Nest with Fedora: 2021

by on 2021/08/11 at 4:43 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock

Last week was the 2021 edition of Nest with Fedora. Nest is the all virtual version of Flock, the annual Fedora community conference. While sad we couldn’t all get together in person again this year, the virtual version was fine. The platform again used was ‘hopin’ and it did a reasonable job overall. I did have some problems sharing my presentation for my talk, but otherwise I think everything went smoothly. A few of the talks I went to and some thoughts on them:

  • State of Fedora keynote: Nothing earth shattering here, but good that things all seem to be going up and to the right. 🙂
  • Fedora Council Town Hall: Some good questions, next time it might be good to go round robin as I think there were a few council members that didn’t talk and some that talked a lot.
  • Meet CPE: Good overview of how we do things and whats going on from my teammates.
  • 6 tips working with communties: I think these were all things I knew, but I think it was a good talk for those that don’t know or haven’t thought about how open source communities work.
  • My Pinephone talk: I had technical problems to start with, but after that it went smoothly enough. I was worried that I would have too much time to fill, but I just had enough with some questions. (More on this talk below)
  • Exploring our bugs: Lots of interesting charts and graphs. I am still not 100% sure what they might mean. I wish Fedora had a data analysts SIG or something that tried to ask questions and answer them with data. You could spend a LOT of time in this. 🙂
  • CentOS and Alma: Nice talk about how things were going in both projects and how they collaborate.
  • fbrnch a year on: I knew about fbrnch, but I haven’t used it. This talk made me put playing with it on my list for sure. Lots of things it can do for you/simplify workflows.
  • But it’s all ‘upstream’, why doesn’t it work on fedora? great talk from Peter about different levels of upstream and how you need to integrate things in fedora, not just assume they will all work together when updated.
  • Hassle-free Throw-away VM’s with Testcloud: I missed the start of this talk, so I really want to watch the recording later and get the basic info. I was a bit lost lacking that info. 🙂
  • Fedora Trivia Pub Quiz: Fun as always. I never win.
  • Fedora Project Leaders of Legend and Lore: This was _AWESOME_ to see (almost all) the ex-fpl’s in one screen and answering questions. I had to leave about 1/2 way through this talk, so I am looking forward to the recording to watch the rest of the fun.
  • Giving and Receiving Feedback: This was a great talk, I hadn’t really though about feedback from all the angles, and changing the dynamics so you are on the same side trying to reach a goal is brilliant. I hope to use this and to see if we can make it pervasive in out communities. Also ended up reading thought a bunch of related blog posts and twitter threads… great stuff!
  • Building Initrd Images from RPMs: A plan to make initramfs from rpms instead of using dracut. I’m ok with this plan.
  • Making Your Life Easier with the Packager Dashboard: The packager dashboard is great, I hope this gets more folks using it. I have been using it myself for a while and it’s really quite nice for package maintainance.
  • Cross Collaboration Panel: This was interesting, but might have been more interesting from a ‘each person tell your collaboration story’ instead of just trying to answer questions from the audience. Still, cross distro collaboration is a great thing and we should all strive to do it when we can.
  • Closing Remarks: Most signups and attendees ever. It seems clear even if we do in person next year, we should either _also_ do a virtual conference or some kind of hybrid. It’s just too handy to not have to travel. 🙂

My talk on the pinephone seemed to go well, but it’s hard to tell. 🙂 I tried to put forth the idea that because smart phones are slowing down (people want longer support, don’t replace their phones every year anymore, no new superfeatures, % sales lower year over year) this is a great time to move a open source community into the phone space. It’s very similar to the pc market in a lot of ways. I went over the pinephone hardware (will never be super fast, but at ~150$ it’s reachable to hack on from everyone) and hopefully someday may be a daily driver for some. We really need upstreaming of some connectivity so we can start making fedora images: wifi/bt/modem/usb-c, etc. Hopefully that will happen soon. Userspace is coming along fast with Phosh/plasma/other desktops and applications.

Overall a nice time, many thanks to all the organizers again this year!

