Fedora – Page 42 – Sick Gaming

Posted on October 31, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Upgrading Fedora 28 to Fedora 29

Fedora 29 was just officially released. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system to the latest version of Fedora. Fedora Workstation has a graphical upgrade method. Alternatively, Fedora offers a command-line method for upgrading Fedora 28 to Fedora 29.

Upgrading Fedora 28 Workstation to Fedora 29

Soon after release time, a notification appears to tell you an upgrade is available. You can click the notification to launch the GNOME Software app. Or you can choose Software from GNOME Shell.

Choose the Updates tab in GNOME Software and you should see a window like this:

If you don’t see anything on this screen, try using the reload tool at the top left. It may take some time after release for all systems to be able to see an upgrade available.

Choose Download to fetch the upgrade packages. You can continue working until you reach a stopping point, and the download is complete. Then use GNOME Software to restart your system and apply the upgrade. Upgrading takes time, so you may want to grab a coffee and come back to the system later.

Using the command line

If you’ve upgraded from past Fedora releases, you are likely familiar with the dnf upgrade plugin. This method is the recommended and supported way to upgrade from Fedora 28 to Fedora 29. Using this plugin will make your upgrade to Fedora 29 simple and easy.

1. Update software and back up your system

Before you do anything, you will want to make sure you have the latest software for Fedora 28 before beginning the upgrade process. To update your software, use GNOME Software or enter the following command in a terminal.

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

Additionally, make sure you back up your system before proceeding. For help with taking a backup, see the backup series on the Fedora Magazine.

2. Install the DNF plugin

Next, open a terminal and type the following command to install the plugin:

sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade

3. Start the update with DNF

Now that your system is up-to-date, backed up, and you have the DNF plugin installed, you can begin the upgrade by using the following command in a terminal:

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=29

This command will begin downloading all of the upgrades for your machine locally to prepare for the upgrade. If you have issues when upgrading because of packages without updates, broken dependencies, or retired packages, add the ‐‐allowerasing flag when typing the above command. This will allow DNF to remove packages that may be blocking your system upgrade.

4. Reboot and upgrade

Once the previous command finishes downloading all of the upgrades, your system will be ready for rebooting. To boot your system into the upgrade process, type the following command in a terminal:

sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

Your system will restart after this. Many releases ago, the fedup tool would create a new option on the kernel selection / boot screen. With the dnf-plugin-system-upgrade package, your system reboots into the current kernel installed for Fedora 28; this is normal. Shortly after the kernel selection screen, your system begins the upgrade process.

Now might be a good time for a coffee break! Once it finishes, your system will restart and you’ll be able to log in to your newly upgraded Fedora 29 system.

Resolving upgrade problems

On occasion, there may be unexpected issues when you upgrade your system. If you experience any issues, please visit the DNF system upgrade wiki page for more information on troubleshooting in the event of a problem.

If you are having issues upgrading and have third-party repositories installed on your system, you may need to disable these repositories while you are upgrading. For support with repositories not provided by Fedora, please contact the providers of the repositories.

Posted on October 27, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Design faster web pages, part 3: Font and CSS tweaks

Welcome back to this series of articles on designing faster web pages. Part 1 and part 2 of this series covered how to lose browser fat through optimizing and replacing images. This part looks at how to lose additional fat in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and fonts.

Tweaking CSS

First things first: let’s look at where the problem originates. CSS was once a huge step forward. You can use it to style several pages from a central style sheet. Nowadays, many web developers use frameworks like Bootstrap.

While these frameworks are certainly helpful, many people simply copy and paste the whole framework. Bootstrap is huge; the “minimal” version of 4.0 is currently 144.9 KB. Perhaps in the era of terabytes of data, this isn’t much. But as they say, even small cattle makes a mess.

Look back at the getfedora.org example. Recall in part 1, the first analysis showed the CSS files used nearly ten times more space than the HTML itself. Here’s a display of the stylesheets used:

That’s nine different stylesheets. Many styles in them that are also unused on the page.

Remove, merge, and compress/minify

The font-awesome CSS inhabits the extreme end of included, unused styles. There are only three glyphs of the font used on the page. To make that up in KB, the font-awesome CSS used at getfedora.org is originally 25.2 KB. After cleaning out all unused styles, it’s only 1.3 KB. This is only about 4% of its original size! For Bootstrap CSS, the difference is 118.3 KB original, and 13.2 KB after removing unused styles.

