Have you always wanted to start contributing to Fedora but don’t know how? Submitting a supplemental wallpaper is one of the easiest ways to start as a Fedora contributor. Keep reading to learn how.
Each release, the Fedora Design team works with the community on a set of 16 additional wallpapers. Users can install and use these to supplement the standard wallpaper. And submissions are now open for the Fedora 31 Supplemental Wallpapers.
Dates and deadlines
The submission phase opens June 3, 2019 and ends July 26, 2019 at 23:59 UTC.
Important note: In certain circumstances, submissions during the last hours may not get into the election, if there is no time to do legal research. The legal research is done by hand and very time consuming. Please help by following the guidelines correctly and submit only work that has a correct license.
Please stay away to submit pictures of pets, especially cats.
The voting will open August 1, 2019 and will be open until August 16, 2019 at 23:59 UTC.
How to contribute to this package
Fedora uses the Nuancier application to manage the submissions and the voting process. To submit, you need an Fedora account. If you don’t have one, you can create one here. To vote you must have membership in another group such as cla_done or cla_fpca.
For inspiration you can look to former submissions and the previous winners. Here are some from the last election:
Pink House by Everaldo Coelho
Blue Mystic by Clyde He
Canadian Rockies by Helena Bartosova
Mushroom Family by ahalman
Mountains of North Iran by ahalman
Wheat by psav
Sunset on Skye by noe38330
Zen Lover by hhlp
Snow on Balanced Rock by n8inup
Wasser im Winter by Alexander Hanauer
Dortmund Sunset by Hendrik Borghorst
I see stars by haven1
Enjoying the Sun by lhirlimann
Lonely tree in kenya by lhirlimann
Great Oak in Claremont by n8inup
Fabric by Hendrik Borghorst
You may only upload two submissions into Nuancier. In case you submit multiple versions of the same image, the team will choose one version of it and accept it as one submission, and deny the other one.
Previously submissions that were not selected should not be resubmitted, and may be rejected. Creations that lack essential artistic quality may also be rejected.
Denied submissions into Nuancier count. Therefore, if you make two submissions and both are rejected, you cannot submit more. Use your best judgment for your submissions.
Badges
You can also earn badges for contributing. One badge is for an accepted submission. Another badge is awarded if your submission is a chosen wallpaper. A third is awarded if you participate in the voting process. You must claim this badge during the voting process, as it is not granted automatically.
ffsend is the command line client of Firefox Send. This article will show how Firefox Send and ffsend work. It’ll also detail how it can be installed and used in Fedora.
What are Firefox Send and ffsend ?
Firefox Send is a file sharing tool from Mozilla that allows sending encrypted files to other users. You can install Send on your own server, or use the Mozilla-hosted link send.firefox.com. The hosted version officially supports files up to 1 GB, and links that expire after a configurable download count (default of 1) or 24 hours, and then all the files on the Send server are deleted. This tool is still in experimental phase, and therefore shouldn’t be used in production or to share important or sensitive data.
While Firefox Send is the tool itself and can be used with a web interface, ffsend is a command-line utility you can use with scripts and arguments. It has a wide range of configuration options and can be left working in the background without any human intervention.
How does it work?
FFSend can both upload and download files. The remote host can use either the Firefox tool or another web browser to download the file. Neither Firefox Send nor ffsend require the use of Firefox.
It’s important to highlight that ffsend uses client-side encryption. This means that files are encrypted before they’re uploaded. You share secrets together with the link, so be careful when sharing, because anyone with the link will be able to download the file. As an extra layer of protection, you can protect the file with a password by using the following argument:
ffsend password URL -p PASSWORD
Other features
There are a few other features worth mentioning. Here’s a list:
Configurable download limit, between 1 and 20 times, before the link expires
Built-in extract and archiving functions
Track history of shared files
Inspect or delete shared files
Folders can be shared as well, either as they are or as compressed files
Generate a QR code, for easier download on a mobile phone
How to install in Fedora
While Fedora Send works with Firefox without installing anything extra, you’ll need to install the CLI tool to use ffsend. This tool is in the official repositories, so you only need a simple dnf command with sudo.
