At the recent Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in Berlin, held alongside the LinuxTag 2009 event, over 150 attendees gathered to teach, learn, and collaborate on subjects ranging from systems management best practices to user interface design. Attendees included developers, translators, security professionals, designers, and system administrators from around the globe and the Fedora community. The three-day event included two days of development featuring group-driven brainstorming, code sprints, and lecture sessions; and a dedicated day of over thirty technical and educational talks, in which the schedule and proceedings were organized directly on site by the participants themselves.

One group attending the FUDCon event was the Red Hat Security Response Team, which is made up of employees from eight different countries. During the event they collaborated on procedural revisions and were able to discuss current security issues of interest. FUDCon also hosted a Linux wireless mini-summit, attended by over a dozen upstream Linux developers representing various kernel wireless LAN driver and infrastructure component communities, related user applications, hardware vendors, and Fedora and other Linux distribution communities. The face-to-face involvement of hardware vendors helped expose the need for specific testing mode extensions. The group also explored the impact of current standards activities on Linux thanks to the attendance of a voting member of the IEEE 802.11 standards body. Finally, during the technical sessions, the group presented tutorial material that would allow contributors to participate in developing and improving open source wireless drivers.

You can’t put it better than Linux kernel wireless LAN maintainer and Red Hat engineer John Linville, who said, after the event: “Keeping these people working well together is key to further improvements and successful maintenance in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and the rest of the Linux community.”

Among the many speakers at FUDCon:

• Byte-Code solution architect Francesco Crippa and Red Hat’s 2008 RHCE of the Year award winner Jeroen van Meeuwen delivered a mini-track of topics on systems management using Cobbler, Koan, Puppet, Func, and Symbolic.
• Chitlesh Goorah conducted several sessions on the Fedora Electronics Lab and the future of low-cost, high-TCO open source tools in technical verticals.
• Fedora Engineering Manager Tom Callaway spoke on a variety of open source licensing and other legal issues.

To learn more about the proceedings in Berlin, FUDCon, and the Fedora Project, visit the Fedora Project wiki page for FUDCon Berlin 2009, at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009.

Advancements and enhancements are being made every day in many key areas of virtualization technologies. The Fedora Project is on the cutting edge and Fedora 11 showcases recent enhancements to virtualization technology that focus in on management, performance and security.

Fedora 11 includes many new features, one of which is a redesign of ‘virt-manager’; an end-to-end desktop UI for managing virtual machines. The ‘virt-manager’ feature allows the user to focus more on managing virtual machines and less on the backend, no matter what type of virtualization technology they are using. The new features within “virt-manager” include:

• a new VM creation wizard,

• improved support for host-to-host migration of VMs,

• an interface for physical device assignment for existing VMs, easing allocation of physical resources tied to VMs,

• an upgraded statistics display that shows fine grained disk and network I/O stats, and

• improved VNC authentication to connect to VMs, which allow clients to securely connect to remote VMs.

You can learn more about this innovative new tool at http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/.
» Read more

I’d like to think I’m pretty tech savvy for a CEO and have always been an early adopter of the latest and greatest tech innovations. It comes as no shock to those who know me well that I spent yesterday evening taking Fedora 11 for a test drive. I’m not ashamed to admit that I count down the days until the latest release of Fedora comes out with the same level of anticipation that my kids have when they know their birthday is coming up soon. As the title of this blog notes, one word sums up my Fedora 11 experience – wow!!!

There is so much to be excited about from improved virtualization to ext4. The latest enhancements were apparent before I even ran Fedora 11. The downloading experience was the fastest I’ve seen on the first day for previous releases. And, Fedora 11 is so easy to install that even my non-techy CEO counterparts could run Fedora 11 with ease.

On the theme of speed, I installed Fedora 11 on a pretty old machine at home and the boot is amazing. It’s almost too fast — I didn’t get a chance to fully enjoy the new graphics during boot! I’ve also installed Fedora 11 on a HP2133 netbook. It works great and handles fonts on a small screen beautifully.

Several of the advances in Fedora 11 are “under the hood” and I look forward to (and my wife is dreading) this weekend, when I can spend more time trying out Fedora 11.

Fedora continues to do a great job of fulfilling its role as a community R&D lab, and Red Hat as a major contributor benefits immensely from each new release of Fedora. Community participation is a bedrock principle of how Red Hat works, and directly equates to our increased ability to focus on the work that is vital for our customers.