The next question is, must there be a bootstrap.css and a font-awesome.css? Or can they be combined? Yes, they can. That doesn’t save much file space, but the browser now requests fewer files to succesfully render the page.

Finally, after merging the CSS files, try to remove unused styles and minify them. In this way, you save 10.1 KB for a final size of 4.3 KB.

Unfortunately, there’s no packaged “minifier” tool in Fedoras repositories yet. However, there are hundreds of online services to do that for you. Or you can use CSS-HTML-JS Minify, which is Python, and therefore easy to isntall. There’s not an available tool to purify CSS, but there are web services like UnCSS.

Font improvement

CSS3 came with something a lot of web developer like. They could define fonts the browser downloads in the background to render the page. Since then, a lot of web designers are very happy, especially after they discovered the usage of icon fonts for web design. Font sets like Font Awesome are quiet popular today and widely used. Here’s the size of that content:

current free version 912 glyphs/icons, smallest set ttf 30.9KB, woff 14.7KB, woff2 12.2KB, svg 107.2KB, eot 31.2

So the question is, do you need all the glyphs? In all probability, no. You can get rid of them with FontForge, but that’s a lot of work. You could also use Fontello. Use the public instance, or set up your own, as it’s free software and available on Github.

The downside of such customized font sets is you must host the font by yourself. You can’t use other online font services to provide updates. But this may not really be a downside, compared to faster performance.

Conclusion

Now you’ve done everything you can to the content itself, to minimize what the browser loads and interprets. From now on, only tricks with the administration of the server can help.

One easy to do, but which many people do wrong, is decide on some intelligent caching. For instance, a CSS or picture file can be cached for a week. Whatever you do, if you use a proxy service like Cloudflare or build your own proxy, minimze the pages first. Users like fast loading pages. They’ll (silently) thank you for it, and the server will have a smaller load, too.

Posted on October 24, 2018 by — Leave a comment

4 cool new projects to try in COPR for October 2018

COPR is a collection of personal repositories for software that isn’t carried in the standard Fedora repositories. Some software doesn’t conform to standards that allow easy packaging. Or it may not meet other Fedora standards, despite being free and open source. COPR can offer these projects outside the standard set of Fedora Fedora packages. Software in COPR isn’t supported by Fedora infrastructure or signed by the project. However, it can be a neat way to try new or experimental software.

Here’s a set of new and interesting projects in COPR.

GitKraken

GitKraken is a useful git client for people who prefer a graphical interface over command-line, providing all the features you expect. Additionally, GitKraken can create repositories and files, and has a built-in editor. A useful feature of GitKraken is the ability to stage lines or hunks of files, and to switch between branches fast. However, in some cases, you may experience performance issues with larger projects.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides GitKraken for Fedora 27, 28, 29 and Rawhide, and for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. To install GitKraken, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable elken/gitkraken sudo dnf install gitkraken

Music On Console

Music On Console player, or mocp, is a simple console audio player. It has an interface similar to the Midnight Commander and is easy use. You simply navigate to a directory with music files and select a file or directory to play. In addition, mocp provides a set of commands, allowing it to be controlled directly from command line.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides Music On Console player for Fedora 28 and 29. To install mocp, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable Krzystof/Moc sudo dnf install moc

cnping

Cnping is a small graphical ping tool for IPv4, useful for visualization of changes in round-trip time. It offers an option to control the time period between each packet as well as the size of data sent. In addition to the graph shown, cnping provides basic statistics on round-trip times and packet loss.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides cnping for Fedora 27, 28, 29 and Rawhide. To install cnping, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable dreua/cnping sudo dnf install cnping

Pdfsandwich

Pdfsandwich is a tool for adding text to PDF files which contain text in an image form — such as scanned books. It uses optical character recognition (OCR) to create an additional layer with the recognized text behind the original page. This can be useful for copying and working with the text.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides pdfsandwich for Fedora 27, 28, 29 and Rawhide, and for EPEL 7. To install pdfsandwich, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable merlinm/pdfsandwich sudo dnf install pdfsandwich

Posted on October 19, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Edit your videos with Pitivi on Fedora

Looking to produce a video of your adventures this weekend? There are many different options for editing videos out there. However, if you are looking for a video editor that is simple to pick up, and also available in the official Fedora Repositories, give Pitivi a go.