$ sudo dnf install ffsend
After that, you can use ffsend from the terminal .
ffsend also provides a way to check the history of the uploads made with the tools. This can be really useful if you upload a lot of files during a scripted tasks for example and you want to keep track of each files download status.
$ ffsend history LINK EXPIRY 1 https://send.firefox.com/download/#8TJ9QNw 23h59m 2 https://send.firefox.com/download/KZIA-PaQ 23h54m
Delete a file
Another useful feature is the possibility to delete a file.
Firefox Send is a great service and the ffsend tools makes it really convenient to use from the terminal. More examples and documentation is available on ffsend‘s Gitlab repository.
With the recent release of Fedora 30, Fedora 28 officially enters End Of Life (EOL) status effective May 28, 2019. This impacts any systems still on Fedora 28. If you’re not sure what that means to you, read more below.
At this point, packages in the Fedora 28 repositories no longer receive security, bugfix, or enhancement updates. Furthermore, the community adds no new packages to the Fedora 28 collection starting at End of Life. Essentially, the Fedora 28 release will not change again, meaning users no longer receive the normal benefits of this leading-edge operating system.
There’s an easy, free way to keep those benefits. If you’re still running an End of Life version such as Fedora 28, now is the perfect time to upgrade to Fedora 29 or to Fedora 30. Upgrading gives you access to all the community-provided software in Fedora.
Looking back at Fedora 28
Fedora 28 was released on May 1, 2018. As part of their commitment to users, Fedora community members released over 9,700 updates.
This release featured, among many other improvements and upgrades:
GNOME 3.28
Easier options for third-party repositories
Automatic updates for the Fedora Atomic Host
The new Modular repository, allowing you to select from different versions of software for your system
Of course, the Project also offered numerous alternative spins of Fedora, and support for multiple architectures.
About the Fedora release cycle
The Fedora Project offers updates for a Fedora release until a month after the second subsequent version releases. For example, updates for Fedora 29 continue until one month after the release of Fedora 31. Fedora 30 continues to be supported up until one month after the release of Fedora 32.
The Fedora Project wiki contains more detailed information about the entire Fedora Release Life Cycle. The lifecycle includes milestones from development to release, and the post-release support period.
Packit (https://packit.dev/) is a CLI tool that helps you auto-package your upstream projects into the Fedora operating system. But what does it really mean?
As a developer, you might want to add or update your package in Fedora. If you’ve done it in the past, you know it’s no easy task. If you haven’t let me reiterate: it’s no easy task.
And this is exactly where packit can help: with just one configuration file in your upstream repository, packit will automatically package your software into Fedora and update it when you update your source code upstream.
Furthermore, packit can synchronize downstream changes to a SPEC file back into the upstream repository. This could be useful if the SPEC file of your package is changed in Fedora repositories and you would like to synchronize it into your upstream project.
Packit also provides a way to build an SRPM package based on an upstream repository checkout, which can be used for building RPM packages in COPR.
Last but not least, packit provides a status command. This command provides information about upstream and downstream repositories, like pull requests, release and more others.
Packit provides also another two commands: build and create-update.
The command packit build performs a production build of your project in Fedora build system – koji. You can Fedora version you want to build against using an option –dist-git-branch. The command packit create-updates creates a Bodhi update for the specific branch using the option —dist-git-branch.
Installation
You can install packit on Fedora using dnf:
sudo dnf install -y packit
Configuration
For demonstration use case, I have selected the upstream repository of colin (https://github.com/user-cont/colin). Colin is a tool to check generic rules and best-practices for containers, dockerfiles, and container images.
First of all, clone colin git repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/user-cont/colin.git $ cd colin
Packit expects to run in the root of your git repository.
Prerequisite for using packit is that you are in a working directory of a git checkout of your upstream project.
Before running any packit command, you need to do several actions. These actions are mandatory for filing a PR into the upstream or downstream repositories and to have access into the Fedora dist-git repositories.
