Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for Pi Day, 3/14/15:

Google Summer of Code

Fedora has been selected as a mentoring organization for the 2015 version of the Google Summer of Code program. (If you’re not familiar: this is a global program where students are paid stipends to write code for open source projects — a wonderful contribution from Google both for the learning experience for students getting into open source, and to the projects that benefit.)

If you’re interested in working either as a student or as a mentor, please check out the Fedora GSOC 2015 page. Of particular note, the program opens for student applications on Monday, March 16, and closes March 21st — see our GSOC Guide for Students for information on getting started and other important information.

Fedora 22 Alpha Release is Here!

I hope no one missed it, but just in case: the Fedora 22 Alpha was released ealier this week. If you’re interested in checking out what’s coming, or helping shake out bugs, give it a try.

KDE & Xfce in the Alpha

The release notes mention our alternate spins showcasing the KDE and Xfce desktop environments. If you’re a fan of one of these, or interested in trying something new, these F22 alpha releases could use your attention too. You can get both from the Spins Prerelease page.

The F22 KDE spin features the new Plasma 5 desktop, with a beautiful new look, better HiDPI support, and more. Xfce updates to 4.12, which sounds less dramatic, but consider that .12 was three years inthe making — there are many, many improvements, and if you’re a Xfce user this is definitely cause for excitement.

Other Spins Alpha News

In addition to the desktop environment spins, we have a number of spins which present a tailored selection of applications for a specific purpose. Fedora contributors recently blogged about several of these and the F22 alpha: Luya Tshimbalanga discusses the Fedora 22 Design Suite, for graphic artists and content creators, and Amit Saha shows off Fedora 22 Scientific, aimed at scientific computing users. (The former is based on GNOME and the latter on KDE, by the way.)

Again, check out all the spins on the Spins Prerelease page. (You’ll find ARM images there too, by the way!)

Easier Copr Access Coming Soon

Copr is a software build service designed to create a lower-barrier-to-entry way to package and make software available to Fedora users. Everything included is open source and must fit the same legal criteria as software in the main distribution, but there are no requirements for packaging polish.

The wide repository of high-quality packages is, of course, one of the great things about Fedora, but Coprs makes it easy to distribute (and get) Fedora packages which for one reason or another aren’t quite ready for the mainstream.

Up until now, you could either find a Copr repository on the web site and enable it manually, or use an option to the command-line tool

dnf

(the successor to

yum

). In the future, though, select Copr repositories may also show up in the GNOME Software center — as I understand the plan, they’ll show in search results, but installation won’t be enabled by default, and there will be some mechanism to help users understand the tradeoffs they may be making.

This week, FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, our community-elected technical oversight body) updated the Third Party Repository Policy to reflect this.

Note: no 5tFTW next week

This Five Things in Fedora This Week is coming at pretty much the last of what can be actually considered “this week”. Unless there is a lot of early-week drama next week, I’ll collect items with the goal of getting back to approximately-Tuesday posting the week after that.