MACCHIATObin boot on serial port

 March 6, 2023

I bought a MACCHIATObin Single Shot a few months ago with the idea of creating a NAS out of it. The results have been very good and, to begin in an easy way, I decided to install Fedora 37 Server Edition.

Now that I’ve decided exactly what I want out of it, I reinstalled Fedora and started from scratch with exactly what I wanted. I decided to install Fedora 37 IoT, which is an rpm-ostree based release. To create the installation media, I leveraged arm-image-installer. Overall everything went well, and the system booted successfully, although I wasn’t sure at first due to an issue with my DHCP server configuration. Therefore I decided to connect to the board serial port and see if the boot was successful.

Fedora Sway artifacts approved by FESCo

 January 4, 2023

Back in August, I asked for suggestions for a name for an os-tree-based Fedora version with Sway. Although I’ve not posted anything more on the topic, the work went forward.

We have asked Fedora Council to approve the naming, to FESCo for the approval for the change to Fedora, and to RelEng support to merge our work in the Fedora workstream.

A couple of weeks ago, the Fedora Council approved the request to create a “traditional” spin called “Fedora Sway spin” as well as an os-tree spin called “Fedora Sericea”.

Gopass 1.15 in Fedora 37

 December 21, 2022

Back in April, I announced the availability of gopass in the Fedora repositories. In the last few months, though, gopass had multiple releases, many of which arrived in Fedora 38 but not Fedora 37. Since Fedora 38 will be released in a few months, most users are not using it, and therefore those releases are not directly benefitting those users. The reason for the delayed update for Fedora 37 is that the dependencies of gopass changed in the course of those updates, and the Fedora process makes updating packages with many dependencies changes more painful than it could be.

Install Fedora on MACCHIATObin

 August 31, 2022

After my last post about MACCHIATObin, a few people reached out to better understand how to install Fedora on it.

The MACCHIATObin board provides many different installation options. It has an onboard eMMC (in my case, 8GB, but I’m not sure if other sizes are available), an SD card slot, 3 SATA ports, and 1 PCI x4 slot. This setup means that the various options to install Fedora on a MACCHIATObin are:

Fedora Sway OSTree Spin name

 August 12, 2022

The Fedora Sway SIG is working to create an immutable version of the Sway Spin (also work in progress) using OSTree.

Those immutable spins of Fedora are becoming more common following Silverblue and Kinoite’s success.

As it often happens, one of the most challenging things to do in creating something is to come up with clever names. This task is made even more complex by the relatively small amount of people active in this conversation. For this reason, during the last SIG meeting, it was decided to socialize this decision so that more people could suggest their ideas.

MACCHIATObin Single Shot first impressions

 July 31, 2022

I’ve played with a MACCHIATObin Single Shot board for the last month. I decided to pick this up instead of a different board because of its sheer connectivity. This board has 1x1GbE, 1x2.5GbE, and 2x10GbE, which is very rare for those kinds of boards. I was most interested in the two 10GbE due to some projects I have in mind.

I was interested in installing Fedora, which proved very easy. The first time I created a bootable micro-SD card with Fedora, it worked perfectly out of the box. After a few tests, I decided to install Fedora on a SATA drive. The SATA installation proved a bit more complex because I assumed it could boot from USB, but I did not manage to do so. I then moved the Fedora ISO to a micro-SD card and installed it from there, which proved to work flawlessly.

Nebula on Fedora

 June 30, 2022

In the last year, I moved more and more data and services to hardware that I can directly control. A direct consequence of this is that I started to run more hardware at my house. This change has been very positive, but it is suboptimal when not at home. All services I run are secure and could be shared directly on the web, but I prefer a more cautious approach. For this reason, I decided to create a VPN.

gopass in Fedora

 April 25, 2022

I started to use ZX2C4’s pass back in 2016 to manage my passwords. I liked the idea behind pass, but I found it too hackish. For this reason, I moved to gopass at the end of 2017 because it was a far more complete implementation of pass from my point of view.

gopass is now part of my system, and I’m so used to it that it is hard for me to think about my workflows without gopass into them.

gRPC-Gateway 2 in Fedora

 February 22, 2022

gRPC is a very nice technology that allows the implementation of efficient APIs in a very efficient way. Thanks to gRPC and protobuf, you do not have to write much boilerplate code since the boilerplate code is generated automatically from the proto file. This works perfectly until both your client and server can perform gRPC calls. Luckily most of the languages have no issue with this. Still, the big exception is JavaScript (and other languages that will compile to JS, such as TypeScript) running in a browser.

pdfcpu in Fedora

 February 19, 2022

pdfcpu is a command-line tool to perform actions on PDF files. It allows to perform all the standard operations, such as merge, split, and rotate pages. It also allows less common operations such as changing the user and owner passwords, encrypting/decrypting, optimizing, etc.

The project started back in 2017, but I discovered it only last year. I like pdfcpu due to the high focus on allowing and making it easy to perform those kinds of operations in batch.