Parsidora 16 Released!

Happy new year!

I’m happy to announce the release of next version of our Fedora remix: Parsidora 16 ! We expect it to be a solid release based on latest updates for Fedora 16, providing a pleasant experience for “others”.  It can be downloaded from our sourceforge space. Everything that a regular user expects should work out of the box, or is a few clicks away. While the default installation adds only a few packages to the Fedora’s default installation, there are lots of packages in DVD media which can be added either during the installation of after the installation using Add/Remove Software or yum.

Parsidora 16 Login Page

Compared to Parsidora 15 and Fedora 16, this released provides relatively few new changes. A few packages have been added to the media, including: Openshot, Synapse, Choqok and Hotot, Tucan, phpMyAdmin, Klavaro and a few more TeXLive 2011 packages. Also, for the first time we are planning to release a Live media version in addition to Parsidora installation medias; but it is not released yet.

Parsidora 16 also comes with an updated version of Jockey(0.9.6) following upstream jockey releases. Parsidora 15 was the first distro coming with Jockey in the Fedora world. It was interesting for others too, as it was added to Fedora Utils, and some other Fedora remixes like Kororaa. In fact, Chris Smart from Kororaa Linux had joined me and helped in preparing the latest Jockey for Fedora. I’m really happy to collaborate with him, which has resulted in higher quality packages. He also added support for installing akmod packages rather than kmods. You can install the latest version of Jockey for Fedora from Parsidora 16 repository similar to the instructions given here. I sent a number of my patches upstream and fortunately, all of them are accepted. It is a healthy collaboration which benefits both parties.

I was trying to add Jockey to RPMFusion, but adding it properly needs some changes which I should discuss with RPMFusion developers. I didn’t have time for it, but I’ll probably re-start my efforts soon.

Due to its size, Parsidora is not very friendly to downloaders, but once it is downloaded it is very handy to pass on. You won’t need any external packages for most of your usual needs, and this is one of our main goals. Still, it doesn’t bloat your default install, which is not (usually) achievable by live distributions and is helpful to people who do not have access to fast internet connections. However, we are going to provide a live version for others too!

Grub 2

As I noted in the previous post, Fedora 16 now uses Grub 2 on some architectures. Thanks to this, one of my long standing bug reports against grub2 in Fedora is finally fixed (all it needed was to add os-prober dependency to grub2 which, unfortunately, was unnoticed for a long time). The other bug, which is also very easy to fix, is unfortunately not solved yet… (sorry, but I’m really disappointed to see this bug is still open).
Grub 2 comes with a number of interesting features. One of them is auto-detecting other installed OSes using os-prober (as I have written here, you can do the same for Legacy Grub using my script). This means that now Fedora will detect other installed OSes when installed… well, not completely. Currently, Fedora doesn’t recognize OSes installed on LVM partitions during the installation (apparently because LVM volumes are not active when it is run). Therefore, you should run grub2-mkconfig again after Fedora 16 installation if you have any OSes installed on LVM partitions. Also, there is another problem with os-prober itself: it doesn’t recognize OSes installed on MD RAID partitions. The bug, with the possible fix, is reported upstream and I hope to see it fixed soon too.

Unfortunately, Grub 2 in Fedora doesn’t come with any artwork. You’ll see an ugly black and white grub menu (I never liked the look of Grub2 in Ubuntu and I hoped that it won’t happen in Fedora too). Hopefully, it’ll be fixed soon; but for the time being you can do it yourself. With the pointers given here (Hey! Ask Fedora is also officially launched!), I came up with the following:
First, you should create a font file for Grub 2 using any TTF fonts. I did the following:

grub2-mkfont --output=/boot/grub2/unicode.pf2 \
           /usr/share/fonts/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf

Then, you need appropriate settings in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x32
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
GRUB_BACKGROUND=/usr/share/backgrounds/verne/default/normalish/verne.png

 

Yes, it sets the default Fedora 16 background for Grub and it automatically scales the image to the Grub’s resolution! Finally, don’t forget to regenerate your grub’s config file (remember that the following command completely overwrites the existing config. Therefore, if you have manually edited /boot/grub2/grub.cfg all of your changes will be overwritten by it):

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

 

A part of the result is given below (for whatever reason (see Update 2 for the reason and the fix!), grub 2 selects a very high resolution in qemu, so I was forced to crop the image):

Grub 2 with Fedora 16 background and BiDi (Persian) Text

And yes, Grub 2 supports UTF-8 BiDi (right-to-left) text automatically (It’d be great if it was also possible to right align the menu entries, but apparently it is not supported). And notice that you should use qxl or vmware vga driver for qemu if you are using Grub 2′s graphical menu.