Pitivi is an open source, non-linear video editor that uses the GStreamer framework. Out of the box on Fedora, Pitivi supports OGG Video, WebM, and a range of other formats. Additionally, more support for for video formats is available via gstreamer plugins. Pitivi is also tightly integrated with the GNOME Desktop, so the UI will feel at home among the other newer applications on Fedora Workstation.

Installing Pitivi on Fedora

Pitivi is available in the Fedora Repositories. On Fedora Workstation, simply search and install Pitivi from the Software application.

Alternatively, install Pitivi using the following command in the Terminal:

sudo dnf install pitivi

Basic Editing

Pitivi has a wide range of tools built-in to allow quick and effective editing of your clips. Simply import videos, audio, and images into the Pitivi media library, then drag them onto the timeline. Additionally, pitivi allows you to easily split, trim, and group parts of clips together, in addition to simple fade transitions on the timeline.

Transitions and Effects

In addition to a basic fade between two clips, Pitivi also features a range of different transitions and wipes. Additionally, there are over a hundred effects that can be applied to either videos or audio to change how the media elements are played or displayed in your final presentation

Pitivi also features a range of other great features, so be sure to check out the tour on their website for a full description of the features of the awesome Pitivi.

Posted on October 17, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Design faster web pages, part 2: Image replacement

Welcome back to this series on building faster web pages. The last article talked about what you can achieve just through image compression. The example started with 1.2MB of browser fat, and reduced down to a weight of 488.9KB. That’s still not fast enough! This article continues the browser diet to lose more fat. You might think that partway through this process things are a bit crazy, but once finished, you’ll understand why.

Preparation

Once again this article starts with an analysis of the web pages. Use the built-in screenshot function of Firefox to make a screenshot of the entire page. You’ll also want to install Inkscape using sudo:

$ sudo dnf install inkscape

If you want to know how to use Inkscape, there are already several articles in Fedora Magazine. This article will only explain some basic tasks for optimizing an SVG for web use.

Analysis

Once again, this example uses the getfedora.org web page.

Getfedora page with graphics marked

This analysis is better done graphically, which is why it starts with a screenshot. The screenshot above marks all graphical elements of the page. In two cases or better in four cases, the Fedora websites team already used measures to replace images. The icons for social media are glyphs from a font and the language selector is an SVG.

There are several options for replacing:

HTML5 Canvas

Briefly, HTML5 Canvas is an HTML element that allows you to draw with the help of scripts, mostly JavaScript, although it’s not widely used yet. As you draw with the help of scripts, the element can also be animated. Some examples of what you can achieve with HTML Canvas include this triangle pattern, animated wave, and text animation. In this case, though, it seems not to be the right choice.

CSS3

With Cascading Style Sheets you can draw shapes and even animate them. CSS is often used for drawing elements like buttons. However, more complicated graphics via CSS are usually only seen in technical demonstration pages. This is because graphics are still better done visually as with coding.

Fonts

The usage of fonts for styling web pages is another way, and Fontawesome is quiet popular. For instance, you could replace the Flavor and the Spin icons with a font in this example. There is a negative side to using this method, which will be covered in the next part of this series, but it can be done easily.

SVG

This graphics format has existed for a long time and was always supposed to be used in the browser. For a long time not all browsers supported it, but that’s history. So the best way to replace pictures in this example is with SVG.

Optimizing SVG for the web

To optimize an SVG for internet use requires several steps.

SVG is an XML dialect. Components like circle, rectangle, or text paths are described with nodes. Each node is an XML element. To keep the code clean, an SVG should use as few nodes as possible.

The SVG example is a circular icon with a coffee mug on it. You have 3 options to describe it with SVG.