INFO: Running 'anitya' versioneer Version in upstream registries is '0.3.1'. Version in spec file is '0.3.0'. WARNING Version in spec file is outdated Picking version of the latest release from the upstream registry. Checking out upstream version 0.3.1 Using 'master' dist-git branch Copying /home/vagrant/colin/colin.spec to /tmp/tmptfwr123c/colin.spec. Archive colin-0.3.0.tar.gz found in lookaside cache (skipping upload). INFO: Downloading file from URL https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/source/c/colin/colin-0.3.0.tar.gz 100%[=============================>] 3.18M eta 00:00:00 Downloaded archive: '/tmp/tmptfwr123c/colin-0.3.0.tar.gz' About to upload to lookaside cache won't be doing kinit, no credentials provided PR created: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/colin/pull-request/14
Once the command finishes, you can see a PR in the Fedora Pagure instance which is based on the latest upstream release. Once you review it, it can be merged.
Sync downstream changes back to the upstream repository
Another use case is to sync downstream changes into the upstream project repository.
upstream active branch master using "master" dist-git branch Copying /tmp/tmplvxqtvbb/colin.spec to /home/vagrant/colin/colin.spec. Creating remote fork-ssh with URL git@github.com:phracek/colin.git. Pushing to remote fork-ssh using branch master-downstream-sync. PR created: https://github.com/user-cont/colin/pull/229
As soon as packit finishes, you can see the latest changes taken from the Fedora dist-git repository in the upstream repository. This can be useful, e.g. when Release Engineering performs mass-rebuilds and they update your SPEC file in the Fedora dist-git repository.
Get the status of your upstream project
If you are a developer, you may want to get all the information about the latest releases, tags, pull requests, etc. from the upstream and the downstream repository. Packit provides the status command for this purpose.
The last packit use case is to generate an SRPM package based on a git checkout of your upstream project. The packit command for SRPM generation is srpm.
$ packit srpm Version in spec file is '0.3.1.37.g00bb80e'. SRPM: /home/phracek/work/colin/colin-0.3.1.37.g00bb80e-1.fc29.src.rpm
Packit as a service
In the summer, the people behind packit would like to introduce packit as a service (https://github.com/packit-service/packit-service). In this case, the packit GitHub application will be installed into the upstream repository and packit will perform all the actions automatically, based on the events it receives from GitHub or fedmsg.
In addition to providing an operating system, the Fedora Project provides numerous services for users and developers. Services such as Ask Fedora, the Fedora Project Wiki and the Fedora Project Mailing Lists provide users with valuable resources for learning how to best take advantage of Fedora. For developers of Fedora, there are many other services such as dist-git, Pagure, Bodhi, COPR and Bugzilla that are involved with the packaging and release process.
These services are available for use with a free account from the Fedora Accounts System (FAS). This account is the passport to all things Fedora! This article covers how to get set up with an account and configure Fedora Workstation for browser single sign-on.
Signing up for a Fedora account
To create a FAS account, browse to the account creation page. Here, you will fill out your basic identity data:
Account creation page
Once you enter your data, an email will be sent to the email address provided, with a temporary password. Pick a strong password and use it.
Password reset page
Next, the account details page appears. If you intend to become a contributor to the Fedora Project, you should complete the Contributor Agreement now. Otherwise, you are done and your account can now be used to log into the various Fedora services.
Account details page
Configuring Fedora Workstation for single sign-On
Now that you have your account, you can sign into any of the Fedora Project services. Most of these services support single sign-on (SSO), allowing you to sign in without re-entering your username and password.
Fedora Workstation provides an easy workflow to add SSO credentials. The GNOME Online Accounts tool helps you quickly set up your system to access many popular services. To access it, go to the Settings menu.
GNOME Online Accounts
Click on the ⋮ button and select Enterprise Login (Kerberos), which provides a single text prompt for a principal. Enter fasname@FEDORAPROJECT.ORG (being sure to capitalize FEDORAPROJECT.ORG) and click Connect.
Kerberos principal dialog
GNOME prompts you to enter your password for FAS and given the option to save it. If you choose to save it, it is stored in GNOME Keyring and unlocked automatically at login. If you choose not to save it, you will need to open GNOME Online Accounts and enter your password each time you want to enable single sign-on.
Single sign-on with a web browser
Today, Fedora Workstation supports two web browsers “out of the box” with support for single sign-on with the Fedora Project services. These are Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Due to a bug in Chromium, single sign-on does not currently work properly in many cases. As a result, this has not been enabled for Chromium in Fedora.