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A critique of google chat

by on 2021/04/14 at 11:58 am
Posted In: fedora, linux

I’m not usually one to say bad things about… well, anything, but more and more people I interact with lately have been using google chat at their preferred communication medium and I have been asked a few times why I dislike it, so I thought I would do a blog post on it and can then just point people here.

First a few pros before any cons:

  • It works fine in firefox as far as I have seen
  • It’s included in “google workspace’, so if you have that you have google chat too.
  • It looks ok. Links, emojis, reactions, links, videos all look/work fine.
  • It’s easy to start a chat with multiple people or groups
  • All your chat history is there on restart (but see below)
  • It’s encrypted (but no idea if google can read all the history or not)

And now all the actual current cons:

  • It’s a browser only application. If I don’t remember to reload that tab after rebooting, it’s just not there and I get no notices. Needless to say: no 3rd party applications have a chance to do better than the web interface.
  • It’s thread model is utter junk. There are ‘threads’ of conversation, but they are all in the same linear timeline, so its really really hard to tell or notice if someone added something to an old thread without knowing you need to scroll back up to it.
  • It’s horribly “unreliable”. By this I mean I could have the app loaded in my browser and _still_ not see notifications because: google is randomly asking me to login again, google chat decides to put <— and 100 more lines here –> collapsed section, google chat randomly decides to put “and 10 more messages” button at the bottom, Someone could have started a new thread and the one you care about has any of the above happen to it and you never know.
  • Someone you are messaging could just not use google chat or be busy or away. Google chat will helpfully mail them about your message… but 12 hours later. You can also say you are ‘busy’ but only for 8 hours at a time. If you are gone for a week, too bad.
  • Surprisingly search is kind of bad. It finds things you search for, but there’s no way to go to the ‘next’ match or see how many or navigate at all in it.
  • Related to search, there’s no way to have logs locally to use unix tools on like grep, etc.
  • There’s a indicator of how many messages are unread in a room/chat, but no indications if thats just general or if someone mentioned your name.
  • No good keyboard navigation, you have to click around to change channels, threads, conversations, etc.
  • Unless you have been invited, it’s virtual impossible to find rooms. There’s a ‘browse rooms’ dialog, but it only lets you search in the room name, not description or who is in what room or anything.
  • Depending on how things are configured, you may not be able to chat with everyone, only people in your company or workspace.
  • You can adjust notifications per room somewhat, but it’s not as flexible as any IRC client. You can notify on everything, or on just mentions of your name, or mentions of your name and every new thread or nothing. No way to look for keywords or anything.

And of course there’s potential future cons:

  • google changes chat products more than a bakery changes it’s day old bread. Is this iteration of google chat going to stick around? Who knows? Could be a completely rebranded and different one next week. ;(

So, all in all, I will use google chat if I have to, but it’s going to be my least favorite chat method and I wish everyone would switch to something else. Matrix perhaps?

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Ansible and Fedora/EPEL packaging status

by on 2021/04/12 at 4:35 pm
Posted In: ansible, fedora, linux

Just thought I would post a current status on ansible packaging in Fedora/EPEL

ansible 2.9.x (aka, “ansible classic”) continues to be available in EPEL7/EPEL8 and all supported Fedora releases. Odds are most people are just still using this. It does still get security and some small bugfixes, but no big changes or fixes.

ansible 3.x (aka, “ansible-base 2.10.x + community collections”). I had packaged ansible-base in rawhide/f34, but due to the naming changing and lack of time, I have dropped it. ansible-base is retired now in Fedora and likely never will land there.

ansible 4.x (aka, “ansible-core 2.11 + community collections”). I have renamed ansible-base to ansible-core in rawhide. Unfortunately, a dep was added on python-packaging, so there’s 6 or so packages to finish packaging up and getting reviewed. The collections are a bit all over the place as people have been submitting them and getting them in. You can find the ansible collections via ‘dnf list ansible-collection\*’. After I get ansible-core in shape, I am going to look at packaging up at least the rest of the collections for 4.x. At that point we could look at dropping ansible-classic (or moving it to ‘ansible-classic’ and shipping ansible-core + community collections as ‘ansible’ 4.x. Note that collections work with both ansible-classic and ansible 4.x.

ansible-core 2.12 (I don’t know if this will be in ansible 5.x, but I guess so?) will REQUIRE python-3.8 or larger. So, EPEL7 will probibly never move to this. EPEL8 may, but it might be tricky to use the python3.8 module for this.

