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.
 
tag, tagging, tags

 
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 have seen question of how to make VIA VT6421 PCI SATA card work under Ubuntu on number of forum posts and only solutions I have seen on Ubuntu forum was: “Solved:: Installed Windows. Got data no problems.” :(
 
This obviously is not the solution. I found a solution that works on Ubuntu 8.10 but probably will work on any other Ubuntu version.
 
So in order to make this device work you need to see what module it uses:
 
lspci -k|grep -i VT6421 -A 2
 
01:07.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6421 IDE RAID Controller (rev 50)
Kernel driver in use: sata_via
Kernel modules: sata_via
 
So we can see that the module this card uses is called “sata_via”, now just load the module for this VIA card and of you go:
 
sudo modprobe sata_via
 

 
I really like Open Source software and would like have completely Open Source desktop at work, as I have at home. Our company uses Exchange mail server and since our admins switched to newer Exchange mail server 2007 there wasn’t an option to use anything but Microsoft Outlook for reading email on Linux desktop:(
 
Since evolution-mapi project got started I got really happy because it promised full Exchange 2007 compatibility, so that I could again use 100% Open Source desktop.
 
I tried it causally when Fedora 10 and 11 launched but knowing that the project was still fresh I didn’t expect much. Now that Fedora 12 with Gnome 2.28 launched I really hoped that evolution-mapi got stable enough for real use. Unfortunately there are some bugs that prevent international users from using Evolution. It is so close to being a perfect solution for lots of us who have to use Exchange, and that “almost there” feeling makes it even more frustrating :)
 
I know that lots of great hackers are working on fixing this solution, and we all are thankful for their contribution. I’m asking myself can we, regular users, donate and make some online actions so that we also get companies donate? Hopefully that would help the project in getting these issues fixed faster.
 
Do you have other/better suggestion how to help developers?
 
These are the mentioned bugs :
Mail is in the wrong encoding
unable to send mails containing UTF8 strings

 
Please check out this great blog post from Romanian mappers.
 
Ever since I saw great ItoWorld animation Year of Edits I wanted to make my own version. This look like it is possible, as mapguy has clearly demonstrated.
UPDATE: Ciprian aka Mapguy has made tutorial explaining how to make OSM progress animation.
 
So in order to make this work they made git repository for planet file and that is how it is possible to get a history for some town or place, because git repository keeps all changes ever made.
 
So in order to make your own animations you need to have your own planet.osm git repository. That is the first big hurdle :(
 
I hope that OpenStreetMap project creates an official public git repository so that anybody can get “history” for his town/place.
 
Read rest of story…

 
“Con Kolivas has done what he swore never to do: returned to the Linux kernel and written a new — and, according to him — waaay better scheduler for the desktop environment.” You can read here the full story.
 
Has anybody tested this new scheduler? Are there some guides on how to patch linux kernel, compile it and do come comparison tests to stock Fedora and Ubuntu kernels?
 
I’m willing to take my laptop on a spin with new scheduler, just tell me how ;)
 

GPX Viewer is a simple tool but essential if you are OpenStreetMap contributer or if you use gps logs in gpx format, also this tool would be a great fit for Fedora Geo Spin.
 
You can find this tool on it’s Freshmeat homepage.
 
In Fedora this tool is not currently packaged so you need to compile it, which is pretty simple.
 
UPDATE:
Gpx-viewer is currently packaged for Fedora and ready for testing from fedora-testing repository:
yum install gpx-viewer --enablerepo=updates-testing
 
First download and install dependencies for compiling GPX Viewer:

 
Now download, extract, configure and compile it.

 
Now that it is compiled you only need to become root and install it:

 
Homepage of GPX Viewer: http://blog.sarine.nl/gpx-viewer/