Planet Open Fonts

Máirín Duffy: Some www.fpo header mockups

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:27:07 +0000

I worked through these fedoraproject.org redesign header mockups today with Sijis’ feedback. I’m really liking the last one, #7. Sometimes you just have to keep trying, keep experimenting, until you discover something that works.

The problem we were trying to solve here was having two competing navigation bars, and placing the navbar in such a manner that I felt it wouldn’t necessitate an awkward non-front page layout. In #6 and #7 you can see the two navbars have been collapsed into one, and it’s above the main banner / slideshow area. Sijis suggested moving it above the banner and I think it works really well. The problem with it on the bottom is that if you have a subpage that doesn’t have a banner, it makes the nav bar move up and down the page making it much more complicated to move between pages via that navbar (when the navbar itself jumps around the page you have to refind your place on the page to click on a nav item.)

Anyway, I hope these are at least nice eye candy, if not a more interesting study of how to solve a design problem through iteration.

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Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Team, Uncategorized, Websites

Máirín Duffy: fedoraproject.org front page redesign mockup #1

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:53:13 +0000

So as part of the ongoing www.fedoraproject.org website redesign project, I’ve been working on mockups for a new www.fedoraproject.org front page. Here’s the rough sitemap I’ve drawn up for the work:

As you can see, a lot of thought has been put into the home page and articles features on it (sections 1-5). I haven’t had much opportunity to flesh out the Get Help and Join Fedora sections yet, although I know Diana Harrelson’s anthropological study of the Fedora community is chock-full of useful data and recommendations, especially for the Join Fedora section. If you have any ideas or suggestions for either Join Fedora or Get Help please let me know, since we’re still in the process of fleshing out those sections.

Now, before I type out those img tags for the mockups themselves, a few caveats:

These are very rough mockups. I’ve been working out the navigation scheme with Sijis – I’m not happy with it right now so he’s been helping me figure out a better way – so it will probably change. So yeah, we know it kind of sucks, we’re working on it.
The position of individual elements on the screens will probably change. The one item I do not want to move is the download button in the right sidebar, though. I want it to be approximately in that area, although it may move up to be inside of the banner. This is because especially around a release, many users visit the website in order to download Fedora so the download button needs to be prominent.
The main banner is meant to be a slideshow. I’ll show some examples of alternative slides for it below. The idea was that the first slide would introduce users to Fedora, and subsequent slides will show you particular new features or highlights of the latest Fedora release. We’ll also have a slide in there to promote our community.

Mockups

(You can click on any of the mockups for a larger version)

Front Page

Alternate slideshow banners

Features

This page is so very rough – and these features are by no means exhaustive or even the right ones, just filler for now.

The Content

Jef van Schendel put together a content review of the current fedoraproject.org website and identified areas for improvement and called out essential elements we need to keep in place on the site. It’s a great read. Let’s dive a bit into the articles mentioned in his review and in the mockups above:

Tutorials

Ian MacGregor put together an initial list of tutorials for the tutorial section of the website. What do you think of them? Would you change any of them, or add additional ones? Do you know of any tutorials that already exist for Fedora that would be useful that could be formatted for the site?

Here’s Ian’s list:

Build beautiful color palettes for your home and wardrobe (Agave)
Automatically upload your files to a backup drive every week (crontab)
Access your favorite apps with one click (custom desktop launchers)
Decorate your desktop with family photos (Gimp tutorial)
Get organized and build a personal database (Gnote)
Turn your friends into the Hulk! (Cheese)

Your Life on Fedora

This article category still needs fleshing out. I’d like to see 5 article topics for it. ‘Your Life on Fedora’ is meant to show real-life use cases of Fedora users in a variety of situations – maybe an interview of a student with a sidebar highlighting her favorite apps, for example. My hope is that someone new to Fedora would come away from this set of articles with a better understanding of how Fedora might fit into their life.

What Makes Fedora Different?

What makes Fedora different is another article cateogory that needs more fleshing out. It is targeted at both users of other distros and other operating systems to point out what makes Fedora different from what they use now and to set their expectations. Why would you pick Fedora over another Linux distro, for example? Folks should have an answer to that question after reading this section.

The Project

So all of the work for this project is being organized on the Website redesign wiki page on the Fedora wiki. The www.fpo mockups are on the following page:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Website_redesign/Mockups/Www.fpo

There’s a lot of ways you can help, so let me run through them in case you are interested :

Writing Articles – Do any of the tutorial ideas above appeal to you? Do you have even better tutorial ideas? Want to write a tutorial that will appear on fedoraproject.org?
Brainstorming Article Ideas – Do you have ideas for articles in the ‘Your Life on Fedora’ or ‘What Makes Fedora Different?’ categories? Do you have a story about Fedora you’d like to share? Would you be willing to interview a friend or family member who uses Fedora?
Mockup feedback – Do you see any crackrock in the mockups I’ve posted here? (Of course you do!) Call it out! Let me know where we’ve goofed in the mockups, and your suggestions will be warmly welcomed!
Ideas for Join Fedora and Get Help – Do you help field questions on Fedora on the users list, forum, or IRC help channel? Have some great ideas for how the ‘Get Help’ pages on fedoraproject.org could be organized? Have you helped on-board various new Fedora contributors and have some experience you’d like to share for the Join Fedora section?
Content for the Features Page – Does the crappiness of the filler content in the Features mockup above give you severe indigestion? Do you have a clear idea of how we should be broadcasting Fedora’s features and have the time and will to write it up?

Anyhow, our work on the website in preparation for Fedora 14 continues; I just wanted to check in with you all and show you the latest. Please feel free to continue the conversation in the comments area on this blog post, or on the websites list, or in the websites channel at #fedora-websites on irc.freenode.net. We need your help to make Fedora’s website great; thanks for all of the feedback and suggestions you’ve given so far – it’s what’s gotten us here!

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Team, Websites

Máirín Duffy: Unpackaged Open Font: Comfortaa

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:06:14 +0000

Comfortaa is a sans-serif typeface created by Johan Aakerlund, a young and very talented, self-taught font designer from Denmark who has been creating fonts for around 2 years now. I asked Johan what inspired him to create Comfortaa, and he responded, “What really got me interested in fonts in the first place was actually a documentary on Helvetica that i watched. At that time my favorite font was Century Gothic, but I wanted a softer (and plainly different) alternative, but with some of the same qualities as Century Gothic. So after searching a while without finding one I decided to try and design it myself.” He has named it Comfortaa because of his goal of making it ‘comfortable.’

Johan recently changed Comfortaa’s license such that it is now licensed under the Open Font License. Comfortaa is a great font feature-wise, because it features three weights:

Comfortaa’s coverage is also great. Fedora’s design team has been running a trial of Comfortaa to see if it’d be a suitable headline font for Fedora, and we’ve found it has much better glyph coverage in our languages than our current headline font, MgOpen Modata. One big win, for example, is Comfortaa’s Cyrillic support (it looks like only ‘Ҙ’ ‘Ҫ’ ‘Ҡ’ and ‘Ӏ’ are missing below):

Comfortaa is a clean & contemporary font that will serve you well as a heading font and in logo treatments. For example,
Luya Tshimbalanga (who first introduced the Fedora Design team to Comfortaa) used this font in the headlines for Muffin, the French Fedora user magazine (MgOpen Modata didn’t have sufficient glyphs for French!) Emily Dirsh, our recent design bountry winner also used it as a headline font in the Fedora slide presentation template. Typographically-speaking, Comfortaa can be considered a geometric sans serif font; geometric because some of the letterforms are based around geometric forms, such as the lowercase ‘a’ and ‘o’ being so close to perfect circles. The width of the letterforms is also quite uniform (meaning it’s not a humanist font.)

Comfortaa is licensed under the Open Font License.

Fedora Font Wishlist Entry:https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Comfortaa
Upstream Homepage: http://aajohan.deviantart.com/art/Comfortaa-font-105395949

So, you want to package Comfortaa?

The Fedora design team is planning to replace MgOpen Modata with Comfortaa in our brand guidelines. Getting Comfortaa packaged into Fedora is then a very important step. So if you would be willing to help us out, it would be very much appreciated, not just to expand the range of fonts available in Fedora but also to help improve Fedora’s branding!

You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fonts_SIG

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_packaging

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts.

Last Font

The last font this blog series covered was Gillus ADF. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

Yes, font blog posts are back! Probably not weekly though. I’ll give monthly a shot! .

Filed under: Uncategorized, Unpackaged Font of the Week

Máirín Duffy: Second Fedora Design Bounty Ninja identified!

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:55:59 +0000

I am quite happy to report that we have identified our second Fedora Design Bounty Ninja: Emily Dirsh!! Emily responded to our second Fedora Design Bi-Weekly Bounty – a slide template project – shortly after introducing herself on the Design Team’s mailing list. Emily put together a new default slide template for Fedora presentations, using Inkscape to create her mockups, and building the final template for OpenOffice.org Impress. She came up with a very nice texture for the background based on Fedora logo elements, and carefully adhered to all of the Fedora branding guidelines. She also provided all of her source work!

Congratulations, Emily, on a job well-done! Emily has already started regularly attending the Fedora Design Team meetings and has provided very useful suggestions during these meetings, including some great feedback on Fedora websites redesign project, so we’re definitely looking forward to work with her more!

Ninja Supply Kit

Both Emily and Jef have ninja supply kits on the way to help thank them for their Fedora Design Bounty work. Are you ready for your chance to become an open source design ninja too? Keep an eye out for the next Fedora Design Bounty!

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Bounty

OSP (Open Source Publishing): Interleaved formats

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:21:14 +0000

This interview may be a good read. It deals with some aspects of the “current state” (June 2010) of SVG implementations. It’s got a really sweet format. It’s a two-sided interview, meaning that Doug Scheppers and Patrick Dengler interview each other. It’s not often that I come across interviews that are interleaved: I asked Patrick [...]

OSP (Open Source Publishing): GML

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:13:33 +0000

Yesterday Constant met with Evan Roth to discuss gestures and standards, confessions and F/LOSS, archiving and collaboration. More soon.

Máirín Duffy: get.fedoraproject.org redesign post-mortem

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:28:00 +0000

On Post-Mortems

“Post-mortem!” you exclaim, “how ghoulish!” Well, yeah. The term is usually used for meetings and discussions about how well a software release went after it’s out the door, at least on som of the teams I’ve worked on (greets to my tacos!) So, anyway, here is a post-mortem examination of the new http://get.fedoraproject.org design.

A little background on the Fedora website design

So I’ve already given you the story behind why we decided to re-do the get.fedoraproject.org pages on fedoraproject.org. The get.fedoraproject.org redesign work was completed as part of Phase 2 and was released with Fedora 13 this past May. If you’re curious as to the why and how we got here, you can read up on it on another blog post.

Run-down of the redesign

The design is documented on the get.fpo design wiki page and was also shared several months before release on this blog.

As mentioned in the history of this project, we decided to split get.fedoraproject.org out into two main sections:

The first section, presented by default, would be aimed at fulfilling the Board’s requirements – a single simple download button prominently placed, a promo for spins.fedoraproject.org, and clear links to support & help.
The second section would be accessible by links on the default page, and would provide an ala carte experience for more particular Fedora downloaders.

First Section

The first section consisted of two pages, the main default download page and an exit splash page.

Main Default Download Page

This is simply the default download page. It has a single prominent download button, listing basic requirements and instructions as to what to do with the download and links to many resources on getting help in the right-hand column. It’s meant to be simple and straight-to-the-point.

Exit Splash page

This was intended to be an exit-splash page that appeared after you clicked on the download link, but due to various technical and time constraints, this part of the design has not yet been implemented. Note it also includes pandas – very important to a good design. The bottom is meant to be a space where a rotating set of tutorials would appear – e.g., “now that you’ve found Fedora, what are you gonna do…. with iiiiittt?” (shouts to HeavyD and the Boyz!)

