Tag: Fedora Project community

The Fedora Classroom is a project to help people by spreading knowledge on subjects related to Fedora for others, If you would like to propose a session, feel free to open a ticket here with the tag “classroom.” If you’re interested in taking a proposed session, kindly let us know and once you take it, you will be awarded the Sensei Badge too as a token of appreciation. Recordings from the previous sessions can be found here.

We’re back with another awesome classroom on IRC 101 led by Pac23.

About the Session: A Beginners Guide to Internet Relay Chat

In short, the IRC 101 session will be a guide for newcomers on how to get started with IRC with the Fedora community and hang out with other contributors in IRC. After finishing the session you will have the knowledge to setup your IRC client and start communicating with other Fedora people.

When and where

The Classroom session will be organized on May 9th, 16:00 UTC. Here’s a link to see what time it is in your timezone. The session will be streamed on Fedora Project’s YouTube channel.

Topics covered in the session

• Why IRC & How it works?
• How to install an IRC Client.
• Registering your nick in IRC
• Some basic commands, modes & access controls
• Joining fedora channels
• Brownie Topic: Fedora bots in IRC.

About the instructor

Pac23’s been around in the Fedora community and contributing to the project for around a year. He’s started with volunteering to package a custom kernel. He’s also a Computer Engineering undergrad at the University of Mumbai. His interests mostly reside in DevOps, IoT & system design. Outside computer science, he loves traveling, airplanes and history. He can be found as pac23 in IRC channels including #fedora-neuro, #fedora-devel, and #fedora-kernel.

If you miss the session, no worries. The recording will also be uploaded in the Fedora Project‘s YouTube channel.

We hope you can attend and enjoy this experience from some of the awesome people that work in Fedora Project. We look forward to seeing you in the Classroom session.

Photograph used in feature image is San Simeon School House by Anita Ritenour — CC-BY 2.0.

What happens if you have multiple disks or partitions that you’d like to use for a media project and you don’t want to lose any of your existing data, but you’d like to have everything located or mounted under one drive. That’s where mergerfs can come to your rescue!

mergerfs is a union filesystem geared towards simplifying storage and management of files across numerous commodity storage devices.

You will need to grab the latest RPM from their github page here. The releases for Fedora have fc and the version number in the name. For example here is the version for Fedora 31:

mergerfs-2.29.0-1.fc31.x86_64.rpm

Installing and configuring mergerfs

Install the mergerfs package that you’ve downloaded using sudo:

$ sudo dnf install mergerfs-2.29.0-1.fc31.x86_64.rpm

You will now be able to mount multiple disks as one drive. This comes in handy if you have a media server and you’d like all of your media files to show up under one location. If you upload new files to your system, you can copy them to your mergerfs directory and mergerfs will automatically copy them to which ever drive has enough free space available.

Here is an example to make it easier to understand:

$ df -hT | grep disk
/dev/sdb1 ext4 23M 386K 21M 2% /disk1
/dev/sdc1 ext4 44M 1.1M 40M 3% /disk2 $ ls -l /disk1/Videos/
total 1
-rw-r--r--. 1 curt curt 0 Mar 8 17:17 Our Wedding.mkv $ ls -l /disk2/Videos/
total 2
-rw-r--r--. 1 curt curt 0 Mar 8 17:17 Baby's first Xmas.mkv
-rw-rw-r--. 1 curt curt 0 Mar 8 17:21 Halloween hijinks.mkv

In this example there are two disks mounted as disk1 and disk2. Both drives have a Videos directory with existing files.

Now we’re going to mount those drives using mergerfs to make them appear as one larger drive.

$ sudo mergerfs -o defaults,allow_other,use_ino,category.create=mfs,moveonenospc=true,minfreespace=1M /disk1:/disk2 /media

The mergerfs man page is quite extensive and complex so we’ll break down the options that were specified.