Thank you to the entire Fedora community for a fantastic new release!

Today, the community-driven and Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project shows the latest in a line of innovative and compelling distribution releases with Fedora 11, code-named “Leonidas.” This release, like its predecessors, is the culmination of over six months of work by the Fedora community. It combines the efforts of volunteers, Red Hat engineers, and many upstream communities into a leading-edge distribution that anyone can download, use and redistribute for free.

Twice a year, the Fedora Project releases a new version of Fedora with a projected lifetime of about a year. This quick release cycle results in consistent development and integration of the latest in open source technologies. That makes Fedora useful not just to hobbyists and enthusiasts, but also to those looking for a sneak peek at technologies that may be found later in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
And Fedora 11 contains the broadest set of features yet for a Fedora release, including:

• New fingerprint reader support that makes biometric support easy and well-integrated

• Automatic font and mimetype installation that downloads support as needed for foreign-language documents and other content types

• New IBus input method system that makes it easy to switch languages without having to restart a session

• Improved kernel modesetting features for more video cards, including many models of Intel, ATI and NVidia

• Support for the latest filesystems like ext4, with much higher device and file size limits, and faster consistency checking

• Improved virtualization features such as a more flexible and interactive console, and a rewritten VM creation wizard

• MinGW cross-compiler tool set for creating Windows executables using the Fedora distribution

Check out the release video; that features Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields and Red Hat Community Architecture manager Max Spevack, talking about how open source evolves in Fedora. To read more about this release of Fedora visit the F11 tour on the Fedora wiki.

The Fedora distribution allows open source enthusiasts to see the future of Linux technologies. Some of these technologies are an early demonstration of helpful functions that crop up in other Linux distributions. By creating innovative features in Fedora; which is developed rapidly, released twice a year, and used by millions of people, we can help drive improvements to a myriad of open source projects.

One such project centers around interoperability. Fedora contributors are constantly working on technologies which enhance, improve and advance interoperability because our audience of developers and enthusiasts interact with a variety of systems every day. Fedora 11 gives users a chance to see these future technologies at work today.

An important interoperability feature included in the upcoming release of Fedora 11 is OpenChange. OpenChange aims to provide a portable open source implementation of the Microsoft Exchange and Exchange Server protocols. Microsoft Exchange is a proprietary messaging and collaborative software product. And until now open source clients have been unable to use its full functionality because Exchange utilizes a proprietary protocol, the Messaging Application Programming Interface or MAPI. OpenChange is the first open source implementation of the MAPI protocol.

The OpenChange implementation provides a client-side library which can be used in existing messaging clients to offer native compatibility with Exchange. Using the “libmapi” library, OpenChange allows clients such as Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, and other open source applications to utilize the full range of MAPI functionality including messaging, shared calendars, contact databases, public folders, notes and tasks. All applications can now start speaking the same language, regardless of platform.

In order to enable OpenChange and libmapi to function properly, parts of Samba 4, the open source software suite for interoperability with Microsoft network resources, has been updated in Fedora 11. Samba is the software that allows Linux hosts to use services such as Windows File and Printer Sharing, authentication and authorization functionality, and name resolution.

This is another way that the Fedora community is solving problems for open source users. To check out OpenChange download a copy of Fedora 11 from fedoraproject.org.

Summer is quickly approaching in the Northern Hemisphere and we cannot believe how fast April came and went. The Red Hat Summit and JBoss World are officially four months away, and we are very excited about everything these co-located events will offer attendees. Mark your calendars and don’t forget to submit for the 2009 Innovation Awards before nominations close on May 31. This year’s winners will be announced in September at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World.

Red Hat has a busy May ahead of us, with events in every region of the world. Make sure to keep up-to-date on all Red Hat events by following us on Twitter.

Worldwide

Red Hat and the Salt River Project (SRP) will be hosting a webinar on May 5 at 2:00 p.m. ET. Learn from a customer’s perspective how SRP made Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployable, scalable and manageable.

JBoss will be hosting a webinar entitled “Make it Rich: JBoss Tools to Easily Build Rich Internet Applications.” The webinar will take place on May 7 at 2:00 p.m. ET, and recordings will be available soon after.

View all upcoming worldwide events.

