Tag: Fedora

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Major changes to how PHP requests are handled in Fedora 33

(This post has an update 20210203 at the bottom.)

I run the www.malak.ca website and this blog on an old reclaimed computer using Fedora Linux. I used to use CentOS because of its long term stability, and in fact I still have a computer running CentOS running at full capacity as a computational node for the World Community Grid.

I have used Fedora on my desktops since 2008, and on my website server since at least 2018.

I have found CentOS very stable but, through my brother, somewhat limiting as each given version ages. My brother provides invaluable technical support and often does the heavy lifting on my servers and computers when it comes to, well, technical support and setup, for which I am very grateful. He has humoured me over the years in my use of CentOS, but has been frustrated with CentOS for years given its upstream source’s conservative development cycle and the difficulty in maintaining such systems over time.

In the meantime, over the years while using Fedora, I typically use a version for roughly its full lifecycle of 12 to 13 months, and I normally skip a version in the process. Previous to somewhat recent experiences, I would perform a full new install every year from a downloaded image; I was acting on advice from the Fedora website, increasingly old and out of date each time I performed a reinstall, to not use the dnf upgrade function on the grounds that it wasn’t ready yet. This further gave me reason for the occasional use of CentOS and its long term stability on some computers, which I might want to not want to bother reformatting yearly, let alone reinstall software. However, while I was performing another fresh install from Fedora 27 to Fedora 29 in the fall of 2018, I observed a command line upgrade of a Fedora system, and was intrigued. In the fall of 2019, when upgrading from Fedora 29 to Fedora 31, I used the command line upgrade path instead. (Here’s my archive.) This resolved, at least in my mind, my longtime concerns about the short lifespan of Fedora.

Unfortunately, this proved to be a matter of famous last words, since it was merely a convenience for upgrading, something that could be easily done on a weekday evening, instead of setting aside a Saturday afternoon and a (wholly pleasant) visit with my brother.

My most recent upgrade cycle of my server, from Fedora 31 to Fedora 33, was in and of itself as easy as it was on my laptop, desktop, and another box earlier this year. However, it proved to be effectively fatal for my website, since the web server was showing error 503 for PHP requests on the blog. Apparently, a PHP handling module, mod_php, used on my website, was deprecated in favour of php-fpm (here’s my archive). A mixed technical and somewhat editorialized discussion on this is on my brother’s blog. (Here’s my archive.)

For me, this isn’t so much an opportunity to complain; as I said, my brother did the real work in performing another iteration of setting up my website in April, 2020, only to do it once more in November, 2020, for which I’m grateful, under a fresh, baremetal install (which I performed.) Instead, the second comment to come to mind — initially, privately, and tongue-in-cheek! — after my gratitude that he would do the job yet again, was that my brother at least got to hone his skills on “the new method”.

After that, a few other things came to mind. As such, risking being a back-seat gratuitous commentator on the process:

  • It occurs to me that Fedora, while an excellent desktop operating system, arguably has risks associated with it as a medium-term and long-term server, given its mission to showcase and test new technologies as they are introduced while “old” technologies are deprecated;
    • And, since CentOS (and RHEL) grow old long enough before their 10 year EOL, but Fedora’s approximately 13 month lifespan is too short, how long is ideal?
  • The actual process itself of upgrading Fedora versions remains smooth, polished, and easy;
  • Could the upgrade process itself have included:
    • At least a warning that certain major changes were literally about to occur or were occurring?
    • An opt-out option for some changes?
    • Or involve as possible actually upgrading settings and/or other setups such that a neutral net effect on existing functions is effected, ie. change things properly, not just literally changing things without regard to any possible detriment to functions?
    • Or, make changes, but in separate, neutered files, and a notification that some potential conflicting changes have been made, requiring attention?
  • With regards to general version upgrading of my server, I should do some research into the new technologies to be installed before upgrading, so as to prepare for any major changes, just as any sysadmin should when upgrading versions to another of any long-term distribution such as CentOS, RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu LTS versions, or any other such system.

20210203 Update: It would seem that another victim of the change toward php-fpm was an inability to use the WordPress upgrade tool when it was time to change to v.5.6. It seems that using some file ownership settings on my machine, which facilitated my administration of the website on a larger scale than just WordPress, was at issue, and how php-fpm handles files and the required permissions, vs. the way mpm-itk and php-cgi would handle similar tasks.

And, at the same time, it seems to me that an additional question is raised, following my musing of “And, since CentOS (and RHEL) grow old long enough before their 10 year EOL, but Fedora’s approximately 13 month lifespan is too short, how long is ideal?”: The literal answer may well lie in “well that depends on individual packages and how they evolve over time, especially regarding the “real world” and other pressures which may shape the project’s evolution”, meaning that things may change more swiftly than Fedora’s 13 month lifespan, and others may outlive RHEL / CentOS’ (at least old) lifespan of ten years.

Which leads to my asking: “How to deal with change management?” and “How to choose a distro, and deal with change in a selected platform which has gone in a different direction from decisions leading to its original choice?”

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Dumpster Diving for Old Computers

To paraphrase Forrest Gump’s mother, “Dumpster diving for computers is like a box of chocolates … you never know what you’re gonna get.”