Circle element with the mug on top

<circle style="opacity:1;fill:#717d82;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;stroke-width:9.51950836;stroke-linecap:round;stroke-linejoin:round;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-dashoffset:0;stroke-opacity:1;paint-order:markers fill stroke" id="path36" cx="68.414307" cy="130.71523" r="3.7620001" />

Circular path with the mug on top

<path style="opacity:1;fill:#717d82;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;stroke-width:1.60968435;stroke-linecap:round;stroke-linejoin:round;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-dashoffset:0;stroke-opacity:1;paint-order:markers fill stroke" d="m 68.414044,126.95318 a 3.7618673,3.7618673 0 0 0 -3.76153,3.76204 3.7618673,3.7618673 0 0 0 3.76153,3.76205 3.7618673,3.7618673 0 0 0 3.76206,-3.76205 3.7618673,3.7618673 0 0 0 -3.76206,-3.76204 z" id="path20" />

single path

<path style="opacity:1;fill:#717d82;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;stroke-width:1.60968435;stroke-linecap:round;stroke-linejoin:round;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-dashoffset:0;stroke-opacity:1;paint-order:markers fill stroke" d="m 68.414044,126.95318 a 3.7618673,3.7618673 0 0 0 -3.76153,3.76204 3.7618673,3.7618673 0 0 0 3.76153,3.76205 3.7618673,3.7618673 0 0 0 3.76206,-3.76205 3.7618673,3.7618673 0 0 0 -3.76206,-3.76204 z m -1.21542,0.92656 h 2.40554 c 0.0913,0.21025 0.18256,0.42071 0.27387,0.63097 h 0.47284 v 0.60099 h -0.17984 l -0.1664,1.05989 h 0.24961 l -0.34779,1.96267 -0.21238,-0.003 -0.22326,1.41955 h -2.12492 l -0.22429,-1.41955 -0.22479,0.003 -0.34829,-1.96267 h 0.26304 l -0.16692,-1.05989 h -0.1669 v -0.60099 h 0.44752 c 0.0913,-0.21026 0.18206,-0.42072 0.27336,-0.63097 z m 0.12608,0.19068 c -0.0614,0.14155 -0.12351,0.28323 -0.185,0.42478 h 2.52336 c -0.0614,-0.14155 -0.12248,-0.28323 -0.18397,-0.42478 z m -0.65524,0.63097 v 0.21911 l 0.0594,5.2e-4 h 3.35844 l 0.0724,-5.2e-4 v -0.21911 z m 0.16846,0.41083 0.1669,1.05937 h 2.80603 l 0.16693,-1.05937 -1.57046,0.008 z m -0.061,1.25057 0.27956,1.5782 1.34411,-0.0145 1.34567,0.0145 0.28059,-1.5782 z m 1.62367,1.75441 -1.08519,0.0124 0.19325,1.2299 h 1.79835 l 0.19328,-1.2299 z" id="path2714" inkscape:connector-curvature="0" />

You probably can see the code becomes more complex and needs more characters to describe it. More characters in a file result, of course, in a larger size.

Node cleaning

If you open an example SVG in Inkscape and press F2, that activates the Node tool. You should see something like this:

Inkscape – Node tool activated

There are 5 nodes that aren’t necessary in this example — the ones in the middle of the lines. To remove them, select them one by one with the activated Node tool and press the Del key. After this, select the nodes which define this lines and make them corners again using the toolbar tool.

Inkscape – Node tool make node a corner

Without fixing the corners, handles are used that define the curve, which gets saved and will increase file size. You have to do this node cleaning by hand, as it can’t be effectively automated. Now you’re ready for the next stage.

Use the Save as function and choose Optimized svg. A dialogue window opens where you can select what to remove or keep.

Inkscape – Dialog window for save as optimized SVG

Even the little SVG in this example got down from 3.2 KB to 920 bytes, less than a third of its original size.

Back to the getfedora page: The grey voronoi pattern used in the background of the main section, after our optimization from Part 1 of this series, is down to 164.1 KB versus the original 211.12 KB size.

The original SVG it was exported from is 1.9 MB in size. After these SVG optimization steps, it’s only 500.4KB. Too big? Well, the current blue background is 564.98 KB in size. But there’s only a small difference between the SVG and the PNG.

