The kernel team is working on final integration for Linux kernel 6.15. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora Linux. As a result, the Fedora Linux kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Sunday, June 08, 2025 to Sunday, June 15, 2025. The wiki page in this article contains links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Please continue reading for details.
How does a test week work?
A test week is an event where anyone can help ensure changes in Fedora Linux work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed before, this is a perfect way to get started.
To contribute, you only need to be able to do the following things:
Download test materials, which include some large files
Read and follow directions step by step
The wiki page for the kernel test week has a lot of good information on what and how to test. After you’ve done some testing, you can log your results in the test week web application. If you’re available on or around the days of the event, please do some testing and report your results. We have a document which provides all the necessary steps.
Happy testing, and we hope to see you on one of the test days.
As we head into Flock, It’s time again to talk about #strategy2028 — our high-level plan for the next few years.
Since it’s been a while since I’ve given an update, I’m going to start at the top. That way, If this is new to you, or if you’ve forgotten all about it, you don’t need to go sifting through history for a refresher. If you’ve been following along for a while, you may want to skip down to the “Process section”, or if you just want to get to the practical stuff, all the way down to “Right Now”.
The Strategic Framework and High Level Stuff
Fedora’s Goals
Vision
The ultimate goal of the Fedora Project is expressed in our Vision Statement:
The Fedora Project envisions a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive, welcoming, and open-minded communities.
Mission
Our Mission Statement describes how we do that — we make a software platform that people can use to build tailored solutions. That includes offerings from our own community (like the Fedora Editions or Atomic Desktops) and those from our “downstreams” (like RHEL, Amazon Linux, Bazzite, and many more).
Strategy 2028
We also have a medium-term goal — the target of Strategy 2028. We have a “guiding star” metric for this:
Guiding Star
By the end of 2028, double the number of contributors1 active every week.
But this isn’t really the goal. It’s a “proximate measure” — something simple we can count and look at to tell if we’re on track.2
The Goal of Strategy 2028
The goal itself this:
The Fedora Project is healthy, growing, relevant, and ready to take on the next quarter-century.
But, goals aren’t strategy — they describe the world we want, and Fedora’s overall work, but not the path we’ll take to get there.
The Actual Strategy
During our Council Hackfest session, I realized that we haven’t really put this into writing — instead, we’ve jumped straight to other levels of the process. So, here it is:
1. Identify areas of community interest and effort which we believe will advance Fedora towards our goal.
The computing world changes quickly, and Fedora is a community-driven project. We can’t pick things out of thin air or wishful thinking. We also need to pick things that really, actually, practically will make a difference, and that’s a hard call. Making these calls is the fundamental job of the Fedora Council.3
2. Invest in those areas.
A strategy needs to have focus to be meaningful. The Council will devote time, energy, publicity, and community funding towards the selected areas. This necessarily means that other things won’t get the same investment. At least, not right now.
3. Check if the things we picked are working.
The “guiding star” metric is one way, of course, but we’ll need specific metrics, too. At the meeting, we agreed that we have been lazy on this in the past. It’s hard work, and when something isn’t working, can lead to hard conversations. We need to do better — keep reading for how we plan to do that.
4. When things are working, double down. When things aren’t, stop, change, or switch direction.
If we’re on the right track in one area, we should consider what we can do next to build on that. When something isn’t working, we need to take decisive action. That might be re-scoping an initiative, relaunching in the same area but with a different approach, or simply wrapping up. What we won’t do is let things linger on uncertainly.
5. Rinse, repeat!
Some of what we choose will be smaller bites, and some will be more ambitious. That means we expect to be choosing new initiatives several times a year.
The Process
Practically speaking, for each area we choose, we’ll launch a new Community Initiative. We know these haven’t always been a smashing success in Fedora, but the general concept is sound. We’re going to do a few things differently, driven by our Fedora Operations Architect. (Thanks, @amoloney.)
Better Community Initiatives
First, we will require better initial proposals. We need to see concrete milestones with dates and deliverables. There needs to be a specific plan of action — for example, if the Initiative intends to progress its technical work through a series of Changes, the plan should include a list of expected proposals with a brief description for each.4
Second, we will hold initiatives accountable. Each Initiative Lead should produce a monthly or weekly status report, and we will actively review each initiative every quarter.
Third, we will create “playbooks” for the roles of Initiative Lead and Executive Sponsor. The Lead is responsible for the work, and the Sponsor is accountable for its success. We’re working on written guidance and onboarding material so that when we start an Initiative, the people involved at the Council level know what they actually need to do.
Finally, we will provide better support. We’ll help develop the Initiative’s Logic Model rather than requiring it as part of the submission. We will be better at broadcasting the leadership of each Initiative, so community members (and the leaders themselves!) know that they’re empowered to do the work. We’ll make sure Initiatives are promoted at Fedora events, and in other ways throughout the year. We will prioritize Initiatives for in-person Hackfests and other funding. And, we will will provide some program management support.5
Previously on Strategy 2028…
Our Themes
We started all of this a few years ago by asking for community input. Then, we grouped ideas we heard into Themes. These will be stable until the end of 2028 (when it’ll be time to do this whole thing over again). Under each theme, we have several Focus Areas. In bold, areas where we have a recently completed project, or something big in progress already. (See the footnotes.)
We spent the bulk of our time getting more specific about our immediate future. Under each theme, Council members identified potential Initiatives that we believe are important to work on next. We came up with a list of thirteen — which is way more than we can handle at once. We previously set a limit of four Initiatives at a time. We decided to keep to that rule, and are planning to launch four initiatives in the next months:
1. Editions block on a11y
Accessibility
This one is simple. We have release criteria for accessibility issues in Fedora Editions… but we don’t block on them. Sumantro will lead an effort to get all of our Editions in shape so that we can make these tests “must-past” for release.