Second Section

The second section consisted of a page with four tabs, one each for desktop options, architecture options, media format, and activities (which basically is a full-page promo for spins.fpo.)

Desktop Tab

This tab lets you select from different desktop options.

Architectures Tab

This tab lets you select from different architecture options and provides a promo area for the secondary arches.

Formats Tab

This tab lets you select which formats you’d like to download (DVD vs. LiveMedia).

Activities Tab

This tab is basically a promo for spins.fpo.

Where the drama comes in

So I alluded to some torrential controversy in the last websites blog post. The day we released Fedora 13 and consequently the new get.fedoraproject.org, on IRC, identi.ca, and the mailing list there was a flooding of comments about how users could not find the bittorrent links. Some other complaints included not being able to find the download verification and less prominent LiveUSB instructions.

Identi.ca and IRC feedback

Here’s some of the identi.ca and IRC feedback we got so you can get an idea of the kinds of reactions we were getting:

“@mairin nice work, thank you! BTW, will the LiveUSB tool and guide (wiki page) have a place on the right sidebar? it should be helpful. “
“@mairin: Hard to find the ‘normal’ dvd download? Too many options?”
“The !Fedora download page gets more confusing with each release. Is there any way to install Fedora with no optical disk drive? Maybe a floppy? I don’t want to switch hardware around just to upgrade!”
“@mairin It says I need a CD or DVD… are there no LiveUSB instructions on the new download page?”
“@mairin There seems to be no mention torrents anywhere on that page?”
“stickster: I don’t know how designed the “get-fedora” pages, but kudos to them. It’s a GREAT new design and organization.”
“Hey, so we’ve been getting some comments that people can’t find torrents on fp.o”
“@mairin The more I look at it the less it confuses me. But I wish there was an obvious way to look through directories on download mirrors.”
“is it intendet that there are no torrent links on the new download pages?”
“@mairin I wasn’t really looking for them, but I noticed the 6 CDs and netinst didn’t seem to be mentioned in the download page.”
“Its understandable since “gnome” is default but I was a little confused which version was which and kept looking for ‘gnome-live’”
“I hunted for fully 4 mins before I found either 64 or 32 bits. I’m not used to having 43 different options (most of which meant nothing to me btw, from the names)”
“Re the < 1 CD version….. isn't that just a pain updating to all the crap that we load on our machines?"
“I need the checksum to verify it. the gpg stuff I can do without, but a nice easy checksum would help.”
“Is it just me or does the new website make it extremely difficult to find F13 torrents? I don’t have a problem downloading directly from a server, but I figure we should probably make the links more prominent to reduce server+mirror load”
“I don’t think we can avoid the fact that people not in the target audience are going to sent to get-fedora. Giving them an exit is one link. one link that could be worded so a beginner would never click it.”
“”Installation Quick Start Guide” is only for live media, so maybe we should make it clearer – Since it’s linked from a page with DVDs too”
“Do we really need an architecture tab? We already link to both 32 and 64 bit on every page other than get-fedora”

Mailing list feedback

Image credit: Scared Man by laobc on Open Clip Art.

The thread subject line – Regarding Get Fedora page” from the Fedora users mailing list – still makes my stomach drop and my soul feel a little meaty in a kind of traumatic post-harangue hangover: It’s not a pretty thread. It ran from May through June. Now that the dust has settled though, there are some nuggets of valuable feedback that can be extracted from the stink cloud of misery:

“I can’t find a mention of torrents anywhere. What happened to the big master list of all image download links?”
“I could not figure out where to grab the torrents from, or how to download the checksum files, or how to grab individual CD ISOs, or….I was lost for 5 minutes before I even figured out how to download the x86_64 DVD image!”
“The main things, Download and more info, were there.”
“I wouldn’t have imagined that anyone would remove all the information about torrents, jigdo, mirror lists, etc. from the “here’s all the ways to get fedora” page.”
“I followed the work for most of the many months and I think that the pages are clear, well laid out, and easy to follow. I have spent more time reading this thread than it took me to hunt for and find the information that you are being accused of hiding. “
“When you read ‘download options’, you think, ‘methods of downloading.’ The way ‘download options’ was originally intended, however, was to
mean, ‘different variations of Fedora’ – options like Desktop, Architecture, etc. Options for FEDORA, not how you were DOWNLOADING it.”
“I’m unlikely to be following many developer-oriented lists, in any case. Like I said, I’m just a user.”
“I also spent a couple of minutes going back and forth trying to find a link to the torrents (… sure, I could have Googled right away — which I ended up doing after visiting the “Formats” page for the 3rd time )”
“when I didn’t find the link to the torrents right away, my first reaction was to CTRL+F for “torrent”.”
“I found the emphasis on all the different “spins”, frankly, confusing. There are two different alternative desktops (neither of which I am familiar with) whose descriptions are nearly indistinguishable. Which trim efficient resource-sparing one do I want to try first? Impossible to tell. If you
drill for more information there’s nothing there, and you end up back where you started. I did try one desktop and was unimpressed (but, then, it’s running from a CD!)”
“In the past, Red Hat/Fedora offered Gnome up front and left it to more experienced users to discover KDE, etc. (and made them easy to install, if desired, and even switch among them). They supplied main download sites, mirrors and, eventually torrent files and tried to encourage
people to use the latter, with the second preference being a nearby mirror. I think these were wise policies that should be continued.”
“Another “curious” thing I find about the Get Fedora page is the existence of the “Activities” tab. That tab is the only place where I could find the word “activities” or “activity”. Everything under that area uses the terminology “Spin”. Is there a difference between an “Activity” and a “Spin”? If so, what is the difference? If not, why not just have a “Spin” tab? Seems to me it would be more consistent.”

Making sense of the feedback

So during the deluge of feedback we received, Ricky Zhou and I had a conversation in #fedora-websites to try to figure out what we should do. We reviewed the feedback, clustering it into a few concerns:

Where are torrents?
Where are the mirrors?
Where is the checksum?
Where are: 6 CD format, netinstall, jigdo?

We took some immediate action in response to the most dire complaints we received. First was the lack of live USB instructions, which we added to the ‘What Do I Do?’ step-by-step instructions in the right-most column. Second was the lack of a link to the torrents. To address that, we did a link switcheroo to add torrents without making the page more crowded – we had a link that linked to archive.fedoraproject.org in the lower right corner of the screen, so we swapped that link for the torrents & other download methods links.

Then we came up with a plan for further longer-term improvements. These haven’t been made yet:

The new advanced users link in the lower right should lead to an updated/cleaned-up version of http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all.
The architecture tab of the alacarte get.fpo pages should be removed since downloads by arch are mentioned on every other tab. Instead, secondary arches could be advertised on the updated http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all.

Applying the feedback received to future design work generally

As was pointed out in the Fedora users list thread o’ doom, many Fedora users are not developers and do not follow what they consider ‘development’ lists, including the logistics, websites, and design team mailing lists. Furthermore, many insisted that they do not read Fedora Weekly News or Planet Fedora. So there is a population of users from whom we are not getting feedback from because we’re not posting our mockups and plans as widely as we should.

Well, the concern has been heard loud and clear. First off, you may have noticed the Fedora Design team for F14 is pushing out our calls for feedback wider than ever before – we have a feedback-gathering plan that includes identi.ca, twitter, facebook, fedoraforum.org, and the Fedora users list, as well as the comments pages on any external news sites that have written about our artwork so far.

Secondly, you’ll notice we’ve built community feedback periods into the F14 web schedule, and these blog posts are part of that. We are a little bit behind schedule right now but I’m hoping we’ll catch up. This blog post will be shared with the Fedora users list and other non-contributor-centric Fedora areas.

Summary, and on avoiding missing the point

The main point of this work was to make the download experience for new Fedora users simple and streamlined, so the main tension here is doing so, without destroying the experience for existing users who have much more demanding needs. I felt throughout the project we had a spectrum from “simple page” to “matrix of links” and I felt a lot of times we were being forcefully pulled towards the “matrix of links” end of the spectrum. Every single link on its own seems so innocent, “just one more link!” but the problem is, many people had their own pet “just one more link!” requests, and if we fulfilled them all on the default page, we’d have the very swamp-o’-links state we were consciously trying to avoid. While the struggle is very real, I don’t think it is very obvious to casual observers which I think is why some of the feedback got so heated.

I hope this background and play-by-play of the get.fedoraproject.org redesign project, with details on the how it was received and updated, has been a interesting read for you. We’d love to hear your feedback on how you felt this all went, and your suggestions for further improvement of get.fedoraproject.org.

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Team, Websites

Simos Xenitellis: Ubuntu Font Beta and Greek

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:07:48 +0000

Update: All open bugs for this font at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntufontbetatesting/+bugs File your bug. Currently there bugs relating to Greek, 1. Letter γ ((U03B3) has an untypical style 2. In letters with YPOGEGRAMMENI, YPOGEGRAMMENI is expected to be under not on the right and 3. Many Greek small letters have untypical style

Here we see some samples of Greek with Ubuntu Font Beta.

Ubuntu Font supports both Greek and Greek Polytonic.

In the following we compare between DejaVu Sans (currently the default font in Ubuntu) and the proposed Ubuntu Font Beta.

This is DejaVu Sans, showing the Greek Unicode Block. This means, modern Greek and Coptic.

This is Ubuntu Font Beta, showing the Greek Unicode Block. Coptic is not covered as it was not part of the requirements for this version of the font (actually Coptic currently uses a separate new Unicode Block so the Coptic here are too low of a priority).

This is DejaVu Sans showing the Greek Polytonic Unicode Block coverage. We show the second part of the Unicode Block which has the most exotic characters with up to three accents.

Same thing with Ubuntu Font Beta.

Note that those characters that appear as empty boxes are characters that either were not designed by the font designers, or are reserved characters that have not been defined yet.

Antigoni text in DejaVu Sans and Ubuntu Font Beta (PDF, 12pt)

Antigoni text in DejaVu Sans and Ubuntu Font Beta (PDF, 10pt)

If there are things to be fixed, this is the time to do them. Post a comment and we can take if further.

Traditionally, the letters γ and ν tend to have a unique form. In this case, in Ubuntu Font Beta, γ looks different to what a Greek user is accustomed to. I attach an SVG file of γ; if you have suggestions for enhancement, please use Inkscape, this gamma_UbuntuBeta-Regular file and make your suggestion!

(see top of post for link to bug reports)

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Máirín Duffy: Fedora websites design status

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:48:05 +0000

While the Fedora Design team and Fedora Websites team along with the Fedora Board have been working towards a completely updated web presence for Fedora over the past couple of releases, I wanted to give a bit of a summary of what’s happened so far, provide you a bit of an update on our current status, and give you another avenue for providing feedback as well as solicit yet more feedback from you.

A little background on Fedora website design

A long time ago, but not so long ago, http://fedoraproject.org was a simple splash page with just a bunch of links. Later on, it redirected straight to the wiki. After a release or two bringing the entire wiki down (and halting contributors from getting work done!) because of high-demand on the website for downloading releases, a very simple, lightweight set of static pages was put together to help alleviate the problem. It is the base of that lightweight static page set that we have been using for quite some time these days.

After the initial launch of Fedora Community and its freshened-up template with the release of Fedora 11, the Fedora Project homepage appeared in severe need of some lovin’, and the Fedora Project Board at the time decided to approach me as a representative of the Fedora Design Team and Ricky Zhou as a representative of the Websites Team in order to request a new design. We met with the Board at their 30 July 2009 meeting, after which the Board followed up with formal requirements for both get.fedoraproject.org and a newspins.fedoraproject.org site. Paul Frields and I ended up having a brief brainstorming session on how to make the overall Fedora Project web presence a bit more contemporary and nice-looking that August, and I floated the idea by you all here on this blog:

A phased approach

Out of all the brainstorms and discussions that happened around this time period, we came up with a phased approach we are still roughly following today (with some expansion):

Allow me to give you a phase-by-phase summary of how it’s gone so far.

