Fedora Linux

Fedora 27

Fedora 27, the latest and greatest version, has been released. As always, a lot of work went into putting it all together. But for personally, the new releases has stopped being exciting a long time ago. My desktop needs have been satisfied for years. All I need is MATE Desktop Environment (with i3 window manager), a browser, terminal emulator and Vim. That’s pretty much it. And it has been there forever.

So, is there anything interesting in this new version at all? Release Notes are rather thin, but let’s have a look.

New and improved Gnome 3.26. I know a lot of people who use Gnome, so that’s probably exciting.
New LibreOffice 5.4. Personally, I don’t know anyone who is using LibreOffice. Google Docs is doing a pretty good job these days.
Security section looks like the largest area of changes.
Web Development section mentions Node.js 8.

If you want even more details on what has been done, why and how, have a look at the Fedora 27 changes page.

To me it looks like there is some internal restructuring and reorganization going on, with release process changes (no more Alpha releases), a lot of effort on modularity, and so on.

Hopefully, the next one will be a bit more exciting.

Google Chrome color profile

My good friend and colleague Michael Stepanov has been recently annoyed by some weird color offsets on his external screen in Fedora 26. Turns out, it wasn’t the external monitor, video card, or cable issue. The problem was with the new Google Chrome and its choice of the color profile. The solution was found in this Reddit thread:

Open new tab and type there chrome://flags

Find option “Force color profile” and set it to “sRGB”

Restart Chrome and enjoy blue as blue 🙂

MATE + i3wm = Happy, happy, happy!

I finally freed up a few minutes to try this solution for combined MATE desktop environment with i3 window manager. And I have to say it works perfectly!

I now have the best of both worlds – MATE’s out of the way desktop, with good multi-monitor support, and i3wm’s tiling windows and keyboard navigation.

Fedora 26 Update

Fedora 26 has been release about a month and a half ago. But I didn’t have the time to update my laptop until today. There was also nothing particularly exciting for me in this release, so there was no rush.

Here’s what I had to do today to update my laptop from Fedora 25 to Fedora 26:

# Let's get into root to save a few keystrokes
sudo su -
# Install all updates for Fedora 25
dnf update
# Install dnf system upgrade plugin
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
# Download upgrade packages for Fedora 26
dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=26
# Reboot and install Fedora 26
dnf system-upgrade reboot

If you need more help, have a look at DNF system upgrade wiki page.

The whole process took less an hour, but your mileage may vary. For me, the download itself was the slowest part. I had to pull down about 2.5 GBytes worth of packages, and given my office connection, it took about 35-40 minutes.

The installation itself took about 10-15 minutes, for which, I think, the solid-state disk (SSD) helped a lot.

One more reboot later, everything was up and running. Of all the changes pushed into this version, I think, the upgrade to PHP 7.1 is the one that affects me the most.

sshrc – bring your .bashrc, .vimrc, etc. with you when you ssh

sshrc looks like a handy tool, for those quick SSH sessions to machines, where you can’t setup your full environment for whatever reason (maybe a shared account or automated templating or restricted access). Here’s a description from the project page:

sshrc works just like ssh, but it also sources the ~/.sshrc on your local computer after logging in remotely.
$ echo "echo welcome" >> ~/.sshrc
$ sshrc me@myserver
welcome

$ echo "alias ..='cd ..'" >> ~/.sshrc
$ sshrc me@myserver
$ type ..
.. is aliased to `cd ..'
You can use this to set environment variables, define functions, and run post-login commands. It’s that simple, and it won’t impact other users on the server – even if they use sshrc too. This makes sshrc very useful if you share a server with multiple users and can’t edit the server’s ~/.bashrc without affecting them, or if you have several servers that you don’t want to configure independently.

I’ve discovered it by accident when searching through packages in the Fedora repositories. So, yes, you can install it with yum/dnf.