North America

Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO,will be keynoting on Monday, May 4, from 1:30-2:30 p.m. PT at the SIIA Software Summit and CODiE Awards conference, located in San Francisco. This is a comprehensive conference for the entire software industry including: ISVs, platform vendors, system integrators, venture capitalists other influencers.

On May 5th, Red Hat will be hosting the JBoss Government Users and Developers Conference in Washington, DC. Back by popular demand, this complimentary one-day conference will help attendees learn how agencies can securely and rapidly deliver mission-critical Web 2.0 applications and SOA services by leveraging open source middleware and data services platforms.

» Read more

Just a month on the heels of the Fedora 11 Beta, the Fedora Project released the Fedora 11 Preview yesterday, the last in its line of public test releases leading up to the general availability of Fedora 11, which is scheduled for official release on Tuesday, May 26, 2009. 

The preview release represents the work of a thriving community of thousands of developers that continue to make improvements and resolve issues for the final release of Fedora 11. 

The Fedora 11 release contains a long list of new features, maintained on our Feature List.  Because one of Fedora's functions is to serve as the upstream provider of leading-edge technologies, the features in Fedora 11 are a strong indicator of the future direction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The long list of improvements and innovations includes:


New virtualization features for security and desktop interaction
Automatic installation of fonts and programs for specific downloaded files
Better video card support including ATI, Intel, and Nvidia
A new system for improved handling of input by international users
The ability for developers to create Windows programs directly in Fedora using the MinGW cross-compiler
And many more


The Preview release will allow the public to see a close representation of the final release, while still giving them the opportunity to report issues that will help developers create a better final product. The Preview will be available as an installable DVD and CD set, and also as Live images.  

To see the latest in open source technologies, visit the Fedora pre-release download site and download a copy of the Fedora 11 Preview!

The rain has been falling, and spring is now in full force at Red Hat’s headquarters in North Carolina. During April, we’re looking forward to a busy month – from online webinars, to partner, middleware, and community events, we’ve got it all covered. Take a look below to see what’s happening in your part of the world.

Follow Red Hat events on Twitter.

Worldwide

On April 14, Red Hat will host the webinar “Do More with Less: Java Application Platforms for Lightweight Workloads. Look at ways to reduce TCO and do more with a shrinking IT budget. Learn how JBoss Enterprise Middleware can accommodate all types of Java application workloads. Whether you’re building and managing simple websites, or highly transactional Java EE applications, Red Hat solutions can help cut costs out of your middleware infrastructure and do more with your budget.

» Read more

Twice a year, the Fedora Project releases a distribution that combines recent innovations in free software with the polish, usability and stability for which our community has become so widely known. The Fedora 10 release in November 2008 has garnered a number of glowing reviews from users and press, who call it “fast, stable and definitely worth the upgrade” and “seasoned and solid.”

At the end of May 2009, the next release of this groundbreaking distribution, Fedora 11 — codename “Leonidas” — will be available, with a feature list that dwarfs any previous release. This release will include innovations such as:

• Further improvements to the boot process that include NVidia, ATI, and Intel video adapters, using the revolutionary kernel mode setting feature in an effort to cut boot time and provide pleasing visuals.
• Additional enhancements to the PackageKit cross-distribution package manager that support on-demand font and file support, extending the free desktop into a level of support that compares favorably to any proprietary systems.
• New virtualization features such as a new management console with enhanced mouse support on the display and larger screen real estate, integration of SELinux for guest virtual machines, access to PCI bus devices from guests, and authentication for VNC remote access.
• Support for cross-compiling Windows applications directly on Fedora using the MinGW environment.

Before each final release, Fedora produces a set of test phases that involve a growing community to find and squash bugs and issues, so the distribution will be as polished as possible. Our Alpha release from February, for instance, is meant only for a small audience of developers and community members, and is used to simply ensure that a minimum number of quality targets are being met. Nevertheless, the Fedora 11 Alpha release has already generated over 40,000 downloads in just over a month!

But today’s Beta release is meant for a much wider audience. Anyone can download the Beta as an installation medium or a Live image to try it on their system. The larger open source community, beyond just developers and Fedora contributors, can download, test, and report issues, which should substantially improve the final release. Fedora even provides convenient Live images that testers can write to either CD/DVD, or to a USB key. Windows users can also make Live USB keys using the easy LiveUSB Creator application.