To sign on to a service, browse to it and select the “login” option for that service. For most Fedora services, this is the only thing you need to do and the browser handles the rest. Some services such as the Fedora Mailing Lists and Bugzilla support multiple login types. For them, you need to select the “Fedora” or “Fedora Account System” login type.
That’s it! You can now log into any of the Fedora Project services without re-entering your password.
Special consideration for Google Chrome
In order to enable single sign-on out of the box for Google Chrome, Fedora needed to take advantage of certain features in Chrome that are intended for use in “managed” environments. A managed environment is traditionally a corporate or other organization that sets certain security and/or monitoring requirements on the browser.
Recently, Google Chrome changed its behavior and it now reports “Managed by your organization” under the ⋮ menu in Google Chrome. That link leads to a page that states “If your Chrome browser is managed, your administrator can set up or restrict certain features, install extensions, monitor activity, and control how you use Chrome.” Fedora will never monitor your browser activity or restrict your actions.
Enter chrome://policy in the address bar to see exactly what settings Fedora has enabled in the browser. The AuthNegotiateDelegateWhitelist and AuthServerWhitelist options will be set to *.fedoraproject.org. These are the only changes Fedora makes.
Linux Containers have become a popular topic, making sure that a container image is not bigger than it should be is considered as a good practice. This article give some tips on how to create smaller Fedora container images.
microdnf
Fedora’s DNF is written in Python and and it’s designed to be extensible as it has wide range of plugins. But Fedora has an alternative base container image which uses an smaller package manager called microdnf written in C. To use this minimal image in a Dockerfile the FROM line should look like this:
FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal:30
This is an important saving if your image does not need typical DNF dependencies like Python. For example, if you are making a NodeJS image.
Install and Clean up in one layer
To save space it’s important to remove repos meta data using dnf clean all or its microdnf equivalent microdnf clean all. But you should not do this in two steps because that would actually store those files in a container image layer then mark them for deletion in another layer. To do it properly you should do the installation and cleanup in one step like this
FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal:30 RUN microdnf install nodejs && microdnf clean all
Modularity with microdnf
Modularity is a way to offer you different versions of a stack to choose from. For example you might want non-LTS NodeJS version 11 for a project and old LTS NodeJS version 8 for another and latest LTS NodeJS version 10 for another. You can specify which stream using colon
# dnf module list # dnf module install nodejs:8
The dnf module install command implies two commands one that enables the stream and one that install nodejs from it.
# dnf module enable nodejs:8 # dnf install nodejs
Although microdnf does not offer any command related to modularity, it is possible to enable a module with a configuation file, and libdnf (which microdnf uses) seems to support modularity streams. The file looks like this
A full Dockerfile using modularity with microdnf looks like this:
FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal:30 RUN \ echo -e "[nodejs]\nname=nodejs\nstream=8\nprofiles=\nstate=enabled\n" > /etc/dnf/modules.d/nodejs.module && \ microdnf install nodejs zopfli findutils busybox && \ microdnf clean all
Multi-staged builds
In many cases you might have tons of build-time dependencies that are not needed to run the software for example building a Go binary, which statically link dependencies. Multi-stage build are an efficient way to separate the application build and the application runtime.
For example the Dockerfile below builds confd a Go application.
# building container FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal AS build RUN mkdir /go && microdnf install golang && microdnf clean all WORKDIR /go RUN export GOPATH=/go; CGO_ENABLED=0 go get github.com/kelseyhightower/confd
FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal WORKDIR / COPY --from=build /go/bin/confd /usr/local/bin CMD ["confd"]
The multi-stage build is done by adding AS after the FROM instruction and by having another FROM from a base container image then using COPY –from= instruction to copy content from the build container to the second container.
This Dockerfile can then be built and run using podman
The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.1. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. This version has many security fixes included. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, May 13, 2019 through Saturday, May 18, 2019. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
How does a test week work?
A test day/week is an event where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed before, this is a perfect way to get started.