This is just the begining, and I’m at the beginning too! Grub 2 supports themes, and I hope to see great themes for Fedora. A Fedora theme for grub 2, along with a new Plymouth theme (which has not been changed for a long time) could be very interesting for Fedora 17…

Update: I forgot to say that since Grub 2 can be installed on an LVM partition, you no longer need to have a separate /boot partition in LVM setups. While anaconda still suggests that, you are not forced to do so.

Update 2: Use lower case ‘x’ in GFXMODE variable. Initially I used upper case X so it was actually ignored!

Fedora 16

Finally, I finished my M.Sc a few days ago and therefore I’m going to be more active after finishing some postponed tasks. But, all that didn’t prevent me from jumping to Fedora 16 early around Beta release and afterwards. And this is my mini-review now:

Fedora Robotics Spin
First of all, we at Fedora Robotics SIG are proud to announce the first official release of Fedora Robotics Spin. This is a LiveDVD spin providing many usable tools, libraries and frameworks usable in robotics such as Eclipse development environment, MRPT libraries, Player/Stage/Gazebo and RoboCup soccer simulator 2D and 3D. Fawkes was supposed to be included too but IIRC it is not included in this version due to some problems. There are still a lot to be done and we will provide more interesting stuff in future.

Gnome 3.2.1
Fedora 16 comes with Gnome 3.2.1. To summarize, it is better than Gnome 3.0 (surprisingly!;)). It felt a bit faster (if I’m not mistaken!), and more polished. It also comes with a number of bug fixes that annoyed me in Fedora 15: the renaming problem in nautilus in non-English locales is solved, and while the problem with tray icons of Java applications is not solved (and it fact it is a bit worse since you cannot get the icon back even by restarting gnome-shell), it doesn’t cause gnome shell to use 100% CPU anymore. So, you still cannot see Java icons but at least it won’t heat up your system. Good news is that a fix for Java is already applied to JDK 8 (thanks to Danesh Dadachanji) and hopefully it will be backported to JDK 6 & 7 soon. Apparently, it fixes another problem too: Java windows will be grouped in Gnome Shell as a single application (currently each window appears as a separate application).

Gnome 3.2.1 comes with some enhancements and new features too: Sushi, a quick previewer for Nautilus. Highlight a file (e.g. image or video) and press Space bar button. You should see a preview of the file.
Another enhancement is in NetworkManager, whch provides a “HotSpot” feature. In Gnome 3.0, there were no straight forward way to do wireless sharing in the new NetworkManager interface and you were forced to create it manually using Netowrk Connections dialog. But in Gnome 3.2 there is a HotSpot button in the Wireless section which creates an ad-hoc wireless connection and shares internet over it easier than ever (just press the button and a few seconds later others can connect you with the provided password). But NetworkManager still lacks some basic functionality, for example while you can enter network proxy information, there is no (clear) way to add authentication information (probably you can add your username and password in the URL box, but it is not a good solution specially as the password is visible to everyone). I hope that NetworkManager can have a kind of “Location” (or Connection) concept which makes it possible to assiosiate some network settings with network Locations (e.g. separate proxy information for different Locations/Connections).

Unfortunately, on my ThinkPad X61 the suspend button (Fn+F4) no longer works. I have not looked into this problem yet. Also, some of the gnome shell extensions in Fedora 16 repository are not compatible with Gnome Shell 3.2.x but they are installable (they should require gnome shell 3.0.x so that you cannot install them in Fedora 16).

Personal File Sharing
In Fedora 15 and 16, you might have noticed that there is no longer any “Personal File Sharing” in Gnome 3. I mostly wanted it to enable receiving files using bluetooth since my mobile didn’t see my laptop to send any files to it. Fortunately, it is not gone forever and you can easily get it back: just install gnome-user-share package and you’ll get it back.

Gnome Fallback + Compiz Session
And a final note about Gnome in Fedora 15/16: if you would like to use gnome fallback mode rather than Gnome Shell, you can install Compiz 0.9.5 and specially compiz-gnome package. It’ll add a new session (“Classic Gnome with Compiz”) in the login window which you can select to run Gnome Fallback mode with compiz. So, you can select the desired environment in the login window.

Grub 2
Another notable feature of Fedora 16 is replacing lagacy Grub with Grub 2 (not for all architectures currently). But I’ll talk more about it in a separate post since this one is long enough already.
Fedora 16 comes with more interesting features like USB support in KVM. See other features in Fedora 16 feature page.

Parsidora 16

Since Fedora 16 is out, we are going to release our Parsidora 16 soon, specially that it seems that have less problems than Fedora 15. Fedora 16 is better than Fedora 15, so Parsidora 16 will be better too!

Have fun!

