Month: December 2012

Fedora 18 LiveCD now contains LibreOffice

From Fedora 18, we will finally have LibreOffice included on Live CD, and installed by default! (We were able to do this by raising the Live CD size from 700 MiB to 1 GB, now targeting flash drives instead of CD media). This is great news for our users, because the office suite is needed by many and they had to manually install it in older releases. With this change Fedora 18 makes another step towards reasonable defaults, and it will certainly be appreciated by our newcomers.

Thanks to everyone who supported me in the discussion, and Bill Nottingham for pushing that change.

It’s a bit ironic that Fedora 18 DVD will not install LibreOffice by default, you have to select it as an “add-on” in the installer. The infrastructure standing behind package collections has been re-worked and it doesn’t allow us to enable some collection (like LibreOffice) by default. Of course you can still select it manually. Hopefully we will have it fixed and auto-selected in Fedora 19.

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Fedora 17: Possible data loss when copying files to an external HDD with Nautilus

system-file-managerI would like to warn you all about a serious bug discovered in Nautilus in Fedora 17 (GNOME 3.4). If you use it to copy files from your computer to an external HDD, you might experience a data loss (some files missing/corrupted). The problem is that Nautilus doesn’t show notifications properly when you want to eject the drive and all data is not written out yet. The bug has been fixed in Fedora 18 (GNOME 3.6), but it is still present in Fedora 17, and it is reported in bug 886435. It does not affect flash drives, only external HDDs (at least according to my tiny statistical data).

Ideally, it should look like this – if you try to eject the device, you are told that data are still being written: umount-notification-writingOnce that is complete, you are told that you can finally eject the device:

umount-notification-complete

However, none of these notifications are shown in Fedora 17, if you eject the drive using Nautilus. You then assume that everything is OK and disconnect the drive – and some of your data is silently lost.

The workaround is to use GNOME Shell notification area to unplug the drive:

umount-systray

That works well and notifications are shown.

If you happen to use some other desktop environment, like XFCE or MATE or something else with Nautilus, then probably the safest choice it to open up a terminal and run “sync” command. Once it finishes, all your data is written out correctly.

Hope this helps.

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Fedora 18: Google Chrome doesn’t work after upgrade

After I upgraded to Fedora 18 and I tried to run Google Chrome, I saw this:

$ google-chrome 
/usr/bin/google-chrome: error while loading shared libraries: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The solution is simple, just reinstall it (I assume you have google repositories added in the system):

$ yum remove 'google-chrome*'
$ yum install google-chrome-stable

It should work now.

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GNOME 3.6: GNOME Online Accounts and Google two-factor authentication

goa-panel In GNOME 3.4 (Fedora 17), GNOME Online Accounts (GOA) worked great with Google two-factor authentication (you really should enable that, if you value your data). In GNOME 3.6 (Fedora 18) it works no more, and it might be fixed in GNOME 3.8. When developers break some existing functionality for the sake of “progress”, but don’t bother fixing it or providing an alternative way before an official release, I always feel a bit… disenchanted.

Fortunately you can work around the broken code.

  1. Open Seahorse, filter your passwords for “GOA”, you should see one or two items of “Gnome Online Accounts password” type. Delete them.
  2. Re-login to Gnome session.
  3. Open Online Accounts and log in to your Google account. It will fail.
  4. Create an application-specific password for your Google account in the web browser.
  5. Open Seahorse, filter your password for “GOA”, you should see a single item. Open it and display the password. It will be very long, find the following section: 'password': <'your_password'>.
  6. Replace your_password with your application-specific password you’ve generated.
  7. Close Seahorse and re-login to your Gnome session.
  8. Online accounts should work now. It worked for me.

It would be really nice if we didn’t have to fix this stuff by hand. Every time I upgrade I have to do lots of these kinds of magic fixes. In Fedora 18, this was one of the minor issues. The big issues still await me.

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The heroes of Fedora 18 Alpha/Beta testing

Now that Fedora 18 Beta has been released, I would like to thank all who contributed to Fedora 18 Alpha/Beta testing (Install, Desktop and Base) .  Below is a list of contributors together with the number of results they reported into our release validation wiki matrices.

User name Reports submitted Referenced bugs
robatino 380 873387 847693 847691 847696 847694 875364 875380 868469 862557 847644 856894 862537 847689 847688 848631 847683 847686 853590 820472 820797 856096 872844 877313 (23)
Wutao85 173 856495 848675 854153 856503 854181 876091 849095 849112 854836 873106 878365 854471 874456 853636 874459 (15)
kparal 166 879295 875599 857523 857076 860791 810112 853988 864180 873065 848641 864842 849632 870586 879290 853404 864120 879187 863348 848682 856194 (20)
lnie 121 849504 849513 849507 849501 854844 848714 856463 875599 854836 875999 873103 878738 868777 856150 (14)
mkovarik 96 874012 862667 873463 873387 868834 856463 855513 873576 853508 873647 869391 861123 873355 866519 864468 868777 (16)
mkrizek 75 866486 (1)
satellit 52 868661 862591 862537 878985 864058 879046 875393 (7)
pschindl 50 849152 853405 856938 (3)
adamwill 47 868558 876789 856938 848305 863591 879142 856225 848641 855849 867658 879187 867605 (12)
jkeating 22 853404 (1)
jpospisi 20 876319 (1)
jskladan 19 864360 857044 (2)
smatula 17 870220 873446 870208 87342 856270 (5)
fholec 15 872695 872691 (2)
mbanas 12 851114 856463 862602 862371 (4)
bubeck 10 855170 862996 (2)
masami 9 863632 863634 860278 (3)
lkardos 7 864468 (1)
tflink 7 856225 853510 862613 868925 (4)
ljozsa 6 864926 868903 868704 (3)
efreeti 6 863689 863675 863673 863670 860278 863680 (6)
mbriza 6 855509 856169 (2)
secipolla 6 857257 857229 857207 (3)
pholica 5 (0)
jsedlak 5 864360 855849 862801 (3)
jgrulich 4 (0)
jstodola 3 862653 862593 (2)
boblfoot 3 (0)
vicodan 3 (0)
jreznik 3 705086 (1)
Wutao 3 (0)
wolfi 2 872791 (1)
Roignac 2 (0)
dvratil 2 (0)
spstarr 1 875414 (1)
Martix 1 (0)
adamwill/viking-ice 1 (0)
ljozsal 1 868704 (1)

What to say? Andre Robatino owns the game! A big thanks, Andre, your help is phenomenal! (I guess he has some handy scripts for certain test cases, but that definitely deserves a full credit.)

I am very happy to see significant community participation in the list, not just Red Hatters. Robatino being the first of course, but lots of results were reported also by satellit, followed by bubeck and masami. Thank you guys, and also thanks every one else in the matrix. It wouldn’t be possible to keep Fedora quality high without all of you!

If you haven’t participated in Fedora 18 release validation, you still have the chance and we would love to see you help us. Please read QA/Join#Release_validation or talk to us in #fedora-qa on IRC.

Thanks everyone!

A few footnotes:

  • Please bear in mind that the purpose of these numbers is not to evaluate anyone’s amount of contribution to Fedora, it displays just a single piece of a large puzzle. Lots of people test, but they don’t fill in the test case results. And even if they do, different test cases have different complexity.
  • The statistics were generated by the release-test-stats.py script.