Over the past at least twelve years, I have been salvaging computers I have found on the streets on garbage day, or found in other locations where my various personal travels have taken me, for use to reformat into usable computers. The various finds have served as main desktop computers, secondary computers, home servers, computation nodes for the World Community Grid, gifts to my brother or the occasional friend, and the like. It has variously allowed me to indulge in a bit of tinkering, trying out a new linux distro or version of BSD, build a home server, or just pass the time while engaging in a hobby.

In the process, I’ve watched the lower bar of what is acceptable “junk that isn’t junk, at least not yet” move upwards from about P4-533 MHz 32 bit processors to dual core 2.66 GHz 64 bit processors (although single core 64 bit P4 at 3.4 GHz to 3.8 GHz range is good if you don’t want to depend on a GUI, or if you have a lot of RAM and an SSD), 512 MB of RAM to 2GB of RAM, and 20GB hard drives to 80GB hard drives. Now it seems that the next big thing will be in moving from mechanical drives to SSD drives, which I expect — when SSD drives become common in the old computers I find being thrown out — will make a revolutionary change upwards in speed in low end hardware, the way I learned the same in 2017 when I swapped out the mechanical drive in my laptop and replaced it with an SSD. (To be fair, when I bought the computer new in 2015, the hard drive was curiously a 5400 RPM model, presumably either to make it less expensive, less power hungry vis-à-vis battery life, or both.)

As an aside: My favourite brands of castoffs have been, in order, IBM / Lenovo ThinkCentres, then Dells. After that, I’ve had an excellent experience with a single used HP desktop that has been doing computations for World Community Grid running at 100% capacity, since late summer 2016. I’ve dealt with other types of computers, but the ThinkCentres and the Dells have been the ones I’ve had the most success with, or at least the most personal experience. (Since initially writing this post, I have been developing a suspicion that based on the longevity of the HP cast-off I have, HP actually might be superior to the IBM / Lenovo when it comes to cast-offs; however, since it’s the only HP cast off that I can remember ever having, it’s hard to form a proper opinion.)

But to wit: Over the past two weeks, I have tried to revive three used computers that were cast-offs.

Two of them were IBM / Lenovo ThinkCentres, which I think were new in 2006 / 2007, 2.66MHz 64 bit dual cores, 80GB hard drives, and 2 GB memory. The third computer was a Dell case with only the motherboard (proving to have been — see below — a 64 bit dual CPU running at something like 2.66MHz) but no memory, no hard drive, no wires, no DVD player, and not even a power supply!

The two ThinkCentres were from a pile of old computers marked for disposal at a location where I happened to be in mid-2017, and I was granted permission to pick and choose what I wanted from the pile. I gave them to my brother, who at the time evaluated them and determined that neither worked, one just beeping four times and then hanging. After that, they just sat around in his apartment for whenever they might come in handy for spare parts. He had since determined that one actually worked, but he hadn’t done anything with it.

The third computer was found on the street near home a couple of months ago, and was covered with about an inch of snow by the time I’d recovered it. I brought it home, and let it sit around for several weeks just to make sure that it dried out properly. Based on the “Built for Windows XP” and “Vista Ready” stickers, I’d guess that it was new in about 2005 or 2006.

Having forgotten about the ThinkCentre computers I’d given to my brother in 2017, I casually asked him if he had the requisite spare parts to make the snow-covered computer work, since we normally share our piles of spare parts retrieved from old computers that die. To my surprise, he sent me the functional ThinkCentre. My knee-jerk reaction was “I don’t need a new-to-me computer; just the parts required to see if I can get the snow-covered computer to work.” Perversely, I didn’t actually want the results of my planned efforts to produce a functional computer; I just wanted the amusement of a small project, and more generally to see whether the Dell found on the street would work.

In parallel, my home server on which I hosted my backups and my website, another computer of the used several times over variety, worked perfectly except for mysteriously turning off on its own a couple of times recently, perhaps once a week. My brother and I decided that what was probably happening was the result of one or more thermal event(s) which shut down the computer, no doubt due to a combination of dust accumulation, the CPU fan ports in the case not having enough clearance from the computer next to it to allow for proper aspiration of ambient cooling air, and possibly high heat generation from occasional loads due to search engine bots crawling my website. Despite cleaning out the dust, removing the computer’s side panel from which the CPU fan drew air, and shifting both computers a bit in order to allow for adequate ventilation, the computer turned itself off again after about a week.

My brother and I made a swift decision to replace my server with a new installation on a “new” computer — the good ThinkCentre I initially didn’t want — because even though the existing machine was otherwise performing spectacularly well given the overall small load, we tacitly agreed that the shutdowns were a problem with a production server, though we hadn’t actually said the words. This incidentally dealt with another curious behaviour exhibited by the existing server which appeared to otherwise be completely benign, and hence perhaps beyond the scope of why we changed the physical computer.

The operational ThinkCentre was plugged in, formatted with Fedora 31, and my brother helped me install the requisite services and transfer settings to the new server in order to replicate my website. Newer practices in installation were implemented, and newer choices of packages were made. For instance, the “old” machine is still being kept active for a bit as a backup as well as to maintain some VPN services — provided by openVPN — for the purposes of setting up the new server and installing WireGuard for VPN on the new server, and generally allow for a smooth transition period. Other things that we had to remember as well as learn, perhaps for another time, were to install No-IP as a service, and that drive mounts should be unmounted and re-mounted through rc.local.

One of the unexpected bonuses to the upgrade is that it appears to be serving web pages and my blog a wee bit faster, for reasons unknown.