Fedora seeks to create more and better opportunities for collaboration. Our upstream-friendly policy ensures that when we find issues and solutions, they are shared equally with other open source communities. Our project hosting facilities offer the ability to create open source projects with any of a number of source code management systems. And our user base, participation and membership keep rising as we’ve made it easier for people to become part of the global open source movement.

Do you want to see the future of Linux? It’s here today. Download Fedora 11 Beta and take it for a spin.

I wanted to take a quick moment to provide a brief “State of the Union” for Red Hat. I’ve been on the job at Red Hat since December 2007, and have had the opportunity to meet hundreds of Red Hat customers, partners, associates and industry leaders. In keeping with the U.S. presidential State of the Union address, I’d like to touch on plans for the upcoming year while also reflecting back to share a few observations from the past 13+ months.

Red Hat’s accomplishments help us better serve our customers and reflect the tremendous work of our associates. In addition, significant events in the external environment helped shape our business environment and influence our work and lives. Here are some highlights:

1. The value Red Hat delivers during both good and tough economic times. Red Hat has always focused on delivering quality solutions at the lowest price. With the current economic downturn, IT budgets are shrinking while expectations for performance, quality and innovation continue to grow. Enterprises are turning to open source now more than ever and Red Hat continues to help customers carve out IT costs with everything from virtualization, subscription costs, application costs and management costs to heating and cooling costs and much more.

2. Welcome Qumranet and Amentra. Red Hat made a few key acquisitions in 2008 including Qumranet and Amentra. Amentra, a provider of systems integration services for SOA, business process management, systems development and enterprise data solutions, provides a solution-oriented depth to the JBoss middleware business. In September, Red Hat welcomed Qumranet in an acquisition that positions us to deliver comprehensive, reliable and open virtualization to Linux and Windows servers and desktops. Both of these acquisitions build on Red Hat’s commitment to open source in our technologies and services.

3. Consume and contribute. I’ve met with customers and partners all over the world during the past 13 months and have heard great stories about companies who are not only consumers of Red Hat and open source, but who have also contributed back. While this is great news, I’d like to develop even deeper relationships with our customers and work together more closely to develop solutions that serve real needs and solve real problems. This continues to be a top priority as we move into 2009 as truly collaborative partnerships are instrumental to delivering value to Red Hat customers.

4. Hail to the community! Have you downloaded Fedora 10 yet? Tried out JBoss Application Server 5.0.0 GA? The Fedora Project and JBoss.org communities continue to thrive and innovate, providing the technology foundation for Red Hat’s enterprise products. As a loyal Fedora user, I’m always counting down the days as a new release approaches and I look forward to trying out all of the new features. The past year brought many successes on the community front and I can’t wait to see what Fedora and JBoss.org have in store for 2009.

5. Holding firm ground on software patents. Red Hat held firm last year on a couple of key software patent issues. First, we settled patent litigation in June involving Firestar and DataTern. With this settlement Red Hat provided for extensive protections for our customers and the larger open source community that Red Hat relies upon. We also took a stand on software patents in the Bilski case concerning the subject matter limits of patent law. Red Hat filed a brief in Bilski to educate the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals about FOSS and how software patents impede innovation in the software industry and conflict with open source development and distribution.

6. Weathering the economic storm. Red Hat has continued to execute well in what is a pretty competitive economic climate. In fiscal year 2008, Red Hat became the first open source vendor to cross the $500 million mark in revenues and we’ve also maintained 27 consecutive quarters of sequential growth in total revenue. We have a consistent track record for providing low cost, high value software and services to our enterprise customers and we will continue to build Red Hat with an eye toward growth. I also have to say that Red Hat employees are the most committed and passionate I’ve seen.

7. Keep on fighting the good fight. There is a Mohandas Gandhi quote that covers the full length of the lobby at Red Hat’s Raleigh headquarters: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” As I walk through the doors each day, this is a constant reminder of the open source ideals that are the foundation of everything we do at Red Hat. While Red Hat may be small in comparison to the proprietary giants we challenge, our open source culture promotes the free exchange of ideas and enables us to deliver better software, faster. With an endless abundance of creative thinking and collaboration, I’m proud to say that Red Hat is well equipped to continue to fight the good fight.

In closing, thanks to everyone who has welcomed me to the company over the past several months. I continue to see great opportunities for Red Hat in the coming years and can’t wait for what the remainder of 2009 has in store for Red Hat and the open source community.