To contribute, you only need to be able to do the following things:
Download test materials, which include some large files
Read and follow directions step by step
The wiki page for the kernel test day has a lot of good information on what and how to test. After you’ve done some testing, you can log your results in the test day web application. If you’re available on or around the day of the event, please do some testing and report your results.
Happy testing, and we hope to see you on test day.
If you’ve been reading the Community blog, you’ll already know: AskFedora has moved to Discourse! Read on for more information about this exciting platform.
Discourse? Why Discourse?
The new AskFedora is a Discourse instance hosted by Discourse, similar to discussion.fedoraproject.org. However, where discussion.fedoraproject.org is meant for development discussion within the community, AskFedora is meant for end-user troubleshooting.
The Discourse platform focuses on conversations. Not only can you ask questions and receive answers, you can have complete dialogues with others. This is especially fitting since troubleshooting includes lots of bits that are neither questions nor answers. Instead, there are lots of suggestions, ideas, thoughts, comments, musings, none of which necessarily are the one true answer, but all of which are required steps that together lead us to the solution.
Apart from this fresh take on discussions, Discourse comes with a full set of features that make interacting with each other very easy.
This decision was made mainly to combat the spam and security issues previously encountered with the various social media login services.
So, unlike the current Askbot setup where you could login using different social media services, you will need to create a Fedora Account to use the new Discourse based instance. Luckily, creating a Fedora Account is very easy!
Choose a username, enter your name, and a valid e-mail address, a security question.
Do the “captcha” to confirm that you are indeed a human, and confirm that you are older than 13 years of age.
That’s it! You now have a Fedora account.
Get started!
If you are using the platform for the first time, you should start with the “New users! Start here!” category. Here, we’ve put short summaries on how to use the platform effectively. This includes information on how to use Discourse, its many features that make it a great platform, notes on how to ask and respond to queries, subscribing and unsubscribing from categories, and lots more.
For the convenience of the global Fedora community, these summaries are available in all the languages that the community supports. So, please do take a minute to go over these introductory posts.
Discuss, learn, teach, have fun!
Please login, ask and discuss your queries and help each other out. As always, suggestions and feedback are always welcome. You can post these in the “Site feedback” category.
As a last note, please do remember to “be excellent to each other.” The Fedora Code of Conduct applies to all of us!
Acknowledgements
The Fedora community does everything together, so many volunteers joined forces and gave their resources to make this possible. We are most grateful to the Askbot developers who have hosted AskFedora till now, the Discourse team for hosting it now, and all the community members who helped set it up, and everyone that helps keep the Fedora community ticking along!
Nothing lasts forever. When it comes to the hardware in your PC, most of it can easily be replaced. There is, however, one special-case hardware component in your PC that is not as easy to replace as the rest — your hard disk drive.
Drive Mirroring
Your hard drive stores your personal data. Some of your data can be backed up automatically by scheduled backup jobs. But those jobs scan the files to be backed up for changes and trying to scan an entire drive would be very resource intensive. Also, anything that you’ve changed since your last backup will be lost if your drive fails. Drive mirroring is a better way to maintain a secondary copy of your entire hard drive. With drive mirroring, a secondary copy of all the data on your hard drive is maintained in real time.
An added benefit of live mirroring your hard drive to a secondary hard drive is that it can increase your computer’s performance. Because disk I/O is one of your computer’s main performance bottlenecks, the performance improvement can be quite significant.
Note that a mirror is not a backup. It only protects your data from being lost if one of your physical drives fail. Types of failures that drive mirroring, by itself, does not protect against include:
Simultaneous Failure of all Mirrored Drives (highly unlikely)
Some of the above can be addressed by other file system features that can be used in conjunction with drive mirroring. File system features that address the above types of failures include:
This guide will demonstrate one method of mirroring your system drive using the Multiple Disk and Device Administration (mdadm) toolset. Just for fun, this guide will show how to do the conversion without using any extra boot media (CDs, USB drives, etc). For more about the concepts and terminology related to the multiple device driver, you can skim the md man page:
$ man md
The Procedure
Use sgdisk to (re)partition the extra drive that you have added to your computer:
– If the drive that you will be using for the second half of the mirror in step 12 is smaller than this drive, then you will need to adjust down the size of the last partition so that the total size of all the partitions is not greater than the size of your second drive. – A few of the commands in this guide are prefixed with a test for the existence of an efivars directory. This is necessary because those commands are slightly different depending on whether your computer is BIOS-based or UEFI-based.