So, progress is being made, all be it slowly. 🙂 I’ll post again soon hopefully to announce that ansible-core is usable/testable in rawhide.

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Pinephone and Fedora

by on 2021/03/20 at 1:38 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

Greetings everyone. I thought I would just write up a quick post on some current status and tips and information around running Fedora on pine64 pinephones.

First, let me talk about scaling. One of the problems putting a desktop OS into a small screen on a phone is scaling. Phosh (a librem started gnome-shell replacement for small screens) and Phoc (a mutter/window manager replacement that works with Phosh do there best with this issue. There’s a setting to try and resize all windows from all applications, and a way to do it on a case by case basis, however many applications are just not friendly to small screens. They refuse to shrink below a point, or they cut off valuable parts. I guess this might be something thats best solved upstream at the toolkit level, but it’s a hard problem. By default Phosh sets 200% scaling on the pinephone as well. It all depends on how small a screen/type you can handle, but lowering that gets more applications usable. You can do so via: ‘wlr-randr –output DSI-1 –scale 1.25’ for 125% for example. This also makes it harder to press buttons, so beware. 🙂

Next some great news. The latest round of uboot updates in Fedora Rawhide get my 3GB pinephone booting from a stock rawhide workstation image. Things boot, the display comes up, gnome comes up (and is really difficult to use, see above scaling issue). There’s no net, no modem, no camera, etc, but the display and the base boot chain all works great. Many thanks to Peter Robinson for getting those patches in!

A short note about flatpaks: I installed some flatpaks from flathub, and they work just dandy. The Fedora flatpak registry should soon also be advertising all it’s flatpaks for aarch64 as well. This is a great step for us down the road when we start working on a ostree version.

On the remix front, more things are getting reviewed and added to Fedora repos. chatty (sms/mms/matrix/jabber) client just finished review. There’s only a few more things on the list, but then the big one: The kernel patches. Hopefully we can find some folks to help us upstream things so we can get a vanilla fedora kernel usable. Even just getting in the patches for wifi or modem would be a great help (allowing you to ssh in and apply updates).

I’m still not using mine as a daily driver yet, there’s stil some important things not there that I need:

  • MMS handling (in progress via a mmsd and chatty, but not there yet). For those in EU, in the US all group chats and anything with media uses MMS (at least on my carrier)
  • The camera now works, but it’s still really not good at all. I’m hoping for improvements.
  • There’s so far no good otp app packaged up. Will have to look at them and package up the best one.
  • Lots of small stuff thats nice, but not urgent: the torch mode, auto rotation, docking detection

But a number of things are looking better:

  • Sound works fine along with bluetooth and gpodder, so podcasts are good. (Side note: if you set the dip switch for serial console, it messes up the audio, you need to reset it back to get working audio. 😉
  • epiphany works pretty well here as a web browser. Resizes nicely and is pretty fast.
  • neochat seems the best of the matrix clients here (but chatty is adding matrix support, so will be interesting to see that)
  • newsflash works pretty great for rss reading (although you have to actually read each article to mark it as read. The android tt-rss reader I am using on my android phone lets you just scroll by things to mark them read.
  • gnome-maps seems to work fine, except no GPS. There’s some AGPS upload song and dance I haven’t looked into yet. Hopefully that can get automated so it works out of the box.
  • tootle works fine for mastodon.
  • cawbird works ok if I don’t give up twitter entirely.

Finally a few hardware related notes:

  • In case you missed out on any of the community edition pinephones, the “Beta edition” should be open for preorders on March 24th: https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/19/beta-edition-pre-orders/ This is the same hardware as the later community editions (1.2) at the same price. 🙂
  • There should be in a few months a keyboard for the pinephone. It will be a big honking battery case, so in addition to a hardware keyboard you will get a large battery too. Even though battery life has been pretty good having that extra battery will be very nice. I definitely plan to get one.
  • Finally, and I can’t stress how much I still find this cool and amusing: The modem on the phonephone is a armv7 SOC. You can even run linux on it (The postmarketos folks are making a distribution for it). So wild to see a armv7 processor to just run the modem. How far we have come.

