GNOME and Red Hat
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GNOME 44.rc released! [Ed: With stuff such as Flathub (not to mention Wayland, systemd etc.) GNOME is increasingly a purveyor of IBM lock-in]
Sorry for the slight delay, we discovered a problem in the GNOME OS startup but that should be fixed now with the patch for mutter here: [1] (thanks Carlos for helping with the investigation and the fix). You can see all the tests passing now in our openQA instance at openQA: gnomeos-master-iso-x86_64-gnomeos@qemu_x86_64 test results 25
We remind you we are string frozen, no string changes may be made without confirmation from the l10n team. Hard code freeze is also in place, no source code changes can be made without approval from the release-team. If you need to request any of the above, see ReleasePlanning/RequestingFreezeBreaks - GNOME Wiki! 17
Also remember you can use the 44beta branch of the flatpak runtimes, which is now available on Flathub beta.
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Jonathan Dieter: Duct tape in the datacenter
When I was growing up, on Thursday nights we would watch the Red Green Show, a comedy show set in very rural Canada. One of the regular segments on the show was the Handyman Corner, where Red Green would build something impressive out of the spare parts and garbage he had sitting around the shop, along with copious amounts of “the Handyman’s secret weapon,” duct tape, to hold everything together. To this day, whenever I see duct tape I think about the Red Green Show.
Lately I’ve had cause to think about duct tape when looking into IT infrastructure issues, some that I’ve had to handle at work, and some that we’ve all gotten to see from the outside. I don’t think I’ve ever actually used physical duct tape on the job, but there’s more than one kind of duct tape.
The thing about duct tape is that it is an incredibly useful tool for holding things together that perhaps were never intended to be connected (the Apollo 13 duct tape and cardboard scene comes to mind here). The problem is when duct tape is used as a core part of the design (as per most of Red Green’s builds).
When working with infrastructure, we may not normally be using physical duct tape, but there are plenty of things we do that correspond with duct tape. At my day job, our infrastructure is built using a GitOps model where server deployments are managed using Ansible playbooks and, more recently, Terraform configuration, all stored in git repositories. We also have development environments where we can test infrastructure and code changes before pushing to production.
The primary advantages of using the GitOps model are documentation and repeatability. Documentation in git comes pretty easily because when changes are made, it’s easy to see what was changed, and (assuming we’ve been disciplined when writing commit messages) why it was changed. Repeatability is there because, If we deploy one server with a specific configuration and need to re-deploy it at a later point, the second deployment will be identical to the first. We don’t need to worry about missing steps because it’s all automatically done when deploying the playbooks.
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Fedora Magazine: The Fedora Project FOSDEM 23 Experience
A measure of growth is most apparent when scaled across a span of different times and situations. That applies to folks getting to see you after a long time, to vegetation left alone to spread and of course, to communities having their first meetup after a prolonged spell of online-bound interactions. FOSDEM 23 happened to be one of the first times after around three years that community members from across the world met in person with each other in Brussels, Belgium. With new and old faces alike, their time was well spent representing the community, exhibiting to the wider free and open-source communities the good stuff that they have been keeping themselves busy with and most importantly, bonding with their Fedora friends.
This year FOSDEM took place on 4th February ’23 and 5th February ’23 at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, Avenue F. D. Roosevelt 50, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium. This free event was participated by over 8000 software engineering enthusiasts from across the world, had around 36 lightning talks and around 771 talks spanning 55 designated devrooms. Contributors from our community did not restrict their participation in the event as just attendees but they also enthusiastically volunteered to be stand keepers in the Fedora Project booth, speakers for a variety of talks and lectures, organizers for a set of devrooms and even as ground staff for making FOSDEM 23 a grand success.