Last week my FirefoxOS reference phone arrived: The "flame". It's not a super high end phone, but it is higher end than any of the previous firefoxos phones out there. It's got all the things they want to test as part of their os, ie, dual sim cards, front and rear cameras, adjustable memory, etc. First a bit of background: Why would I want one of these when I have a android phone? A number of reasons:

• It was only $170 and I like tinkering with new hardware.
• Android has been worrying me more and more over time. Taking core parts of the OS closed source, tying things more and more to their fiefdom of google over all else, and doing less and less the open source way.
• I'm going to be traveling to europe soon for flock, and my sprint android phone won't work over there, but I can (and did, see below) get a sim from another provider that does provide text/data roaming there.
• I like rooting for the underdog and android sure isn't that anymore.

Lets go over the hardware first. You can see a full list (and also buy one if you like) at everbuying.com ( http://www.everbuying.com/product549652.html ).  The phone is nicely solid, if a bit thicker than my galaxy s3. The screen is pretty bright and nice. Presses are somewhat different than I am used to, but seem to work fine after adjusting a little bit where I press. The battery life so far has been awesome! Leaving it unplugged overnight after some playing around with it leaves me at around 85%. Doing a wifi hotspot for about an hour leaves me also at around 85% (so 6 hours off power of wifi teathering). There is only one button on the phone which definitely takes some getting used to if you are used to android devices, but is doable. The sim slots and micro-sd work fine and are pretty easy to get to. Wifi works fine as well, it connected right up there. Also, once you enable debugging in the developer options, connection via usb to a Fedora machine works fine and (re)uses the adb and fastboot tools. On the software end, there's a lot of rough edges. A bit confusingly to me is that you can use the 'I'm thinking of' search bar to search for something... say "facebook" and it basically finds web pages related to that. If you press and hold the 'facebook' icon one it adds it to your desktop. It's basically just a launcher for the firefox browser to load the mobile facebook site. If you go to the marketplace and search for 'facebook' you get a facebook 'app' that's a html5/js/whatever application, which you can also add to your desktop. They have slightly different icons, and behave slightly differently when run. I guess if I had to make a suggestion there, I would say they should always prefer the 'app' since most mobile sites views are... not ideal. This is apparent in the g+ mobile site with the browser: you cannot get to communities. There's just no link to do so. It takes a bit of getting used to to look for a back arrow in applications (since there's only one button), and if you are in a web session, you have to swipe very gently up from the bottom to get a small toolbar with a back arrow (that was not easy to discover).  I was very happy to see 'do not track' options available in settings, and the browser seems to do pretty well on most any site I hit. The camera pictures I have taken haven't been great. It doesn't seem to focus very well. I couldn't get the email client hooked up to my server because a use a cacert ssl cert, and it's untrusted and the app has no 'allow untrusted certs'. Here maps is the replacement for google maps, and it's actually not too bad. I guess it's a nokia thing? Contacts imported from google just fine. You can also import from facebook and others. There's not so many applications yet in the marketplace. In particular I'd like a openvpn client, freeotp (although there are some shady looking otp clients already), fbreader (there is a passable epub reader, but it's pretty primitive next to the current gen of android ebook apps), and a few others. I picked up a cheap t-mobile sim for it (T-Mobile has free roaming to europe apparently), and it activated fine and works great so far. The sms app is pretty reasonable, the wifi hotspot app works fine, calls work ok, etc. The phone is running a prerelease of firefoxos 1.3. It sounds like 2.0 (due out later this year) is going to have a major UI re-write and facelift. It's not very easy to find one place with any information on the OS. There's a bunch of different places in the mozilla world mentioning it, and you can drill down to blocker bugs in their bugzilla, but there's not much in the way of an accurate schedule for when something is going to land and whats in it and who or what is doing the work on those things. I'm going to try and take and use it as my primary phone next month when I go to flock, should have a good deal more to report then. I think I could use it as my primary phone with some pain, but we will see. I really like the idea of a 100% free android competitor.

According to the schedule, yesterday was Fedora 21 branch day. We ran into a few minor issues with the branching, but overall it went well. This is the part of the release where we basically copy rawhide over to a new "branched release", in this case what will become Fedora 21. Rawhide then moves ever on (in this case to Fedora 22, which of course it will never reach, as that will be branched off it someday and it will go on to 23, etc). So, rawhide users need to look carefully the next few days. Do you want to follow Fedora 21 on it's new branch being stablized for release? Or do you want to keep on riding the rawhide train? Pay attention to fedora-release versions and what repos are enabled to make sure you choose the path you want. Otherwise things have been running along about as usual in rawhide. A bit of breakage in image creation with some systemd changes, but otherwise pretty quiet at least for me. For those of you following the branch: good luck. I'll be sticking with rawhide here and will keep trying to keep it usable day to day.

Just thought I would do a quick post to note that our fedora message bus is more active than ever since we have gotten lots of new things hooked up to it lately and it's so easy to watch all the activity and note things you are interested in.

• You can simply join #fedora-fedmsg on freenode and watch the messages go by and use your irc clients native highlight to alert you to things you care about. Or watch them all and learn something new. :)
• If you're on a fedora machine: "yum install fedmsg" and then run 'fedmsg-tail --really-pretty' in a terminal to watch the bus. You can also trigger actions off with fedmsg-trigger (in same package)
• There's fedmsg-notify if you want gui messages direct on your desktop. Install that package and run fedmsg-notify-config to set it up.
• Look for our notifications service to roll out fully soon too, so you can have it email, msg you on irc or notify you on your mobile device when a message you care about drives accross the message bus.

It's great to see all the messages, and we are only going to be adding more...