In a few weeks, I’ll reformat the old webserver and make it another computation node for the World Community Grid — in fact, this particular machine’s “original” vocation when I first got it in late 2017.

In the meantime, on the next project, I got the non-functional ThinkCentre for its spare parts. The first idea I had was that maybe this second ThinkCentre might still be good, and we looked at a YouTube video that suggested cleaning out the seats for the memory sticks with a can of clean compressed air. I was suspicious of this but let it go for a while, and I proceeded to harvest parts from the computer after deciding that the machine wouldn’t work regardless.

A power supply, cables, a hard drive, and memory sticks were placed in the Dell found on the street. It powered up, and after changing some settings in the BIOS, I was able to boot up a Fedora 31 LiveUSB. Using the settings option from the Gnome desktop, I was able to determine that there was a 64 bit dualcore CPU running at about 2.66GHz, that the 2GBs of memory I’d inserted worked, and that the 80GB hard drive was recognized. I looked around on the hard drive a bit with a file manager (Nautilus) and determined that the place from which I’d retrieved the ThinkCentre appeared to have done at least a basic reformatting of the drive with NTFS. I didn’t try to use or install any forensic tools to further determine whether the drive had been properly cleaned, or had merely received a quick reformat.

Suppertime came around, and the machine was left idle to wait for my instructions for about an hour or so. When I returned to the computer, I saw an interesting screen:

“Oh no! Something has gone wrong.” error screen

(If you can’t see the picture above, it’s an error screen, vaguely akin to a Windows Blue Screen of Death.) After a few reboots, all with the same “Oh no!” error screen, my brother suggested that the machine may have been thrown out for good reason, intimating that it was good luck that I’d even managed to boot it up in the first place and look around a little bit. I, on the other hand, was relieved: I’d had my evening’s entertainment, I’d gotten what I wanted in the form of working on the machine to determine whether or not the machine could be used, and I’d learned that it indeed couldn’t be used. Parts were stripped back out of the Dell, and the box was relegated to the part of the garage where I store toxic waste and old electronics for the times I have enough collected to make it worthwhile to go to an authorized disposal centre.

At this point, something was still bugging me about the second ThinkCentre. I hadn’t yet placed my finger on it, but I was suspicious of the “use compressed air to get rid of the dust in the memory bays” solution. So I placed the salvaged parts back into the ThinkCentre — having fun with which wires go where in order to make it work again — and got the four beeps again. I looked up what four beeps at start up means (here’s my archive of the table, which I had to recreate since a direct printing of the webpage only printed one of the tables,) and found that at least on a Lenovo ThinkCentre, it means “Clock error, timer on the system board does not work.” While I assumed that changing the BIOS battery may well fix the problem, I decided not to investigate any further.

I salvaged the parts again and placed them in my parts pile, ready for the next time I find a junker on the street or from elsewhere. The second ThinkCentre’s case was also placed beside the Dell, awaiting my next trip to an authorized disposal centre.

This means that out of the last three computers, I have one functioning computer replacing an existing computer (that I hope will continue with an industrious afterlife doing something else), one computer scavenged for spare parts and the case relegated to the disposal centre pile, and the Dell computer which was found on the street also relegated to the disposal centre pile.

Or, to paraphrase Meat Loaf, “One out of three ain’t bad …”

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Upgrades to Fedora 27 — what a breeze!

Over the past two weeks, I have upgraded two computers to Fedora 27 (from Fedora 25, having skipped Fedora 26 and enjoyed roughly a year’s worth of Fedora goodness).

The two computers are:

  • Dell desktop (main system):  Intel® Core™ i5-4460 CPU @ 3.20GHz — no Hyperthreading, 1 TB 7200 HD, 8gigs memory; screen upgraded separately to an Acer widescreen, and old screen relegated to a “new to me” computer setup as a node on the World Community Grid.
  • Acer laptop (secondary system): Intel® Core™ i7-5500U CPU @ 2.40GHz (Hyperthreaded), now 500gig SSD HD, 8 gigs memory.

Two of the equipment upgrades are the screen on the desktop, which is now a used Acer widescreen, and the laptop’s 5200RPM 1TB drive was upgraded to a 500gig SSD.  The laptop went from interminably slow to incredibly fast!  The comment from my brother:  “SSD’s are one of the few things that actually lives up to the hype.”  In my experience — under linux, anyway.  Under a corporate controlled windows box?  Well I’d say that my work computer, with an SSD, needs the SSD speed just not to be unusable!

The upgrades were incredibly easy this time, and fast, the new SSD installed on the laptop probably being the big factor.  In fact, I was able to do the basic install in about 15 minutes, and the rest of my list (made for Fedora 23, but the basic list is still valid) was easy to complete while on a business trip in the motel room during off hours.  In fact, one of the things that took a couple of days to realize:  Fedora has had difficulty with the UEFI on this machine in the past — it would install, and then not work, and I’d have to reinstall under legacy BIOS.  Note that I have a BIOS password, so perhaps in the past I just figured out how to make it persistent.  As for restoring the data, once home, I managed to easily copy all my data files from my desktop overnight.

As for the desktop, having just gone through the process a couple of days earlier with my laptop, I was able to easily update, and then re-transfer my data from the laptop overnight, as well as update my data backup on my home server.