2. GitOps Experiment
Communications/Collaboration Tools
This is Aleksandra’s project to demostrate how we could use a “GitOps” workflow to improve the packager experience from beginning to end. Matthew is the Executive Sponsor (for now!) Read more about this here: [RFC] New Community Initiative – GitOps for Fedora Packaging.
3. Gitforge Migration
Communications/Collaboration Tools
We’re moving to Forgejo. That’s going to be a long project with a lot to keep track of. Aoife is sponsoring the effort overall and will work with others on specific initiatives.
4. AI Devtools Out-of-Box
Tech Innovation
This is about making sure Fedora Linux is ready for people who want to work on machine learning and AI development. It isn’t about adding any specific AI or LLM technology. David is taking the lead here, with details in the works.
Next up
We can only focus on so much at once, but as current and near-future initiatives wrap up, these are the things we expect to tackle next, and an associated Council member. (That person may be either an Initiative Lead or an Executive Sponsor when the time comes.)
Bugzilla Archive (David) Red Hat is winding down bugzilla.redhat.com. There’s no planned shutoff date, but we should be ready. We are likely to move most issue tracking to Forgejo — it’d be nice to have packaging issues right next to pull requests. But, the current bugzilla database is a treasure-trove of Fedora history which we don’t want to lose
Discussions to Discourse (Matthew, for now) This is part of our overall effort to reduce Fedora’s collaboration sprawl — and to set us up for the future. It’s time to move our primary discussion centers from the devel and test mailing lists.
Get our containers story straight (Jason) The previous system we used to build containers was called “OSBS”, and was a hot mess of a hacked-up OpenShift, and not even the current kind of OpenShift. I know people are pretty skeptical about Konflux as a Koji replacement … but it can build containers in a better way.
Formal, repeatable plan for release marketing (Justin) We have a great Marketing team, but don’t do a great job of getting feature and focus information from Edition working groups to that team. We should build a better process.
More Fedora Ready (Matthew/Jef) Fedora Ready is a branding initiative for hardware vendors who want to signal that their product works well with our OS. Let’s expand this — and bring on more vendors with preinstalled Fedora Linux.
Mindshare funding for regional Ambassador planning events (Jona) This is the first step towards rebuilding our worldwide local community Ambassadors.
Silverblue & Kinoite are ready to be our desktop Editions, with bootc (Jason) We think image-based operating systems are the future — let’s commit.
CoreOS, IoT, and Atomic Desktops share one base image (Jason) Right now, we’ve got too many base images — can we get it down to one?
Fedora, CentOS, RHEL conversation (Matthew/Jef) See What everyone wants for more on this one.
See you all at Flock!
So, that’s where we are now, and our near-future plans. After Flock, look forward to more updates from Jef!
For this purpose, we are using a broad definition of contributor. That is: A Fedora Project contributor is anyone who: 1) Undertakes activities 2) which sustain or advance the project towards our mission and vision 3) intentionally as part of the Project, (4) and as part of our community in line with our shared values. A contribution is any product of such activities. So, active contributors for a week is the count of people who have made at least one contribution during that time. ︎
Um, yeah, I know that we don’t have a public dashboard with our estimate of this number yet. That’s because when we started, we quickly realized we need data scientist help — we need to make sure we’re measuring meaningfully. ︎
The Fedora Council has two elected positions, representatives from Mindshare and FESCo, and Leads for each Community Initiative. If you care about where we are going as a project, you could be the person in one of those seats! ︎
Of course, this plan can evolve, but any major changes should be brought back to the Council. ︎
The Fedora Linux 42 election results are in! After one of our most hotly contested elections recently, we can now share the results. Thank you to all of our candidates, and congratulations to our newly elected members of Fedora Council, Fedora Mindshare, FESCo and EPEL Steering Committee.
Results
Council
Two Council seats were open this election. A total of 988 ballots were cast, meaning a candidate could accumulate up to 1659 votes.
# votes
Candidate
1089
Miro Hrončok
906
Aleksandra Fedorova
593
Akashdeep Dhar
586
Jared Smith
554
Shaun McCance
490
Fernando F. Mancera
447
Eduard Lucena
FESCo
Four FESCo seats were open this election. A total of 1128 ballots were cast, meaning a candidate could accumulate up to 1617 votes.
# votes
Candidate
1036
Neal Gompa
995
Stephen Gallagher
868
Fabio Valentini
835
Michel Lind
625
Debarshi Ray
607
Jeremy Cline
559
Tim Flink
Mindshare Committee
Four Mindshare Committee seats were open this election. A total of 982 ballots were cast, meaning a candidate could accumulate up to 1520 votes.
# votes
Candidate
774
Emma Kidney
750
Sumantro Mukherjee
702
Akashdeep Dhar
670
Luis Bazan
623
Samyak Jain
587
Shaun McCance
529
Greg Sutcliffe
500
Eduard Lucena
EPEL Steering Committee
As we had the same number of open seats as we had candidates, the following candidates are elected to the EPEL Steering Committee by default:
Davide Cavalca
Robbie Callicotte
Neal Gompa
Once again thank you to all of our candidates this election. The caliber was truly amazing! Also thank you to all of our voters, and finally – congratulations to our newly elected representatives!
We are currently working on the Fedora 43 Wallpaper and wanted to update the community while also looking for contributors!
Each wallpaper is inspired by someone in STEM in history with the letter in the alphabet we’re on. We are currently on the letter R, and voted here with the winner resulting in Sally Ride.
