Markdown is a lightweight markup language that is useful for adding formatting while still maintaining readability when viewing as plain text. Markdown (and Markdown derivatives) are used extensively as the priumary form of markup of documents on services like GitHub and pagure. By design, Markdown is easily created and edited in a text editor, however, there are a multitude of editors available that provide a formatted preview of Markdown markup, and / or provide a text editor that highlights the markdown syntax.
This article covers 3 desktop applications for Fedora Workstation that help out when editing Markdown.
UberWriter
UberWriter is a minimal Markdown editor and previewer that allows you to edit in text, and preview the rendered document.
The editor itself has inline previews built in, so text marked up as bold is displayed bold. The editor also provides inline previews for images, formulas, footnotes, and more. Ctrl-clicking one of these items in the markup provides an instant preview of that element to appear.
In addition to the editor features, UberWriter also features a full screen mode and a focus mode to help minimise distractions. Focus mode greys out all but the current paragraph to help you focus on that element in your document
Marker is a Markdown editor that provides a simple text editor to write Markdown in, and provides a live preview of the rendered document. The interface is designed with a split screen layout with the editor on the left, and the live preview on the right.
Additionally, Marker allows you to export you document in a range of different formats, including HTML, PDF, and the Open Document Format (ODF).
Where the previous editors are more focussed on a minimal user experice, Ghostwriter provides many more features and options to play with. Ghostwriter provides a text editor that is partially styled as you write in Markdown format. Bold text is bold, and headings are in a larger font to assist in writing the markup.
It also provides a split screen with a live updating preview of the rendered document.
Ghostwriter also includes a range of other features, including the ability to choose the Markdown flavour that the preview is rendered in, as well as the stylesheet used to render the preview too.
Additionally, it provides a format menu (and keyboard shortcuts) to insert some of the frequent markdown ‘tags’ like bold, bullets, and italics.
Do you want to share a piece of Fedora news for the general public? Have a good idea for how to do something using Fedora? Do you or someone you know use Fedora in an interesting way?
We’re always looking for new contributors to write awesome, relevant content. The Magazine is run by the Fedora community — and that’s all of us. You can help too! It’s really easy.Read on to find out how.
What content do we need?
Glad you asked. We often feature material for desktop users, since there are many of them out there! But that’s not all we publish. We want the Magazine to feature lots of different content for the general public.
Sysadmins and power users
We love to publish articles for system administrators and power users who dive under the hood. Here are some recent examples:
We don’t forget about developers, either. We want to help people use Fedora to build and make incredible things. Here are some recent articles focusing on developers:
We also feature interviews with people using Fedora in interesting ways. We even link to other useful content about Fedora. We’ve run interviews recently with people using Fedora to increase security, administer infrastructure, or give back to the community. You can help here, too — it’s as simple as exchanging some email and working with our helpful staff.
How do I get started?
It’s easy to start writing for Fedora Magazine! You just need to have decent skill in written English, since that’s the language in which we publish. Our editors can help polish your work for maximum impact.
The Magazine team will guide you through getting started. The team also hangs out on #fedora-mktg on Freenode. Drop by, and we can help you get started.
Changing the theme of a desktop environment is a common way to customize your daily experience with Fedora Workstation. This article discusses the 4 different types of visual themes you can change and how to change to a new theme. Additionally, this article will cover how to install new themes from both the Fedora repositories and 3rd party theme sources.
Theme Types
When changing the theme of Fedora Workstation, there are 4 different themes that can be changed independently of each other. This allows a user to mix and match the theme types to customize their desktop in a multitude of combinations. The 4 theme types are the Application (GTK) theme, the shell theme, the icon theme, and the cursor theme.
Application (GTK) themes
As the name suggests, Application themes change the styling of the applications that are displayed on a user’s desktop. Application themes control the style of the window borders and the window titlebar. Additionally, they also control the style of the widgets in the windows — like dropdowns, text inputs, and buttons. One point to note is that an application theme does not change the icons that are displayed in an application — this is achieved using the icon theme.
Two application windows with two different application themes. The default Adwaita theme on the left, the Adapta theme on the right.
Application themes are also known as GTK themes, as GTK (GIMP Toolkit) is the underlying technology that is used to render the windows and user interface widgets in those windows on Fedora Workstation.
Shell Themes
Shell themes change the appearance of the GNOME Shell. The GNOME Shell is the technology that displays the top bar (and the associated widgets like drop downs), as well as the overview screen and the applications list it contains.
Comparison of two Shell themes, with the Fedora Workstation default on top, and the Adapta shell theme on the bottom.
Icon Themes
As the name suggests, icon themes change the icons used in the desktop. Changing the icon theme will change the icons displayed both in the Shell, and in applications.
Comparison of two icon themes, with the Fedora 30 Workstation default Adwaita on the left, and the Yaru icon theme on the right
One important item to note with icon themes is that all icon themes will not have customized icons for all application icons. Consequently, changing the icon theme will not change all the icons in the applications list in the overview.
Comparison of two icon themes, with the Fedora 30 Workstation default Adwaita on the top, and the Yaru icon theme on the bottom
Cursor Theme
The cursor theme allows a user to change how the mouse pointer is displayed. Most cursor themes change all the common cursors, including the pointer, drag handles and the loading cursor.
Comparison of multiple cursors of two different cursor themes. Fedora 30 default is on the left, the Breeze Snow theme on the right.
Changing the themes
Changing themes on Fedora Workstation is a simple process. To change all 4 types of themes, use the Tweaks application. Tweaks is a tool used to change a range of different options in Fedora Workstation. It is not installed by default, and is installed using the Software application:
Alternatively, install Tweaks from the command line with the command:
Next, launch Tweaks, and switch to the Appearance pane. The Themes section in the Appearance pane allows the changing of the multiple theme types. Simply choose the theme from the dropdown, and the new theme will apply automatically.
Installing themes
Armed with the knowledge of the types of themes, and how to change themes, it is time to install some themes. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to install new themes to your Fedora Workstation — installing theme packages from the Fedora repositories, or manually installing a theme. One point to note when installing themes, is that you may need to close and re-open the Tweaks application to make a newly installed theme appear in the dropdowns.
Installing from the Fedora repositories
The Fedora repositories contain a small selection of additional themes that once installed are available to we chosen in Tweaks. Theme packages are not available in the Software application, and have to be searched for and installed via the command line. Most theme packages have a consistent naming structure, so listing available themes is pretty easy.
To find Application (GTK) themes use the command:
dnf search gtk | grep theme
To find Shell themes:
dnf search shell-theme
Icon themes:
dnf search icon-theme
Cursor themes:
dnf search cursor-theme
Once you have found a theme to install, install the theme using dnf. For example:
sudo dnf install numix-gtk-theme
Installing themes manually
For a wider range of themes, there are a plethora of places on the internet to find new themes to use on Fedora Workstation. Two popular places to find themes are OpenDesktop and GNOMELook.
Typically when downloading themes from these sites, the themes are encapsulated in an archive like a tar.gz or zip file. In most cases, to install these themes, simply extract the contents into the correct directory, and the theme will appear in Tweaks. Note too, that themes can be installed either globally (must be done using sudo) so all users on the system can use them, or can be installed just for the current user.
For Application (GTK) themes, and GNOME Shell themes, extract the archive to the .themes/ directory in your home directory. To install for all users, extract to /usr/share/themes/
For Icon and Cursor themes, extract the archive to the .icons/ directory in your home directory. To install for all users, extract to /usr/share/icons/
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.