The “big” thing this time?  The hardware upgrades.  The almost un-noticeable thing this time?  The installs, which were incredibly easy, quick, routine, and almost easily forgotten.  Sheesh, I’ve lost track of how many installs I’ve done over the years …

 

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I’ve finally got a convert, sort of, to whom I’m giving a linux desktop!

In 2011 a new hire at work was assigned to join me on a few field jobs in order to expose them to the kinds of things we do at the office.

At the time, I enthusiastically told him about my use of linux. Suffice it to say his reaction was “What is this communist stuff anyway?!?!” Harrrummmpphh. “Red Hat is in line to have $1 billion with a big fat capital B in revenues this year alone. Doesn’t sound very communist to me at all.”

Back in mid-December of 2015 — after countless times of telling him about linux in the meantime, hopefully a bit more toned down — he sent me a message: “Here’s a modest budget; set me up, I’d be interested in trying it out.” I was practically beside myself in my pleasure.

I came back from the Christmas holidays and announced that I’d tracked down a used computer for free, and just needed to get it into my hot little hands. I explained that I wanted to give him a relatively risk free introduction. In the meantime, the computer in question, I’m told, proved to be dead and not usable. I’m promised another computer, and this week, when it looks like I’ll indeed be getting it in time for an install day this weekend, I further explained to my colleague: “The computer is probably about four or five years old but it’s supposed to be a dual core with 4 gigs of memory. It won’t be the best performing computer in the world, and some things it just won’t be able to do, at least not spectacularly, not because of linux, but because of the computer itself; however, it should still be good enough for videos, games, and day to day stuff, and you’ll be able to explore all the software available for it and see what can be done with linux, and you can add a few things like a bluetooth dongle if you like.”

He cautiously tells me all along that I’m building up anticipation; the caution suggests to me that he is mildly tongue-in-cheek meaning “of the disappointing variety”.

I then start asking him very specific questions, like what he wants as the computer name (I give him examples of current and past computer names I’ve used, and advise him to choose carefully since using the name of a pet or relative could backfire in case something goes wrong, and in the process of relating the experience to family or friends they may be confused or even become upset), the user name and password to use, the root password he wants, and things like which email client he uses at home. Pleased that he’ll be able to use a GMail interface, he begins to apparently genuinely say “Oh now you’re *really* building anticipation!” instead of the cautious insinuations from before.

Therefore in anticipation of the build this coming weekend, I put together this list of the main things I’ll need to install on his computer, especially since I’ll be helping my brother-in-the-know again with another desktop install, and try to get in some of his under the hood expertise at getting my server to be a bit more useful than a rarely used ftp server, a backup server for my data which depends on my remembering to back up my data on it, and consuming electricity.

So enjoy my list of things to do to loading a Fedora desktop very similar to how I use mine. And yes I know that there are plenty of things I *don’t* say, like “take this icon and place it third or fifth or last in the dock on the left on the activities screen” or, how to do “that”. 🙂

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Installing Fedora 21 (Part II), 32 bits at a time

In Part I, I talked about installing Fedora 21 on a new Dell desktop, and promised a Part II, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But wait folks, I was serious. 🙂

I have an Acer Aspire One which I received new out of the factory sealed box as a birthday present in 2009, and immediately converted it to linux after receiving it – Fedora 11, to be exact. It has used, as I recall, Fedora 11, 12, 14, 15, possibly 16, 17, and 19, all without any trouble. Well, ok, none that can’t be attributed to “whaddya expect out of a notebook vs. a full horsepower machine” and errors stemming from somewhere between the keyboard and the chair. ?

However, time is starting to march on with this machine, and while it was great under roughly 18 months of Fedora 19, it was clearly starting to slow down a bit, but … well, Fedora keeps releasing new versions, and, well, while CentOS 7, which is based on Fedora 19 and which I’d be happy to install on my netbook, unfortunately is only available under 64bit while my netbook is only 32bit. So my options were to either keep Fedora 19 unpatched, upgrade to Fedora 21 workstation, which I wanted to do, upgrade to Fedora 21 with XFCE, which would probably make it peppier, or explore other distros, which I don’t wish to do.

When Fedora 21 Workstation came out in December 2014, I downloaded the 32 bit version, and the fun began. Within a couple of minutes of booting up the live DVD and before the desktop loaded up, the machine went into hibernation. This didn’t feel right, but I hit a key and things came back to life. Then, within about a minute, the machine went into hibernation again. I hit a key again, got a minute of performance, and it hibernated again, ad nauseum, and ad infinitum, literally.

Despite this, I decided to continue with the F21 Workstation installation anyway, and I ended up babysitting the install, hitting a key to wake up the system every minute or so during the installation. On a single core atom processor running at 1.5 GHz, this took a good long while and a lot of keyboard wakeups. Finally, the system was installed, but it kept on hibernating after roughly a minute.

As a reference, I proceeded to install Fedora 21 XFCE Spin, and, except for hibernating once during the initial booting up of the liveDVD, it worked like a charm.

One solution I tried was to do a “yum install fedora-release-workstation” or somesuch from an installed XFCE spin, hoping to then do a “yum groupremove XFCE” and repeat “yum install fedora-release-workstation” just to reinstall any packages which may have gotten removed, but it bricked the install and I had to reinstall XFCE yet again.

For a variety of reasons which are now lost in the winds but which probably included having gone through the following suggestions from ask.fedoraproject.org, I managed to install and re-install the XFCE spin several times again after probably having reinstalled the Workstation a few times in between.