Who is Sally Ride?
Sally Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was a physicist and astronaut, who became the first American woman in space on June 18, 1983. The third woman ever!
Once her training at Nasa was finished, she served as the ground-based CapCom for the second and third Space Shuttle flights. She helped develop the Space Shuttle’s robotic arm which helped her get a spot on the STS-7 mission in June 1983. Two communication satellites were deployed, including the first Shuttle pallet satellite (SPAS-1). Ride operated the robotic arm to deploy and retrieve SPAS-1, which carried ten experiments to study the formation of metal alloys in microgravity.
Ride then became the president and CEO of ‘Sally Ride Science’. Sally Ride Science created entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students, focusing largely on female students.
Ride and her life long partner O’Shaughnessy co-wrote six books on space aimed at children, to encourage children to study science. Ride remarked, “Everywhere I go I meet girls and boys who want to be astronauts and explore space, or they love the ocean and want to be oceanographers, or they love animals and want to be zoologists, or they love designing things and want to be engineers. I want to see those same stars in their eyes in 10 years and know they are on their way.” It was after her death it was revealed she was the first LGBT astronaut in space.
Brainstorming
The design team held a separate meeting from our usual time to dedicate an hour of time to gathering visuals that were related somehow to Ride’s work. From visuals of space that were used in the books she created,
Possible Themes to Develop:
Space Mid Century Modern Graphics
This is probably my personal preference! Mid century modern is categorized with clean lines, bold saturated colors, and organic forms in nature. It was most popular from the late 1940s-1960s, extending to when the space race first started to lay its roots.
Going down this route would result in a colorful wallpaper, although not overwhelming since it would be limited to a small color palette. The idea was sparked by Ride’s dedication to education and teaching- as these types of graphics would often pop up in schools as informative posters.
Blueprint of Space
A dark background with planets and white details to show information just like a blueprint would. Also sparked by the type of graphics you would find in a school. The only problem that might arise is too much detail. Wallpapers on the whole are supposed to be quite simple so the user can have a calm experience. Too many details that might make it look like a blueprint, might make it too busy. However I’m sure there could be a balance of both.
Colorful Space
We have several space themed wallpapers that show the stars or planets, so this would be a nod to them (see F33,F24, F10, F9) as well as a nod to the most well known part of Ride’s career. Including some of the colors from Fedora’s color palette, like Freedom Purple, Friends Magenta, Features Orange, and First Green, into the galaxy or planetary visuals would be a great option. But not too bright and electric that it irritates the viewer when they look at it.
As a Python developer you work hard to ensure code works correctly across different Python versions. You have to test against Python 3.11, 3.12, 3.13 and beyond, it can be tedious. But what if your continuous integration (CI) pipeline could handle it automatically? This is where GitHub Actions and tox come in – a powerful combo for seamless CI and multi-version testing.
Introduction
Imagine you are a developer for a small real estate company, racing against the clock to deliver a groundbreaking fizz-buzz feature on the company’s python app. You make a last minute fix and commit. After testing locally, you merge with confidence, push to GitHub, and ship. Then disaster strikes, the change breaks an existing feature and the new feature you added does not work. Management is furious, and the only excuse you could give is “it worked on my machine”.
If only you had set up GitHub Actions for continuous integration (CI), you could have made sure it worked on different versions of Python.
In this article, you will learn how to set up GitHub Actions to manage continuous integration for your Python projects. You will also learn how to test your code on different versions of Python using tox on Fedora.
Prerequisites
GitHub Account
Fedora, CentOS, or RHEL server. This guide uses Fedora 41 server edition. Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL servers are interchangeable.
A user account with sudo privileges on the server.
Command line competency.
Python 3.13 environment, with poetry, tox, and pytest packages installed.
What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice where you merge your code to the repository several times a day. CI reduces software defects, because every time you push a change to the repository it is verified by automated tests and built. Generally, CI refers to the server part of the build process, where you run unit tests and build your application. However, it can also be done locally. To carry out CI, you define a build pipeline using YAML. The build pipeline runs a set of automated tools for unit tests, security checks, document generation, or code quality checks.
Why use CI?
Central to CI is code stability. By running unit tests on your code whenever you make a change, you are confident that those changes do not cause software defects in your codebase. This way, you know, your code is stable; commit after commit.
There are two important aspects of CI that ensure code stability:
CI checks that code compiles or builds successfully.
CI checks that all unit tests pass successfully.
What is Tox?
Tox, is a tool that automates Python unit tests in multiple Python environments. According to tox documentation, you can use tox for:
checking your package builds and installs correctly under different environments
Running your tests in each of the environments with the test tool of choice
As a frontend to continuous integration servers
What are GitHub Actions?
GitHub Actions is a feature on Github.com that serves as an automation engine for CI. It allows you to automate tasks directly within your GitHub repository using workflows.
To use GitHub Actions effectively, you need to understand how the system works using a top-down approach.
An event is a specified activity that triggers a workflow. An activity may occur when a commit is pushed or a pull request is made. In this tutorial, an event occurs when you push a commit to your GitHub repository.
A workflow is an automated process which runs when an event occurs. It defines how code is tested, built or compiled using actions. A YAML file defines the steps in the workflow and exists in the .github/workflows directory of your repository.
A job runs actions you specify. While there are no limits on the number of actions you can run in a job, there is a maximum execution time of 6 hours. Jobs are executed in runners (containers or virtual machines). You can choose Linux, Windows, or macOS runners to run your CI jobs.
An action is the smallest building block of a workflow. According to GitHub documentation; “an action is a custom application for the GitHub Actions platform that performs a complex but frequently repeated task”. You can write custom actions as Node.js scripts or use those in the GitHub marketplace.
