Fedora¶

Reference material¶

Start page: https://start.fedoraproject.org/

Getting started with virtualization (fedoraproject.org)

I am keeping here a link to “Beyond Linux From Scratch” which seems to be an interesting read. i stumbled upon the page while asking about initramfs. Accessed okay on 20 Oct 2018.

Locating documentation¶

From around 2020 fedora are trying to put all documentation together in docs.fedoraproject.org.

Have a look at apps.fedoraproject.org

Fesco ticketing system

FESCo is the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

Bugzilla where reviews and bugs are entered.

Wiki documentation on the various systems (the wiki site is deprecated, so the deep links here work, but the top link takes one to docs.fedoraproject.org):

Koji: Using the koji build system

Bhodi

MP4 video codecs¶

The solution below requires rpmfusion packages. The ipod touch I have saves “*mov” files that are MP4 H.264 AAC encoded files.

I found out because I could not play them with the standard “totem” in Fedora 24.

This was cured with these commands:

dnf install h264enc.noarch
dnf install faac
dnf install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
dnf install gstreamer-plugins-bad
dnf install gstreamer-plugins-bad-free
dnf install gstreamer-ffmpeg
dnf install gstreamer1
dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-good
dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld
dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-ugly
dnf install gstreamer1-libav

Systemd¶

This is an article by Jon Stanley about converting sysv-init scripts to systemd in fedora magazine (2015). systemd: Converting sysvinit scripts

And here is a link to the man page of the systemd service: systemd.service (Freedesktop dot org)

Version¶

One of the possibly many ways to determine which fedora version you are running:

rpm -E %fedora

On my current machine, it gives me “24” (July 2016).

On a redhat system, this is possible too:

rpm -E %rhel

The result is “7” on a RHEL7 machine.

This was noticed first in the recipe from rpmfusion.

Other things can be gleaned at from rpm –showrc that shows many, many entries (about 1400 lines on the redhat system I tried it on).

How to generate a password¶

I copied examples from how to geek on password generation:

openssl rand -base64 32

date +%s | sha256sum | base64 | head -c 32 ; echo

< /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c${1:-32};echo;

How to find the source rpm of an installed package¶

This command outputs a source rpm for a package:

rpm -qa --queryformat='%{NAME} %{SOURCERPM}\n' <package>

For example:

$ rpm -qa --queryformat='%{NAME} %{SOURCERPM}\n' python3-docutils
python3-docutils python-docutils-0.14-6.fc30.src.rpm

the list of elements that can go in the query formats comes from:

rpm --querytags

Setting up a second monitor¶

For an all-in-one pc with a broken main display running Fedora.

The configuration below allows the pc to operate on a second monitor ignoring the first monitor.

The configuration file is “monitors.xml” in the folder ~/.config

For gdm to operate the same way, I had to copy it to /var/lib/gdm/.config:

<monitors version="2">
  <configuration>
    <logicalmonitor>
      <x>0</x>
      <y>0</y>
      <scale>1</scale>
      <primary>yes</primary>
      <monitor>
        <monitorspec>
          <connector>HDMI-2</connector>
          <vendor>MED</vendor>
          <product>MD 20119</product>
          <serial>0x01010101</serial>
        </monitorspec>
        <mode>
          <width>1280</width>
          <height>1024</height>
          <rate>75.025177001953125</rate>
        </mode>
      </monitor>
    </logicalmonitor>
    <disabled>
      <monitorspec>
        <connector>HDMI-1</connector>
        <vendor>LEN</vendor>
        <product>Lenovo AIO PC</product>
        <serial>000001</serial>
      </monitorspec>
    </disabled>
  </configuration>
</monitors>

And this is for a newer Lenovo ThinkPad laptop:

<monitors version="2">
  <configuration>
    <logicalmonitor>
      <x>0</x>
      <y>0</y>
      <scale>1</scale>
      <primary>yes</primary>
      <monitor>
        <monitorspec>
          <connector>eDP-1</connector>
          <vendor>CMN</vendor>
          <product>0x15e5</product>
          <serial>0x00000000</serial>
        </monitorspec>
        <mode>
          <width>1680</width>
          <height>1050</height>
          <rate>59.954250335693359</rate>
        </mode>
      </monitor>
      <monitor>
        <monitorspec>
          <connector>HDMI-2</connector>
          <vendor>DEL</vendor>
          <product>DELL 2407WFP</product>
          <serial>UY5456BE10WS </serial>
        </monitorspec>
        <mode>
          <width>1680</width>
          <height>1050</height>
          <rate>59.883251190185547</rate>
        </mode>
      </monitor>
    </logicalmonitor>
  </configuration>
</monitors>

gnome-gdm¶

Configure monitors for login screen

Copy the monitor configuration file from a user account where it is configured properly to the gdm directory:

cp /<user home dir>/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm/.config/

Fedora Packaging¶

Fedora uses the rpm packaging tool.

The documentation includes a tutorial by Alexandre de Abreu (in Fedora News) [1].

This is a link to the draft RPM guide by Stuart Foster, Stuart Ellis and Ben Cotton.

These are the Fedora Packaging Guidelines [2].

Footnotes

Setting up a vnc session¶

On the linux workstation:

sudo dnf install tigervnc-server
vncserver :1 -name <my-session-name> -geometry 1200x850

To set the password:

vncpasswd

On the Mac OS system (client):

open vnc://username:passwd@host-ip:5901

Mock¶

Mock is a chroot environment to build rpms under fedora for various distributions. This is used in koji, the build system for fedora.

User documentation: https://github.com/rpm-software-management/mock/wiki

Miroslav Suchy’s article from 2015 about the problem of using mock on EL6 and EL7. It has to do with yum being upgraded to dnf. There is a solution… (article link)

Find the source rpm for a package¶