I went to ask.fedoraproject.org to ask for help (here’s my archive), and I got a few interesting responses.

The first response I got was:

“You can do tests and get logs without interference with systemd-inhibit – ie sudo systemd-inhibit bash. The system won’t suspend or hibernate until you end the process invoked with systemd-inhibit.” This didn’t work; hibernation continued as before.

The next response was “I’m just guessing, but it feels like the system thinks that the battery is almost empty and because of that does the right thing in that situation. I’m not sure which software component is handling this situation but anyway, there seems to be a bug that happens to manifest on your particular environment.” This could have been ruled out immediately – mostly – because at the time the battery was physically out of the machine when I tested, and I was running on mains electricity out of the wall. Nonetheless, I did check, with a fully charged battery in, to be sure I wasn’t being a fool; no such luck, under both cases, the machine kept on hibernating every minute or so.

All through this, I learned that at least one user with a Toshiba Satellite Pro without a CD player had this same problem, and worked just fine up till Fedora 20.

My “brother in the know” helped me with some research, and we found something: In the Arch Linux forums, the problem is described, and the user “Scimmia” comes up with the following workaround (here’s my archive):

“Try setting ‘HandleSuspendKey’ and ‘HandleLidSwitch’ to ignore in /etc/systemd/logind.conf” “Scimmia” further claims that this problem appears to be caused by systemd/logind. This all means that somewhere, signals are being sent out, rightly or wrongly or otherwise, that are being interpreted as “the clamshell lid is being closed, so it’s time to hibernate.”

To wit, my brother and I, after I’d installed Fedora 21 Workstation for the probably at least third time, then boot up an XFCE liveDVD (but do not install it), and through some of my brother’s linux kung-foo, he mounts the hard drive, using Thunar in the XFCE spin as a facilitator, and we edited the appropriate file.

… And Bingo was his name-OH. (Translation: Yup, that worked and the machine now works.)

Here are the instructions to correct the problem, at least for an Acer Aspire One, and which are also findable through ask.fedoraproject.org:

1) install F21 32bit workstation, by babysitting the system throughout the whole install to keep waking it up every minute or so (literally!)
2) reboot using a live-dvd that works on the system, such as the F21 XFCE live-DVD
3) mount the hard drive (not really sure specifically how my brother did it but using Thunar seemed to help out a lot)
4)open a terminal session and make sure the hard drive is mounted
5) edit the file /etc/systemd/logind.conf (such as using nano)
6) uncomment the settings for “HandleSuspendKey” and “HandleLidSwitch”
7) set the “HandleSuspendKey” and “HandleLidSwitch” options to “ignore”
8) save the file
9) reboot
10) enjoy

… and, it seems, my instructions, posted on ask.fedoraproject.org, helped at least one other user with an Acer Aspire one. I’m pleased. ?

Now, as for what I think of it … well I like F21 Workstation. On my laptop, it’s a slightly sluggish, but still working well.

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I’d say that Fedora has arrived!

Almost five years ago in March 2010, I stated “Ubuntu and Fedora LiveCDs — Ubuntu a clear winner!”

I’d burned two live CD’s — one of the current Fedora of the day, and one of the current Ubuntu of the day. I had wanted a group I belonged to to use one to reformat a virus-infected computer to use it again. Incidentally, they declined the honour, however that’s beyond my point: I didn’t want to give them (or anyone) the Fedora CD, while I thought that the Ubuntu CD was great out of the box, specifically including OpenOffice.org (now LibreOffice) and a cute little directory including a short video, a sample mortgage calculator, and two or three other little gems which really put the CD over the top for its immediate usefulness.

Well, I haven’t really used Live CD’s much since I’m not all that worried about having linux on the run, but at this point Fedora 21 seems to only be available by Live CD’s. But to wit, the experience with Fedora 21 seems to be quite the improvement in experience, according to at least two of my somewhere between the stated and implicit standards of comparison: The inclusion of (now) LibreOffice, what I considered a killer omission, and the ability to quickly and easily install many “productive” pieces of software through the new software installer. To be fair, at the time Fedora limited itself to CD’s and in its efforts to include as wide a base as possible for supposed widest mass appeal, Fedora was unable to include OpenOffice.org (or, as possible, any usable subset thereof) due to space restrictions, although it was able to include AbiWord.

Now, Fedora Workstation includes LibreOffice, and by typing into the search box in the “Activities Overview” (click on “Activities” on the upper left hand corner of the screen, or invoke it using the “hot corner” by bringing your cursor up there), the installed software that may help you, as well as a number of other pieces of software in the repositories which may help you, as indicated by a little shopping bag to the left of the proposed piece of software.

screenshot of proposed software

Well, I guess now I just need to find someone who needs to have their computer saved from viruses and spyware. 🙂

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Installing Fedora 21 — Part I

Well, well, Fedora 21 Workstation came out in early December, 2014 to (at least my) great anticipation. It works great, and it’s a nice evolution in the Fedora desktop.

Initially, one of the biggest things that had me confused about it was wrapping my head around the hoopla: What’s the improvement? What’s the big deal? What has really come about to fill up the time between the release of Fedora 20 in December, 2013, and the release of Fedora 21 in December, 2014? Ok, tell me. “Uhhhh …” And so on.