Phase I: spins.fedoraproject.org

Since the Board’s requirements necessitated a single download link, it was made a requirement that http://spins.fedoraproject.org was designed, created, and complete before http://get.fedoraproject.org was changed, to address concerns posed by Fedora spins owners. The site was meant to alleviate the effects on spins’ download numbers, and also to maintain and even improve the ease with which spins’ users could find information and downloads for the spins. The new Fedora spins portal was completed in November 2009 and launched with the release of Fedora 12

The mockups, graphic sources, and other planning documents for the spins.fedoraproject.org / phase 1 of the website redesign project are available on the Fedora Project wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Website_redesign_2009/Mockups/Spins.fpo. We worked very carefully with the spins owners at the time to develop graphics and content for the spins, and even coordinated an awesome effort from the Fedora Design team in producing over 100 graphics for many of the games in our Games spin.

How well did this design work? So far, we’ve updated it once to account for the new crop of spins released with Fedora 13 (including the new Design Suite, wee!!), and I really haven’t heard any negative feedback about it besides folks simply not knowing about it. So we probably need to continue advertising it and socializing it, maybe even ramping those efforts up a bit more.

Phase II: get.fedoraproject.org

After the release of Fedora 12, we got to work on planning a revamp of the oft-complained-about http://get.fedoraproject.org page, the main page used in order to download Fedora every release. The main goal of the redesign according to the Board was, “To more effectively promote a single instance of Fedora that satisfies the computing needs of the average person.” It also needed to “Provide a clear route to the new Spins hub” and “Provide clearer instructions and links to support options.” The page should be designed for:

Primary Users

People who are somewhat computer savvy, but may be new to Fedora and/or Linux and FOSS in general
People who are not sure what they need to do in order to try Fedora
People who may not understand how to create and use Live media

Secondary Users

People who don’t know where to find anything other than the default offering (i.e., is there something else available?)

Page is not designed for

People who are currently and comfortably using Fedora
People who have pre-specified needs for the Fedora they download
People who know where to find non-default offerings, and want to pick from an a la carte-style or other expanded sort of list

Now, if you know the Fedora users I do, the main tension here should have jumped off your screen and nipped you in the nose by now – we have folks who are particular about the desktop they run, the arches they need to run it on, the format in which they’d like it (live media vs. DVD vs. initrd vs. net boot vs. preupgrade vs. pxe vs. ad nauseum ), and the download method (http, ftp, bittorrent, postal mail paid, postal mail free media, etc. etc.). This is a very complex matrix, and directly conflicts with having a simple one-click download.

In order to figure out how to make this all happen and succeed, we had our work ahead of us. First, I did a little bit of research on how folks currently in the community download Fedora, running a survey on our planet. Note the survey doesn’t include any new users.

We learned three very important things via the survey:

Amongst readers of this blog, the vast majority of users download Fedora when a new release comes out. The time between releases can be considered a much lower-traffic time period for downloads.
By far, the most popular method of obtaining Fedora amongst blog readers is via the website, 46+15= 61% of users downloading directly from the website. The second and third most popular methods are bit torrent and pre upgrade, 19% and 18% respectively.
The DVD and Live Media are by far the most popular formats to download Fedora in amongst readers of this blog.

Based on these results, it seemed to be that the Fedora website is the primary place folks seek to download Fedora, and the more familar/technical users do have a wide range of requirements as to which Fedora they’d like to download and how they’d like to download it. Their needs won’t be met by a single download button. So we decided to split get.fedoraproject.org out into two main sections:

The first section would be presented by default, and would be aimed at fulfilling the Board’s requirements.
The second section would be accessible by links on the default page, and would provide an ala carte experience for more particular Fedora downloaders.

Site maps, mockups, graphics, sources, and discussion can all be found at the wiki project page for the http://get.fedoraproject.org redesign project.

This redesign launched with Fedora 13′s release this past May. How well did it work? Well. There were some (ahem) torrential discussions following its launch, which I’ll detail in a follow-up blog post I’ll call the get.fpo postmortem.

Phase III: www.fedoraproject.org and fedoracommunity.org

So for Fedora 14′s release we’ve gotten even more ambitious, and we’re planning a new http://www.fedoraproject.org design and a new site, http://fedoracommunity.org. Here on this blog I’ve already filled you in on the fedoracommunity.org site background and current design work(thank you for all the comments and feedback so far!) I’m still working on the www.fedoraproject.org design with Sijis Aviles and the Fedora Design team – we had a big discussion on it at this week’s design team meeting. Pop into #fedora-websites or #fedora-design on freenode if you’d like to pitch in and get involved as we continue to work on it.

I’ll be doing a separate post on the new in-progress http://www.fedoraproject.org design very soon, so please look out for it! In the meantime, please feel welcome to read through the Fedora Design team discussion of the current mockups, browse through some of the raw mockups and their sources, review our list of prioritized user tasks for the site, and pop into #fedora-websites or #fedora-design to continue the discussion.

So there you have it

In summary, we’ve been following a 3-phase approach to the http://fedoraproject.org design process, and we’re currently working towards the third phase with our eye on F14′s release for the next launch.

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Team, Uncategorized, Websites

Máirín Duffy: fedoracommunity.org Website Design

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:59:18 +0000

The vision for fedoracommunity.org

Fedora has a lot of local community websites. A somewhat recent addition to the mix is Fedora’s local community domain program, whereby a local Fedora community can obtain a *.fedoracommunity.org domain to point to their self-hosted website.

In the midst of a thread on the advisory-board mailing list, it became clear that it would be a good thing to have a single place where folks seeking out their particular local Fedora community could go to find it, rather than searching in multiple places for their community. In the thread, a Fedora Infrastructure ticket to this end was also referenced.

The work so far

Matt Domsch created the barebones portal page for this directory that is up on fedoracommunity.org now, asking for assistance in making it a nicer-looking site. I posted an initial mockup for feedback in reply, and since then have iterated a few times based on the feedback I’ve gotten. I’ve been working with Sijis Aviles, who very quickly took my early mockups and produced a first cut at an HTML/CSS version of them.

A few design decisions have been made throughout this process that you might want to be aware of:

Both national flags and national borders can, in a few cases, be quite controversial and stir up hard feelings so we did our best to avoid them in the design.
The countries have been split up by continent because there are quite a lot to list on one page, and the continent to which a country belongs nor the shape of the continents of the world are not so controversial.
We’re considering using screenshots of each local site to help users distinguish between different communities that share the same country. Having the screenshots displayed on the screen all at once makes it a little cluttered, so Sijis and I have discussed using something like on-hover popup snapshots instead.
This design uses the new Comfortaa font that the Fedora Design team is trialing usage of for a new Fedora titling font.

How you can help

Are you a member of a local Fedora community? Can you take a look at this mockup and let us know if we missed your community site?
Are you a designer? Got any great ideas for the style and design of this site? Crack open the latest SVG source, which uses the fonts Comfortaa and Droid Sans, and try out your ideas!
How well do you think Comfortaa works in this design?
Got any feedback on the site concept and design? Let us know. You can provide feedback through the blog comment system here, but even better, let us know on the Fedora website team list. I’m especially interested to hear feedback from Fedora Ambassadors.

Filed under: Fedora, Websites

Rogério Brito: I am going to DebConf 10

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 03:34:40 +0000

I just bought my tickets today to NYC and I am glady to say that I am going to Debconf 10.

I am going to DebConf10

The tickets have this information:

GRU->JFK: Departure: 2010-07-30, 21:25; Arrival: 2010-07-31, 6:10, Flight AA950
JFK->GRU: Departure: 2010-08-09, 21:40; Arrival: 2010-08-10, 8:35, Flight AA951

This represents a personal milestone for me, as I have many plans for the conference. In fact, this will be a trip of many “firsts” for me:

this will be my first international trip by airplaine.
this will be my first DebConf ever (despite the fact that I could not apply for the DebConf Newbies initiative, due to my visa interview being delayed until the 7th of this month).
this will be the first time to see many people with whom I work together for some years now, but have not yet had the opportunity to meet in person.
this will be a nice opportunity to work hard on some issues that threaten the PowerPC port of Debian.
this will be a nice opportunity to do some QA work with some packages that I would like to have sponsored; also to upload some of the fonts that I already packaged (or intend to take care) and that will be maintained under the Debian Fonts Task Force umbrella.
this will be a very nice opportunity to get myself in a “big” strongly connected component of the Web-of-Trust with as many arcs as feasible, by means of the key signing party.
and many, many other things that I would like to do for the project.

I am thankful for the DebConf team sponsoring both accomodation and food. It is highly appreciated.

See you in NYC! Any hints that you may happen to have are warmly welcome.

Máirín Duffy: Fedora Board Meeting, 16 July 2010

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:15:03 +0000

Last Meeting

The Fedora Board did not meet last week – the meeting was cancelled due to the transition of leadership between Paul and Jared.

Let me give you a quick update on the action items from last meeting:

jds2001 to help skvidal with tech side of FAS account name displayed per planet user as needed. item complete
mizmo will bring up some alternatives and additional solutions for the fedoracommunity.org portal on the advisory-board list. That thread is here, and work is on-going to develop a nice portal for fedoracommunity.org. I’ll be blogging about it here very soon.
mizmo talk to seth re FAS ids on planet and file infraticket if needed. Ticket filed, complete. Now mizmo needs to update the planet template to use the new FAS attribute.

Log Links

A New Meeting Format

The board meeting today experimented with a different format than previous meetings. Rather than having a separate #fedora-board-questions channel, we allowed everyone voice in #fedora-board-meeting and had an open discussion. We started with Q&A upfront and then decided about halfway to make the entire meeting Q&A.

The new format wasn’t perfect (a lot of different topics were interleaved with each other at the same time, making the raw logs a little hard to follow!) but there’s definitely benefits to it. The format will be discussed at the next Board meeting and we’ll discuss where to go from here with the meeting format!

Mizmo’s Meeting Summary

Anthropology Report

The meeting started off with a question from brunowolff:

“Does the board have initial impressions of the anthropology report?”

Mizmo responded, “I think it points out that while we’re awesome at collaborating, we need to improve our on-boarding processes! ~80% of our contributors have been here 2 years or longer – we need new blood and we need that knowledge in oldtimer folks’ heads to be shared with new folks.” Jon added, “+1. I think that’s a problem in any organization though. There’s plenty of tribal knowledge, be that in Fedora or anywhere else.” To which Mizmo replied, “I think though, it’s hard to feel comfortable enough to ask until you get your feet wet, it’s that initial experience of getting your feet wet we need to make easier. once someone has accomplished their first project and have gotten positive feedback on it, i think they feel more comfortable getting involved in other projects – easier to dig the tribal knowledge out ”

Jared also chimed in: “I think it was worthwhile… I have a bit of a background in market research, and will be interested to dive into it deeper when I have a chance. But my initial impressions are that there’s a lot of data there we can use to improve the Fedora experience (both from the distro and community side).”

Paul answered, “In answer to your question, my impression was that it shows that people get involved in Fedora for many different reasons.”

Challenges for FPL

Dennis asked, “What do you see as the biggest challenge in your starting weeks/months?”

Jared replied, “We need to continue to push Fedora development, and to make the Fedora community more inclusive. I’m reminded this week at FUDCon at the barriers to entry that are there, not because we’re trying to be exclusive, but because of language and cultural differences for example… My biggest challenge in the beginning is to find ways to get buy-in from all the parties involved so that we can push with a concerted effort. I’d rather make it a collaborative effort.”

Legacy Support

Next a question about legacy support from Devilment followed:

“There was a discussion last weekend in #fedora-uk about why isn’t there a Fedora LTS. RHEL/CentOS was mentioned as filling this role and how there used to be Fedora Legacy, which ended up folding due to lack of volunteers, IIRC. There is nothing to prevent a third party from providing LTS to a Fedora release, but would we ever see anything official again?”