Test a Python project
This python project is for a calculator with functions for adding and multiplying numbers only. You will use pytest and tox to test the code using Python 3.12, and 3.13. You will also push the code to GitHub, and use GitHub Actions for CI.
HEAD’s UP: Remember, GitHub Actions uses runners for CI jobs, and runners can be Windows, Ubuntu or macOS? Did you notice, Fedora is not on the list?
Checkout, out this repository on GitHub. It contains working code for the calculator, tests, and a workflow for this tutorial. It uses the tox-github-action from Fedora Python to run tests in CI. The tests are run in a Fedora container, which is hosted in an Ubuntu runner.
This is the file structure you will work with;
Step 1: Write the Code
Here is the calculator code at /ciwithfedora/calculator.py
def add(a, b): """Returns the sum of two numbers.""" return a + b
def multiply(a, b): """Returns the product of two numbers.""" return a * b
Step 2: Write unit tests
Here is the unit test code at /ciwithfedora/test_calculator.py
This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.
The purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.). List of planned/in-progress issues
Here’s another update on the upcoming fedoraproject Datacenter move.
Summary: there have been some delays, the current target switch week to the new Datacenter is now the week of 2025-06-30. ( formerly 2025-05-16 ).
The plans we mentioned last month are all still in our plan, just moved out two weeks.
Why the delay? Well, there were some delays in getting networking setup in the new datacenter, but thats now been overcome and we are back on track, just with a delay.
Here’s a rundown of the current plan:
We now have access to all the new hardware, it’s firmware has been updated and configured.
We have a small number of servers installed and this week we are installing OS on more servers as well as building out vm’s for various services.
Next week is flock, so we will probibly not make too much progress, but we might do some more installs/configuration if time permits.
The week after flock we hope to get openshift clusters all setup and configured.
The week after that we will start moving some applications that aren’t closely tied to the old datacenter. If they don’t have storage or databases, they are good candidates to move.
The next week will be any other applications we can move
The week before the switch will be getting things ready for that (making sure data is synced, plans are reviewed, etc)
Finally the switch week (week of june 30th): Fedora Project users should not notice much during this change. Mirrorlists, mirrors, docs, and other user facing applications should continue working as always. Updates pushes may be delayed a few days while the switch happens. Our goal is to keep any end user impact to a minimum.
For Fedora Contributors, Monday and Tuesday we plan to “move” the bulk of applications and services. Contributors should avoiding doing much on those days as services may be moving around or syncing in various ways. Starting Wednesday, we will make sure everything is switched and fix problems or issues as they are found. Thursday and Friday will continue stabilization work.
The week after the switch, some newer hardware in our old datacenter will be shipped down to the new one. This hardware will be added to increase capacity (more builders, more openqa workers, etc).
This move should get us in a nicer place with faster/newer/better hardware.
Authselect is a utility tool that manages PAM configurations using profiles. Starting with Fedora 36, Authselect became a hard requirement for configuring PAM. In this article, you will learn how to configure PAM using Authselect.
Introduction.
Unauthorized access is a critical risk factor in computer security. Cybercriminals engage in data theft, cyber-jacking, crypto-jacking, phishing, and ransomware attacks once they gain unauthorized access. A common vulnerability exploit for unauthorized access is poor configuration authentication. Pluggable authentication module (PAM) plays a critical role in mitigating this vulnerability, by acting as a middleware layer between your application and authentication mechanisms. For instance, you can use PAM to configure a server to deny login after 6pm, and any login attempts afterwards will require a token. PAM does not carry out authentication itself, instead it forwards requests to the authentication module you specified in its configuration file.
This article will cover the following three topics:
PAM
Authselect, and authselect profiles
How to configure PAM
Prerequisites:
Fedora, Centos or RHEL server. This guide uses Fedora 41 server edition. Fedora, Centos, and RHEL servers are interchangeable.
A user account with sudo privileges on the server.
Command line familiarity.
What is PAM?
The Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) provides a modular framework for authenticating users, systems, and applications on Fedora Linux. Before PAM, file-based authentication was the prevalent authentication scheme. File-based authentication stores, usernames, passwords, id’s, names, and other optional information in one file. This was simple, and everyone was happy until security requirements changed, or new authentication mechanisms were adopted.
Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAMs) provide a centralized authentication mechanism which system applications can use to relay authentication to a centrally configured framework. PAM is pluggable because there is a PAM module for different types of authentication sources (such as Kerberos, SSSD, NIS, or the local file system). Different authentication sources can be prioritized.
PAM acts as a middleware between applications and authentication modules. It receives authentication requests, looks at its configuration files and forwards the request to the appropriate authentication module. If any module detects that the credentials do not meet the required configuration, PAM denies the request and prevents unauthorized access. PAM guarantees that every request is consistently validated before it denies or grants access.
Why PAM?
Support for various authentication schemes using pluggable modules. These may include two-factor authentication (2FA), password authentication (LDAP), tokens (OAuth, Kerberos), biometrics (fingerprint, facial), Hardware (YubiKey), and much more.
Support for stacked authentication. PAM can combine one or more authentication schemes.
Flexibility to support new or future authentication technology with minimal friction.
High performance, and stability under significant load.
Support for granular/custom configuration across users and applications. For example, PAM can disallow access to an application from 5pm to 5am, if an authenticated user does not possess a role.
Authselect replaces Authconfig
Authselect was introduced in Fedora 28 to replace Authconfig. By Fedora 35 Authconfig was removed system-wide. In Fedora 36 Authselect became a hard dependency making it a requirement for configuring PAM in subsequent Fedora versions.