Use mdadm to create RAID devices that use the new partitions to store their data:
# cat << END > /etc/mdadm.conf
MAILADDR root
AUTO +all
DEVICE partitions
END
# mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm.conf
– The missing parameter tells mdadm to create an array with a missing member. You will add the other half of the mirror in step 14. – You should configure sendmail so you will be notified if a drive fails. – You can configure Evolution to monitor a local mail spool.
– Dracut will include the /etc/mdadm.conf file you created in the previous section in your initramfs unless you build your initramfs with the hostonly option set to no. If you build your initramfs with the hostonly option set to no, then you should either manually include the /etc/mdadm.conf file, manually specify the UUID’s of the RAID arrays to assemble at boot time with the rd.md.uuid kernel parameter, or specify the rd.auto kernel parameter to have all RAID arrays automatically assembled and started at boot time. This guide will demonstrate the rd.auto option since it is the most generic.
– The new Boot Loader Specification states “if the OS is installed on a disk with GPT disk label, and no ESP partition exists yet, a new suitably sized (let’s say 500MB) ESP should be created and should be used as $BOOT” and “$BOOT must be a VFAT (16 or 32) file system”.
Reboot and set the rd.auto, rd.break and single kernel parameters:
# reboot
– You may need to set your root password before rebooting so that you can get into single-user mode in step 7. – See “Making Temporary Changes to a GRUB 2 Menu” for directions on how to set kernel parameters on compters that use the GRUB 2 boot loader.
– The dotglob flag is set for this bash session so that the wildcard character will match hidden files. – Files are removed from the boot directory because they will be copied to a separate partition in the next step. – This copy operation is being done from the dracut shell to insure that no processes are accessing the files while they are being copied.
Use single-user mode to copy the non-root file systems:
– It is OK to run these commands in the dracut shell shown in the previous section instead of doing it from single-user mode. I’ve demonstrated using single-user mode to avoid having to explain how to mount the non-root partitions from the dracut shell. – The parameters being past to the cp command for the boot directory are a little different because the VFAT file system doesn’t support symbolic links or Unix-style file permissions. – In rare cases, the rd.auto parameter is known to cause LVM to fail to assemble due to a race condition. If you see errors about your swap or home partition failing to mount when entering single-user mode, simply try again by repeating step 5 but omiting the rd.break paramenter so that you will go directly to single-user mode.
– You can re-enable selinux after this procedure is complete. But you will have to relabel your file system first.
Install the boot loader on the new drive:
# sed -i '/^GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=.*/d' /newroot/etc/default/grub
# echo "GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true" >> /newroot/etc/default/grub
# MY_DISK_1=$(mdadm --detail /dev/md/boot | grep active | grep -m 1 -o "/dev/sd.")
# for i in dev dev/pts proc sys run; do mount -o bind /$i /newroot/$i; done
# chroot /newroot env MY_DISK_1=$MY_DISK_1 bash --login
# test -d /sys/firmware/efi/efivars || MY_GRUB_DIR=/boot/grub2
# test -d /sys/firmware/efi/efivars && MY_GRUB_DIR=$(find /boot/efi -type d -name 'fedora' -print -quit)
# test -e /usr/sbin/grub2-switch-to-blscfg && grub2-switch-to-blscfg --grub-directory=$MY_GRUB_DIR
# grub2-mkconfig -o $MY_GRUB_DIR/grub.cfg \;
# test -d /sys/firmware/efi/efivars && test /boot/grub2/grubenv -nt $MY_GRUB_DIR/grubenv && cp /boot/grub2/grubenv $MY_GRUB_DIR/grubenv
# test -d /sys/firmware/efi/efivars || grub2-install "$MY_DISK_1"
# logout
# for i in run sys proc dev/pts dev; do umount /newroot/$i; done
# test -d /sys/firmware/efi/efivars && efibootmgr -c -d "$MY_DISK_1" -p 1 -l "$(find /newroot/boot -name shimx64.efi -printf '/%P\n' -quit | sed 's!/!\\!g')" -L "Fedora RAID Disk 1"
– The grub2-switch-to-blscfg command is optional. It is only supported on Fedora 29+. – The cp command above should not be necessary, but there appears to be a bug in the current version of grub which causes it to write to $BOOT/grub2/grubenv instead of $BOOT/efi/fedora/grubenv on UEFI systems. – You can use the following command to verify the contents of the grub.cfg file right after running the grub2-mkconfig command above:
# sed -n '/BEGIN .*10_linux/,/END .*10_linux/ p' $MY_GRUB_DIR/grub.cfg
– You should see references to mdraid and mduuid in the output from the above command if the RAID array was detected properly.
