Posted on November 16, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Akash Angle: How do you Fedora?

We recently interviewed Akash Angle on how he uses Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine. The series profiles Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. Contact us on the feedback form to express your interest in becoming a interviewee.

Who is Akash Angle?

Akash is a Linux user who ditched Windows some time ago. An avid Fedora user for the past 9 years, he has tried out almost all the Fedora flavors and spins to get his day to day tasks done. He was introduced to Fedora by a school friend.

What Hardware?

Akash uses a Lenovo B490 at work. It is equipped with an Intel Core i3-3310 Processor, and a 240GB Kingston SSD. “This laptop is great for day to work like surfing the internet, blogging, and a little bit of photo editing and video editing too. Although not a professional laptop and the specs not being that high end, it does the job perfectly,” says Akash.

He uses a Logitech basic wireless mouse and would like to eventually get a mechanical keyboard. His personal computer — which is a custom-built desktop — has the latest 7th-generation Intel i5 7400 processor, and 8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM.

What Software?

Akash is a fan of the GNOME 3 desktop environment. He loves most of the goodies and bells and whistles the OS can throw in for getting basic tasks done.

For practical reasons he prefers a fresh installation as a way of upgrading to the latest Fedora version. He thinks Fedora 29 is arguably the the best workstation out there. Akash says this has been backed up by reviews of various tech evangelists and open source news sites.

To play videos, his go-to is the VLC video player packaged as a Flatpak, which gives him the latest stable version. When Akash wants to make screenshots, the ultimate tool for him is Shutter, which the Magazine has covered in the past. For graphics, GIMP is something without which he wouldn’t be able to work.

Google Chrome stable, and the dev channel, are his most used web browsers. He also uses Chromium and the default version of Firefox, and sometimes even Opera makes its way into the party as well.

All the rest of the magic Akash does is from the terminal, as he is a power user. The GNOME Terminal app is the one for him.

Favorite wallpapers

One of his favorite wallpapers originally coming from Fedora 16 is the following one:

And this is the one he currently uses on his Fedora 29 Workstation today:

Posted on November 14, 2018 by — Leave a comment

VS Code Live Share plugin

Contributing to Open Source projects leads to collaborating with people around the world this is traditionally done via emails or instant messages. But with the rise of extreme programing practices like pair programing being able to remotely share a code editor is a great feature. VS Code has a plugin Live Share that does just that.

Getting Started with Live Share

If you do not have VS Code already installed, you can read our previous article to get started.

Using Visual Studio Code on Fedora

Installing the Live Share plugin

First let’s install the dependencies the Live Share plugin requires.

$ sudo dnf install openssl-libs krb5-libs libicu zlib gnome-keyring libsecret desktop-file-utils xorg-x11-utils

Once the installation completes, the Live Share plugin is ready to be installed from the Extensions marketplace.

More details on the role of each dependency can be found in the Documentation.

Finally reload VS Code to activate the new plugin.

Start a Collaboration Session

To start a new collaboration session, it requires a project to be open in VS Code, so let’s clone the following git repository and open it.

$ git clone https://github.com/cverna/rss_feed_notifier.git

This repository contains the source code of the following Magazine article.

Never miss a Magazine article — build your own RSS notification system

In VS Code, use the [Ctrl+K, Ctrl+O] combination to select and open the git repository.

Then from the Live Share extension menu start a collaboration session.

Live Share requires its user to sign in so that it can display the identity of the session participants. You can easily sign in using a GitHub account for example.

Ready to collaborate

To start collaborating Live Share provides a link that can be shared with others. You can get this link in you clipboard by clicking on the Invite paticipants … text.

Once one or more participant have joined the session you can start collaborating.

Sharing Code

This is where Live Share really shines as it shows clearly which participant is currently editing the file.

It is also possible to follow a participant. This has for effect to open in your editor all the files that the participant you are following opens.

Sharing Resources

Another feature of Live Share is to share resources like a server, a terminal or even a debugger session. For example it is very easy to share a terminal session and help a participant setting up a development environment, another example would be to share a database server and to inspect the content of a table.

