Gnome Desktop – Don's House of Fine Patisseries

November 5, 2025November 6, 2025

Upgrading to Fedora 43 — (Mostly, but not quite) A Breeze

Since about 2018 or 2019, I have been using the Fedora upgrade tool (here’s a link to my backup) to upgrade my fleet of computers to new versions of Fedora, normally skipping a version at a time, and having settled on odd numbered versions (as a matter of convenience to take advantage of Fedora’s roughly year long life cycle) since about Fedora 15.

In December 2023, I blogged about upgrading my fleet of five computers — all of which I still have and are still running — from Fedora 37 and 38 to Fedora 39. This included two baremetal installs, which proved to be the most difficult. So, despite the title above, I want to underline that the upgrade tool makes upgrading a breeze, even when there are issues, which are usually trivial, and, usually not difficult to resolve … admittedly, if one has a bit of experience! 🙁

As I recall, the upgrade cycle at the end of 2024 from Fedora 39 to Fedora 41 was rather unremarkable. Meaning, I have no recollection of the experience beyond that it happened, especially given the evidence of having just spent the last year using Fedora 41!

The release of Fedora 43 came around a few weeks ago, and I embarked on the upgrades on a sunday afternoon at the very beginning of November, 2025, and was finished and writing up this blog post by the Tuesday evening a couple of days later.

To begin, I looked up my post from December 2023 as a reference throughout the process, and was constantly referring to the following commands, performed as root:

dnf upgrade --refresh
dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=43
dnf system-upgrade reboot

Despite the experience largely being a breeze and relatively unremarkable, I had three distinct problems of note over three systems on the upgrades.

Problem #1: Download of new version blocked by existing packages

On my desktop and later on one of my laptops, I received what was to me cryptic errors about some packages on my systems, which were listed, which somehow blocked the upgrade. Looking around on the internet but before even finding a solution, I recalled that I could add “—allowerasing” to the end of the

dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=43

command to start downloading the packages; this allowed the system upgrades themselves to proceed “like a breeze”. Well, sort of, but not quite.

Adding –allowerasing to the download command

For what it’s worth, www.debugpoint.com (here is my archive) mentions this workaround.

And here is a screenshot from my desktop post-upgrade, but before I started dealing with Problem #2:

Desktop on my desktop computer, with new Fedora 43 artwork, and my IP address shaded out

Problem #2: Gnome Extensions causing system to freeze:

According to my recollection, which of course is subjective at this point, one of the points highlighted as a positive in the transition from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 — in the Fedora world, beginning with Fedora 15 in May, 2011 — was that Gnome 3 was designed to be extensible. (Looking back, this may well have been a concession on the part of the Gnome developers since the code, being open source, naturally lends itself to such, at least in the short term.) This way it allowed both the Gnome developers to present the desktop environment according to their vision, and allow users to modify it to behave as they pleased. From this, for instance, the Cinnamon Desktop, initially really just a heavily extended variant of Gnome 3, was born.

Unfortunately, what has really occurred in my experience — including during this upgrade cycle — is that with just about every upgrade comes breakage of many Gnome 3 extensions; and from this, for instance, the Cinnamon Desktop finally forking itself away from Gnome 3 due to the extensive work they had to do with each release to maintain their extensions and their functionality. As such, I have had many Gnome extensions over the years — which I have gotten directly from extensions.gnome.org to boot! — that have come and gone simply because maintainers could not devote the time to update them for each release. This is doubly frustrating, because:

on the one hand, I would love Gnome to have some kind of pathway such as stable APIs or whatnot that would keep extensions alive instead of having to be (sometimes massively) rewritten with every release of Gnome, and,
on the other hand, you get what you pay for, which in my case, is a wonderful operating system for which I paid nothing more than the internet connection to download it, and if I don’t like what I get, I can always change desktop environments — there are several!

To wit, on my desktop, existing and active extensions made the system freeze, usually within roughly 15 minutes or thereabouts: The mouse would not work, they keyboard would not work, the screen would freeze, the time and date display would freeze, and I could not ssh into the machine from another machine. After the third or fourth hard reboot requiring powering down with the power button and after about a day, I noticed a notification window come up after a reboot, saying that there were extensions that needed to be updated; I proceeded with this, and the problem was solved.