YFD plugin updated

A while back I introduced Yum Fast Downloader plugin, a plugin to use a download accelerator application (Aria2) to download yum metadata and packages (except delta rpms). The next step is trying to integrate such a functionality in Yum itself. However, I have not found the time to implement my ideas in yum, and the a few bugs in the plugin were found. Therefore, today I spend some time to identify and solve the known problems and a new update is already pushed into the plugin’s repository. Therefore, all of YFD users are encouraged to update their plugin ASAP. Hopefully, it should now work much better now.

Thanks for your interest,

Hedayat

Parsidora 15 is out!

Finally, we released the third version of Parsidora: Parsidora 15. It brings an up-to-date Fedora Remix and tries to provide a more pleasant out of the box experience for people not bound by US law. Therefore, you can find multimedia codecs and other extra goodies in it. Unlike others, its primary focus is on providing an Installation DVD/media instead of a live version. While we are going to release a live version too, it is not our primary goal because our main target users are users who do not have access to high speed internet. Therefore, the image takes 4.7GB almost completely and we try to make sure that most of our target users are able to receive it through internet shops or from their friends.

Parsidora is NOT a localized distribution, and the main language is English. But it does provide some features suitable for Persian users, which can be easily disabled during the installation. Therefore, it can be considered an international distribution.

As mentioned already, Parsidora 15 is the first Fedora remix which features Jockey for easier hardware driver installation. You can read more about this version in this release announcement.

Thanks to all Fedora and RPMFusion contributors for creating such an interesting and high quality product, which enabled us to create Parsidora based on their efforts.

Try Jockey on Fedora and Parsidora 15!

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was porting Jockey to Fedora. The work is almost finished now and ready for public testing. It would be great if you can try it and let me know about the results.

For testing, you can either try Parsidora 15 Release candidate version, which will be available in a few hours (less than 4 hours) from parsidora sourceforge area, or add the following repository to your Fedora 15 (put the following distinguished text inside a parsidora.repo file inside /etc/yum.repos.d/):

[parsidora]
name=Parsidora 15 – $basearch
baseurl=http://parsidora.sourceforge.net/releases/15/repos/parsidora/$basearch
enabled=1
metadata_expire=7d
gpgcheck=0

Then, install:

yum install jockey-selinux jockey-gtk

for the GTK interface or:

yum install jockey-selinux jockey-kde

for the KDE interface. You can omit jockey-selinux if you have disabled selinux on your system. Notice that RPMFusion repositories should be enabled to use this software.

Have fun!

Update: Packages for Fedora/Parsidora 16 are also available. All you need to do is to replace “15″ in the above URL with “16″. or use “$releasever” so that it’ll be replaced by your Fedora release version.

Parsidora 15 and a special feature: Ubuntu Hardware Driver Installer (Jockey)

Parsidora 15 – the third version of Parsidora Fedora Remix – is going to be released soon. Hopefully, it is going to be an interesting release. It is more polished and better integrated than previous releases. It both provides better features for Persian users and better support for international users. You can easily disable all features specific to Persian users in the installation time by un-checking a single package group.

However, it is going to have a new experimental feature as a surprise for its users: Jockey. Jockey is the tool used by Ubuntu to install and manage third-party drivers.

Jockey in Fedora

Porting such a software to Parsidora was one of my goals from the beginning. I didn’t want to support non-free drivers by installing them by default, but a tool which can detect required drivers is nice since some users will need to install such drivers anyway. And I wanted something like the Ubuntu’s driver installer software, therefore I decided to look at the code to see if I can use some parts of it. Finally, I did it a few days ago; but I didn’t expect to be able to prepare it for Parsidora 15. Jockey is an Ubuntu tool, so I expected to have a hard time porting it to Fedora/Parsidora. However, I was surprised to see that “Jockey was designed to be distribution agnostic and fulfill the need of different distributions, driver vendors, and system integrators.” And to a great extent, it really is. Even better, it has a reference implementation which uses PackageKit as its package management backend! This means that the upstream version of Jockey is even more compatible with Fedora than Ubuntu (the Ubuntu specific version is maintained in a separate branch)!! I should thank Ubuntu developers for building a tool which can be used by others too.

Finding out that porting Jockey to Fedora could be easier than what I thought before, I decided to give it a try. While the reference implementation basically works, it needs some integration work. Also, it was not completely compatible with Fedora 15′s PackageKit, so some changes in some parts of the code were needed. I also needed to configure it in a way to be able to detect and install required RPMFusion hardware drivers. Finally, it needs a SELinux module to work correctly when SELinux is enabled. A basic version is ready, and will be available in Parsidora 15, but it still needs more integration work (Like integrating with Gnome 3 notifications) which I’ll hopefully do for Parsidora 16. Finally, I might go with adding it to Fedora or RPMFusion repositories (since it doesn’t provide anything useful without such a third party repository).