This tool does not configure your applications (LDAP, AD, SSH); it is a configuration management tool designed to set up and maintain PAM. Authselect selects and applies pre-tested authentication profiles that determine which PAM modules are active and how they are configured.
Here’s an excerpt from the Fedora 27 changeset which announced Authselect as a replacement for Authconfig
Authselect is a tool to select system authentication and identity sources from a list of supported profiles.
It is designed to be a replacement for authconfig but it takes a different approach to configure the system. Instead of letting the administrator build the pam stack with a tool (which may potentially end up with a broken configuration), it would ship several tested stacks (profiles) that solve a use-case and are well tested and supported.
From the same changeset, the authors report that Authconfig was error prone, hard to maintain due to technical debt, caused system regressions after updates, and was hard to test.
Authconfig does its best to always generate a valid pam stack but it is not possible to test every combination of options and identity and authentication daemons configuration. It is also quite regression prone since those daemons are in active development on their own and independent on authconfig. When a new feature is implemented in an authentication daemon it takes some time to propagate this feature into authconfig. It also may require a drastic change to the pam stack which may easily introduce regressions since it is hard to test properly with so many possible different setups.
Authselect profiles, and what they do.
As mentioned above, Authselect manages PAM configuration using ready-made profiles. A profile is a set of features and functions that describe how the resulting system configuration will look. One selects a profile and Authselect applies the configuration to PAM.
In Fedora, Authselect ships with four profiles;
$ authselect list
- local Local users only
- nis Enable NIS for system authentication
- sssd Enable SSSD for system authentication (also for local users only)
- winbind Enable winbind for system authentication
For descriptions of each profile, visit Authselect’s readme page for profiles, and the wiki, available on GitHub.
You can view the current profile with;
$ authselect current
Profile ID: local
Enabled features:
- with-silent-lastlog
- with-fingerprint
- with-mdns4
You can change the current profile with;
$ sudo authselect select local
Profile "local" was selected.
Scenario: You have noticed a high number of failed login attempts on your Fedora Linux server. As a preemptive action you want to configure PAM for lockouts. Any user with 3 failed login attempts, gets locked out of your server for 24 hours.
The pam_faillock.so module maintains a list of failed authentication attempts per user during a specified interval and locks the account in case there were more than the stipulated consecutive failed authentications.
The Authselect profile “with-faillock” feature handles failed authentication lockouts.
Step 1. Check if current profile on the server has with-faillock enabled;
$ authselect current Profile ID: local Enabled features: - with-silent-lastlog - with-mdns4 - with-fingerprint
As you can see, with-faillock is not enabled in this profile.
Authselect has now configured PAM to support lockouts. Check the /etc/pam.d/system-auth file, and the /etc/pam.d/password-auth files, to see that the files are updated by authselect.
From the vimdiff image below you can see the changes authselect added to /etc/pam.d/system-auth.
Step 3. Check if the current configuration is valid.
$ authselect check
Current configuration is valid.
Step 4. Apply changes
$ sudo authselect apply-changes
Changes were successfully applied.
Step 5. Configure faillock
$ vi /etc/security/faillock.conf
Uncomment the file to match the following parameters
silent
audit
deny=3
unlock_time=86400
dir = /var/run/faillock
Step 6. Test PAM configuration
6.1 Attempt to login consecutive times with the wrong password, to trigger a lockout
6.2 Check failure records
Important: As a best practice, always backup your current Authselect profile before making any change.
Back up the current Authselect profile as follows;
$ authselect select local -b
Backup stored at /var/lib/authselect/backups/2025-05-23-22-41-33.UyM1lJ
Profile "local" was selected.
To list backed up profiles;
$ authselect backup-list
2025-05-22-15-17-41.fe92T8 (created at Thu 22 May 2025 11:17:41 AM EDT)
2025-05-23-22-41-33.UyM1lJ (created at Fri 23 May 2025 06:41:33 PM EDT)
On Thursday, May 29 (yes, two days away!) we will host the F42 release party on Matrix.
We would love for you to join us to celebrate all things F42 in a private event room from 1300 – 1600 UTC. You will hear from our new FPL Jef Spaleta, learn about the design process for each release, and hear about some of the great new features in Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE and our installer. Plus there’s a git forge update and a mentor summit update too, plus lots more.
You can see the schedule on the event page wiki, and how to attend is simple: please register for the event, for free, in advance. Using your Matrix ID, you will receive an invitation to a private event room where we will be streaming presentations via ReStream.
Events will be a mixture of live and pre-recorded. All will be available after the event on the Fedora YouTube channel.
Join us on Thursday, May 29 2025 for the Fedora 42 release party! Free registration is now open for the event, and you can find an early draft of the event schedule on the wiki page. We will be hosting the event in a dedicated matrix room, which registration is required to gain access, and will stream a mix of live and pre-recorded short sessions via Restream from 1300 UTC – 1600 UTC.
Read on for more information, although that intro might cover most of it
Why a change in format, kind of?
For F40, we trialed a two-day event of live presentations, streamed via YouTube into a matrix room over Friday and Saturday. This was fine, but probably a little too long to ask people to be able to participate for in full.
For F41, we trialled ‘watch parties’ across three time zones – APAC, EMEA and NA/LATM. This was ok, but had a lot of production issues behind the scenes, and unfortunately some in front of the scenes too!
So, for F42, we decided to run a poll to collect some feedback on what kind of event and content people actually wanted. The majority prefer live presentations, but time zones are unfortunately still a thing so we have decided to do a mix of live and per-recorded sessions via Restream in a dedicated matrix room. Each presentation will be 10-15 minutes in length, a perfect amount to take in the highlights, and the event itself will be three hours in duration. Lets see how this remix goes!