Popup window indicating extensions to be updated (window taken from a laptop system, not my desktop)

The “Log Out” button was pressed, and I logged back in; all seemed to be solved.

Problem #3: Deprecation of X11 would cause systems to not boot into a graphical desktop

On my webserver — the host of this blog! (and which is in my bedroom, not colocated in some datacenter or some virtual machine in a cloud service — I use Fedora Workstation (graphical) instead of the server edition. This is simply because at its core, both editions are essentially the same operating system, and at the time that I installed the current instance, I hadn’t ever used the server edition. Of course, each has different subsets of packages and different settings in their default installations, but at their core, they are the same OS, a few “dnf install” commands and settings away from each other. And, while I indeed normally treat it and administer it as a headless server, there have been a small handful of occasions over the years during which my significantly-less-than-expert abilities have allowed me to do things with it using the graphical desktop that I would have had more difficulty doing on the command line.

At this point I should say that usually, one should do backups before proceeding with the upgrades, a practice that with one exception I don’t normally do.

However, I did do so with my webserver, which is also a passive backup for my data from my other computers … which is a bit out of date, although I expect / hope not substantially.

So I asked my brother to do a backup to his network, which just required a manual differential update, since we had already set up cron jobs to do so:

The next day, I started doing things like dnf updates and then the upgrade. Whaddya know, I got a couple of messages from my brother while I was upgrading. He sent me some screenshots:

Warning from my brother that my website was down

My brother has an alert on my website to detect downtime. I told him that I was aware, because I had manually disconnected the external hard drive with the static parts of my website.

Then a few minutes later, I got another message from him:

Warning from my brother that the site was back up

I responded to him again saying well of course, but I’m still in the process of doing the upgrades!

I went through the upgrade, which seemed to work. Yet, upon the reboot after the upgrade, I got the following screen:

Oddly, it stopped during the reboot. However, I managed to ssh into the machine, as well as check to see if it was able to serve web pages. Both worked.

In the meantime, I also got ambitious and started upgrading one of my laptops. Again, once I’d done the “–allowerasing” addition to the download command (above), and the system went through with the upgrade, I got the following screen:

Fortunately, I was able to ssh into the laptop.

But I was wondering what was going on, especially since both machines appeared to stop at different times — although, I suppose, the webserver had a few other services to start, but that’s beyond what I actually checked.

So I tried to ask on the internet, and the first suggestion I found was on the Fedora discussion boards (somehow I can’t seem to create a proper PDF of it …) suggesting that I modify a shadow file:

This did not work for me.

Another suggestion I found elsewhere was to check what failed, so as root on my server I entered:

systemctl –failed (that’s two dashes, wordpress decided to combine them!)

and I got the following information:

This seemed to tell me that there were issues with starting up the graphical display. I suspected that this could be the same problem I was having on my laptop.

Again on the Fedora project’s discussion boards, I came across the following advice:

The advice was to edit the /etc/gdm/custom.conf file by commenting the line “WaylandEnable=false”

With this I remembered that on my webserver and one of my laptops, the windowing system was X.org for historical reasons related to my brother helping me a lot with these systems, and, until recently, X.org was easier for him to remotely help administer those systems if he needed to use the desktop. Alas, X.org has been deprecated in Fedora Workstation Edition using Gnome (here’s my archive), although one can still use it elsewhere in other editions and spins.

WaylandEnable=false uncommented, telling my system to not use Wayland, therefore making my system hang

WaylandEnable=false commented out, allowing my computer to reboot properly and get to a GUI

Well once the WaylandEnable=false line was commented out, that solved my problem easily on both my webserver, and on the laptop that was affected.

Note about desktop on abovementioned laptop:

Curiously, the laptop’s wallpaper wasn’t changed. In fact, it still has the wallpaper from its original install of Fedora 36 when it was new!

