Fedora 19 Virt Test Day is tomorrow, Tuesday May 28th

The Fedora 19 Virt Test Day is tomorrow, Tuesday May 28th. Check out the
test day landing page:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2013-05-28_Virtualization

If you're interested in trying out some new virt functionality, there's step
by step instructions for:

* Live migrate a VM without the need for shared storage
* Virtio RNG, a paravirtual random number generator for VMs
* PCI device assignment using VFIO

Even if you aren't interested in testing new features, we still need you! The
test day is the perfect time to make sure your virt workflow is working fine
on Fedora 19, as there will be several developers on hand to answer any
questions, help with debugging, provide patches, etc. No requirement to run
through test cases on the wiki, just show up and let us know what works (or
breaks).

If you can't make the date of the test day, adding test case results to the
wiki anytime next week is fine as well. Though if you do plan on showing up to
the test day, add your name to the participant list on the wiki, and when the
day arrives, pop into #fedora-test-day on freenode and give us a shout!

Thanks,
Cole

Fedora 18 notification sound is now a 'drip' noise

One random change I noticed during the F18 cycle was that the default notification noise changed from an innocuous 'bell' sound to a 'water drip' noise. While I turn off all terminal noises, this sound still pops up in Firefox and Thunderbird when a ctrl-f quick search doesn't find a match, and in my F18 VMs with default configuration. And while I'm sure many developers just turn off all sound effects, I find them useful for email and IRC notifications.

This new sound is offensive to my ears, one small step below nails on a chalk board. Unfortunately there is no way to undo this change in gnome-control-center's Sound panel, just 2 choices for the drip noise ('default' and 'drip'), and some other comical choices like a dog 'bark'. Nothing as unoffensive as the previous default. I (just yesterday) filed a bug against control-center asking for a way to restore the old behavior.

However, if you want to revert it in a hacky way, this should cover you until the next time sound-theme-freedesktop is updated:

 sudo wget http://cgit.freedesktop.org/sound-theme-freedesktop/plain/stereo/bell.oga?id=38bc773912317a2163083b6f483fbc8e6fb61123 -O /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/bell.oga

<rant>Why this was changed is really anyone's guess. The commit message is needlessly vague. I couldn't find any mailing list posting on freedesktop lists or gnome's desktop-devel-list, nor any bug report that might have spurned the change. The 'bell' noise was just overwritten in place, despite the fact that the new noise is not remotely a 'bell' sound, though I guess the bell name is about the action and not the sound content. The git repo had been unchanged for nearly 3 years, not an issue in itself, just makes the above bits stick out even more. And finally I really don't understand why the most common sound effect on a stock install would be a noise that is an annoyance by nature: a dripping/leaking faucet.</rant>

Fedora 18 Virt Test day is Tomorrow, Thurs Nov 1st

The Fedora 18 Virt Test Day is Thursday, November 1st. That's tomorrow!

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-11-01_Virtualization

If you're interested in trying out some new virt functionality, we've got
step by step instructions for:

* Using snapshots to backup disk images of a live VM with no VM downtime
* Assigning a physical USB3 device to your VM
* Assign a local USB device to your VM, even if the VM is on a remote machine!
* Setting disk IO bandwidth limits on your VM
* Suspend and Hibernate your VMs
* Enabling the PV EOI performance optimization for your VMs
* Using kernel syscall filters (seccomp) to further secure your host
  against VM exploits (currently busted but we are working on a fix)

Of course, maybe you don't care about new features. We still need you! The
test day is the perfect time to make sure your virt workflow is working fine
on Fedora 18, as there will be several developers on hand to answer any
questions, help with debugging, provide patches, etc. No requirement to run
through test cases on the wiki, just show up and let us know what works (or
breaks).

And to be clear, while it is greatly preferred that you have a physical
machine running Fedora 18, participating in the test day does NOT require
it: you can test the latest virt bits on Fedora 17 courtesy of the
virt-preview repo. For more details, as well as easy instructions on updating
to Fedora 18, see:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-11-01_Virtualization#What.27s_needed_to_test

If you plan on showing up to the test day, add your name to the participant
list on the wiki, and on Thursday, pop into #fedora-test-day on freenode
and give us a shout!

Thanks,
Cole