Connectivity

By default the Live Share connection automatically checks if the host machine and the guest machine can communicate directly, if not Live Share uses a relay hosted in the Azure cloud.

It is possible to configure Live Share to use only direct connection between the host and the guest. For that the host machine needs to open a port in the 5990-5999 range and accept inbound local network connections. The guest needs a network route and outbound access to the host on the same port.

Finally set the connection mode to direct in the Live Share settings.

The documentation provides more details on the connectivity options.

Please note that the Live Share extension is available as Public Preview. The extension source code is currently not open source but this should change once the extension is generally available.

Posted on November 9, 2018 by — Leave a comment

How Do You Appreciate Fedora?

This week is the first annual Fedora Appreciation Week. As an extension of the How Do You Fedora? series, this article presents how past interviewees appreciate Fedora. The Fedora Project defines four common values that it encourages all contributors and community members to uphold. Those values are known as the Four Foundations. One such value, Friends, represents the vibrant community of contributors and users from across the world, all working towards the same goal: advancing free software.

Like any community, the Fedora community evolves over time. Each contributor’s story is a little different. That diversity is what makes the Fedora community so strong. Kernel contributor Justin Forbes puts it succinctly:

Fedora is the community. So much of what Fedora is now came as a direct result of community effort.

Fedora is successful today because of the many contributors, both past and present, who have put their time and effort into the project. Here are some of their stories, and how they appreciate others in the community.

You can click on any of the story headers to see our original interviews with these notable people.

Maria Leandro’s story

Fedora has been a huge part of my personal and professional life, so choosing a top moment would leave several fantastic stories behind. I do remember that first time I went to a Flock and meet personally people that I had been interacting, learning from and teaching for almost 5 years. For people like us who spend most of our time behind a screen, having that personal meeting can be life changing. That particular moment is not about the goals or the tasks that need to be done, that moment is the prize to people who work for a common well, for those who change people’s life without asking anything in return, it’s the moment when you put a face to those commits and bugs, to those wallpapers and docs; it’s the moment when we stop being a random robot name to be real… that moment when we hug each other and greet, that has to be the best moment in all Open Source History.

Maria has two favorite wallpapers from Fedora releases:

She sends a special thank you to appreciate Máirín Duffy, who leads the Fedora design team:

Definitely my hero, mo (mizmo). She pushed me to be the designer I am today, always had a chat to solve any doubt I had, and is the most friendly person you can meet.

Maria’s most memorable release was early on:

Probably Fedora 6, since it was the first time I did any artwork at all for the community.

Michael Larabel’s story

Without a doubt the best Fedora memory with friends would have to be celebrating the Fedora “Beefy Miracle” release back in 2012 at LinuxTag in Berlin where the Fedora booth played it so well and was serving up free hot dogs to go with the delicious beverages of the region. Lots of good catching up with open-source contributors, discussing new ideas, and more during the wonderful community-driven open-source events particularly in Europe.

Michael’s favorite Fedora desktop wallpaper will be familiar to current readers of the Magazine. It’s the brand new wallpaper for Fedora 29:

Michael also sent a special thank you to a very special contributor who died in 2013:

The late Seth Vidal earns much respect for his contributions to Fedora, Yum, and Red Hat communities. His technical achievements were great and he was a kind and interesting person at conferences, etc.

His favorite release was Fedora Core 3:

Fedora Core 3 certainly holds a special place in my heart as it was the first Fedora release I really became intrigued by as it was in much better shape than FC1/FC2. Since there it improved while overall from say Fedora 26 and newer, each release has felt particularly polished and keeps getting better — including Fedora 29 and my experience with it thus far on many test boxes.

Julita Inca’s story

Julita shared with us this photo from a recent Women in Fedora event, celebrating the positive impact and contributions of women in the Fedora community:

Her favorite Fedora wallpaper is from the Fedora 17 release:

Julita also took time to appreciate one of Fedora’s amazing Czech community contributors and organizers:

The person I admired since the beginning was Jiri Eischmann! He is a polite person and very active in his community. He continues to inspire me to this day! I hope to soon attend a celebration of Fedora in Europe where I am living now.