Smooge responded, “I can speak to some of that. It is quite open for other people to do long term support on things which is what we were looking for in Legacy. However many of the people looking to do it found that they didn’t have the resources to expend. Thus an LTS is something that would probably fall onto the sponsoring company (eg Red Hat) to put the resources into it.. to make it successful.”

Jared added, “I don’t have any immediate plans for a Fedora LTS… the rapid development cycle and community-driven nature of Fedora doesn’t really lend itself to long-term updates. If I had a full-time staff and ten times the infrastructure, I’d be happy to explore it from the community standpoint.”

“We have infrastructure challenges to face with that,” Jon pointed out. “lt is a noble goal, and seems to have a not-insignificant amount of popularity among users, but apparently not much support among anyone able/willing to do the work to make it happen (a *lot* of work),” Rex said.

Sijis asked Devilment, “What do you consider LTS? don’t we already go back 2 releases?” Devilment responded, “I’m happy with the status quo of ~13 months. I thought I’d raise the question so I can feed back to the person who was arguing for Fedora LTS.”

Mizmo also asked, “Do you think there’s more community interest in maintaining something like that now compared to the old long term support program we had that died due to lack of interest?” Paul replied, “There was a group of community members who voiced some interest again last year, but I haven’t seen the results of that process.”

MeGenius asked, “Are there any plans to change the cycle of fedora releasing??” to which Jared replied, “I don’t think we need any major changes to the develoment cycle. We may adjust from time to time to make it seven months (or possibly eight) should the need arise, but I don’t see us moving to a much slower release cycle. It’s very hard to continue to push innovation with a slower release cycle.”

Paul said, “The stress always gets more visible as a previous RHEL or CentOS release ages. I would imagine that when RHEL 6 is released, with many of the desktop features that people have seen mature in new Fedora releases, the pressure for LTS will drop precipitously.”

Meeting with SIG groups

Sijis then asked,

“A couple of months ago, there was an effort to meet with different SIG groups. honestly, i haven’t kept up with it has there been other ones besides web and design? if not, is this expected to continue going forward?”

Paul answered, “That’s a good question for jsmith — but just to give a bit of background, the Board has held numerous meetings with different SIGs over the past few months. It’s up to the current Board whether they want to continue that practice. I would encourage it, because it helps when the Board is aware of challenges of different Fedora teams, and participates directly in resolving them.”

Chris Aillon agreed, “I enjoyed them, fwiw. I’d be in favor of continuing to do so, actually.”

Jared followed up with, “I want to continue to work with the SIGs, but as a board we need to decide the best way to interact with them. My general rule of thumb is “give them the tools they need, give them some mentorship, and then get out of the way.”

Sijis concluded, “Sure. I thought it was beneficial to hear what other groups are doing and what challenges/assistance they may need.”

Rolling Releases

MeGenius asked a question about Fedora versioning and update policy:

“Have you even thought about canceling the version system, i mean, pushing updates directly?”

Jared answered, “It’s been discussed, but I’m personally not a fan of “rolling releases. There needs to be some point where we produce installable media.”

Rex pointed out, “That’s largely what rawhide *is*.”

“we can’t be *everything* for *everybody*, or what we end up with is just average (or worse the lowest common denominator). That being said, I think we can be *most* everything for *most* everybody. We *can* and *should* be a leading Linux distribution, which gives users and devs the tools they want and need (if not *the* distro, obviously.)” Jared added.

Paul concluded, “And I would go further to say, leading in that space means we have the opportunity to solve problems that are common to ‘most everybody.’”

ZFS Support

VisBits asked about ZFS filesystem support:

“Can we get native ZFS support in fedora ?”

Dennis replied, “When licensing is sorted, I’m sure it will come.” Jared added, “We work from upstream kernels… get it pushed upstream, and we’ll have it.”

“I wouldnt hold my breath with current events,” Jon warned. Chris provided a link with more information: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/

Spins SIG

Brunowolff pointed out:

“Note that the Spins SIG was (and to some extent still is) very close to totally failing. We need to get spin owners more involved. How to do that is an open question.”

Jared pointed out that “The board is happy to accept suggestions on concrete ways the board can help improve that.”

BH-Alex pointed out: ” What about spins? I’ve tried to use revisor to make my own, but it’s been broken since Fedora 10, despite submitting bug reports. What does the Spins SIG need, I might have some time.”

Brunowolff brought up his Spin owner documentation plans: ” I have a plan to better document roles to set expectations for spin owners and to hopefully make it easier to volunteer for the special roles of lead and wrangler.” Jared thought this was a good plan.

Paul recommended the Board examine this issue in more depth. “the Board should devote some time to thinking about the health and well-being of the Spins SIG. When I hear brunowolff say he wants spin owners to be “more involved” it gives me some concern.”

BH-Alex asked, “What is wrong with the Spins SIG currently?” somewhat confused as to the backstory of the discussion. EvilBob pointed out: “From what I hear “Not enough Indians”. lots of grand ideas and little in the way of getting it done.”

“Would the Spins SIG benefit from a trimmed down mission, short-term?” BH-Alex asked.

Paul then said, “Spin owners provide an “official” Fedora release that’s been approved by the Board. I think it’s important that the results are successfully passing through a process that ensures the results work well.”

“I would like to say that A) We need to talk with them before we can say that and B) I would need to know who the members are,” Smooge said, wanting a bit more information about the issue.

EvilBob asked, “How are we promoting the spins that are new and innovative along with the other spins that have been approved?” Paul’s response was, “In part through set-aside areas in our talking points and other marketing materials.”

BH-Alex: “Aren’t Spins just built from kickstart files? Why does it appear that a lot of resources are required to successfully produce a spin? From running cobbler and livecd-creator I’ve found kickstart to be wonderful and easy.” Brunowolff answered, “QA is busy enough with the main spins (Desktop and KDE) that they can’t test the other spins. The Spins SIG needs to do that.” “So if I understand correctly,” BH-Alex responded, “it’s a manpower issue combined with a what-the-public-wants issue?” Brunowolff continued, ” The ks files need review. For example Dan Walsh wants to make a kiosk spin but currently is doing it in what we suspect is a bad way. But we don’t have someone that can work with him to fix things up.” Chris Aillon pointed out, “brunowolff, arguably, they should be doing that anyway. different spins look to provide different experiences. something which works as expected on one spin might be considered a bug in another spin.”

BH-Alex then asked, “What would be the end-result of Spins SIG were disbanded? From looking at http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ downloads are low?” Mizmo pointed out, “Downloads are low because the counter is reset every release. Those numbers don’t reflect the F12 downloads which were quite large before we reset the counter.” Chris added, “I don’t think downloads show the full picture; some spins are duplicated heavily by those involved with them.” Sijis also said, “the spins stats are just torrent downloads too, not direct download ones.” Jon pointed out, “some stats are at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics.”

“It seems to me like Spins itself is problematic because of the difficulty to assemble the ‘experience’ — wouldn’t it be beneficial to have the Base Fedora install then have “profiles” (a list of packages provided by the spin-author) that can be made available?” BH-Alex pointed out. Chris responded, “part of the point of spins is that you can run them live, and can install them directly.” “Is that true of all spins?” asked BH-Alex. ” I believe so,” responded Chris. “I think we need to re-examine the spin technology in the light of the “sudden overlay failure” issue (when run from USB, affecting SoaS particularly) as well as fedora-embedded/arm/mips/mini needs.”

“this sounds like something more technical and less board related,” Dennis pointed out. “The idea is worth discussing,” said Paul. He concluded the topic with a suggestion: “Why don’t we take the idea to the spins@ list for more discussions.”

Enabling Contributors

Dennis asked:

“How can I as a regular fedora contributor feel like i can take ownership of some task or segment of fedora. How are we going to make sure that contributors feel enabled?”

Jared provided an extended answer to this question – ” First of all, they need to know what Fedora is and what it represents. Second, they need to have a support network — people they can ask questions to, preferably in their locality and language. Third, they need to feel their involvement is welcome and valued. Fourth, we need to make it clearer both how they can contribute/participate/lead, and what the steps are to do so.”

Dennis replied, “Great. now to make sure that we take the steps that way.”

Chris pointed out, “There’s getting started as a user (straightforward) and getting started as a contributor (less straightforward).” Jared suggested an improved website as being key to helping with this, “One thing I really want to push is some improvements to the website. More details to come… but in general, we need to do a better job of telling the Fedora story and how it meshes with the open source way.”

“We happen to be approaching the third phase of a website redesign,” Paul informed everyone. Phase one (F12) was the spins.fp.o site; phase two (F13) was the get-fedora* pages; phase three (F14) is the main www.fp.o page.”

Fedora Forums

MeGenius brought up his interest in the forums, “I want to see some imrpvments on the forums.” Jon pointed out “unfortunately, the forums are not run by Fedora, but they have a trademark license.” MeGenius asked if he could create his own forum, and Paul answered, “Yes, with some limitations. This is a question best asked on the advisory-board list: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board – Also check out http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Local_community_domains.” MeGenius pointed out, “the forums with the current situation are not that helpful – a lot of times, duplicated threads are opened, for example.” “Forums take quite a bit of herding for that to not have that problem,” Smooge pointed out. Rex also brought up that the problem “happens everywhere, irc, mailing lists, forums.”

“i want to see a helpful problems solving directory,” MeGenius said, “a user can refers to it, before asking any questions in the forums or the irc channels.”

Paul gave MeGenius a suggestion – “Have you considered talking to the forum admins and offering some help there directly?” But the topic died off at that point.

Getting Non-Coders Involved

Devilment asked a question about non-coders:

“Not everyone is a coder, so may feel they cannot contribute back to the Fedora Project. How can we get non-coders more involved?”

“I don’t know C to save my life ” replied Jon. Rex pointed out, “There’s plenty on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join not involving coding.” Dennis agreed – “there is so much of fedora not at all involved with code we need to make sure that those sections are visable to all.” “i guess reporting bugs, suggesting feature .. etc..” suggested meGenius.

Paul talked a bit about the Fedora join page: “Although our ‘join’ page is in need of some work, we do clearly indicate there’s plenty of ways to be involved that are non-code related.”

Mizmo made her agenda not so secret! “Join the design team We post bounties specifically for brand-new contributors, no coding required. http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/fedora-design-bounty/” Jared also pointed out, “Design, docs, marketing” as areas non-coders can help out in. “Contributor doesn’t always mean coder,” he said. Paul also suggested: “Bug reports, documentation, translation, design, …” Smooge agreed, “well there are a lot of places for non-coders (I am one of those). Design, QA, Ambassadors, proof-reading the Wiki.. there are lots of areas. However most of them are technical based versus social.”

Dennis suggested, “Could this stuff be mentioned on the anacoder installer screen? something like, “You don’t have to be a programmer to contribute back to Fedora. See for details.”

Question for Jared: Ponies

Jon asked, “What are you going to do to give us all ponies?”

Jared replied with a Fedora analogy: “Great question…. I see Fedora (and operating systems in general) like ponies… You don’t just buy a pony and forget about it. You have to feed it, clean up after it, and take care of it. I hope that when my tenure is done, we can look back at all the ponies we’ve helped raise :-p”

Question for Jared: T-Shirts and Swag

Mizmo asked: “i have a question that’s very… different than the current ones and perhaps stupid. is there real value in the number of t-shirts we produce? could we be doing something to provide more value for the $? i’m kind of an eco hippie and i feel really bad about the number of shirts, but maybe it’s because i have so many. maybe most people dont.”

Jared replied, “I’m open to suggestions. I think the t-shirts fill two important purposes — they give something tangible for participants to take home, and it serves as marketing.” Rex added, “or swag in general, but I figure t-shirts are the biggest $$ item at the moment?”