The Fedora 21 mass rebuild took about 40 hours this time. This a bit of improvement over last time and we have more packages now. Distribution of builds: (all times my local time, Month/Day/Hour) Jun 06 16 82 Jun 06 17 183 Jun 06 18 365 Jun 06 19 370 Jun 06 20 385 Jun 06 21 374 Jun 06 22 363 Jun 06 23 365 Jun 07 00 380 Jun 07 01 378 Jun 07 02 350 Jun 07 03 409 Jun 07 04 447 Jun 07 05 453 Jun 07 06 345 Jun 07 07 294 Jun 07 08 312 Jun 07 09 372 Jun 07 10 314 Jun 07 11 421 Jun 07 12 474 Jun 07 13 393 Jun 07 14 310 Jun 07 15 251 Jun 07 16 284 Jun 07 17 362 Jun 07 18 327 Jun 07 19 358 Jun 07 20 516 Jun 07 21 409 Jun 07 22 350 Jun 07 23 222 Jun 08 00 231 Jun 08 01 273 Jun 08 02 271 Jun 08 03 319 Jun 08 04 317 Jun 08 05 281 Jun 08 06 276 Jun 08 07 266 Jun 08 08 273 Jun 08 09 190 Total packages rebuilt: 13929 Packages that failed: 1298 Please see http://ausil.fedorapeople.org/f21-failures.html for a list of failed builds. Also, bugs are being filed against all the failed builds (including logs) for maintainers. The rebuilds should land in today's rawhide (syncing out now). We are going to be branching Fedora 21 from rawhide in just about a month: 2014-07-08 so it would be great if we could get things all cleaned up before then.

Final day of the FAD has arrived. After catching up on emails and a few other pending tasks, I headed down and joined the rest of the FADders after breakfast. First order was some more releng staging setup: made the staging koji hub a nfs server and set some other staging hosts as nfs clients. This should let us test things like mashing updates with Bodhi, or building rawhide. Also, should allow us to do newrepo tasks on the builder instead of just on the hub. Some more discussion around QA infrastructure today, mostly just sorting out what we discussed some already yesterday, and we started merging qa ansible playbooks into infrastructure and created a new db host and resultsdb servers. Lots of discussion around taskotron and bodhi interactions. What queries when and how we could hook in gating when we/if we get to the point where we want to do that. All in all lots and lots of things got done. I think it's been a very productive FAD. No, we didn't get bodhi2 deployed, but it's much more clear the parts that need implementing and lots of parts got implemented. I definitely expect bodhi2 to land sometime this year. ;)

A few fun things to share with everyone in rawhide land: First, we turned on xz repodata a while back, so if you have noticed your yum/dnf updates being a bit quicker and less BW intensive that might be why. If you are manipulating rawhide in an older os, you may need to install pyliblzma in order to keep reading the data as before. The work on signing rawhide packages is moving forward. Stay tuned, but hopefully we will have something before too long on that front. Finally, the f21 mass rebuild is almost on us. It will start this friday evening. We have more builders than ever enabled and ready, so I suspect this will be a pretty quick rebuild. Do look for almost all your installed rawhide packages to get updates however. Hopefully there won't be too much fallout to clean up.

Today for me was all about getting our staging releng env better up to snuff so we could test things properly like bodhi2 once it's ready. Dennis and I got our koji.stg.fedoraproject.org all functional at the end of the day. It's got its own builder and inherits repos from the production instance so we don't need to update it all the time. I have a pretty good set of instructions to set things up again and we are going to look at turning them into a proper script/playbook soon. A few minor things remain, like setting things up so we can properly mash updates in stg and syncing pkgs.stg.fedoraproject.org up with production, but all in all a great day. Other folks worked on more parts of bodhi2. Lots of things coming together now. I don't expect it to be done by the end of the FAD, but it should be really a lot further along. ;)

Day two started with some catchup on emails and so forth, then another run to the airport for me. Then, everyone had arrived and we had some great discussions. I talked with Tim Flink from QA about infrastructure plans and we sorted out a lot of things. We are going to look at improving some of our infrastructure tools and merge in their playbooks into our ansible setup. We talked databases, monitoring and backups. Great to get some things sorted out more and will be working on things more in the next few days. Then was some releng talk. We brainstormed a way we might be able to make our staging releng actually useful: Set it up so it uses the primary koji as external repos. This would allow us to easily build against whats in production to test the package lifecycle, without having to carry a bunch of differences. I started working on making our koji staging over in ansible so we can get this going. We just need that setup, a staging builder and we should be in much better shape. I got the instance reinstalled, but it needs more config work. A great dinner and some classic arcade and pinball playing ended the day.

Folks started arriving and after a quick run to the airport and hotel, 4 of us gathered at the site of the FAD and started doing some planning and goals for the next few days. We have some big ones, but I think we can get a lot done. We started a document on gobby: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Gobby to brainstorm things and mark what is done and still needs doing. Another two of our FAD crew arrived in the afternoon, with the last delayed until tomorrow. I managed to do a fair bit of talking with folks about behavior of various corner cases, reviewed a few packages that are needed for bodhi2, setup jenkins to let bodhi2 do some CI magic, and organized things for the next few days. Feel free to join us in #fedora-fad over the next few days as we work to get bodhi2 and taskotron worked into shape. :)

Just happened to see that we now have over 10,000 ranked users in Fedora Badges along with over 180 badges. It's a great way to contribute to Fedora and have some fun along the way. If you've not looked around yet, there's a number of easy to get badges you could grab in a lazy saturday afternoon if you wanted. :) https://badges.fedoraproject.org/ has more information about Fedora Badges, a leaderboard, and ways to explore and see what badges are available.