Eventually I understood, or at least presumed, rightly or wrongly, that the biggest improvements for me would be under the hood and I wouldn’t really notice much, although I’d see the better and more intuitive software installation manager on the gui, and the polish, which I have. Apparently — for (one of) the main (now) Products, the Workstation — improvements would show up in the clearing of many bugs, general issues, and polish issues, and as well as choosing “best of breed” components (and in some cases, working with or even creating some upstream projects expressly to make desired components into the “best of their breed”, at least toward Fedora’s new vision). This would be instead of Fedora giving the impression (again, rightly or wrongly) of just “throwing together a bunch of packages and compiling them into a distribution” (admittedly, that worked rather well, and by working with upstream projects directly to fix bugs and contribute desired new functionality.) And finally, the dimensions of the windows have been changed such that in many places, the gray space and borders are smaller and thinner.

So after downloading and burning the 64-bit ISO (and concurrently, the 32-bit iso, the subject of Part II), and doing a full backup of my /home directory (including the hidden directories), I dived into the installation.

I had no trouble at all installing F21 on my NEW NEW NEW Dell Inspiron Dell i3847-5387BK PC (Intel Core i5-4460 / 1TB HDD / 8GB RAM / Intel HD Graphics / Windows 8.1). Firstly, nuking the Windows install was a great pleasure after having been pestered into first installing the Windows 8.1 which came with the computer. And that’s not including all the really annoying and really invasive questions the install asks, like full names, areas, and connecting to your (or signing up for) Windows Live or whatever account (which of course I don’t have).

The install was fairly easy (I suppose I’m not saying much given the several, several dozen linux installs I’ve done over the past eight plus years). In fact, the liveDVD — only because Fedora gave up on the size restrictions of CD’s for the live versions a few years ago, the image size was the order of 1.4 gigs (ok almost twice the size of a regular CD) — booted up rather quickly (faster than I’m accustomed to with the usually low-powered P4 single cores), and the first thing I saw was an option to either try out F21 Workstation or go directly to installation, all on top of Gnome Shell. I of course hotly jumped onto the install option, egged on by the annoying Windows install I’d just done (which, BTW, went flawlessly beyond the nuisances mentioned above, and fairly quickly.)

The biggest thing that was a bit confusing was discerning in Anaconda the checkbox that allowed me to free up all space on the hard drive, given that it seemed to be slightly below the screen and I needed to scroll down to it.

In the part of Anaconda that asks for location in order to set the time zone (and possibly / probably) set other regional default settings, Montreal — where I live — isn’t available. To me this is “a (minor) thing” since Montreal *used* to be available in the Anaconda locations list. The main cities in my time zone and “nearby” were Toronto and New York. I suppose that setting “New York” is generic enough, but in the presence of a long list of city names around the world spanning multiple time zones and with multiple redundancies per time zone, requiring someone from Montreal to indicate that their location is Toronto is downright near insulting — no Maple Laughs here! 🙂 Heck, I couldn’t even choose Ottawa had I wanted to, or choose to be equally insulted to indicate Quebec City — Go Habs Go! 🙂

Once the basic information was input, the installation was great and quick; so quick, in fact, I neglected to enter a computer name — easily fixed with a “hostname (addnamehere)” and “nano /etc/sysconfig/network” as root and editing things appropriately.

Interestingly, UEFI was not even a non-issue (ok so I do think that tin-foil hats are a legitimate fashion statement. 🙂 ) A quick check afterwards of the pre-boot menu options listed the following:

Boot Mode is to: UEFI
Secure Boot: ON
UEFI Boot: Fedora UEFI OS

How pleasing to see that Windows *isn’t* listed.

Now, beyond assuming that most linux distros pay the UEFI tax, err, registration fee, I wonder if Oracle pays it for Solaris, IBM for z/OS — I assume as much based on a cursory search for “IBM zos uefi” — or just about any other os developer working on intel architecture.

After that, the computer ran (and of course still runs) great. I even described it as “frighteningly fast”. The new software installer in F21 is quite helpful in suggesting software I want if it’s not already installed, and installs it quickly. The best part is that it’s seamlessly integrated with the activities screen where I can enter software I want to use in the search line, and most of the uninstalled software that I’d want is listed.

A few other command line installs were necessary though, to install (what my brother calls “your linux kung-fu”) some things like DenyHosts, some codecs, and so on.

However a there was one little problem with the settings. For one of the settings surrounding locations, I entered the likes of GB or UK for Great Britain / United Kingdom, so as to get settings with British spellings (again, Canadian English settings weren’t available). This had the result of setting the calendar applet at the top center of the screen to start weeks on Mondays. Now, I know that around the world this is gaining a certain traction for a variety of reasons, including ISO reasons, but this is incredibly confusing to one who is accustomed to calendars using Sundays as the first day of the week. (Yes, I know that this same argument, appropriately centred on Mondays, applies to those who use Mondays as the first day of the week.) This was finally fixed by setting the locales setting in /etc/default/locale to:

ANG=”en_CA.UTF-8″
LC_TIME=”en_CA.UTF-8″
LC_PAPER=”en_CA.UTF-8″
LC_MEASUREMENT=”en_CA.UTF-8″

Well this solution didn’t seem to be persistent, even if the file is. I ended up going into the “settings” / “region and language” option of the gui and setting both the language and region to, surprise, surprise, Canada.

Well this system is up and running, and works just like Fedora, surprise, surprise. My /home directory was restored with no trouble at all. And, while I was happy to have used Fedora 19 for a year and a half (as far as I’m concerned, Fedora heaven for me, getting an extra six months of system stability) I’m also glad to have updated to Fedora 21.