What you can expect
10-15 minute sessions that highlight all the good stuff that went into our Editions this release, plus hear about our new spin – COSMIC! You can also learn a little more about the Fedora Linux design process and get an update on the git forge work that’s in progress too, plus much more!
Real Time Matrix Chat – Attendees are welcome to chat in our event room, share thoughts, ask questions, and connect with others who are passionate about Fedora. Some speakers will be available for questions, but if you have any specific ones, you can always follow up with them outside of the event.
Opening Remarks from Fedora Leadership, updating you on very exciting things happening in the project, plus an introduction from our new FPL – Jef Spaleta!
Why a registration for an event on Matrix?
Right now we have no tooling to get some metrics for the event with on matrix. Plus we want to avoid spammers as much as we possibly can. That’s why we are using a free registration system that will send an invitation to your email in advance of the event. We recommend registering in advance to avoid any last minute issues, but just in case they are unavoidable anyway, we will have someone on hand to provide the room invite to attendees who have not received it.
As always, sessions will be available on the Fedora YouTube channel after the event for folks who want to re-watch or catch up on the talks. Also a big thank you to our CommOps team for helping put together this release party! We hope you enjoy the event, and look forward to celebrating the F42 release with you all on Thursday, May 29 from 1300 – 1600 UTC on Matrix!
Voting in the Fedora Linux 42 elections is now open. Go to the Elections app to cast your vote. This cycle we have lots of amazing candidates nominated for Council, Mindshare, EPEL and FESCo. Voting will close at 23:59 UTC on Monday, June 2 at 23:59 UTC and don’t forget to claim your “I Voted” badge when you cast your ballot. Links to candidate interviews are below.
Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo)
There are four seats open for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). The candidates for election are:
There are three seats open for the EPEL Steering Committee. The candidates for election equal the number of open seats, so by default, the following candidates will be elected to the EPEL Steering Committee on June 2, 2025. We will not hold a ballot box for this election.
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Having been present in different areas and having served on the council, I can offer a user-centric perspective that considers not only the technical aspects, but also the needs of the users. From the council, we can make decisions that impact how users see not only the community, but also its management.
The Fedora Strategy guiding star is that the project is going to double its contributor base by 2028. As a council member, how would you try to help the project delivering on that goal’?
The hot topic right now is the ability to stream and play AAA games on Linux. To attract users who have tried Linux in the past and failed, I would show them how these two points are now good and demonstrate how we are improving our technology stack. By showing this, we could change how Fedora Linux is seen as a distribution for developers. We should also promote the Fedora podcast more. I may be biased because I founded it, but with YouTube’s growth and one of the biggest YouTubers’ recent adoption of Linux, Linux adoption is going to grow. By showcasing the project on YouTube through the podcast and other projects on the official Fedora channel, we can attract new users.
How can we best measure Fedora’s success?
By being the activity increase in our public places, like mastodon, discourse, matrix and discord
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
The Fedora Project is a place to promote, integrate and use the newest technologies while keeping current and previous technologies working as expected.
The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?
I do remote work, so I can be active every time the project needs me.
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Interview with Miro Hrončok
FAS ID: churchyard
Matrix ID: mhroncok
Matrix Rooms: devel, python, EPEL and many others
Questions
Why are you running for Fedora Council?
I’ve been an active Fedora contributor for over 12 years—co‑maintaining the Python and 3D‑printing stacks and sponsoring new packagers—and I’ve served five years on the Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and seven years on the Packaging Committee (FPC). Through those roles I’ve gained a deep understanding of how Fedora is built and governed. I can bring that experience to the Fedora Council and ensure that the people who do the day‑to‑day work of creating Fedora Linux have a strong, informed voice at the table.
The Fedora Strategy guiding star is that the project is going to double its contributor base by 2028. As a council member, how would you try to help the project delivering on that goal’?
Onboarding new contributors is the key. Packaging is one of the most visible and rewarding entry points for newcomers, but our current sponsorship and review processes can be complex, intimidating and slow. I’d like to:
Streamline sponsorship.
Create a lightweight, automated “sponsor queue” to match newcomers with willing sponsors.
Clearly document every step so first‑time packagers aren’t stalled hunting for sponsors.
Unify and simplify workflows.
Consolidate all packaging documentation into a single, community‑maintained guide.
Move new‑package reviews from Bugzilla into a Git‑based Pull Request workflow to match modern development practices.
By making packaging more accessible, we’ll give new contributors quick wins, boost their confidence, and inspire them to explore other areas of Fedora.
How can we best measure Fedora’s success?
The ultimate sign of Fedora’s impact is when it becomes the default platform for open‑source development and emerging technologies—such as AI. Success metrics might include:
Fedora Linux usage in CI pipelines. Track how many major platforms (e.g. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) offer e.g. fedora-latest (or even select it as default) and how many major projects (e.g. Python, Rust, GNOME, the Linux kernel) use it.
Container base image. Measure how many (popular) containers on hubs use Fedora Linux as a base image.
Windows Subsystem for Linux. Monitor or estimate how many Windows users set Fedora as their WSL distribution and strive to make it the default.
Surveys and feedback loops. Reach out to upstream maintainers and CI providers to identify blockers and prioritize improvements.
By combining quantitative tracking (CI default stats, WSL distro statistics) with qualitative engagement (surveys, interviews), we can see where Fedora leads, where we trail, and where to invest next.
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
Fedora should be the premier innovation platform for the entire open‑source ecosystem. Whether you’re launching an AI framework, advancing the Linux desktop, or experimenting with 3D printing software, Fedora ought to be your first choice for building, testing, and distributing your work. We already have a good range of tools for this.