We have received many positive feedback about Parsidora so far . We do not have lots of users, but it seems that we are going in the right direction to serve our target users. I’ll write more about Parsidora 15 features soon.

Fedora in RoboCup 2011…

Fedora systems, 3D Soccer Simulation Competition

Some of my friends considered these Fedora systems as the best way to find me in the arena!

My Fedora 15 Pre-release experience

Today, it become clear that Fedora 15 will be released on May 24th . It is an interesting release, specially as the first official Linux distribution coming with GNOME 3. Besides, it comes with a number of interesting features including (but not limited to): KDE 4.6, systemd, power management enhancements, Robotics Suite, Retrace Server, Better SPICE support, Dynamic Firewall and GDB 7.3. You can find the complete list of new features at Fedora 15′s Feature Page.

I have tried Fedora 15 since its Alpha release, and started using more seriously since the first test compose of the final release. I generally really like this release, however it has a number of issues too because of the arrival of the new GNOME 3. Let’s start with the annoying parts first!

I have already talked about some GNOME 3  design decisions that I don’t like. I use my laptop as a “computer”, and its main job is … computing rather than being an interactive device! So, when I close its lid I don’t want all my downloads or processes to be stopped; and I know that there are many like me. Fortunately, you can install gnome-tweak-tool to be able to easily change this setting.

The most annoying part of my experience were these 2 problems: the first on is a problem that I have faced since the first Fedora Desktop Test Day. From time to time, gnome-shell starts to eat my CPU time, making the desktop sluggish and my laptop very hot. This is really annoying, and I am forced to restart gnome-shell (Alt+F2 and then ‘r’) so that it goes back to the normal state. The next one is that currently, you are unable to connect to Ad-Hoc wireless networks in Fedora 15 using NetworkManager due to this bug. It really annoys me, but at least command line still works!

Except the tray icons of Java applications which float around in GNOME 3, almost everything is fine with it … as while as I use en_US locale. As soon as I switch to fa_IR locale, problems appear: simply, gnome-shell crashes immediately! Using one of two available workarounds, I can actually login to gnome-shell. Then, a number of issues appear, with the third one being so problematic that makes gnome-shell in fa_IR locale almost unusable and forced me to switch to en_US locate for the time being.

OK, these were all that really hit me with this release. It’s probably not that bad for such a release with big changes! However, we will probably delay our Parsidora 15 release until some of all of these issues are solved.

Now, the interesting parts! After using GNOME 3 in Fedora for a while, I think I like it! It looks great (while probably sometimes it looks too gray, specially in nautilus) and feels good! Fonts are looking a bit different in Fedora 15, due to some font rendering enhancements merged in freetype and in Fedora. Initially I thought that I won’t like this change, but now I like it! Also, the new notification system is much better and less intrusive. Despite the mentioned problems, I’ll definitely switch to Fedora 15!

I have installed some gnome-shell extensions and gnome-shell themes to customize it a little (while the default gnome-shell theme is also beautiful). Also, since GNOME 3 doesn’t provide “Type Break” settings in its keyboard preferences anymore, I installed DrWritght which is the same application provided for GNOME 3. As said earlier, gnome-tweak-tool also provides some useful features .

Finally, I really liked Fedora 15′s Retrace Server feature. It finally made ABRT a useful tool for me! Till now, I usually disabled ABRT, since it needed to download many large -debuginfo packages to provide any usable services. But this is no longer needed, and you can generate useful bug reports using ABRT without installing any extra packages since retrace server can do that job for you. I have already created two bug reports using this facility, something that I were able to do for the first time! This is a great feature indeed

Update: This bugs are solved now: Ad-Hoc connection problem, gnome shell crash in fa_IR locale and corrupted nautilus menu entries in RTL locales

Introducing Yum Fast Downloader plugin

A few days ago I was thinking that it’d be nice if yum would use a download manager application like aria2c for downloading files rather than it’s own urlgrabber, which lacks many features available in such applications. In fact, I wished for such a feature almost every time I used yum and it needed to download something more than a few MBs. But this time, I decided to see if I can implement it as a yum plugin and in a few hours I had a working prototype which could download packages using aria2c. It was really interesting, so I decided to work on it more seriously, and the first version is available now. It is still experimental, but has worked fine for me up to now!

Warning: this is on of my first serious Python experiences, and my biggest Python code!

Anyway, as I consider the current version to be usable, I created a repository for it which is available here so that updates can be delivered automatically. All you need to do is to add its .repo file to your /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory.

The current version (0.5) provides the following features:
• Using Aria 2 as the download manager application
• Downloading repository metadata from several mirrors simultaneously
• Downloading multiple packages in parallel from several mirrors
• Tries to use fastest mirrors for downloading

Please let me know if encountered any problems.

Have fun!