Boot off of the new drive:
# reboot
– How to select the new drive is system-dependent. It usually requires pressing one of the F12, F10, Esc or Del keys when you hear the System OK BIOS beep code. – On UEFI systems the boot loader on the new drive should be labeled “Fedora RAID Disk 1”.
Remove all the volume groups and partitions from your old drive:
– WARNING: You want to make certain that everything is working properly on your new drive before you do this. A good way to verify that your old drive is no longer being used is to try booting your computer once without the old drive connected. – You can add another new drive to your computer instead of erasing your old one if you prefer.
Create new partitions on your old drive to match the ones on your new drive:
– It is important that the partitions match in size and type. I prefer to use the parted command to display the partition table because it supports setting the display unit:
# parted /dev/sda unit MiB print
# parted /dev/sdb unit MiB print
Use mdadm to add the new partitions to the RAID devices:
# test -d /sys/firmware/efi/efivars || grub2-install "$MY_DISK_2"
# test -d /sys/firmware/efi/efivars && efibootmgr -c -d "$MY_DISK_2" -p 1 -l "$(find /boot -name shimx64.efi -printf "/%P\n" -quit | sed 's!/!\\!g')" -L "Fedora RAID Disk 2"
Use mdadm to test that email notifications are working:
# mdadm --monitor --scan --oneshot --test
As soon as your drives have finished synchronizing, you should be able to select either drive when restarting your computer and you will receive the same live-mirrored operating system. If either drive fails, mdmonitor will send an email notification. Recovering from a drive failure is now simply a matter of swapping out the bad drive with a new one and running a few sgdisk and mdadm commands to re-create the mirrors (steps 13 through 15). You will no longer have to worry about losing any data if a drive fails!
There are numerous services available on the web for managing your personal finances. Although they may be convenient, they also often mean leaving your most valuable personal data with a company you can’t monitor. Some people are comfortable with this level of trust.
Whether you are or not, you might be interested in an app you can maintain on your own system. This means your data never has to leave your own computer if you don’t want. One of these three apps might be what you’re looking for.
HomeBank
HomeBank is a fully featured way to manage multiple accounts. It’s easy to set up and keep updated. It has multiple ways to categorize and graph income and liabilities so you can see where your money goes. It’s available through the official Fedora repositories.
A simple account set up in HomeBank with a few transactions.
To install HomeBank, open the Software app, search for HomeBank, and select the app. Then click Install to add it to your system. HomeBank is also available via a Flatpak.
KMyMoney
The KMyMoney app is a mature app that has been around for a long while. It has a robust set of features to help you manage multiple accounts, including assets, liabilities, taxes, and more. KMyMoney includes a full set of tools for managing investments and making forecasts. It also sports a huge set of reports for seeing how your money is doing.
A subset of the many reports available in KMyMoney.
To install, use a software center app, or use the command line:
$ sudo dnf install kmymoney
GnuCash
One of the most venerable free GUI apps for personal finance is GnuCash. GnuCash is not just for personal finances. It also has functions for managing income, assets, and liabilities for a business. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it for managing just your own accounts. Check out the online tutorial and guide to get started.
Checking account records shown in GnuCash.
Open the Software app, search for GnuCash, and select the app. Then click Install to add it to your system. Or use dnf install as above to install the gnucash package.
It’s now available via Flathub which makes installation easy. If you don’t have Flathub support, check out this article on the Fedora Magazine for how to use it. Then you can also use the flatpak install GnuCash command with a terminal.
