gadget you have to get.
 
Why is it so great? It is a really cheap GPS device (around 55$ or 45€), it has a great SiRF III chipset and it works as a standalone GPS logging device because it has on-board memory! Did I mention it is really cheap? ;)
 
i-gotU GT200 software that comes with it support only Windows XP, there is no support for Linux, OSX or Windows 7.
 
The good news is that there is a project called igotu2gpx that adds Linux and OSX support for this great device!
 
To get this utility running on Fedora here are step by step instructions on how to do it:

You can use GUI tool by running igotugui command or cli version by using igotu2gpx command.
 
To download gps tracks from your i-gotU GT200 GPS use this command:
igotu2gpx dump --gpx > track.gpx
And to clear GPS memory just use this command:
igotu2gpx --action clear
 
You can use igotU GT200 via USB cable but first you need to initialize it:
su -
modprobe navman
echo -n "0x0df7 0x0900" > /sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/navman/new_id

 
Now you can start gpsd and all aplications should see GPS dongle:
gpsd -b -N -D2 /dev/ttyUSB0
 
If you want to use igotU GT200 via bluetooth you can use this Bluetooth GPS Fedora howto guide to set it up.