• defaults: This will use the default settings unless specified.
• allow_other: allows users besides sudo or root to see the filesystem.
• use_ino: Causes mergerfs to supply file/directory inodes rather than libfuse. While not a default it is recommended it be enabled so that linked files share the same inode value.
• category.create=mfs: Spreads files out across your drives based on available space.
• moveonenospc=true: If enabled, if writing fails, a scan will be done looking for the drive with the most free space.
• minfreespace=1M: The minimum space value used.
• disk1: First hard drive.
• disk2: Second hard drive.
• /media: The directory folder where the drives are mounted.

Here is what it looks like:

$ df -hT | grep disk /dev/sdb1 ext4 23M 386K 21M 2% /disk1 /dev/sdc1 ext4 44M 1.1M 40M 3% /disk2 $ df -hT | grep media 1:2 fuse.mergerfs 66M 1.4M 60M 3% /media 

You can see that the mergerfs mount now shows a total capacity of 66M which is the combined total of the two hard drives.

Continuing with the example:

There is a 30Mb video called Baby’s second Xmas.mkv. Let’s copy it to the /media folder which is the mergerfs mount.

$ ls -lh "Baby's second Xmas.mkv"
-rw-rw-r--. 1 curt curt 30M Apr 20 08:45 Baby's second Xmas.mkv
$ cp "Baby's second Xmas.mkv" /media/Videos/

Here is the end result:

$ df -hT | grep disk
/dev/sdb1 ext4 23M 386K 21M 2% /disk1
/dev/sdc1 ext4 44M 31M 9.8M 76% /disk2 $ df -hT | grep media
1:2 fuse.mergerfs 66M 31M 30M 51% /media

You can see from the disk space utilization that mergerfs automatically copied the file to disk2 because disk1 did not have enough free space.

Here is a breakdown of all of the files:

$ ls -l /disk1/Videos/
total 1
-rw-r--r--. 1 curt curt 0 Mar 8 17:17 Our Wedding.mkv $ ls -l /disk2/Videos/
total 30003
-rw-r--r--. 1 curt curt 0 Mar 8 17:17 Baby's first Xmas.mkv
-rw-rw-r--. 1 curt curt 30720000 Apr 20 08:47 Baby's second Xmas.mkv
-rw-rw-r--. 1 curt curt 0 Mar 8 17:21 Halloween hijinks.mkv $ ls -l /media/Videos/
total 30004
-rw-r--r--. 1 curt curt 0 Mar 8 17:17 Baby's first Xmas.mkv
-rw-rw-r--. 1 curt curt 30720000 Apr 20 08:47 Baby's second Xmas.mkv
-rw-rw-r--. 1 curt curt 0 Mar 8 17:21 Halloween hijinks.mkv
-rw-r--r--. 1 curt curt 0 Mar 8 17:17 Our Wedding.mkv

When you copy files to your mergerfs mount, it will always copy the files to the hard disk that has enough free space. If none of the drives in the pool have enough free space, then you won’t be able to copy them.

It’s here! We’re proud to announce the release of Fedora 32. Thanks to the hard work of thousands of Fedora community members and contributors, we’re celebrating yet another on-time release.

If you just want to get to the bits without delay, head over to https://getfedora.org/ right now. For details, read on!

All of Fedora’s Flavors

Fedora Editions are targeted outputs geared toward specific “showcase” uses.

Fedora Workstation focuses on the desktop. In particular, it’s geared toward software developers who want a “just works” Linux operating system experience. This release features GNOME 3.36, which has plenty of great improvements as usual. My favorite is the new lock screen!

Fedora Server brings the latest in cutting-edge open source server software to systems administrators in an easy-to-deploy fashion. For edge computing use cases, Fedora IoT provides a strong foundation for IoT ecosystems.

Fedora CoreOS is an emerging Fedora Edition. It’s an automatically-updating, minimal operating system for running containerized workloads securely and at scale. It offers several update streams that can be followed for automatic updates that occur roughly every two weeks. Currently the next stream is based on Fedora 32, with the testing and stable streams to follow. You can find information about released artifacts that follow the next stream from the download page and information about how to use those artifacts in the Fedora CoreOS Documentation.

