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From attending Jesse Keating's talk about the upcoming features in Fedora 13 I learned that the rawhide repository has been split in an effort to provide a more stable build environment for Fedora releases. I also learned that it is a good idea to disable the updates-testing repo to help avoid potential breakage. Jesse also said that at some point during the upgrade cycle that the Beta will turn into the release version. With the new information, I decided that it wasn't too early build my MontanaLinux Fedora remix.

I had installed the Beta on a couple of physical and virtual machines and was fairly impressed with it so I decided to go ahead with the remix effort. First I would have to find all of the repository URLs to pull the packages from. That wasn't too difficult... just look at the files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ on a Fedora 13 Beta system.

To save on bandwidth over many builds I decided to rsync the entire development tree down so I would have a local copy. The i386 devel tree is about 19GB with 16,787 packages. The x86_64 devel tree is 21GB with 20,811 packages. I also have to rsync every day or two to keep up with package updates.

The RPM Fusion folks already have packages for Fedora 13 and the existing Adobe packages work fine on the Fedora 13 Beta as well so the this remix will be pretty close my previous remixes.

I am building from within a Fedora 13 Beta KVM virtual machine. I composed the first build yesterday and installed it on my netbook last night. I have noticed a few glitches in my initial package selection. For example I installed sugar* and that brought all of the sugar packages including sugar-logos which is a boot-time Plymouth animation. As a result, booting my netbook for the first time after install showed the Sugar animation which I wasn't expecting at all. Also the number of packages I had was right on the edge of 2GB and I wanted to insure that it would continue to fit on a 2GB USB thumbdrive... so I decided to update the package set. I decided to remove sugar completely because that would free up some room and get rid of unwanted boot animation.

I'm doing a second compose right now. We'll see how that turns out.

I just wanted to post a little background about the videos I recorded from LFNW 2010.

I recorded them with a Samsung SC-MX20 which is a very inexpensive / budget rig. The sound quality is fair to good considering the camera does not have the ability to use an external mic. The video quality is fair to good considering that most of the rooms had the lights turned off for viewing projected presentation slides. The videos are unedited and I did not bother to even add title slides mainly because I wanted to stick with Linux apps for production and I have yet to find a reasonable video editor. Yes, I've tried them all and they either have issues with audio export or want to transcode the video resolution to something other than the original size.

The videos were recorded at 720x480 resolution and where transcoded with a combination of Handbrake and ffmpeg2theora... with the final results being in Ogg Theora (.ogv) format.

The videos were uploaded to archive.org and are streaming (and downloadable) from there.

In the HTML 5 video tag I used to embed the videos I used a resolution of 512x288 to avoid forcing horizontal scrolling. Starting with the 3.6 series of Firefox you can play videos full-screen but it is recommended that you simply right-click on the videos and "Save Video As..." to download a local copy and user your preferred video player for best performance and quality.

For those with browsers that don't support the HTML 5 video tag nor Ogg Theora video, you are out of luck. Feel free to download the individual files and play them back with VLC.

Linux Server Hardening Tips and Techniques by Gary Smith.

Automating Configuration, Deployment and Maintenance for Red Hat and CentOS by Kay Williams from Rendition Software.

Hack this Site or Learn How Anyway by Andrew Becherer.

What's under the hat? A sneak peek at Fedora 13 by Jesse Keating.

Don't custom build that site! The many uses for Drupal by Jakob Perry.

Here's the video of Jesse Keating's introduction to git.

This is is the second hour of the two hour Intro to SELinux presentation by Hal Pomeranz.

Please note, my battery died with about 10 minutes to go so the last bit of the presentation is missing. Sorry!

This is is the first hour of the two hour Intro to SELinux presentation by Hal Pomeranz.