Author’s Postscript

As a fellow Fedoran I would like to thank each of the people who responded to my questions and all of the previous interviewees. Writing the How Do You Fedora? series has been immensely rewarding for me. I have learned about lots of new applications and uses of Fedora. The greatest impact of the series is that it reignites my faith in the goodness of the people who make up the Fedora community with each installment.

Posted on November 6, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Celebrate Fifteen Years of Fedora

On November 6, 2003, Red Hat announced Fedora Core 1, the first software release of the Fedora Project. This announcement marked the beginning of a collaborative project between Red Hat and its user community.

A history lesson

The Fedora Project traces its roots to a community-led project called fedora.us.

Fedora is a community project to ease publishing and delivery of 3rd party software on the Red Hat platform.

At the time, Red Hat Linux provided a core set of packages suitable for most users. The Fedora project set themselves up as a community of dedicated Red Hat Linux users with a goal of finding and packaging more software that was not shipped in the core Red Hat Linux product offering.

A few months after launching Fedora.us, an even bigger announcement hit the fedora.us homepage. Red Hat Linux was merging with Fedora Linux, resulting in the Fedora Project.

The Fedora Project was now a single, community-based team of passionate Linux developers, many of whom were still Red Hat employees. However, the projects were still somewhat separate. Red Hat Linux became Fedora Core; an openly developed project but was restricted to Red Hat employees. Fedora.us (or Fedora Linux) became Fedora Extras, where community members could continue to contribute packages and enhancements on top of Fedora Core.

This structure continued to exist for six releases of Fedora Core. With the release of Fedora 7, the distinction between Fedora Core and Fedora Extras was dropped, and Fedora was one big, happy family!

What’s new in Fedora Core 1

The Linux software ecosystem 15 years ago looked very different that today. Fedora Core 1 introduced a few new packages that might sound familiar to the astute reader:

bitstream-vera-fonts
dbus
epiphany
nano
rhythmbox
yum

Innovation and early adoption has been a part of Fedora since the beginning. Even in 2003, the Fedora Project was pushing forward with new projects. The following are excerpts from the Fedora Core 1 Release Notes.

“CUPS is now the only print spooler provided. During upgrades, if LPRng is installed, it will be replaced by CUPS.”
“Fedora Core 1 includes the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL), a new implementation of POSIX threads for Linux. This library provides performance improvements and increased scalability.”
“Fedora Core 1 now uses a graphical interface while booting.”

Not only that, Fedora was in the process of migrating its font system to the new fontconfig/Xft, and switching to UTF-8 across the distribution!

Default desktop

Even in 2003, GNOME was the default desktop for Fedora.

Fedora Core 1 shipped GNOME 2.4, adopting the classic Red Hat Linux panel layout over the upstream project’s two-panel layout.

The Mozilla Suite was the go-to web browser at the time. Mozilla had not yet started the Firefox standalone browser project, so this suite included an email client and usenet news reader. While Mozilla included an email client, Fedora defaulted to Ximian Evolution as its email/groupware program.

Also included:

OpenOffice.org (formerly StarOffice, and not yet LibreOffice)
gAIM (Pidgin would rise in popularity as alternatives to AIM came about, such as Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger)
X-Chat

Hardware requirements

Fedora Core 1 has some pretty modest hardware requirements, even for 2003.

CPU

At a minimum, it requires a Pentium-class CPU. The release notes include an important note about compiler optimizations.

NOTE: Fedora Core 1 is optimized for Pentium PRO (and later) CPUs, but also supports Pentium-class CPUs. This approach has been taken because Pentium-class optimizations actually result in reduced performance for non-Pentium-class processors.

For a graphical installation (an X11-powered desktop), a 400 MHz Pentium II is recommended. And for text-mode only, a 200 MHz Pentium-class or better!

Hard Disk Space

The release notes list a few different space requirements, depending on the intended use:

Custom Installation (Minimal): 520MB
Server: 870MB
Personal Desktop: 1.9GB
Workstation: 2.4GB
Custom Installation (Everything): 5.3GB

In today’s world of terabytes of cloud storage, the modest difference in megabytes between a “Server” and “Personal Desktop” seems downright quaint in comparison.