Of course, we produce more than just the editions. Fedora Spins and Labs target a variety of audiences and use cases, including the Fedora Astronomy Lab, which brings a complete open source toolchain to both amateur and professional astronomers, and desktop environments like KDE Plasma and Xfce. New in Fedora 32 is the Comp Neuro Lab, developed by our Neuroscience Special Interest Group to enable computational neuroscience.

And, don’t forget our alternate architectures: ARM AArch64, Power, and S390x. Of particular note, we have improved support for Pine64 devices, NVidia Jetson 64 bit platforms, and the Rockchip system-on-a-chip devices including the Rock960, RockPro64, and Rock64.

General improvements

No matter what variant of Fedora you use, you’re getting the latest the open source world has to offer. Following our “First” foundation, we’ve updated key programming language and system library packages, including GCC 10, Ruby 2.7, and Python 3.8. Of course, with Python 2 past end-of-life, we’ve removed most Python 2 packages from Fedora. A legacy python27 package is provided for developers and users who still need it. In Fedora Workstation, we’ve enabled the EarlyOOM service by default to improve the user experience in low-memory situations.

We’re excited for you to try out the new release! Go to https://getfedora.org/ and download it now. Or if you’re already running a Fedora operating system, follow the easy upgrade instructions. For more information on the new features in Fedora 32, see the release notes.

In the unlikely event of a problem….

If you run into a problem, check out the Fedora 32 Common Bugs page, and if you have questions, visit our Ask Fedora user-support platform.

Thank you everyone

Thanks to the thousands of people who contributed to the Fedora Project in this release cycle, and especially to those of you who worked extra hard to make this another on-time release during a pandemic. Fedora is a community, and it’s great to see how much we’ve supported each other. I invite you to join us in the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience 28-29 April to learn more about Fedora and other communities.

Edited 1800 UTC on 28 April to add a link to the release notes.

The Python developers have already released five alpha versions of Python 3.9.0 and you can already try the latest one in Fedora! Test your Python code with 3.9 early to avoid surprises once the final 3.9.0 is out in October.

Install Python 3.9 on Fedora

If you run Fedora, you can install Python 3.9 from the official software repository with dnf:

$ sudo dnf install python3.9

In order to get the very latest pre-release, you might need to enable the updates-testing repository:

$ sudo dnf install --enablerepo=updates-testing python3.9

As more alphas, betas and release candidates of Python 3.9 will be released, the Fedora package will receive updates. No need to compile your own development version of Python, just install it and have it up to date. New features will be added until the first beta planned for mid May.

Test your projects with Python 3.9

Run the python3.9 command to use Python 3.9 or create virtual environments with the builtin venv module, tox or with pipenv and poetry. For example:

$ git clone https://github.com/benjaminp/six.git
Cloning into 'six'...
$ cd six/
$ tox -e py39
py39 run-test: commands[0] | python -m pytest -rfsxX
================== test session starts ===================
platform linux -- Python 3.9.0a5, pytest-5.4.1, py-1.8.1, pluggy-0.13.1
collected 200 items test_six.py ...................................... [ 19%]
.................................................. [ 44%]
.................................................. [ 69%]
.................................................. [ 94%]
............ [100%] ================== 200 passed in 0.43s ===================
________________________ summary _________________________ py39: commands succeeded congratulations :)

What’s new in Python 3.9

So far, the first five alphas were released, more features will come until the first beta. You can however already try out the new dictionary merge & update operators:

$ python3.9
Python 3.9.0a5 (default, Mar 24 2020, 00:00:00) [GCC 10.0.1 20200311 (Red Hat 10.0.1-0.9)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> d = {'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'cheese': 3}
>>> e = {'cheese': 'cheddar', 'aardvark': 'Ethel'}
>>> d | e
{'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'cheese': 'cheddar', 'aardvark': 'Ethel'}
>>> e | d
{'cheese': 3, 'aardvark': 'Ethel', 'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2}
>>> d |= e
>>> d
{'spam': 1, 'eggs': 2, 'cheese': 'cheddar', 'aardvark': 'Ethel'}

And stay tuned for Python 3.9 as python3 in Fedora 33!