Dennis suggested, “perhaps we can do a plant a tree for me/give me a t-shirt option for events.” Jared also suggested, “When we do create t-shirts, it may make sense not to tie them to one particular meeting or date.” Mizmo suggested virtual swag, which Paul noted “Virtual swag interestingly ties into spot’s idea for contributor karma.” Smooge pointed out, “Red Hat for the first 5 years was paid for by swag sales. We were a company that sold you a T-shirt and gave you a Cdrom.”

The point was brought up that the shirts could be sold to fund contributors travel or FUDPub food. But Paul noted there are some issues with Fedora accepting money, and that there’s a lot of discussion about the issue in the advisory-board list archives.

Mizmo pointed out, “I think in some part tshirts are wasteful – i think whenever we produce something we should think about how it’s going to die if that makes sense.” Dennis said it would be nice to have all-organic swag in the next 5 years.

Paul started a thread on the topic on the advisory-board list for further discussion.

Jared’s Background

Rex asked, “For some background, what first brought you to use/contribute-to fedora, and prior to becoming fpl, where was most of your interest in fedora?”

Jared responded, ” Good questions… I started using Linux around the RH 4.2 / 5.0 time frame. And I was lucky enough to have an employer that encouraged me to learn it well, and gave me plenty of time to do so. When Fedora was born, I continued on as a user, but wasn’t much of a contributor. I’d post bugs from time to time and try out the betas and follow the -test list, but wasn’t really a contributor. Over time, however, I started to get involved in the docs project. I’d done some work with DocBook and publishing, and wanted to help contribute. stickster then tricked me into coming to my first FUDCon in Raleigh.”

(note at this point stickster swapped his nick to be tricky_stick. hehe.)

Jared continued, “That’s really what energized me to be a more active participant. rom there, dgilmore and jcollie encouraged me to help with Fedora Talk, and so I got into the infrastructure a bit. The rest, as they say, is history. Based on my own experience, I hope we all take the time to help others have that same sort of “ah ha!” moment.”

Board Salary

meGenius askd, “excuse me, but, do the board members have a salary for being board members??”

Paul responded, “No. The FPL is a paid position at Red Hat, whose duties include chairing the Board. Some Board members, elected or appointed, are paid employees of Red Hat, but are not paid to be on the Board in particular. They do it to better serve the Fedora community and to help make a difference through active leadership.”

Mizmo added, “meGenius, i work on the Board for the pleasure of serving you, not for buckazoids ” Jon also added, “there are several members that are not employed by red hat, both elected and appointed.”

Conclusion

Well there you have it, the latest Fedora Board meeting!

Filed under: Fedora Board

Máirín Duffy: Talking about Inkscape, in Leeds UK, from Boston USA, via Empathy.

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:52:02 +0000

Last Thursday, at the invitation of Rob Martin from the North East Leeds City Learning Centre in Leeds UK, I gave a talk about the Inkscape class I worked on as part of a Red Hat outreach program earlier this year. The occasion was the National City Learning Centres Conference 2010, which very excitingly had an open source track.The National City Learning Centers are organizations that help the area schools around them make use of technological innovations: providing training programs and workshops and supporting and developing solutions for technology use in the schools. Our Inkscape class seemed quite appropriate a topic! Here’s the thing, though: The conference took place in Leeds, UK. I gave my talk from Boston, Massachusetts. Take that, Atlantic Ocean! After numerous failed yet valiant attempts with Skype (no video, only audio and screensharing worked), Rob and his colleague Paul Bellwood gave empathy a shot – and it worked! Now, let me give you some caveats here: The call dropped two times during my talk. While Paul was very quick to reconnect the call, it was a little disorienting. We’re not sure why it happened.Screen sharing would not work in empathy. Sometimes it would be greyed out in the menu. Sometimes, it would not be, and we tried it, but on the Leeds end they just got a black screen. It worked right away in Skype.Audio feedback seemed to be more of a problem with the audio in empathy than it was with Skype. What I did was press the mute on my computer when I spoke and unmute when folks where asking questions. It was kind of annoying though. That being said, how cool is it to talk about using free & open source software to teach kids, via an openly-licensed and free curricula, at an open source track of a educational conference, using open source video conferencing?! That’s the way I like to roll By the way, much of the content of my talk is available as an opensource.com article – you’ll find links to all the worksheets and lesson plans there as well as a run down of the class mechanics, what worked, what didn’t, and suggestions for improvement in running your own. I haven’t filed bugs on any of the issues we ran into because I’m not sure if I really have any useful debugging information on them. I believe we both used empathy-2.30.1-2, vino-2.28.2-1, and vinagre-2.30.0-1. I don’t know about their version of gstreamer but I have gstreamer-0.10.29-1. If there is any way after the event useful bug information could be tracked down let me know and I’m happy to provide whatever info I can.

Filed under: Audio/Video, Inkscape, Inkscape Class, Open Source Rocking

Máirín Duffy: Fedora 14 Theme Preview

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 03:24:08 +0000

The chosen theme

At last week’s design team meeting, we made a decision about the direction of the overall theme for Fedora 14′s artwork, which will affect – among other things – the default wallpaper. We decided on Kyle Baker’s submission, a Blender-created mockup depicting many lines coming together to form a solid figure, to serve as the basis of the visual concept of Fedora 14.

There’s a couple of reasons why this theme relates to Fedora 14:

First, the codename for Fedora 14 is ‘Laughlin’. This is after Robert Laughlin, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in physics for the fractional quantum Hall effect research he did. Laughlin argues for a concept called ‘emergence’ which states: “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Kyle’s proposal shows many separate lines coming together that, when you step back, forms a solid shape as well, relating to Laughlin’s concept of emergence.
Secondly, Fedora is a kind of a single object – a Linux-based operating system aggregating many individual open source projects and work. A whole of many parts. Fedora is also a community made up of many individuals from all over the world working together in an open manner. So the concept also relates to what Fedora itself is and is all about!

Now that we’ve got a decision on our direction, we’re ramping up to polish it in time for Fedora 14. That’s where you come in.

We need your help!

Now that we’ve made our decision, the Fedora design team needs your help in making Fedora 14′s artwork awesome!

We need your feedback on our visual concept for F14

Our deadline for turning this conceptual art into a polished alpha wallpaper is July 27th. Help us get there by giving us your feedback on the F14 artwork feedback wiki page, the Fedora Design Team mailing list, or even the comments section of this blog post. Later on, for Fedora 14 beta, we’ll be creating splashes and other artwork for this theme, but right now we’re focusing on our first task, the alpha wallpaper.

We need your submissions or suggestions for supplemental wallpaper in Fedora 14

Supplemental wallpapers are wallpapers that are made available to Fedora users but are not turned on by default.

Do you take a fancy to one of the other Fedora 14 default wallpaper concept submissions? Suggest it as a supplemental wallpaper!
Take an amazing abstract photo you think would make a great Fedora 14 background? Submit it!
See an awesome Fedora-friendly licensed piece of digital art and want it considered? Suggest it!

Fab’s gonna chime in later on with a blog post with more details on the supplemental wallpapers, so look for it – but no excuses! You can submit now!

We need your design talent!

Are you an awesome artist looking to get involved in free & open source software, or even an old hand at FLOSS? All the sources for our wallpaper concept are available – what are you waiting for? The core of the image is a model Kyle built using Blender, the incredible open-source 3D tool. Crack it open and try your hand at iterating the design!

Onward to Alpha!

Remember kids, we’re working towards having a heart-stoppingly amazing wallpaper ready by July 27th so it can ship in Fedora 14 alpha. (We need to succeed, or else happy cat will start frowning! You wouldn’t want to see that, would you?!?) In Fedora, we pride ourselves on practicing what we preach and creating our designs and artwork just as openly as the software in our distribution, as an open community effort! Come join us and be a part of the fun!

By the way, we had a lot of awesome proposals on the table for Fedora 14, including a proposal by our very first design bounty ninja Jef van Schendel. Let us know which ones you would like as supplemental wallpapers for F14!

Media credits

Robert Laughlin photo credit: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service from Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Need your help image credits: Pointing hand from johnny_automatic on openclipart.org, public domain. Font is HVD Comic Serif Pro by Hannes von Döhren, CC-Attribution 3.0 license.

Happy cat image credits: Yuri Kimura on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Team

Ben Weiner: Untangling RVM and Bundler, for the novice

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:28:00 +0000

I was introduced to the combination of RVM and Bundler while working with my friend James on a project earlier in the year. It’s a nice combination of Ruby tools which offers developers a way to keep tabs on the Ruby gems they are using in a project and to avoid conflicts, or the accidental use of other versions of those gems, when they are actively developing or deploying their work. Typically these projects might be Ruby on Rails-based web applications but although ‘Rails’ is often accidentally substituted for ‘Ruby’ there is no reason why Bundler + RVM should be any less useful outside of Rails.

I found the post he pointed out, by Mike Lindsaar, very helpful to keep me enthused and get me trying things out but I also found the concept was still hard to grasp. Although both Bundler and RVM are adequately documented, somehow their example-driven documentation doesn’t quite make things clear at first/second reading. So here’s a quick synopsis which I’ve written to help my own understanding.

RVM

RVM (Ruby Version Manager) is a tool that creates named Ruby builds and named sets of gems. It lets you swap between these builds and sets at will.

Use RVM to build a named Ruby, then use RVM commands to modify the environment in your current shell so it will use that build instead of the system default. Likewise, once you have created a named gemset with RVM, you can then use RVM commands to bring the gems in that gemset into use in your shell. They will be made available to whichever Ruby is currently accessible using the information in your environment.

An .rvmrc file lets RVM automatically switch the Ruby build and gemset without human intervention.

Bundler

Bundler is a gem that installs and uninstalls other gems following a list you maintain.

The list centralises the information about which gems are needed to allow a given project’s Ruby code to run. It tidies up some loose ends and hard-to-manage conflicts by allowing you to specify exactly which gem version is needed to run the code, so that if there’s a feature that is missing from earlier gem versions or removed from later ones you can keep using the version you need even when it is obsolete.

The Gemfile, the list that Bundler works with, is plaintext and therefore version-controllable. It sits naturally at the root of the project.

Putting them together

RVM is great on its own, because as you swap between projects in daily work on your own machine you can swap between different Ruby versions and different sets of gems instantly. You are protected from updates to a gem on the system breaking things in your projects and you can retrospectively introduce an RVM gemset to sort things out if that does happen. That should make it really useful for anyone developing gems or dealing with legacy code issues.

The Bundler gem is required by Rails 3 itself [‘baked in’ as I am sure its developers would say, with tongues in their cheeks], and I guess that’s because it was the Rails use-case itself that caused Bundler to be written. So either tool is useful alone. The point of Mike’s post is that by coupling the two together you get a really nice combination. Here’s what you can do.

RVM to create a named Ruby build, if desired
RVM to create a named gemset (probably named for the project)
.rvmrc file in project root to ensure that when code is executed in the project’s directory tree it’s run with the right Ruby and gemset
Gemfile in project root to specify gems required for the codebase (remember this is version-controllable)
Bundler to read the list of gems and install them; the gems are installed within the environment that’s active, so they’ll be installed within the RVM gemset for the project and not elsewhere

Of course to benefit from all this on your own machine with multiple projects is one thing; RVM will not seem nearly as necessary if the project code is deployed to a dedicated server with no other web applications running on it. But not all deployments look like that.

I think I have this all right; comments welcome of course.

OSP (Open Source Publishing): Foundry

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 11:58:08 +0000

We’re happy to launch our foundry, today. Have a look http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/foundry There’s no excuse to not write more this summer! They’ve been made using free tools: FontForge, Inkscape… They’re released under free licenses. Some are collaborative works. Some will be in development. Little materials light peculiar happy. Little long length there louder. Enjoy your weekends.

OSP (Open Source Publishing): One thing leads to another

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 11:47:56 +0000

Following a trackback, Alexandre discovered the work of Lafkon studio a few days ago. Than, through Antonio Roberts’ comment on this same post, I find out about his work with animated fontfiles. Antonio writes: “Font files are files that attribute a style to the otherwise plain text that we see on screen. The computer treats [...]