Spins and Labs showcase specialized use cases. Let users create more unofficial ones. I imagine a community-maintained Labs catalog.
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Interview with Aleksandra Fedorova
FAS ID: bookwar
Matrix Rooms: fedora-ci, fedora-council
Questions
Why are you running for Fedora Council?
I’d like to help the Fedora Project to continue to be a supportive diverse international FOSS community. I want to support the non-US perspective in Council discussions and to help deal with existing or future issues, which may appear.
The Fedora Strategy guiding star is that the project is going to double its contributor base by 2028. As a council member, how would you try to help the project delivering on that goal’?
I’d like make the overall process of making a distribution to become more accessible and more open to new contributors, beyond just the packager role.
How can we best measure Fedora’s success?
I would like to see Fedora as a first choice for upstream projects to try and test the new features and integration scenarios.
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
I see the goal of the Fedora Project to integrate the variety of FOSS tools and applications into a platform which can be presented to a user as a unified experience or can be used to build other higher level services.
And as such, the project needs not just tools and services for building and testing code, but also a communication platform and the community which can handle the discussions and arguments around that code and its integration issues.
The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Interview with Fernando F Mancera
FAS ID: ffmancera
Matrix Rooms: mentoring, nmstate, networkmanager
Questions
Why are you running for Fedora Council?
During my past involvement with Fedora Council as Mentored Projects Initiative co-leader, I learned a lot about the project governance and which areas need more support. I want to continue focusing on mentoring but this time internal mentoring and Fedora policies regarding it. How to introduce new people to Fedora kernel, infrastructure, DEI, applications and other SIGs.
In addition, there should be more guidance for council members, so they can contribute more efficiently. I want to contribute to such guides for the future council members. Last but not least, I think I have a good “get things done” mentality that helps to move forward topics with pro-active helping.
The Fedora Strategy guiding star is that the project is going to double its contributor base by 2028. As a council member, how would you try to help the project delivering on that goal’?
I think the participation and promotion of Fedora in mentoring programs and internal mentoring is crucial to achieve this goal. When people contribute to projects they feel rewarded and that encourage them to continue contributing. Internal mentoring creates alternatives for existing contributor to be able to contribute to another area of their interest. This is vital to keep them engaged in the community.
How can we best measure Fedora’s success?
Measuring a project success is a very hard task. In my opinion, a successful FOSS project are those that meet the user needs, adapt over time to new needs and all of these while having an inclusive and healthy community with open discussions.
I guess a more objective and easy way of measuring it is based on user base adoption rate and satisfaction.
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
I don’t think I will ever see Fedora out of the Solar System so that makes this answer much simpler. I think it could be or maybe is, the most popular Linux distribution and one of the distributions that could convince people to move away from proprietary operative systems.
The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?
Fedora Council work won’t be related to my day-to-day work. Although, a week has 168 hours, considering I want to sleep 56 of them and need to work another 40 of them.. I will have around 72 hours of free time per week (wow, this is quite depressing). I can probably take a couple of hours a week to work in the Fedora Council
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Interview with Shaun McCance
FAS ID: shaunm
Matrix Rooms: I’m in a lot of channels. Here are a few you can find me in –
I’ve been around Fedora since the beginning. I love Fedora, and I want to see it continue to grow and thrive. I have a fair amount of experience serving on and with governing bodies. This is one of the areas where I can most effectively contribute to projects now.
The Fedora Strategy guiding star is that the project is going to double its contributor base by 2028. As a council member, how would you try to help the project delivering on that goal?
There are many ways to increase contributions. I’d like to focus on two that both involve expanding our contributor pool beyond the people making Fedora Linux.
First, there is a lot of room for alternative distributions and package sets. We see this already in editions and spins. By identifying target audiences, we can encourage more contributions in new areas.
Second, there are a number of systems derived from Fedora, such as CentOS, various CentOS derivatives, Amazon Linux, and the distros from Universal Blue. For various reasons, these projects are not part of Fedora. Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for contributors to those projects to also be Fedora contributors in a mutually beneficial way. We see this already, and I’d work to strengthen those relationships.
How can we best measure Fedora’s success?
The Council created Strategy 2028 to double the number of active contributors. This is a measurable outcome, and we should continue to monitor it and work towards it. Aside from the Fedora strategy, I often look at how often Fedora and family are referenced online. When I search for how to do something on Linux, I want the search results to be full of answers for Fedora and related distros.
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
Fedora should be the default choice for Linux. It is user-friendly and innovative, and it helps drive many of the technologies that shape the Linux landscape. Our engineering is excellent, but we can do more to prmote Fedora as the leading distribution it is.
The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?
I’m fortunate to have a job that will support me doing Council work during work time. That said, I’ll be honest that I’m stretched thing and my existing obligations aren’t going away. Fedora Council and other high-level strategic work is important to me, and I’ll continue to work to get more community engagement on other work to free me up for this.
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Interview with Jared Smith
FAS ID: jsmith
Matrix Rooms: Mostly the Fedora Meetings and Fedora ARM channels
Questions
Why are you running for Fedora Council?
I have a great love for the Fedora community, and want to ensure it continues to be a strong and vibrant place. One of the best way I can contribute is to help the Fedora council make great decisions. For me, it’s about giving back to a great project.
The Fedora Strategy guiding star is that the project is going to double its contributor base by 2028. As a council member, how would you try to help the project delivering on that goal’?
First, it’s about ensuring that Fedora continues to be appealing — not only as an operating system, but as a community and a project. It’s also about recognizing that perhaps free software operating systems aren’t as cool or shiny as they were 20 years ago, and that’s OK — part of what makes Fedora special is the community that it has built — and perhaps we haven’t been good at explaining that part.