Compressed files

$ ls -lh insgesamt 928K -rw-r--r--. 1 user user 161K 19. Feb 19:44 grey-pattern.png -rw-rw-r--. 1 user user 160K 18. Feb 12:23 grey-pattern.png.gz -rw-r--r--. 1 user user 489K 19. Feb 19:43 greyscale-pattern-opti.svg -rw-rw-r--. 1 user user 112K 19. Feb 19:05 greyscale-pattern-opti.svg.gz

This is the output of a small test I did to visualize this topic. You should probably see that the raster graphic — the PNG — is already compressed and can’t be anymore. The opposite is the SVG, an XML file. This is just text and can compressed, to less then a fourth of its size. As a result it is now around 50 KB smaller in size than the PNG.

Modern browsers can handle compressed files natively. Therefore, a lot of web servers have switched on mod_deflate (Apache) and gzip (nginx). That’s how we save space during delivery. Check out if it’s enabled at your server here.

Tooling for production

First of all, nobody wants to always optimize SVG in Inkscape. You can run Inkscape without a GUI in batch mode, but there’s no option to convert from Inkscape SVG to optimized SVG. You can only export raster graphics this way. But there are alternatives:

SVGO (which seems not actively developed)
Scour

This example will use scour for optimization. To install it:

$ sudo dnf install scour

To automatically optimize an SVG file, run scour similarly to this:

[user@localhost ]$ scour INPUT.svg OUTPUT.svg -p 3 --create-groups --renderer-workaround --strip-xml-prolog --remove-descriptive-elements --enable-comment-stripping --disable-embed-rasters --no-line-breaks --enable-id-stripping --shorten-ids

This is the end of part two, in which you learned how to replace raster images with SVG and how to optimize it for usage. Stay tuned to the Fedora Magazine for part three, coming soon.

Posted on October 10, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Design faster web pages, part 1: Image compression

Lots of web developers want to achieve fast loading web pages. As more page views come from mobile devices, making websites look better on smaller screens using responsive design is just one side of the coin. Browser Calories can make the difference in loading times, which satisfies not just the user but search engines that rank on loading speed. This article series covers how to slim down your web pages with tools Fedora offers.

Preparation

Before you sart to slim down your web pages, you need to identify the core issues. For this, you can use Browserdiet. It’s a browser add-on available for Firefox, Opera and Chrome and other browsers. It analyzes the performance values of the actual open web page, so you know where to start slimming down.

Next you’ll need some pages to work on. The example screenshot shows a test of getfedora.org. At first it looks very simple and responsive.

Browser Diet – values of getfedora.org

However, BrowserDiet’s page analysis shows there are 1.8MB in files downloaded. Therefore, there’s some work to do!

Web optimization

There are over 281 KB of JavaScript files, 203 KB more in CSS files, and 1.2 MB in images. Start with the biggest issue — the images. The tool set you need for this is GIMP, ImageMagick, and optipng. You can easily install them using the following command:

sudo dnf install gimp imagemagick optipng

For example, take the following file which is 6.4 KB:

First, use the file command to get some basic information about this image:

$ file cinnamon.png cinnamon.png: PNG image data, 60 x 60, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced

The image — which is only in grey and white — is saved in 8-bit/color RGBA mode. That’s not as efficient as it could be.

Start GIMP so you can set a more appropriate color mode. Open cinnamon.png in GIMP. Then go to Image>Mode and set it to greyscale. Export the image as PNG with compression factor 9. All other settings in the export dialog should be the default.

$ file cinnamon.png cinnamon.png: PNG image data, 60 x 60, 8-bit gray+alpha, non-interlaced

The output shows the file’s now in 8bit gray+alpha mode. The file size has shrunk from 6.4 KB to 2.8 KB. That’s already only 43.75% of the original size. But there’s more you can do!

You can also use the ImageMagick tool identify to provide more information about the image.

$ identify cinnamon2.png cinnamon.png PNG 60x60 60x60+0+0 8-bit Grayscale Gray 2831B 0.000u 0:00.000

This tells you the file is 2831 bytes. Jump back into GIMP, and export the file. In the export dialog disable the storing of the time stamp and the alpha channel color values to reduce this a little more. Now the file output shows:

$ identify cinnamon.png cinnamon.png PNG 60x60 60x60+0+0 8-bit Grayscale Gray 2798B 0.000u 0:00.000

Next, use optipng to losslessly optimize your PNG images. There are other tools that do similar things, including advdef (which is part of advancecomp), pngquant and pngcrush.