Wallpaper on one of my laptops, from Fedora 36, its original image when new

(Maybe I should check the settings to see if something was set to permanent on the wallpapers when it was initially formatted when purchased new. Maybe.)

And yes, on my desktop, my other laptop, and my webserver, which all have the Workstation Edition, the wallpapers upgraded to the Space Shuttle design for Fedora 43. Only the VPN server, which is the Server Edition, doesn’t have any wallpaper at all.

The “Breezy” systems:

And the other two systems I have? Upgrading them was a breeze — an old PIII 3.4 something or other I found in a building slated to be demolished in 2016, now running Fedora Server edition, and currently used as a VPN gate and soon as a backup server, and a 2015 laptop that I still use regularly, including for teleconferencing and videos. Both upgraded like a breeze and without saying boo.

Now for another year of Fedora goodness!

October 18, 2024October 18, 2024

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 6: Upgrading the Operating System

Previous Chapter: Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 5: Gnome Extensions, and Basic File Management

Note: Although it has been a while between posts and I had planned on another subject for what would have been this post, given the time lapse I decided to take advantage of a new version of Fedora that had been released to show how to easily upgrade the OS version, in this case, from version 39 to version 40. Note that many different versions of linux (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc.) have similar functions and upgrade paths; since I began using the automatic upgrade tool in Fedora in about 2018, I have had good experiences.

Firstly, the “Activities” screen happened to open when I logged into the system, and I chose the software icon in the dock on the bottom (the white “shopping bag” with the red, black, and blue symbols):

Which brought up the following screen, telling me that there were general updates, and that a new version of Fedora was available:

The system updates were first chosen and downloaded:

Once the updates were downloaded, the system was ready to be rebooted for installation:

The “Restart & Install” button was chosen to confirm the reboot:

Restart and install updates dialog box opened

The system rebooted:

… and updates were installed:

Once the updates were installed, the system rebooted:

System rebooted after installation of updates

… leading to the login screen:

… where I entered my password:

Once logged in, I clicked on the software icon again in the dock, and chose to download the upgrades for Fedora 40:

Software store opened again, and upgrade packages downloaded (2%)

Once the upgrade packages were downloaded, the “Restart & Upgrade” button was pressed:

All packages downloaded, and Restart and Upgrade button pressed

… which required authentication, so my password was entered:

Authentication required for the major changes

The system asked again if I wanted to restart and Install the upgrade:

Confirmation requested to restart and upgrade the system

The “Restart & Install Upgrade” button was pressed:

Once the upgrade was complete, the computer rebooted:

The login screen came up again:

And again I provided my password:

Once logged in, new artwork for the new version came up, as well as a notification that the system had been upgraded to the new version (in this case, Fedora v.40):

Just to finish off some checks, the menu at the power button was opened, in order to open the settings screen, accessible from the little gear second from the left on top:

The settings were opened:

I noticed that the name of my computer was curiously changed back to “Fedora” in the upgrade:

System renamed after curious change by upgrade

Then I chose the “System Details”, showing that the system had indeed been updated to version 40:

Confirmation that the system had been upgraded to Fedora 40

Next chapter: Using common pieces of desktop software

March 5, 2015April 27, 2020

Having to find multiple levels of internet access — oh, fun!

Disclaimer: I am musing on the challenges I faced while trying to secure reliable internet I required during a recent set of business trips, and the process of developing various solutions to these challenges. These challenges are, in a general fashion, typical of the routine logistical challenges I face when in-the-field, and no doubt of other field technicians. In no way am I trying to reflect negatively on my employer, who for the purposes of this entry shall remain nameless.

I was recently on a couple of business trips, depending on an iPad as a critical part of the execution of the contract. This trip was to a small city of 25,656 (according to Wikipedia), big enough to have plenty of internet access points, cell phones, and cell phone data. As far as I was concerned, in fact, I was in a mini-mini version of Montreal, home for me, to those who haven’t figured it out yet.