Upcoming: Part II — Installing Fedora 21, 32-bits at a time

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I now have a Fedora Friend Finder!

In early 2011, I decided to go to a FudCon in Tempe, Arizona (here’s my archive). And here’s my blog summarizing my participation.

One of the things in the list of items to bring was a Fedora Friend Finder (archive, since the link disappeared), in other words an extension cord with multiple outlets / a power bar. This of course makes sense when you have a bunch of computer people gathering together, face to face: We still bring computers and as such we want to plug them in.

As you can see if you followed the link or checked my archive, the page featured a long power bar with 12 outlets, like the following:

12 outlet power strip

I of course had considered the power bar shown to be quite fanciful and even comical to the point of farce, and as such I assumed that someone had played around with The GIMP to produce the image.  However, the message was clear: I brought a four outlet power bar with a roll-up extension cord to FudCon Tempe, like the following:

cord caddy

During FudCon Tempe, I was mildly popular during the various “unconference” sessions and certainly made friends as a result of my power bar. In fact, during the “Lightning Talks” at the end of the “unconference” part, I was so popular that I had to turn people away who wanted to plug in, even after several other power bars had been plugged into mine.

Fast forward to this past week in 2014, and I’m shopping for supplies at a Canadian Tire for a job site I’m starting up, including electrical extension cords and power bars. What do I find? To my amazement, a 12 outlet power bar just like I’d seen on the Fedora Friend Finder web page. The person I was with was a bit bewildered by my fascination with it; to him, it was just a big power bar. It may have been odd, but it was just another power bar.

I wasn’t just fascinated; I was practically beside myself. Here I was in front of a real live example of the farcical prop I’d seen on a web page. Of course, I had to buy one.

Here’s a pic of it with eight personal pumps and one DryCal calibrator hooked up, charging the internal batteries:

my Fedora Friend Finder

I think it’s cool. It will probably eventually be used at home where I have my multiple computers and a big wide screen TV and PVR, where things are currently lit up like a Christmas tree, so to speak, with multiple power bars which are nonetheless underused given the multiple oversized adapters.

However, the temptation will be there to bring it out to any events at which not only would such a power bar be useful, but also to just brag on an “over the top” level and get incredulous looks along with a “may I plug in ?!?!?”

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Fedora Life Spans

As a quick post, I am presenting my table here of typical Fedora lifespans.

Surprise, surprise — or, if you prefer, surprisingly — over the years, on average Fedora has actually been doing a good job of keeping to what is colloquially described as a 13 month lifespan, despite fairly variable lifespans of almost +/- 20% compared to average as of Fedora 16, often being delayed by a week or two or more, and in the case of Fedora 18, by two months! In fact, it has been keeping to this average rather closely — as of Fedora 16, the cumulative averages have kept to less than 2% from the overall average since Fedora 5. Well we’ll see how that affects things, as it is right now I’ve estimated the lifespan of Fedora 16, which I’ll correct when the official number comes out. We’ll see how the two month delay has/will affect(ed) the scheduled release of Fedora 19, and as the case may be Fedora 20 and so on.

Each of Fedora’s End of Life (EOL) is scheduled at a month after the release of the second version of Fedora after, eg. Fedora 12’s end of life was one month after the release of Fedora 14, and so on.

So, while I’m making this up, if the lifespans of Fedora 1 and Fedora 2 are any indication, Fedora presumably only started with the “every six months or so release dates” and/or defining the EOL as one month after the release of the second version following a given release, somewhere around Fedora 3, or possibly Fedora 4. (Although apparently Red Hat Linux, as mentioned here, had a release schedule of about every 6 months, too — and an erratic lifespan of 18 months or 3 years or 5 years, depending on what appears to have been whim though what probably was more along the lines of support contracts tied to specific releases, public reception to a given release, or a given release’s perceived technical excellence and value, etc.)

So enjoy the Table.

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My participation at FUDCon Tempe 2011

(I know, I’m a month late on this.)

I went to FUDCon for the first time this year; it was the first large gathering of Linux / Fedora /Computer people I’d attended, and I’m glad I went. I was also pleased to finally see so many Fedora desktops — over time I’ve become mildly frustrated being the only Fedora / Red Hat person in the room, often in a sea of Ubuntu.

One of the more difficult things was figuring out in advance how the nuances of how things would work: Not ever having been to a BarCamp style event, I had no clue how or whether a presentation I had prepared would be accepted, let alone inserted into the schedule.

My participation:

Friday

After a day of touristy stuff in downtown Phoenix, I showed up about 5:30pm ish to the courtesy room at the Courtyard in Tempe. After helping stuff nametags into plastic nametag holders on neckstraps, I actually managed to regale people with my stories about crossing the Canada/US border and get plenty of belly laughs. Harish and I managed to exchange a quip to the order of “Oooh, I get to meet the myth!” — first by my stating amazement at finally meeting someone who had once actually installed SLS Linux, and in turn being on the receiving end from Harish when I confirmed that I’m one of the Trekkie myths. In between, the two of us held court on the subject of rotary phones, much to the amazement of Ryan — a university student under 20 — at the anachronism. In the meantime, opensource.com was celebrating its first birthday and supplied pizza, beer and cake.