Run optipng on your file. Note that this will replace your original:

$ optipng -o7 cinnamon.png ** Processing: cinnamon.png 60x60 pixels, 2x8 bits/pixel, grayscale+alpha Reducing image to 8 bits/pixel, grayscale Input IDAT size = 2720 bytes Input file size = 2812 bytes Trying: zc = 9 zm = 8 zs = 0 f = 0 IDAT size = 1922 zc = 9 zm = 8 zs = 1 f = 0 IDAT size = 1920 Selecting parameters: zc = 9 zm = 8 zs = 1 f = 0 IDAT size = 1920 Output IDAT size = 1920 bytes (800 bytes decrease) Output file size = 2012 bytes (800 bytes = 28.45% decrease)

The option -o7 is the slowest to process, but provides the best end results. You’ve knocked 800 more bytes off the file size, which is now 2012 bytes.

To resize all of the PNGs in a directory, use this command:

$ optipng -o7 -dir=<directory> *.png

The option -dir lets you give a target directory for the output. If this option is not used, optipng would overwrite the original images.

Choosing the right file format

When it comes to pictures for the usage in the internet, you have the choice between:

JPG-LS and JPG 2000 are not widely used. Only a few digital cameras support these formats, so they can be ignored. aPNG is an animated PNG, and not widely used either.

You could save a few bytes more through changing the compression rate or choosing another file format. The first option you can’t do in GIMP, as it’s already using the highest compression rate. As there are no alpha channels in the picture, you can choose JPG as file format instead. For now use the default value of 90% quality — you could change it down to 85%, but then alias effects become visible. This saves a few bytes more:

$ identify cinnamon.jpg cinnamon.jpg JPEG 60x60 60x60+0+0 8-bit sRGB 2676B 0.000u 0:00.000

Alone this conversion to the right color space and choosing JPG as file format brought down the file size from 23 KB to 12.3 KB, a reduction of nearly 50%.

PNG vs. JPG: quality and compression rate

So what about the rest of the images? This method would work for all the other pictures, except the Fedora “flavor” logos and the logos for the four foundations. Those are presented on a white background.

One of the main differences between PNG and JPG is that JPG has no alpha channel. Therefore it can’t handle transparency. If you rework these images by using a JPG on a white background, you can reduce the file size from 40.7 KB to 28.3 KB.

Now there are four more images you can rework: the backgrounds. For the grey background, set the mode to greyscale again. With this bigger picture, the savings also is bigger. It shrinks from 216.2 KB to 51.0 KB — it’s now barely 25% of its original size. All in all, you’ve shrunk 481.1 KB down to 191.5 KB — only 39.8% of the starting size.

Quality vs. Quantity

Another difference between PNG and JPG is the quality. PNG is a lossless compressed raster graphics format. But JPG loses size through compression, and thus affects quality. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use JPG, though. But you have to find a balance between file size and quality.

Achievement

This is the end of Part 1. After following the techniques described above, here are the results:

You brought image size down to 488.9 KB versus 1.2MB at the start. That’s only about a third of the size, just through optimizing with optipng. This page can probably be made to load faster still. On the scale from snail to hypersonic, it’s not reached racing car speed yet!

Finally you can check the results in Google Insights, for example:

In the Mobile area the page gathered 10 points on scoring, but is still in the Medium sector. It looks totally different for the Desktop, which has gone from 62/100 to 91/100 and went up to Good. As mentioned before, this test isn’t the be all and end all. Consider scores such as these to help you go in the right direction. Keep in mind you’re optimizing for the user experience, and not for a search engine.

Posted on October 8, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Play Windows games on Fedora with Steam Play and Proton

Some weeks ago, Steam announced a new addition to Steam Play with Linux support for Windows games using Proton, a fork from WINE. This capability is still in beta, and not all games work. Here are some more details about Steam and Proton.

According to the Steam website, there are new features in the beta release:

Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support.
DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, which improves game compatibility and reduces performance impact.
Fullscreen support has been improved. Fullscreen games seamlessly stretch to the desired display without interfering with the native monitor resolution or requiring the use of a virtual desktop.
Improved game controller support. Games automatically recognize all controllers supported by Steam. Expect more out-of-the-box controller compatibility than even the original version of the game.
Performance for multi-threaded games has been greatly improved compared to vanilla WINE.

