Free software needs you! This year’s Software Freedom Day celebrations will include a Code Jam aimed at getting more people contributing to free software. The Jam is an opportunity for everyone to contribute time, code, bug fixes or anything else to a selection of FOSS projects.

The exact structure of the event is still being finalised but contributions could be in one of many ways including implementing a new feature, fixing known bugs, testing for new bugs, triaging existing bugs or translating projects.

Organiser of the Code Jam, Walter Leibbrandt, has put out a call for suggestions of which projects should be worked on during the Jam. “Because of the sheer scope of possible contributions it is not easy to simply choose a project and a way in which to contribute to it. That’s where you come in! We would like know how and to which project(s) you would prefer to contribute,” says Leibbrandt.

Anyone wanting to be involved in the Code Jam – or make suggestions – can visit the SFD 2009 wiki and add their details there.

Software Freedom Day will be held on Saturday 19 September. The Pretoria staging of the celebrations, at which the Code Jam will take place, will be held at the Department of Science and Technology offices on the CSIR campus.

The Fedora developers have been hard at work, and the result is the first alpha release of Fedora 12 which was announced earlier today.

Codenamed “Constantine”, the Fedora 12 Alpha includes a number of new features and improvements over Fedora 11. Among these are:

• Better webcam support which includes out-of-the box support for many new webcams;
• Empathy as the default IM client in place of Pidgin;
• Gnome 2.27.90 beta and KDE 4.3, the latest versions of those desktops;
• Network Manager Mobile Broadband which includes a database of known mobile broadband providers to simplify setting up a mobile broadband connection;
• A better free video codec in the latest version of the Ogg Theora video encoder, codenamed “Thusnelda”;
• PackageKit improvements that include plugins for browser-based or command line installs;
• PulseAudio improvements to include profiles, input switching and easier speaker setup; and
• Better power management.

Also included in Fedora 12 is better IPv6 network management, and automatic bug-reporting tool, Bluetooth on demand, as well as KVM virtualisation improvements that reduce memory consumption, NIC hotplug, better disk I/O, modern PXE booting, support for flexible network configurations, and much more.

A fuller list of features in Fedora 12 can be found on the Fedora Wiki.

For more information including common and known bugs, tips on how to
report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the
release notes:

The beta release of Fedora 12 is planned for 13 October and the final release for 10 November.

Red Hat, IBM and Novell are the three companies that contribute the most to Linux kernel development. A new report from the Linux Foundation says, however, that despite the contributions of these three companies, it is still non-affiliated individual developers that make up the most significant contribution to the ongoing development of a kernel which grows by more than 5 000 lines of code a day.

According to the report, individual developers (18.2%) and those not explicitly identified as working for a company (7.6%) have made 25.8% of the changes to the 2.6.x kernel to date, or a total of 37 808 changes. Red Hat developers contributed 17 981 (12.3%) changes to the same code base. IBM’s team, the second largest corporate contributor, accounted for 11 151 (7.6%) changes to the kernel.

The top ten contributors to the kernel are:

1 – None (18.2%)
2 – Red Hat (12.3%)
3 – Unknown (7.6%)
4 – IBM (7.6%)
5 – Novell (7.6%)
6 – Intel (5.3%)
7 – Consultant (2.5%)
8 – Oracle (2.4%)
9 – Linux Foundation (1.6%)
10 – SGI (1.6%)

According to the report the average kernel development cycle runs for 81 days, just shy of 12 weeks. The 2.6.12 and 2.6.24 kernels had the longest cycles at 108 days each. The shortest cycle was for the 2.6.14 release at just 61 days.

Growing quickly

With all these contributions to the code base it’s unsurprising that the Linux kernel has grown significantly in size. The 2.6.11 version of the kernel had 17 090 files and 6 624 076 lines of code. The 2.6.30 kernel has 27 911 files and 11 560 971 lines of code.

Even more interesting is the rate at which the kernel is developing and changing form. In the 2.6.11 kernel there were an average of 3 224 lines added, 11 360 lines deleted and 1 290 lines altered each and every day of the year.
This pace has stepped up since the 2.6.24 release and now averages 10 923 lines added, 5 547 lines deleted and 2 243 lines changed every day.

The full report can be downloaded from the Linux Foundation website.

Peter Sunde, one of the founders of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker site, will be the opening speaker on day three of the iWeek conference next month. Sunde will speak on “The changing role of Intellectual Property in modern culture”.

iWeek, organised by the Internet Service Providers’ Association of South Africa and UniForum SA,will be held this year from 2 – 4 September at The Forum at the Dimension Data Campus in Bryanston, Johannesburg. Registration for the event is free but closes on Thursday 27 August.

Over the weekend the Mandriva developers announced the release of a beta version of their upcoming Mandriva Linux 2010 release. The release is available for both 32- and 64-bit systems and has some cool features including Plymouth, a rewrite of NetProfile and the latest versions of KDE and Gnome.

Plymouth is now the default method of managing boot splashes which means starting up Mandriva has the potential for a whole new range of bootup effects. Plymouth runs very early in the boot process, even before the root filesystem is mounted, to provide graphical boot animations while the boot process happens in the background. Plymouth works only on systems with DRM modesetting drivers and runs until the X starts when graphical display is handed over (see Freedesktop.org for more). Non-DRM systems will simply fall back to text mode.

Mandriva Linux 2010 beta also includes a completely rewritten version of NetProfile. The Mandriva-specific tool is an independent network profile management tool that stores information on various network settings (say between home and work) which can easily be switched between. NetProfile also makes it easy to move between machines.

Other major features include KDE4.3, Gnome 2.27.5 and kernel 2.6.31 rc6.

Full details on the release can be found in the release notes and Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Beta can be downloaded from Mandriva as a 32- or 64-bit DVD image file.

The final release of Mandriva Linux 2010 is expected on 3 November 2009.

If you want to learn more about free and open source software (FOSS) then you might want to check out the Wits FOSS Awareness Day on Thursday 4 September. The event, which starts at 8am on the Wits University West Campus, will include presentations on the current state of FOSS in South Africa, the position of FOSS within the Wits University community and its role in the university’s Knowledge and Information Management systems (KIM).

While there are some sessions catering to Wits-specific interests, there will also be a number of demonstration sessions on FOSS desktop tools including those on Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org, The Gimp, Blender, Icecast and Audacity. Also of interest to the education community will be demonstrations on FOSS e-learning tools, including OpenOffice.org, Chisimba, podcasting and realtime class tutorials. The FOSS Awareness Day will be held in the FNB Auditorium and anyone who wants to attend can register on the KIM website.

Starting with the 11.2 release in November OpenSuse’s default desktop will be KDE. Previously OpenSuse shipped with Gnome set as the default desktop, with KDE also available. Now that decision has been reversed and users installing OpenSuse using the defaults will install a KDE desktop. OpenSuse will also include the Gnome desktop but it will not be set as the default desktop to be installed. Read the rest of this entry →

Today I updated OpenZA to the latest version of both WordpressMU (version 2.8.2)  and BuddyPress (version 1.0.3)  which has fixed a number of small bugs that were causing problems in the original version of the site. I also fixed some server settings that fixed teething problems. The most important changes are:

• BuddyPress 1.0.3 works better with WP2.8.2 so things are less buggy;
• New users can upload avatars without errors. This was a MediaTemple hosting problem that was easy to solve but took a bit of research to solve;
• I’ve added an “albums” feature to the community. All users should now be able to add photos/images to their profile. Please test it and let me know if there are problems; and
• Blog owners should now be able to upload images to their posts without errors.

OpenZA is still new so if you find problems please let me know by email or posting a comment in the OpenZA group.