Tag: Fedora Project community

Everything in a PC, laptop, or server is represented as binary digits (a.k.a. bits, where each bit can only be 1 or 0). There are no characters like we use for writing or numbers as we write them anywhere in a computer’s memory or secondary storage such as disk drives. For general purposes, the unit of measure for groups of binary bits is the byte — eight bits. Bytes are an agreed-upon measure that helped standardize computer memory, storage, and how computers handled data.

There are various terms in use to specify the capacity of a disk drive (either magnetic or electronic). The same measures are applied to a computers random access memory (RAM) and other memory devices that inhabit your computer. So now let’s see how the numbers are made up.

Suffixes are used with the number that specifies the capacity of the device. The suffixes designate a multiplier that is to be applied to the number that preceded the suffix. Commonly used suffixes are:

• Kilo = 10³ = 1,000 (one thousand)
• Mega = 10⁶ = 1,000,000 (one million)
• Giga = 10⁹ = 1000,000,000 (one billion)
• Tera = 10¹² = 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion)

As an example 500 GB (gigabytes) is 500,000,000,000 bytes.

The units that memory and storage are specified in  advertisements, on boxes in the store, and so on are in the decimal system as shown above. However since computers only use binary bits, the actual capacity of these devices is different than the advertised capacity.

You saw that the decimal numbers above were shown with their equivalent powers of ten. In the binary system numbers can be represented as powers of two. The table below shows how bits are used to represent powers of two in an 8 bit Byte. At the bottom of the table there is an example of how the decimal number 109 can be represented as a binary number that can be held in a single byte of 8 bits (01101101).

The example bit values comprise the binary number 01101101. To get the equivalent decimal value just add the decimal values from the table where the bit is set to 1. That is 64 + 32 + 8 + 4 + 1 = 109.

By the time you get out to 2³⁰ you have decimal 1,073,741,824 with just 31 bits (don’t forget the 2⁰) You’ve got a large enough number to start specifying memory and storage sizes.

Now comes what you have been waiting for. The table below lists common designations as they are used for labeling decimal and binary values.

Note that all of the quantities of bytes in the table above are expressed as decimal numbers. They are not shown as binary numbers because those numbers would be more than 30 characters long.

Most users and programmers need not be concerned with the small differences between the binary and decimal storage size numbers. If you’re developing software or hardware that deals with data at the binary level you may need the binary numbers.

As for what this means to your PC: Your PC will make use of the full capacity of your storage and memory devices. If you want to see the capacity of your disk drives, thumb drives, etc, the Disks utility in Fedora will show you the actual capacity of the storage device in number of bytes as a decimal number.

There are also command line tools that can provide you with more flexibility in seeing how your storage bytes are being used. Two such command line tools are du (for files and directories) and df (for file systems). You can read about these by typing man du or man df at the command line in a terminal window.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash.

Fedora 31 Workstation comes with a Firefox backend moved from X11 to Wayland by default. That’s just another step in the ongoing effort of moving to Wayland. This affects GNOME on Wayland only. This article helps you understand some changes and extra steps you may wish to take depending on your preferences.

There is a firefox-wayland package available to activate the Wayland backend on KDE and Sway desktop environments.

The Wayland architecture is completely different than X11. The team merged various aspects of Firefox internals to the new protocol where possible. However, some X11 features are missing completely. For such cases you can install and run firefox-x11 package as a fallback.

If you want to run the Flash plugin, you must install the firefox-x11 package, since Flash requires X11 and GTK 2. Wayland also has a slightly different drag and drop behavior and strict popup window hierarchy.

Generally, if you think Firefox is not behaving like you want, try the firefox-x11 package. In this case, ideally you should report the misbehavior in Bugzilla.

The Wayland architecture comes with many benefits, and overcomes many limitations of X11. For instance, it can deliver smoother rendering and better HiDPI and screen scale support. You can also enable EGL hardware acceleration on Intel and AMD graphics cards. This decreases your power consumption and also gives you partially accelerated video playback. To enable it, navigate to about:config, and search for layers.acceleration.force-enabled. Set this option to true and restart Firefox.

Brave users may wish to try the Firefox next-generation renderer, called WebRender, written in Rust. To do that, search for gfx.webrender.enabled and gfx.webrender.all in about:config. Set them to true, then cross your fingers and restart Firefox.

But don’t worry — even if Firefox crashes at start after these experiments, you can launch it in safe mode to reset these options. Start Firefox from a terminal using the following command:

$ firefox -safe-mode

It’s here! We’re proud to announce the release of Fedora 31. Thanks to the hard work of thousands of Fedora community members and contributors, we’re celebrating yet another on-time release. This is getting to be a habit!

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

Toolbox

If you haven’t used the Fedora Toolbox, this is a great time to try it out. This is a simple tool for launching and managing personal workspace containers, so you can do development or experiment in an isolated experience. It’s as simple as running “toolbox enter” from the command line.

This containerized workflow is vital for users of the ostree-based Fedora variants like CoreOS, IoT, and Silverblue, but is also extremely useful on any workstation or even server system. Look for many more enhancements to this tool and the user experience around it in the next few months — your feedback is very welcome.

All of Fedora’s Flavors

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

Fedora Workstation focuses on the desktop, and particular software developers who want a “just works” Linux operating system experience. This release features GNOME 3.34, which brings significant performance enhancements which will be especially noticeable on lower-powered hardware.

Fedora Server brings the latest in cutting-edge open source server software to systems administrators in an easy-to-deploy fashion.

And, in preview state, we have Fedora CoreOS, a category-defining operating system made for the modern container world, and Fedora IoT for “edge computing” use cases. (Stay tuned for a planned contest to find a shiny name for the IoT edition!)

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, which brings a complete open source toolchain to both amateur and professional astronomers, and desktop environments like KDE Plasma and Xfce.

And, don’t forget our alternate architectures, ARM AArch64, Power, and S390x. Of particular note, we have improved support for the Rockchip system-on-a-chip devices including the Rock960, RockPro64,  and Rock64, plus initial support for “panfrost”, an open source 3D accelerated graphics driver for newer Arm Mali “midgard” GPUs.

If you’re using an older 32-bit only i686 system, though, it’s time to find an alternative — we bid farewell to 32-bit Intel architecture as a base system this release.

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’re enabling CgroupsV2 (if you’re using Docker, make sure to check this out). Glibc 2.30  and NodeJS 12 are among the many updated packages in Fedora 31. And, we’ve switched the “python” command to by Python 3 — remember, Python 2 is end-of-life at the end of this year.

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.

In the unlikely event of a problem….

If you run into a problem, check out the Fedora 31 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. And if you’re in Portland for USENIX LISA this week, stop by the expo floor and visit me at the Red Hat, Fedora, and CentOS booth.