The way the iPad is set up, wifi internet access is required to transfer building plans needed to do the work to the iPad, and transfer back files and data collected from my field work. I have made no bones mentioning to some key people heading the overall project that this is a potential Achilles’ Heel to the execution of the project, since, at least in the overall project’s fringe locations sufficiently beyond population centres, internet access would be a spotty luxury at best. My trips were at least symbolically close enough to the edges, underlining the potential problem.

One of the first challenges I found was that the iPad didn’t seem to play well with the internet supplied in the motel (DataValet); although I did manage to get it to work once, it proved a bit too frustrating to get working reliably. A colleague confirmed that he’d had similar problems getting Apple products to connect to DataValet. I had no trouble getting my personal computer running Fedora 21 Workstation to work with DataValet: In fact, besides not recalling having trouble over the years connecting to wifi that wasn’t specific to Linux or Fedora, I would actually say that the experience was even easier than in the past, since the daily leases seemed to automatically renew, although it seemed to insinuate itself by a “convenient” automatic popup window. In parallel, my work Windows-based machine also worked flawlessly throughout with DataValet, although if I remember correctly, I may have had to occasionally open up a browser in order to renew the leases.

Add to this challenge, my employer’s local office didn’t seem to have wifi, or at least, assuming that it *was* there as a hidden network, my work computer didn’t automatically connect to the corporate wifi when not plugged in to the corporate network, which it normally does at my home office.

My first solution was to fulfill a purpose of my having asked for a company smart phone in 2014: Create a hot spot using the data plan on my work phone to do data transfers when not in a wifi zone that works well for the iPad. However, it seemed, between the picture-heavy data and the fact that the iPad seems to do automatic background backups when hooked up to internet — a feature to which I initially had a (negative) knee-jerk reaction that nonetheless actually was useful at one point and since — my phone appeared to run out of my data plan for the month, as evidenced by the sudden stop of internet connection through the phone while still operating just fine as a phone. Having quickly checked the phone’s data usage logs and determining that I’d certainly gotten to the neighbourhood of the limit I believed I had (2 gigs), I assumed that the phone’s contract had a limit set by my employer to turn off the data plans until the month rolls over in order to avoid overage charges. I later learned, upon my return home and standing in front of the IT tech responsible for the corporate cell phones, that the problem was presumed to be an unusual set of settings probably set by some esoteric app (of which I have have very few, esoteric or otherwise, on my work phone), or possibly a SIM card problem, which turned on off the phone’s data capabilities, and that in any case the company has no such policy to ask the cell service provider to turn off a phone’s data access when it reaches the limit of “included data” in the plan, until the rollover date. The lack of internet on the phone is “solved” by resetting the phone to factory settings; I should get instructions on how to do it in the future should I be faced with the problem again. 🙂

This led to a second solution: I used my personal phone to create a hotspot and consumed a bit of my personal data plan, which didn’t bother me too much, at least until it were to involve overage charges. Not that I checked, but based on the little amount of time I used it, I’m sure I never got into that area.

The next solution also created another challenge due to a flub on my part: My client finally gave wifi access to the iPad at her various locations; however, I should have requested that she also enable my work computer, since I had a secondary need for internet given that I developed a need to produce or modify extra plans several times once arriving at some sites, and as such a need to transfer the plans off the computer and onto the iPad.

Finally, I realized that when I have wired access, I had yet another solution available to me: I could set up my linux laptop to create a wifi hotspot. This was rather easy, at least under the current gnome version in Fedora 21 and I believe has been for quite a while under the gnome 3.0 series, and probably before too. Unfortunately, this was wasn’t a solution at the motel since it only had wifi and no wired access, and I didn’t have an external wifi receiver with a cord to provide the wired internet and free up the wifi card.

Here are some screenshots of how easy it is to setup a wifi hotspot under Gnome 3:

step 3

step 4

step 5

Feeling a bit curious along the lines of “shouldn’t this be relatively easy under Windows, too?”, I checked on my work computer, and while it seemed possible, and indeed my brother once did it for me with his Windows computer, it was not obvious at all; in fact, I gave up after about four or five click-throughs with little end in sight.