Máirín Duffy: Fedora Design Bounty: Fedora slide deck template

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:12:53 +0000

The Fedora Design Team Bi-weekly Bounty is a bi-weekly (well, at least monthly! ) blog post where we’ll outline a quick-and-easy design project that needs doing for the Fedora Community, outlining all the tools, files, and other resources you’ll need to complete the project. If you’re a designer and are interested in getting involved in the free and open source community, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet!

Fedora project slide deck template

Fedora project members, from pretty much every part of our project (especially Ambassadors), give presentations all over the world: from FUDcons (Fedora Users’ and Developers’ Conference) all over the world, to FOSS.in in India, to the Linux Symposium in Canada, LinuxTag in Germany, to FISL in Brazil, to SCALE in Calfornia – and many, many more.

However, we don’t have a single, consistent yet flexible template to meet our presenters’ needs.

Your Mission

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a stunning-looking base Fedora presentation template that our worldwide community of users and contributors can use, whether or not they’re giving a presentation at their local Linux Users’ Group or at a well-known international conference.

Tips

I’ve put together a page on the Fedora wiki outlining the requirements of this project, providing the general guidelines, a base template you can open up and use to start designing with, and even some inspiration in the form of other slide presentations that look nice. You’ll be starting out with some basic template content to style, so you can focus solely on the look and feel and not worry about generating sample content on your own.

Helpful Files

Base presentation template file – this is the blank canvas upon which you will unleash your awesome design ninja skills! Download it and play away!

The Comfortaa fonts – this is a typeface designed by Johan Aakerlundthat the Fedora design team is currently trying out on a trial basis as a headline font for our branding materials. It is currently under a CC-BY-ND license, but Johan has agreed to relicense it to a license suitable for Fedora! (WOOO!) By using this font, you’ll be helping us put it to the test! To install this font on Fedora, make a directory called “.fonts” in your home folder and move the font file into that folder.

Droid Sans fontthis is a typeface that the Fedora design team is currently trying out on a trial basis as a body text font for our branding materials. Droid Sans is a set of free & open source fonts. If you have Fedora you can install them by using ‘yum install mgopen-modata-fonts’ or by searching in PackageKit. If you don’t have Fedora you can download the fonts from their website. On Fedora, you install them by making a directory called “.fonts” in your home folder and moving the font files into that folder.

Helpful Tools

OpenOffice.org – You may install it on Fedora using ‘yum install openoffice.org-writer’ or by searching for it in PackageKit. If you are not using Fedora, you can download it here. You’ll need OpenOffice.org to work with the ODT source file.
Inkscape – You may install it on Fedora using ‘yum install inkscape’ or by searching for it in PackageKit. If you are not using Fedora, you can download it here. Inkscape is going to be a useful tool for you to quickly mockup the look & feel for a slide before producing it in OpenOffice.org, and also a great tool for producing illustrations.

Helpful Resources

Fedora presentation wiki page chock full o’ requirements and inspiration for you, and first steps in getting started on this project!
The OpenOffice.org Impress guide – has lots of tips, especially detailed information on using the Styles & Formatting dialog, which you’ll need to use in creating this template.
The Fedora Design Team: please drop by #fedora-design on irc.freenode.net for any assistance! (Join our chat on the web here. Or join and drop an email to our mailing list.

What’s in it for you?

Okay, okay, we get it. You’re a designer or OpenOffice.org whiz, and you’ve got things to do – why would you bother helping out with this? Let’s do a quick run-down of what’s in it for you:

If you don’t already have it, you’ll get membership into the Fedora Design Team, which includes Fedora voting privileges and hosting space for Fedora-related projects.
For your personal portfolio you’ll have a slide deck template that will be used all over the world
You’ll build skills in using Inkscape and OpenOffice.org – these are excellent free & open source tools that are worth learning because you can use them for just about any design project in the future and they are free forever. You’ll also build skills in addressing general layout challenges!
If you send me your snail mail address, I will send you a thank you card, a full-color copy of your design, and some Fedora swag in thanks for your help!
You’ll gain experience in contributing to a free/open source project.
Bragging rights as a free/open source project design ninja & more importantly a Fedora Design Team Bi-weekly Bounty designer!

You’re totally pumped, right? Awesome. So where to start?

Ninja by Hector Gomez from openclipart.org – Public Domain.

The Rules

You’ll need a Fedora account to submit your work. Don’t worry, it’s not hard to get, you can sign up for it here, quickly and painlessly: Create a Fedora account. Once you’ve created your account, log in to sign the contributor license agreement (this gives us permission to use your work!)
If you are interested in taking this bounty on please make a comment to this blog post below. The first person to claim it in the comments will have exactly 48 hours to give it a shot, at the end of which the bounty will be opened up for someone else (you can try to re-claim it if you want.) I will announce all status changes in the comments.
You must provide source files for your work. This is so we can make any necessary edits or provide translations for the document, create a reusable template out of your awesome deign, or just generally learn from how your design works. If you’re working with OpenOffice.org, this means we need the ODT file, and any SVGs or other graphics you may be incorporating into it.
You’ll need to abide by the Fedora brand guidelines – but please don’t let this stifle any awesome creative and innovative ideas you might have – just check in with your Fedora design team compatriots first. More information and pointers to resources on our branding guidelines is available on the wiki page for this project.
When you’re ready to submit your work,submit it on the presentation template wiki page. If you need help email me (duffy at fedoraproject dot org) or pop into IRC!

Good luck!

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Bounty

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 7 Jul 2010

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:35:37 +0000

Private beta program of open font for Ubuntu kicks off

The private beta program for the open font commissioned for Ubuntu has now been launched. With a webapp to help gather relevant feedback (submitted LP #602933 for better font detection).

The precise details of the DVCS tree holding the various font source formats and the licensing are still to be decided and revealed. Hopefully Kenneth (along with his design team @ Canonical) is looking into my recommendations from discussions at the last LGM and from follow-up emails on open font release and maintainership best practises.

Still waiting for more detailed feedback from you Kenneth...

Ben Weiner: The Design of Understanding

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:35:00 +0000

I’m getting excited about a conference in planning for January 2011 at St Bride Library in London.

It’s part of St Bride Library’s series of one-day events, intended to be both approachable and affordable. This particular conference is The Design of Understanding, and it will be curated by Max Gadney.

A glance at the speakers lined up so far gives a good idea of the quality we can expect from the day’s talks. If you’re into user experience, graphics, information design and data, and can make it to London for 28 January, be sure to be there.

Andy Fitzsimon: Sorry for the RSS hiccups

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:50:43 +0000

My apologies to all the users of aggregation services which just copped a swarm of outdated posts from my blog.

I’m restoring this old blog and merging it with a couple of sites I have so stay tuned and thanks again for enduring the noise.

OSP (Open Source Publishing): Speak my language

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:56:34 +0000

A couple of days ago I was looking at the OSP blog trackback list and discovered the Fork/Memo blog. It documents the work of Lafkon studio. Lafkon is Christoph Haag and Benjamin Stephan — two graphic designers working with unconventional tools for graphic design, including Latex and shell scripts among others Unix commands, to make [...]

Ben Weiner: Python 2.4, libxslt and MacPorts snafu

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:40:00 +0000

I struggled for quite a long time to get the MacPorts libxslt module for python 2.4 (required for a legacy project) to install. A lot of searching turned up many leads but no bug report, and this is a low-priority situation for port maintainers because python 2.4 is now very out of date. This is what I did.

Installed python24.

Installed py-libxslt.

At the end of the port install process for py-libxslt I received an error message. A read of the log said:

[...]
:debug:activate activate phase started at Tue Jul  6 11:48:03 BST 2010
:debug:activate Executing org.macports.activate (py-libxslt)
:error:activate Target org.macports.activate returned: Registry error: py-libxslt 2.6.21_0 not registered as installed.
:debug:activate Backtrace: Registry error: py-libxslt 2.6.21_0 not registered as installed.
    while executing
"registry::installed $name $v"
    (procedure "_check_registry" line 38)
    invoked from within
"_check_registry $name $v"
    (procedure "portimage::activate" line 58)
    invoked from within
"registry_activate $name "${version}_${revision}${portvariants}" [array get user_options]"
    (procedure "portactivate::activate_main" line 6)
    invoked from within
"$procedure $targetname"
:info:activate Warning: the following items did not execute (for py-libxslt): org.macports.activate
:notice:activate Log for py-libxslt is at: /opt/local/var/macports/logs/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_python_py-libxslt/main.log

This indicated that everything was happily built, but the software was not installed in its correct directory for some reason (not evident in the log). I found it difficult to get my head around the way MacPorts works in the time available and establish what went wrong. So I short-circuited the problem by copying the software (libxslt.py) from the MacPorts build directory into the lib directory where it should have been put (/opt/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages).

This will mess up MacPorts’ information about what is installed, so other python 2.4 dependent things might conceivably not be installable. Equally it might be tricky to remove the /opt/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages directory using MacPorts commands without forcing it. But meanwhile I have a working python libxslt module and that’s what I needed.

Ben Weiner: Amending vector map artwork from Osmarender

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:52:00 +0000

I’ve been playing with Osmarender in an effort to generate vector map artwork for a design project. The map needs to have different visual styling from the way Open Streetmap looks and also will lack things like street names and bus stops which are not relevant outside the navigation context for which OSM’s maps are primarily intended.

The Osmarender SVG forms one step of the conversion process from raw information collected on the ground and the presentation of maps online at openstreetmap.org. For me, one problem has been the close tailoring of this transformation to the visual style used in Open Streetmap’s map images. Various ruses are used to create an image that suits a web interface; these are not so beneficial when working with vector data because they tend to exploit the fact that the final images will be seen at a pre-determined and fixed resolution.

After deleting quite a lot of stuff, and latterly separating the land use, waterways, routes and labels, I think I might be getting somewhere. I will post the modified rules files and stylesheet if I do make things work. I can see that I will still have to tidy up the files in a vector editor at the end – but of course OSM is permanently under revision, which implies errors in the data as well as acknowledging that features on the ground will change.

Khaled Hosny: Arabic, Arabic and Arabic

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:47:55 +0000

Thanks to the separation of dots and base glyphs approach, Amiri font can be easily extended to cover all additional characters required for other Arabic script using language. For example, here are all Arabic Wikipedia logos set in Amiri:

اقرأ المزيد

Raph Levien: Google Font API integration of the week - reevoo.com

noreply@blogger.com (Raph Levien) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 00:21:01 +0000

One of the things I’d like to do with this blog is feature particularly interesting sites that use the Google Font API. This week, I’m highlighting mag.reevoo.com. It looks much more like a magazine than a web site, right down to the logo, but all the text is real text, not images.

As a testament to the power of HTML5, the designer writes that the entire site was done in a weekend. That said, there are some rough edges, not least of which the fact that it’s only guaranteed to work on WebKit browsers (although most of the functionality seems fine in Firefox).

I’m looking forward to seeing more great integrations, and would especially like to see web apps, games, and so on. Maybe your site will be featured here soon.

Máirín Duffy: Fedora Board Meeting, 2 Jul 2010

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:37:35 +0000

I’m going to try my best to blog Fedora Board meetings as much as I can. Given this took me quite a bit of time, I’m not sure I can do it every time but I will definitely give it my best shot.

Please let me know what you think about blogging Fedora Board meetings and if you have any suggestions for making this effort better!

As a little introduction, the Fedora Board has two public IRC meetings a month. They are held on Fridays at 6 PM UTC in #fedora-board-meeting on irc.freenode.org. The meetings last 1 hour. The first half of the meeting is reserved for agenda items culled from the Fedora Advisory Board mailing list, and the second half is reserved for questions and answers for community members. Non-board members ask questions in #fedora-board-questions, and then are voiced in #fedora-board-meeting to ask their question directly.