Installation

If you’re interested in trying Steam with Proton out, just follow these easy steps. (Note that you can ignore the first steps to enable the Steam Beta if you have the latest updated version of Steam installed. In that case you no longer need Steam Beta to use Proton.)

Open up Steam and log in to your account. This example screenshot shows support for only 22 games before enabling Proton.

Now click on Steam option on top of the client. This displays a drop down menu. Then select Settings.

Now the settings window pops up. Select the Account option and next to Beta participation, click on change.

Now change None to Steam Beta Update.

Click on OK and a prompt asks you to restart.

Let Steam download the update. This can take a while depending on your internet speed and computer resources.

After restarting, go back to the Settings window. This time you’ll see a new option. Make sure the check boxes for Enable Steam Play for supported titles, Enable Steam Play for all titles and Use this tool instead of game-specific selections from Steam are enabled. The compatibility tool should be Proton.

The Steam client asks you to restart. Do so, and once you log back into your Steam account, your game library for Linux should be extended.

Installing a Windows game using Steam Play

Now that you have Proton enabled, install a game. Select the title you want and you’ll find the process is similar to installing a normal game on Steam, as shown in these screenshots.

After the game is done downloading and installing, you can play it.

Some games may be affected by the beta nature of Proton. The game in this example, Chantelise, had no audio and a low frame rate. Keep in mind this capability is still in beta and Fedora is not responsible for results. If you’d like to read further, the community has created a Google doc with a list of games that have been tested.

Posted on October 4, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Test drive GNOME 3.30 with the Fedora 29 prerelease

Last month, the GNOME project announced the release of GNOME 3.30. The good news is that this new version of GNOME is default in the forthcoming release of Fedora 29 Workstation. GNOME 3.30 includes a range of new features and enhancements, including improvements to Files (nautilus), and the new Podcasts application.

The new Podcasts application in GNOME 3.30

The great news is that you can already give GNOME 3.30 on Fedora a test-drive with a Fedora 29 prerelease version. In fact, there is a Test Day happening this Friday October 5th , 2018.

How do test days work?

A test day is an event where anyone can help make sure that changes in Fedora work well in the upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate and and the public is welcome at these events. The wiki page provides lot of good information on what and how to test.

Posted on October 2, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Even better image upscaling with Waifu2x

You may have already seen the article here in the Magazine about upscaling bitmap images with better quality. That article covered a few utilities to achieve good results, but there’s always room for enhancement. Meet Waifu2x, a sophisticated tool that uses deep convolutional neural networks, or machine learning for short. Therefore it benefits from trained model data sets. Read on to see how well it performs to upscale your images, and how to get the same benefits even without an Nvidia card.

Here are some examples. First, a character that will be familiar to Fedora fans:

Making the Beefy Miracle hot dog four times larger keeps it nearly perfect!

Here’s another example:

Upscaling a drawing from an old book delivers really outstanding results.

Because Waifu2x performs the calculations using Nvidia CUDA computing platform, it requires an Nvidia graphics card. This article, however, covers a more portable version called Waifu2x-converter-cpp that runs everywhere.

Waifu2x-converter-cpp doesn’t require a dedicated Nvidia GPU. Instead, it leverages the OpenCV and OpenCL libraries. Although the overall performance is slower compared to the original code, it’s portable and more people are able to use it. And of course it runs on Fedora!

Follow the directions below to give it a spin.

Installing Waifu2x-converter-cpp in Fedora

To build the application from source, first install build dependencies:

sudo dnf install -y gcc-c++ cmake opencv-devel opencl-utils-devel

Then grab the source code, build it and install the files:

git clone https://github.com/DeadSix27/waifu2x-converter-cpp.git cd waifu2x-converter-cpp/build cmake -DLIB_SUFFIX=64 ../ make sudo make install

Tell the dynamic library linker to index the directory with locally installed libraries:

sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib64

Now everything is ready for upscaling. The example command for processing an image is as follows:

waifu2x-converter-cpp --scale_ratio 2 -i /path/to/input_file -o /path/to/output_file

Don’t miss this very helpful command for extras, such as switching OpenCL on/off, playing with noise level, and so on:

waifu2x-converter-cpp --help

Using a graphical front-end for Waifu2x

Another step forward is to install Qtwaifu2x, a graphical tool that lets you escape Fedora terminal and process images with comfort and convenience.

