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WY025-01 Bible Tight WY025-Negus-v2.cls June 28, 2004 22:29

Part I ✦ Getting Going

Once you log in, check the frequently reported bug list and check the latest errata

updates to see if your bug has already been dealt with. Then select Fedora Core to enter

a new bug report by selecting the component (software package), severity, platform,

priority, summary, description, and other information about the bug.

Note

If you have never entered a bug report before, click the bug writing guidelines link from

the Enter New Bug page. Those guidelines will give you good advice on how to pass on

the most important information about your bug to help the developers reproduce and

ﬁx the problem.

✦ Fix—If you believe that you have a code ﬁx or other solution to the problem, it’s a good

idea to submit that ﬁx along with the bug report. Red Hat, Inc., recommends that most

ﬁxes be delivered in the form of uniﬁed diffs (so the maintainer can see exactly what

code changes you are suggesting).

After you have entered the bug report, you are given an opportunity to attach a patch or

other text to the bug report. Select Create an Attachment and enter the ﬁlename of your

patch (and a brief summary description) along with the attachment.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to enter bug reports to get important ﬁxes done.

When a package maintainer goes through the list of ﬁxes needed to a software package, a

report entered into Bugzilla will carry a lot more weight than ranting in a mailing list or just

ﬁring off e-mails to the maintainer. Bug reports make for orderly ﬁxes.

Joining Fedora Projects

The Fedora Project website already lists a variety of software projects you can become

involved with. Signing on to one of the Fedora mailing lists (described earlier in this chapter)

is a great way to connect up with the people at Red Hat, Inc., who are running the ongoing

Fedora projects.

Some of the best features of Red Hat Linux that have made their transition over to Fedora are

the Red Hat installation program, the graphically oriented redhat-conﬁg tools (called

system-conﬁg in Fedora Core 2), and the Red Hat desktop. Current projects being sponsored

by Red Hat as part of the Fedora Project that include these features are:

✦ Red Hat Installation Program (Anaconda)—Its installation program named Anaconda,

with both graphical and text-based versions, has been one of the strong points of Red

Hat Linux for the past few years. Anaconda also includes a kick-start feature that lets

someone installing Fedora preconﬁgure installation selections so that the install can be

done with little or no live input. Anaconda is written in Python.

Currently, the Fedora Project is asking for bug reports and requests for enhancements

for Anaconda. If you are interested in contributing to this project, I recommend that you

join the anaconda-devel-list and/or kickstart-list mailing lists to see how you can

become involved.

✦ Conﬁguration Tools—Red Hat’s own home-grown graphical conﬁguration tools (many of

which also have text-based interfaces) have made great strides in recent Red Hat Linux

(and now Fedora) releases toward simplifying Linux system administration. These let

you conﬁgure your network, ﬁle sharing, video cards, printers, and many other features.

While I count about 40 Red Hat conﬁguration tools, there is still room to simplify many

other administrative features. The Fedora Conﬁguration Tools Project is recommending