If you’re interested in the pinephone (or any other linux mobility projects), come join us on -phone on freenode or matrix or telegram.

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dumpster fire^W^W2020 year in review

by on 2020/12/31 at 3:14 pm
Posted In: cats, dogs, fedora, flock, linux, pets

Since today is new years eve and 2021 begins here tonight, I thought I would take a look back on 2020.

The big item for me in the first and middle part of the year was our Datacenter move. Planning for that started last year and spilled into early 2020. Then, setup of new machines, migration of services for a minimum Fedora, then moving all the rest of the machines, then getting them online. It was a ton of work, not only in planning, but setting up things, migrating and communicating with everyone involved. Overall I think it went pretty well. Downtime was pretty low for the most part and we managed to get things up pretty fast. It wasn’t perfect of course, we _still_ have things we moved to one datacenter that are not back online yet, but hopefully soon in 2021. I really think how well it worked was a testament to everyone involved: Folks on our team, RHIT planning and networking, and even all the Fedora community members (who were super understanding of the outages and issues!). Here’s to never ever moving from the new datacenter ever again. 🙂

I actually did manage to get one trip in in the early part of the year before covid-19 destroyed everything: I made it to devconf.cz. A excellent time as always!

You may think that the pandemic didn’t affect me much. After all, I am an introvert that lives in the forest 20 miles from the nearest town. However, it really did: When everyone started working from home there was a big flood of video meetings and such, I think because everyone who normally talks to lots of people at the office wanted contact more, and that caused a lot more meetings, making things hard to get done. That died down some, but all the stress about whats locked down and what precautions you need to take to go to the store and all the US politics doom mixed in made it pretty stressful, even when avoiding people.

We managed to get Fedora 32 and 33 out the door, and on time again for the most part!

Flock was of course canceled, and I feel sad not being able to see all my Fedora friends in person. However, nest with fedora was pretty great! Not the same, but still good.

I got a new 2020 dell xps 13 laptop. It’s alright, but I am not amazed by it. I might need to upgrade sooner than the normal 3 years if something amazing comes out and finances permit.

I picked up not one, but two pinephones. I have had a bit of time to play with them over the holidays, but need some more. They are still not to the level of what I would need for daily use, but they are rapidly advancing. Here’s to a Fedora pinephone spin in 2021. 🙂

I decided I should try more microblogging, so I setup a mastodon account: https://fosstodon.org/@nirik Come and join me there and dump twitter. 🙂 No idea if it will stick, but I am going to give it a try. I really didn’t blog much in 2020, given all the datacenter work and doom, perhaps I will try more in 2021.

On the work front, we had some great folks migrate out to other places and some new people come in. If there’s one thing that always stays the same, it’s change. I am pretty happy about how we have moved to actually planning larger projects (initatives) that our team works on now. I think it’s much better for everyone to know what we are working on, what the priority is for everyone involved and clear ideas what done is for those things. Hopefully we keep it up and refine it in 2021. Another thing that I think has been a smashing success is our daily ops standups. Just getting a few folks together every day for 30min to triage tickets, process quick things and discuss things has been great! We have really killed the infrastructure ticket queue down before the holidays. In 2021 we hope to finish that and work on the releng ones.

Finally here we gained a kitten (she was a feral cat that decided she loves people), lost the last of our dogs (he was nearly 15) and just had a bunch of stuff done in our back yard (retaining wall, a bunch of paver stones around our deck, it looks really nice!). I expect in 2021 after we get the back yard grass grown we will look at getting some more dogs, it’s… strange without them around. We have also started (before Christmas even) to eat more healthy and excersize more (I’m down 9lbs so far… at least it’s a dent in the pandemic weight gain.).

Hope 2021 is a great year for everyone! Good riddance to 2020!

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