Present

All Board members were present save Matt Domsch who is traveling, in Africa.

New Fedora Project Leader

Our new Fedora Project Leader has been named: Jared Smith

. The announcement stated that he is gone but not when he’d return: Right now, Jared has limited email access until next week. He’ll be around next week and a lot more when he returns from his LATAM travels (more on them below).

Jared will be making a blog post when he returns and it will be listed on Fedora Planet. He will be traveling together with Paul Frields to the Red Hat Raleigh, NC office for orientation, and they will be meeting up with Max Spevack while there. Jared will also be introduced to various folks around the Red Hat Raleigh office.

Soon after starting as Fedora Project Leader, Jared will be traveling to Santiago Chile for FUDcon Santiago 2010 (July 15-17). Following FUDcon Santiago, Jared will be attending FISL 11 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Jared has spent time in Santiago before and speaks some Spanish as well. LATAM is very important part of the global Fedora community so the board is excited that Jared’s project leadership is starting with this visit to South America.

Some more information about Jared:

fedoracommunity.org Domain Policies Regarding Redirects to Fedora Infrastructure

There is currently an ongoing discussion on the advisory-board list about having a fedoracommunity.org subdomain point to a fedoraproject.org/wiki page. Paul does not think it is the best idea because the point behind the fedoracommunity.org domain was to enable truly community-run sites that run outside of fedoraproject.org’s policies. Not many Board members have disagreed on the thread so he wanted to bring up the topic to make sure it was being considered.

Some background on why the fedoracommunity.org domain came about are available on the Local Community Domains wiki page written by the previous Fedora Project Board on the fedoraproject.org wiki. Paul summarized this information by saying, “Thee intent of the fedoracommunity.org domain is to make it clear that the Fedora Project and Red Hat are not responsible for the content there. That way a local community can feature content that might not be acceptable on, say, the Fedora wiki. Laws are different around the world.”

The question on the advisory-board list specifically referred to setting up a redirect (server-side) from a fedoracommunity.org domain to the Fedora Project wiki. Smooge pointed out there is a difference between this kind of redirect, which he, Paul, and Spot noted they did not support, and having an HTML-based redirect on a page outside of Fedora’s infrastructure. Chris Tyler pointed out that with redirects, if the community later on decides to implement their own infrastructure, links that used the community domain to point to the wiki would then be broken.

Mizmo pointed out that there is, however, a value to having a nice domain like foobar.fedoracommunity.org rather than fedoraproject.org/wiki/foobar. Paul pointed out in that case, foobar.fedoraproject.org could be an appropriate domain to point to the wiki, “Any local community is free to use the wiki that way, or help localize our existing websites on *.fp.o without needing any special permission from anyone.” In response, Mizmo pointed out that for a user wanting to find a local community, they would have two separate domains to look for it and that there should be a directory on fedoracommunity.org to list both *.fedoracommunity.org and *.fedoraproject.org local communities. Paul noted, “That’s true, but it was a compromise so that we could disconnect the “officialness” of the domain from the local community’s ability to just build content and support their region.” Chris Aillon also pointed out an open ticket to create such a directory on the Fedora websites team trac queue.

Mizmo then agreed a redirect might be problematic, but wondered if an html link + auto refresh might be problematic too, no? She took the action item to continue the discussion on the fedora-advisory-board list.

References:

Fedora Planet Discussion

Paul modified the Fedora Planet wiki page to have a mission statement, as discussed on the advisory-board list. The mission statement and guidelines are on the top of the page. The instructions on adding a blog to planet have been moved further down the page. It also now recommends using a tag or category for Fedora so contributors can choose whether or not a post is displayed on our planet.

Paul asked if there were any concerns with the changes, but everyone seemed to agree they were good. Mizmo brought up that she would like to see some of the suggestions from the advisory-board list enacted as well, but they can’t be addressed by the wiki page. For example, she suggested modifying the Fedora Planet template to include FAS info for each planet poster so that posters’ contact information can be found. Right now, in some cases blog comments are turned off, and the real identity of posters is not visible. Mizmo took up the action item to talk to the Fedora Infrastructure team and file a ticket if necessary to make this change to the planet template, and Jon Stanley agreed to help Seth with the technical side of the issue.

By the way, here is the summary of suggested changes from the thread:

kill and consider procedure (maybe requiring a FAS login to trigger,
using a flag link or something)
an easy & consistent way to get contact information for each poster
listed on the planet
an optional planet feed that has fedora & tech only related blog posts
a FAS account aging requirement for posting rights (maybe a separate
planet that, if you have a mentor, they can watch and you can graduate
from? For example new ambassadors could be added to an ambassadors
planet first….. if there is some faux paus people reading will better
know who the poster is and more easily know how to contact them etc)
a sandbox planet, with a policy for invitations to the main planet

References:

Community Question: Fedora Community members and embargoed countries

Question asked by vwbusguy:

Does the board recommend Fedora contributors intently avoid offering support to citizens of embargoed countries?”

The Board can’t give legal advice, but we have both an email contact and a list for legal matters.
Email: legal@fedoraproject.org
Mailing List: legal@lists.fedoraproject.org
List Signup: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/legal

Community Question: Fedora Board Public Meeting Format

Concern brought up by inode0:

Community question periods in these meetings normally get < half of the meeting time. Maybe having the community questions upfront would ensure the community would have their input. EvilBob also made a remark he felt like they were being ignored in the #fedora-board-questions channel and 'relegated'.

The board pretty much universally agreed that we did not want community members feeling left out, nor did anyone oppose considering a different way of running the meetings to improve things.
Rdieter brought up a good point that we’ll be waiting for questions up-front if we do questions first.
Mizmo suggested interleaving agenda item > question > agenda item > question so there was no waiting on questions.
Smooge suggested longer meetings.
Another idea brought up was having designated secretaries for IRC meetings to monitor the questions channel and build a queue. They could queue people’s names and give voice to them when it was their turn to go, or they could queue questions and ask them themselves. It seemed folks preferred queuing people rather than questions.
It was also suggested that zodbot could be modified to have function to queue up questions from the questions channel, maybe with a #question command.
Jon Stanley pointed out board members are available for Q&A at any time, not just during public board meetings, and stickster concurred that we are all on IRC pretty constantly. #fedora-advisory-board was noted as a place Board members idle, and is a good place for folks to bring up questions or concerns or even just brainstorm out loud with Board members at any time.
The advisory-board mailing list is also a place where questions can be brought up at any time. If a community member would like their concern on a board irc meeting agenda they can explicitly request that on-list.
Decision: Next IRC meeting will be wide-open in #fedora-board-meeting, no special voicing. If that doesn’t work, we will dial back a little at a time to find a good balance of order vs. openness
Decision: Q&A first in future IRC meetings.

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Board

Máirín Duffy: First Fedora Design Bounty Ninja identified!

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:29:43 +0000

I am quite happy to report that we have identified our first Fedora Design Bounty Ninja: Jef van Schendel!

Jef responded to our first Fedora Design Bi-Weekly Bounty just a couple of hours after it was posted, and he did an amazing job putting together a 6-page layout for the Fedora 13 feature profiles, carefully adhering to all of the Fedora branding guidelines and providing all of his source work!

Congratulations, Jef, on a job well-done! By the way, Jef is a second-year industrial design student from the Netherlands, and this was his first contribution to open source. Also worth noting, Jef has since taken on two other design tickets as well as worked on some mockups for Design Hub, so he is whooping some serious behind (or skulking stealthily about with a Gimp katana or Inkscape nunchucks at the ready, as ninjas prefer to do)!

Are you ready for your chance to become an open source design ninja too? Keep an eye out for the next Fedora Design Bounty!

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Bounty

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 29 Jun 2010

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:02:31 +0000

Catching up with LGM recordings

Ben, I'm glad you're enjoying the content despite what I feel is - ahem - rather lousy delivery and insufficient preparation... I realise I need to work on my public speaking skills... Thankfully there were quite a few other font-related talks by key members of our growing community :-)

Anyway, hopefully some of the recommendations (and corresponding tools) provide useful food for thought for your various webdesign and open font projects.

Máirín Duffy: Some Geeky comics

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 05:21:46 +0000

Well, the Red Hat Summit & JBoss World ended today. It was an extremely busy week and very busy couple of weeks leading up to it for me. I absolutely love going to and getting involved with this event though. You get to meet brilliant people from all over in one place, learn about the latest free & open source technology and see cool demos and take tutorials, and of course the parties are great….

Photo by Red Hat, used under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial license.

One thing that is really neat about the Red Hat Summit & JBoss World is that every morning there is a newspaper called the Red Hat Free Press that’s given out. It provides the day’s schedule, free/open source software related articles, and some other fun geeky content. This year I was very excited to be involved in creating some comics (using Fedora & Inkscape, of course ), one for each day of the Summit. Here they are, and I’m providing them under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license (please attribute Red Hat.)

The SVG source for these is available.

The most challenging part of creating these was coming up with funny jokes. I’d like to thank my co-workers who helped me out in coming up with some punchlines for me to draw. I have to say the pxe boot pixie is my favorite!

These works by Red Hat are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 25 Jun 2010

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:24:47 +0000

Droid font updates

Looks like the upstream Droid font repository has recently received new drops of updates from commissioned designers: improved hinting, new smart features, initial support for Hebrew, Arabic and Thai. Thankfully there are no encumbered licensing discrepancies in the metadata. Well-done! Thanks for releasing that work more widely.

Still no FONTLOG.txt included yet though...

Ben Weiner: Ruby Mendicant University

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:01:00 +0000

I came across this post about Ruby Mendicant University while reading up on Prawn, a Ruby PDF generation library. RMU is an interesting idea in its own right – is it a new idea? – but what I liked about the post, what connected with me, was the discussion of the ‘plateau’ of learning that comes after grasping the basics of the language, when the need is to discover about good style and efficient, elegant coding. That’s something very familiar.

There are a lot of people who have gone through the initial gauntlet only to plateau and find that while they can play by ear, they can’t quite read the music

Because I often work alone and I have to somehow solve the problems I take on I am slowly grinding away at my Ruby ignorance. It’s great to find neat and expressive ways to achieve things, and it’s always depressing to leave a trail of ugly-looking code in one’s wake, so there are sticks as well as carrots. But as the interviewer prompts, ‘Underwear + ??? = Ruby Knowledge. Meaning, there’s bloody nothing in the middle range.’ In other words, there’s a deafening internet silence just at the point when guidance could be most valuable. This stage includes all sorts of really interesting things, things I know I want to know about but which are nevertheless frustratingly unknown unknowns.

My previous post perhaps illustrates the rather unfocused understanding I have gained so far; I wasn’t able to make the correct assumption about the precedence of the operators because I wasn’t taking into account the = operator in the statement. Un-fluent thinking.

I would guess that in a team with a strong leader, or with a mentor, this stage can be crossed pretty fast. But for those people who are more isolated, the idea of focused group learning online, via IRC, sounds smart. And it looks to be a success so far.

Ben Weiner: Ruby or and || operator evaluation

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:34:00 +0000

I wanted to define a variable in a way that allowed it either to be the result of a method or, if that method didn’t produce anything, a preset default value.

The method was written so that it would return nothing if a certain condition was not met. Here’s my experimental version:

def foo(argument)
  if argument.class == "".class
    return argument
  end
end

foo("bar")
=> "bar"

foo(123)
=> nil

Then I tested to see what happened if I wrote an expression to evaluate the output. I used the ‘or’ operator. It behaved as expected:

foo("bar") or "Nope!"
=> "bar"

foo(123) or "Nope!"
=> "Nope!"