Memory

There is evidence of Moore’s Law in the memory requirements for Fedora Core 1 too. At a minimum, for “text-mode”, it requires 64 MB! And for graphical installations, that increases to 192 MB at a minimum, but recommends at least 256 MB.

Try it out!

Fedora is proud of its heritage. There is no better way to understand history than to experience it. Fortunately, modern virtualization software ships with Fedora Workstation by default! So why not try out Fedora Core 1 yourself? We’ve put together a virtual disk image of Fedora Core 1 (927 MB download) that can be imported directly into GNOME Boxes. It even points to the “current” update repositories so you can try out the “new” yum package manager yourself.

Posted on November 2, 2018 by — Leave a comment

Create a containerized machine learning model

After data scientists have created a machine learning model, it has to be deployed into production. To run it on different infrastructures, using containers and exposing the model via a REST API is a common way to deploy a machine learning model. This article demonstrates how to roll out a TensorFlow machine learning model, with a REST API delivered by Connexion in a container with Podman.

Preparation

First, install Podman with the following command:

sudo dnf -y install podman

Next, create a new folder for the container and switch to that directory.

mkdir deployment_container && cd deployment_container

REST API for the TensorFlow model

The next step is to create the REST-API for the machine learning model. This github repository contains a pretrained model, and well as the setup already configured for getting the REST API working.

Clone this in the deployment_container directory with the command:

git clone https://github.com/svenboesiger/titanic_tf_ml_model.git

prediction.py & ml_model/

The prediction.py file allows for a Tensorflow prediction, while the weights for the 20x20x20 neural network are located in folder ml_model/.

swagger.yaml

The file swagger.yaml defines the API for the Connexion library using the Swagger specification. This file contains all of the information necessary to configure your server to provide input parameter validation, output response data validation, URL endpoint definition.

As a bonus Connexion will provide you also with a simple but useful single page web application that demonstrates using the API with JavaScript and updating the DOM with it.

swagger: "2.0" info: description: This is the swagger file that goes with our server code version: "1.0.0" title: Tensorflow Podman Article consumes: - "application/json" produces: - "application/json" basePath: "/" paths: /survival_probability: post: operationId: "prediction.post" tags: - "Prediction" summary: "The prediction data structure provided by the server application" description: "Retrieve the chance of surviving the titanic disaster" parameters: - in: body name: passenger required: true schema: $ref: '#/definitions/PredictionPost' responses: '201': description: 'Survival probability of an individual Titanic passenger' definitions: PredictionPost: type: object

server.py & requirements.txt

server.py defines an entry point to start the Connexion server.

import connexion app = connexion.App(__name__, specification_dir='./') app.add_api('swagger.yaml') if __name__ == '__main__': app.run(debug=True)

requirements.txt defines the python requirements we need to run the program.

connexion tensorflow pandas

Containerize!

For Podman to be able to build an image, create a new file called “Dockerfile” in the deployment_container directory created in the preparation step above:

FROM fedora:28 # File Author / Maintainer MAINTAINER Sven Boesiger <donotspam@ujelang.com> # Update the sources RUN dnf -y update --refresh # Install additional dependencies RUN dnf -y install libstdc++ RUN dnf -y autoremove # Copy the application folder inside the container ADD /titanic_tf_ml_model /titanic_tf_ml_model # Get pip to download and install requirements: RUN pip3 install -r /titanic_tf_ml_model/requirements.txt # Expose ports EXPOSE 5000 # Set the default directory where CMD will execute WORKDIR /titanic_tf_ml_model # Set the default command to execute # when creating a new container CMD python3 server.py

Next, build the container image with the command:

podman build -t ml_deployment .

Run the container

With the Container image built and ready to go, you can run it locally with the command:

podman run -p 5000:5000 ml_deployment

Navigate to http://0.0.0.0:5000/ui in your web browser to access the Swagger/Connexion UI and to test-drive the model:

Of course you can now also access the model with your application via the REST-API.

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.