Practically all you have to do is hit Browse and Start to launch the upscaling task.

Installing Qtwaifu2x in Fedora

First, install the main build dependency:

sudo dnf install -y qt5-qtbase-devel

Then get the code and build it:

git clone https://github.com/cmdrkotori/qtwaifu2x.git cd qtwaifu2x qmake-qt5 && make

To run the application from the current directory:

./qtwaifu2x

The main window has quite a few options, but it’s usually enough to provide the input file and hit the Start button.

Brew yourself a cup of tea and come back in a while to enjoy the perfectly upscaled image!

Posted on September 19, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Understand Fedora memory usage with top

Have you used the top utility in a terminal to see memory usage on your Fedora system? If so, you might be surprised to see some of the numbers there. It might look like a lot more memory is consumed than your system has available. This article will explain a little more about memory usage, and how to read these numbers.

Memory usage in real terms

The way the operating system (OS) uses memory may not be self-evident. In fact, some ingenious, behind-the-scenes techniques are at play. They help your OS use memory more efficiently, without involving you.

Most applications are not self contained. Instead, each relies on sets of functions collected in libraries. These libraries are also installed on the system. In Fedora, the RPM packaging system ensures that when you install an app, any libraries on which it relies are installed, too.

When an app runs, the OS doesn’t necessarily load all the information it uses into real memory. Instead, it builds a map to the storage where that code is stored, called virtual memory. The OS then loads only the parts it needs. When it no longer needs portions of memory, it might release or swap them out as appropriate.

This means an app can map a very large amount of virtual memory, while using less real memory on the system at one time. It might even map more RAM than the system has available! In fact, across a whole OS that’s often the case.

In addition, related applications may rely on the same libraries. The Linux kernel in your Fedora system often shares memory between applications. It doesn’t need to load multiple copies of the same library for related apps. This works similarly for separate instances of the same app, too.

Without understanding these details, the output of the top application can be confusing. The following example will clarify this view into memory usage.

Viewing memory usage in top

If you haven’t tried yet, open a terminal and run the top command to see some output. Hit Shift+M to see the list sorted by memory usage. Your display may look slightly different than this example from a running Fedora Workstation:

There are three columns showing memory usage to examine: VIRT, RES, and SHR. The measurements are currently shown in kilobytes (KB).

The VIRT column is the virtual memory mapped for this process. Recall from the earlier description that virtual memory is not actual RAM consumed. For example, the GNOME Shell process gnome-shell is not actually consuming over 3.1 gigabytes of actual RAM. However, it’s built on a number of lower and higher level libraries. The system must map each of those to ensure they can be loaded when necessary.

The RES column shows you how much actual (resident) memory is consumed by the app. In the case of GNOME Shell, that’s about 180788 KB. The example system has roughly 7704 MB of physical memory, which is why the memory usage shows up as 2.3%.

However, of that number, at least 88212 KB is shared memory, shown in the SHR column. This memory might be, for example, library functions that other apps also use. This means the GNOME Shell is using about 92 MB on its own not shared with other processes. Notice that other apps in the example share an even higher percentage of their resident memory. In some apps, the shared portion is the vast majority of the memory usage.

There is a wrinkle here, which is that sometimes processes communicate with each other via memory. That memory is also shared, but can’t necessarily be detected by a utility like top. So yes — even the above clarifications still have some uncertainty!

A note about swap

Your system has another facility it uses to store information, which is swap. Typically this is an area of slower storage (like a hard disk). If the physical memory on the system fills up as needs increase, the OS looks for portions of memory that haven’t been needed in a while. It writes them out to the swap area, where they sit until needed later.

Therefore, prolonged, high swap usage usually means a system is suffering from too little memory for its demands. Sometimes an errant application may be at fault. Or, if you see this often on your system, consider upgrading your machine’s memory, or restricting what you run.

Photo courtesy of Stig Nygaard, via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).