But although when calling experimental method it does not seem to matter what kind of object is given on the right hand side of the evaluation…

foo("bar") or {"test"=>1, "me"=>2}
=> "bar"

foo(123) or {"test"=>1, "me"=>2}
=> {"me"=>2, "test"=>1}

… a similarly written expression in the real script would receive nil from a method, yet that returned value of nil would be chosen in preference to the object on the right hand side. Effectively:

foo(123) or {"test"=>1, "me"=>2}
=> nil

I changed the evaluation operator from ‘or’ to ‘||’, and it worked nicely, effectively:

foo(123) || {"test"=>1, "me"=>2}
=> {"me"=>2, "test"=>1}

Here is Programming Ruby 1/e on the or and || operators:

… both “or” and “||” evaluate to true if either operand is true. They evaluate their second operand only if the first is false. As with “and”, the only difference between “or” and “||” is their precedence.

http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_expressions.html#S1

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 23 Jun 2010

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:12:58 +0000

Ubuntu B|Hug day on fontconfig

Come help tackle fontconfig related bugs in Ubuntu.

Nicolas Spalinger (advogato diary): 23 Jun 2010

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:39:49 +0000

Articles about the open font efforts by Google

Marc-Tobias Kunisch from the team behind the Google fonts directory has recently posted various articles about webfonts and related issues (manchmal auch auf Deutsch). Well-worth reading.

OSP (Open Source Publishing): Almost there!

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:17:52 +0000

We’re busy closing the books on LGM 2010 and soon deciding where to go for LGM 2011 (Brasil? Montreal? Vietnam? Follow the discussion at: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create) so we almost did not notice that it’s only a very little stretch to our initial goal of raising 10.000$ on Pledgie

OSP (Open Source Publishing): Libre Graphics Magazine #0

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:18:30 +0000

During LGM 2010, Ana, ginger and Ricardo (+ a.l.e and Femke) edited, designed and published Libre Graphics Magazine #0. You can download it here: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2010/download/lgmag_00.pdf

Ben Weiner: A remarkably small terrier

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:54:00 +0000

On Monday I had the privilege to see a 4mm/ft scale model of a Terrier, a small British railway steam locomotive of the 1870s, that can run on live steam. It’s quite common for people to construct motorized models at this scale, but not to build ones that run on the same principles as the original. The cylinders, where power is developed, are 12” diameter by 20” stroke on the full-size locomotive; that means those of the model, to scale, are 4mm diameter by 6.6mm stroke. The valves, which control the admission and exhaust of steam, will be a fraction of that size. Truly remarkable.

Raph Levien: Nanum Korean fonts now released under OFL

noreply@blogger.com (Raph Levien) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:03:21 +0000

The Nanum fonts, published by Naver and available for some time as free downloads, have been relicensed under the SIL Open Font License. These fonts range in size from 2.2M to 4.5M per weight (gzip compresses them slightly better than 2x), so they're bigger than what I’d consider reasonable for serving as webfonts.

For English-speaking readers, there’s lots more detail about the fonts at this typophile thread. The consensus seems to be that they’re very high quality, and also contain hints tuned for ClearType rendering in Windows.

Here’s a sample of the Nanum Myeongjo (unfortunately rendered as an image rather than served as a true font Mac OS X 10.5):

(text is from the UN Declaration on Human Rights)

If we served these fonts as-is in the Google Font API, would there be people interested in trying them out? I’m not yet sure whether this is a good idea, so right now I’m just trying to gauge interest.

Also, if there’s anyone out there interested in working on making smaller Korean font files, please get in touch with me.

Alexandre Prokoudine: New members of GraphicsPlanet

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:34:56 +0000

There are several new people on the planet, some of them not knowing about it, so I take a liberty to introduce them. Pascal de Brujn is known for his experiments with home-made profiling targets, ICC profiles making and all things color management. Barak Itkin aka LightningIsMyName is working on PDF exporting in GIMP and [...]

Ben Weiner: Font hits at LGM2010

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:08:00 +0000

Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 featured a number of talks about fonts. I’m enjoying Nicolas Spalinger’s talk on practices for designing, releasing, maintaining and packaging open fonts at the moment, and there are several more.

OSP (Open Source Publishing): Kick out the jam

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:19:15 +0000

7 OSP funky geeky sheeps players inTypogravieh lebt’s trailer. Vielen Dank Martin & the typovieh-team. Our Bauhaus typo symposium was more than leben. Here is a color record of the adventure to the Bauhaus University, Weimar. viehturing: Ligatier, Cascading Stylesheeps, Captain Futura u.a. Nach einjäriger Pause hat sich das Typogravieh endlich auscouriert und lebt wieder!

OSP (Open Source Publishing): please computer | make me design

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:28:39 +0000

LG-school — the LGM appetizer — has been the occasion for us (Ivan, Ludi, Steph and Alex) to give a second workshop on fun command-line poster generation. This workshop was intended to introduce graphic designers to a completely different paradigm (the command-line) than the one they are usually used to (the graphical user interface, or even [...]

Khaled Hosny: It is no longer vapourware

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:42:44 +0000

Getting out of my Amiri cave, just to tell you Amiri is there, it is real, it is no longer vapourware ;)

Well, the is actually the only readable phrase that can be written with the font right now, and no, there is no download link this time too :P

Simos Xenitellis: Avestan keyboard layout

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:03:28 +0000

According to Wikipedia,

Avestan (pronounced /əˈvɛstən/ ^[1]) is an Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name. The language must also at some time have been a spoken language, but how long ago that was is unknown. Its status as a sacred language ensured its continuing use for new compositions long after the language had ceased to be a living language.

Only recently was the Avestan script added to the Unicode standard (Unicode 5.2). For more, see page 17 at the Archaic scripts section of Unicode 5.2 (PDF) and the Unicode block details for U+10B00. See also the proposal to add Avestan to Unicode as an archaic script.

A user from UbuntuForums.org asked for help to create a keyboard layout for the Avestan script.

After providing the necessary details, the keyboard layout was created, Avestan keyboard layout for Linux.

So, how can you use the new keyboard layout?

1. Add avestan.txt at the end of /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ir

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ir

in order to open (as administrator) the ‘ir’ layout, and paste the contents of avestan.txt at the end of the ‘ir’ file. Click Save and exit.

2. Register the new ‘avestan’ layout in evdev.xml and base.xml files.

Both files have a section that looks like the following. Do a simple search for ‘ku_ara’ or some other string in order to find the segment.

        <variant>
          <configItem>
            <name>ku_ara</name>
            <description>Kurdish, Arabic-Latin</description>
            <languageList><iso639Id>kur</iso639Id></languageList>
          </configItem>
        </variant>
-----------HERE------------
      </variantList>
    </layout>
    <layout>
      <configItem>
        <name>iq</name>
        <shortDescription>Irq</shortDescription>
        <description>Iraq</description>
        <languageList><iso639Id>ara</iso639Id>
                      <iso639Id>kur</iso639Id></languageList>
      </configItem>

Open base.xml with

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.xml

Then open evdev.xml with

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml

Replace the ‘———–HERE————‘ with the following lines:

 <variant>

 <configItem>

 <name>avestan</name>

 <description>Avestan</description>

 <languageList><iso639Id>ae</iso639Id></languageList>

 </configItem>

 </variant>

What we do here is we insert a variant description for the ‘avestan’ keyboard layout.

Click Save and exit the text editor.

3. Install a suitable font. Follow the steps from http://www.bomahy.nl/hylke/blog/adding-fonts-in-gnome/
which says to install the font in your home directory, in a ‘.fonts’ subdirectory. Normally, Ubuntu will pick up the font as soon as you copy it in there. Any newly started application should be able to use the new font.

4. Finally, add the new Avestan keyboard layout. Go to System → Preferences → Keyboard → Layouts, click on the [Add...] button and select from the list ‘Iran’ and layout ‘Avestan’. Click OK. Notice the new keyboard layout indicator on the panel that allows you to switch between English and Avestan.

Increasingly more scripts and symbols are added to the Unicode standard. These scripts are not useful unless there is a comfortable way to type in them. Find a script you like and help create a keyboard layout.

Keyboard layout for combining diacritics Typically, if you want to type characters with accents, such...
Keyboard layout editor UI concept (click for bigger image) At the top we select the...
The Keyboard Layout Editor (this entry is a repost, the original was lost in...

Rogério Brito: A version of xpdf with the poppler backend available

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:46:13 +0000

Well, it’s been some time since I last wrote here and things are quite hectic, due to some real-life happenings.

Announcement

For those people that are insterested in a small PDF viewer, based on an actively maintained backend, and that doesn’t bring your computer to a halt when you try to zoom your documents when you need to see some details, then you might want to give this version of xpdf a try.

I already received some reports for some bugs and fixed them, with one of them being a problem related by a kind user of Gentoo.

Motivation

Some people have asked me why this even needs to exist in the first place and I agree that it would be better if it didn’t: I would love to spend my time actually using my computers rather than fixing my computers for better tasks (read: studying Mathematics, etc).

The upstream maintainer of xpdf uses it as one source of income and keeps it running across many system (even legacy ones). I imagine that this one of the reasons why he tries to keep xpdf almost self contained, with many parts that could be delegated to other libraries, and with some abstraction code that makes the code compile even in the presence of very broken compilers. Of course, this means, in part, that as long as you take more duties, maintaing the code becomes more and more complex.

He told me that he doesn’t offer an open development tree because he wants to give his customers some advantages over the public version and his reasons are perfectly justifiable, of course. He also manifested the interest of possibly basing xpdf on a “more modern toolkit” and, when I asked him what that would be, he mentioned that, perhaps, it would be Qt. The development of xpdf will, quite probably, take newer directions.

Unfortunately, xpdf has not seen a new upstream release since 2007-02-27. It did, though, have some patchlevel updates released. Taking care of the maintainance of the code is a high concern for distributions.

Some people, though, would like to keep it simple (me included). Unfortunately, some efforts to maintain it had not had the necessary coordination and duplication of effort has occured.

Proposal

I am willing to become a patch aggregator for the code in xpdf with a poppler backend. I would love to give it some refactoring too, drop some of the legacy code that is not used (and only serves to make the code hard to read), and adopt some good coding style standard (I particularly like the one from the Linux Kernel—with the proper adaptations for C++).

I have already contacted the people at Gentoo, and I would love to get people from Fedora, Ubuntu, and Suse involved also. Alas, the last time I tried to mail their mailing lists, I got messages telling me that my messages were rejected or waiting for moderation, because I was not a subscriber. I never heard back, since.

I appreciate it if you could help spread the word.

Thanks.

Ben Weiner: Web fonts: the public face

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 23:42:00 +0000

Three recent things show how far, at least in public, web fonts have moved.

Google’s web fonts subscription service, with its previewer

Apple’s attempt to own HTML5 (associated with its efforts to diss Flash), including a natty web fonts/visual effects demo that only runs on Safari (unless you play with the referer string, I hear)

And finally, an excellent roundup of the state of play by Richard Fink on A List Apart.

Slightly further behind the scenes, the W3C Web Fonts Working Group is currently bickering about the format of metadata in WOFF files, so I am confident that the spec will move forward in the none too distant future. Happy days!

Denis Jacquerye: Attracting devs

noreply@blogger.com (Denis) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:56:14 +0000

Ben threw some good ideas on the DejaVu mailing list after hearing Hồng Phúc Ðặng's presentation How to get contributors to your free/libre/open source project from Vietnam and Asia at LGM 2010. There are some really good ideas there. We just started translating parts of the DejaVu Fonts Wiki. Hopefully we'll start blogging more often.

Máirín Duffy: Video: Easy Tethering with NetworkManager & Fedora 13

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:26:09 +0000

Ray Strode and I recently got the Sprint HTC Evo 4G smartphone this Friday and we just tried out tethering with Fedora 13 today. Thanks to NetworkManager kicking serious booty, it was amazingly easy. Watch and learn in our video.

Filed under: Fedora

OSP (Open Source Publishing): The four freedoms, two rules and one jam

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 14:31:45 +0000

At our Bauhaus Weimar presentation, we decide to make jam. So an adaptation of the GPL principles seems useful. (Free Art Licence)