How can we best measure Fedora’s success?
I would love to see Fedora leadership focus as much on community engagement as they do downloads.
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
I see Fedora as an incredible group of humans — from many parts of the world — who come together to participate and make something bigger than themselves. It’s a place where people (typically) respect each other, collaborate to solve interesting problems, and continue to promote the ideals of software freedom and innovation.
The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?
I think it’s a myth that people just “find” free time. Fedora is important to me, and I’ll prioritize it in my schedule so that I can actively participate.
This is a part of the Fedora Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
With that being where I am coming from, I wish to utilize this platform to continue making technological decisions accessible to the various subprojects and SIGs that make use of our infrastructure services. I want to be able to devise pathways through which we can mentor prospective contributors without needing a scoped project or a formalized mentoring program. Alongside that, I want to continue my role as an effective conduit between sponsored teams and community teams, to understand the evolving needs of infrastructure applications – and potentially lead the creation of new ones as needed by the community or the Fedora Council. With my continuous participation in the Fedora Join SIG over the years, I also wish to contribute significantly toward realizing the Fedora Project’s strategic goal of doubling the number of active contributors.
The Fedora Strategy guiding star is that the project is going to double its contributor base by 2028. As a council member, how would you try to help the project delivering on that goal?
I have taken a statistical approach to onboarding, mentoring, and retention of contributors for several years now, and it largely remains the same – whether I am participating as a mentor in a formalized mentorship program or guiding a group of interested volunteers toward contributions. Following Ankur Sinha’s ideology of “seeking potential, not polish” in contributors (which has been ingrained in me for over five years), I plan on establishing pathways through which we can build a structured mentoring cohort without being constrained by the scoped projects and monetary requirements that often accompany formalized mentoring programmes. The ultimate goal is to create a positive space within the community where newcomers are encouraged to bring fresh ideas to the table, driving an innovative yet sustainable path toward Fedora Project’s growth.
What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?
Fedora Linux has been the distribution where I finally stopped distrohopping about six years ago, when I was looking for something that would run better than Windows on my aging laptop. I could go on about Fedora Linux being a balanced blend of unmatched innovation and stellar user experience, but I like to think we are more than that. With a range of downstream distributions like RHEL, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, Amazon Linux, and others, our community empowers people with the technology of today that shapes the enterprise distributions of tomorrow. People not only get the opportunity to contribute to an inclusive community, but their contributions also flow into our friend projects like Podman, Ansible, OpenShift, Distrobox etc. – making us one of the most exciting and rewarding communities to be a part of.
The Fedora Council is intended to be an active working body. How will you make room for Council work?
I am grateful to be employed in close proximity to the Fedora Project and CentOS Project communities, and my organization i.e. Red Hat Community Linux Engineering team has consistently enabled me to connect and collaborate with the community members. I have always made it a point to set aside time – whether I am working on infrastructure development or simply hanging out with my Fedora Project friends. While time zones can make it challenging to connect with folks on the other side of the world, that has never stopped me from moving appointments around my calendar to make space for what matters to me most i.e. participating in the Fedora Council. Furthermore, I plan to commit a dedicated, scheduled time each week to proactively (not reactively) prioritize action items, while emphasizing delegation wherever applicable.
This is a part of the Mindshare Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Interview with Greg Sutcliffe
FAS ID: Gwmngilfen
Matrix Rooms: I’m in many rooms as a lurker, but Infra (#admin:fedoraproject.org) and CommOps (#commops:fedoraproject.org) are two good places to find me.
Questions
What is your background in Fedora? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?
I’ve been on the fringes (brim?) of Fedora for a long time – I’ve been at Red Hat for over a decade, and I’ve worked on projects like Foreman and Ansible, and I’ve got lots of friends in Fedora.
In the last year or so I’ve come closer by joining the CommOps data work that Justin and Robert were leading, helping to do survey writing & analysis, and generally just lending an opinion where I can. I’ve also tried to learn from / contribute to Fedora in use of Matrix & Discourse, both of which I brought to Ansible.
This year, I formally joined Fedora for the day-job too, as a member of the Community Linux Engineering team. That means I’m back to being a sysadmin alongside people like Kevin and Michal and helping to run our infrastructure.
Please elaborate on the personal “Why” which motivates you to be a candidate for Mindshare.
I might have returned to my sysadmin roots for my job, but I still care a great deal about community architect work, especially from a data perspective. I’ve had some great chats with various existing Mindshare folks about how we can use the data we hold in ways that benefit the project and the community, and I thought it might be a good idea to be here in person to drive those efforts. I’d like to see us making strong use of that data to support the various Mindshare Teams in their work, as well as using it to support the wider Fedora strategy.
How would you improve Mindshare Committee visibility and awareness in the Fedora community?
Data visualisation can be incredibly effective if done well – the popularity of sites like dataisbeautoful and so forth are ample proof. So we don’t just need to get a grip on our data, we need to message it well. I’d like to see CommOps taking a lead on the data, but also rworking with Design, Marketing, and others to make the insights we find really land with users and contributors.
What part of Fedora do you think needs the most attention from the Mindshare Committee during your term?
I’m really just restating the above here, but our data! I think the Mindshare Committee could be crucial for gathering expectations on what data would be useful to the various teams, and helping making sure that data gets delivered. Repeating work in disjointed ways isn’t going to get us as good a result, and the Committee can provide that oversight.
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You attended the Fedora Mentor Summit 2025
You joined the boat party at Flock 2025 in Prague!
You attended Flock 2025 in Prague, Czech Republic!
You attended the F42 Virtual Release Party!