Saturday:

BarCamp pitches, voting, and State of Fedora Address

The pitches were an interesting experience — Of the 170 or so actual participants, it seemed as though at least a third if not half the room got up to pitch their presentation! During the voting process, near the end, I was quite pleased to note that approximately 30-40 people had voted for my presentation. Afterwards, Jared from Red Hat give his “State of Fedora” address, the audio of which can be found here (here’s my archive). His main messages dealt with growth and working together; Fedora is strong, not just because of the bits on the CD but because of the people. His ultimate message was that “Fedora will be stronger tomorrow because of the work today.”

Presentations:

Open Source Anthropology / Diana Harrelson

This was one of the more interesting presentations I attended. Diana did some research for her master’s degree on online communities, and chose the Fedora community as her test subjects. Some of the things that we as linux users — both Fedora and the greater Linux community — know about ourselves were confirmed. One such point that she underlined was the

Future Fedora and Reducing Bureaucracy / Max Spevack and the Fedora Board

This was an “interesting” session — perhaps not the best for me. What I found most interesting was how bureaucratic the meeting felt, and not just because of the subject being discussed. Of course it discussed how frustrated people are with how to get others involved in the Fedora project.

Fedora Security Lab and Securing Linux / Joerg Simon and Donald Buchan

Joerg’s presentation was interesting — he talked about one of Fedora’s spins, tailored to include a bunch of tools on how to test system security by measuring all sorts of parameters — open ports, security holes, and the like. I’ve downloaded it and plan on taking a look at how it operates.

My presentation worked out ok; people seemed (at least politely) receptive to my talk, the subject, and my suggestions. The most contentious issues? Root access, root passwords vs. keys, and su vs. sudo.

Juicy Software Repo Management with Pulp / Jason Connor and Jay Dobies

Even though it would have gone over my head as much as software repo management did, I wish I had have gone to Jeff Darcy’s Cloud Filesystem presentation since he’d been telling me about it on Friday evening. Unfortunately I don’t think I got anything out of this presentation, however well it was presented.

I Want to Keep on Hacking but my Hands Hurt / Mel Chua and Sebastian Dziallas

This was a fun presentation — Mel and Sebastien brought a bunch of ergonomic toys related to relieving and avoiding stresses related to using a computer. There were a lot of defacto visual gags as a result of people using the toys or assuming less harmful positions and ways to use your computer better.

FUDPub

Well as usual I showed off how horrible I am at games by agreeing to be beaten by, er play against Clint at ping pong. Food was great; burrito night! There also was plenty of liquid refreshment. I got to meet a computer science professor from Seneca College in Toronto, and thank him for the wiki he’d put up for his students’ participation in FUDCon, which can be found here (here’s my archive). Although I only found it the day before I left home, this was invaluable for framing and gelling all the little details about my participation.

Sunday

Designing UI mockups in Inkscape / Máirín Duffy

This presentation was a bit more amusing for me; at least it wasn’t over my head. 🙂 Máirín proved to be a true mistress when it comes to Inkscape, even though I suspect that for her and most Inkscape users what she was doing was basic stuff to be expected by anyone in graphic design. The coolest thing about her presentation? Her hot dog wallpaper! hotdog here too

IP Law for Hackers / Pam Chestek and Richard Fontana

This was an interesting, two hour session on how Red Hat lawyers have to deal with open licenses such as the GPL, and trademark issues related to the Fedora project. One of the main things I remember is to “keep the name of your project simple, memorable, and generic, ie. unrelated to your product.”

Lightning Talks!

Covered in another area, the lightning talks were apparently a new entry into the FUDCon format. I think that there should be a couple of such sessions, given a sufficient number of presentations. The most interesting talk? Mel talking about baking (here’s my archive). Seriously.

I did not attend the hackfests per se but I spoke with Simon about OLPC. I found his recounting of the successes of the OLPC in Bolivia (?) interestubg: The response to “we should be sending food and textbooks, not computers” criticisms is “Getting textbooks out is hard, but teachers can easily distribute educational resources with OLPC. And, the kids’ parents come back to the school in the evening to use the internet, and learn reading skills while also finding out the true price of their crops instead of being taken advantage of by unscrupulous purchasers hoping that uneducated, uninformed farmers won’t know any better.” As for having a static base (such as Fedora 7) creating a security risk, Simon reminded me that the likelier security risk is to the order of “Give me your computer, you little (censored)!”

I helped with clean up; after that I made an impromptu organization for a group of us to go to Gordon Biersch’s, a local brewpub. The whitbeer was good, and the chicken parmesan was good too. And a bunch of us organized a road trip for the next morning.

Monday

During the little road trip and on the topic of Fedora and Red Hat, I remember Brian (thank you for the driving!), a Red Hat employee, telling me about working at Red Hat and the RHEL sales model. It felt like tactics similar to a competing product.

After returning from the road trip, the hackfests on Monday were what I would consider “boring” — definitely not my thing.

The bright light for me was unfortunately at the expense of people who were stranded in Phoenix due to winter storms keeping their flights from leaving Phoenix — the Monday night party in the hotel lobby was quite a lot of fun, and even on Tuesday evening there were a few people still waiting around. I on the other hand had planned to stay sveral days later, so of course I was supposed to be there.

My thanks go to Jared, Robyn, Ryan, Southern Gentleman, Simon, Harish, Joerg, Ian, Clint, Chris, Máirín, Mel, and everyone else.