Hence, at the local office and having set up my laptop to create a local wifi hotspot, I’d created a mildly-amusing-to-me setup on my temporary desk, plugging in my personal laptop to the corporate network, running a hotspot using its wifi card, and using my work computer normally over wifi as well as doing data transfers from the iPad.

Back at home and at my home office, I mention my difficulties in getting internet access to my supervisor (who isn’t a computer techie type), who thought that creating a hotspot under Windows couldn’t be done, or at least he didn’t realize it could be.

Further discussing this with him, I explained the situation saying “I don’t mind trying to find other solutions — that *is* my job — but after not having two A Plans (the motel internet not working for the iPad, nor having wifi at the office), then suddenly not having a plan B (the company cell phone internet not working), having to depend on my personal phone’s data plan, then having to depend on the client’s internet access but not having enough access for all devices, and finally coming up with a part-time solution to replace one of the A-plans — using a second of my personal resources in the form of my personal laptop — there’s a problem here,” to which he agreed.

Jovially, he did however suggest that “in the next leg of your travels, I happen to know that if you can go to the local library, they have free wifi”. This made me realize that if necessary and if possible, I could also try the free wifi at the local Tim Hortons (a popular Canadian chain of coffee and doughnut shops), assuming that there is one in the remote town where I’ll be visiting next.

Which has me really thinking about the problem:

– not all the field techs in the company have smart phones with data plans, and as such not able to create a needed hotspot in order to enable the execution of a project;
– not all the field techs have personal smart phones with a data plan, nor should field techs in general be required to use their personal data plans, let alone go into overage charges, in order to enable the execution of a project;
– at least at first glance, it doesn’t seem to be a quick and easy thing to turn a windows machine into a hotspot in order to enable such work — and I don’t want to hear from the peanut gallery on this one, since I *know* that it *can* be done; my point is that at first glance, even a moderately savvy user such as myself shouldn’t have to say “It’s easy under Gnome 3, why isn’t it about as easy under Windows? Boy it’s a good thing that I had my personal laptop with me!” (On a side note, usually the stereotype is that “Windows is easy, and Mac easier, but isn’t Linux hard?” 🙂 )
– and, only a limited number of computer users are using Gnome 3, where it is easy to set up a hotspot if you either have a wired connection to the internet, or two wifi cards on your computer. (I’ll have to check with my brother, who uses XFCE on one of his laptops, which is on a technical level identical to mine, to see how easy it is under that desktop; obviously, it’s technically possible; I imagine it’s just a question of how easily different desktops enable the functionality.)

Which leads me back to the above-mentioned problem of “what do you do in remote, small villages where you don’t have a corporate office with wifi, motel / B&B internet access is spotty at best, there’s no cell phone coverage, and there are few if any public wifi spots like a restaurant or a public library?”

I just hope that the library’s free wifi isn’t provided by DataValet. 🙂

March 4, 2010April 27, 2020

Cool (or mundane) computer trick impresses co-worker

I managed to impress someone at the office this week with a cool (read mundane) computer trick.

I got a call from the secretary, who is a few seconds’ walk from my desk, asking for a scanned version of my hand-written signature. I replied that on my computer at home I have it, and I could easily get it within a few minutes; she replies that it would be faster for her to just walk over with a piece of paper for me to sign, which she would then scan and play around with.

And this is where I began to impress her: By the time she got to my desk with said sheet of paper, I had already VNC’d into my home server’s desktop and was in the process of doing the same from the server to my main computer’s desktop (gotta finish the process of giving it a static IP and setting it up so that I don’t have to go through my home server. 🙂 ) I finished logging into my desktop, and looked in the likely directory, and voilà ! I fired up my home email client, and within a couple of minutes, she’d received my scanned signature.

Beyond the fact that the Gnome desktop is set up standard to do VNC — and the fact that I installed TigerVNC instead of using the standard Gnome Remote Desktop Viewer — too bad that I can’t really claim that this is a cool Linux trick, since my computer at work is Windows, and you can set up Windows boxes to “pick up the phone” too ….

She was still impressed, though. And it took about as much time as the whole process of signing a piece of paper, scanning it, cropping it, etc.