(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog
April 18, 2023
With Fedora 38 officially released, Sericea and Sway Spin have also been officially released!
In the last month, I’ve been working on those variants’ presence on the Fedora website. Now both variants have their page on the Fedora Website respectively at Sericea and Sway Spin.
If you have any questions, reach the Sway SIG in the following ways:
I hope many of you will find these valuable improvements to Fedora as much as I do.
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March 24, 2023
The Fedora Project released Fedora 38 beta images. The Fedora Sway Spin and the Fedora Sericea ones are in the long list of released images!
This is a critical point in the release of those Fedora artifacts based on Sway since it is the first time it has been possible to test them for the wider public. Although the Fedora Project has been creating Sway artifacts for a couple of months, those were based on Rawhide, which is “a not always stable” version of Fedora, since it tracks far in the future (4-10 months) versions of Fedora.
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February 24, 2023
A few weeks ago, I was doing a security check on one of my machines to ensure that everything was secure when I noticed that there were some ports open that I was surprised to find out.
The way I discovered those ports was by checking some ports with netcat (nc -zv IP_ADDRESS PORT).
I was expecting those ports to be closed, and I got surprised when netcat claimed to be able to connect to them.
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”.
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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.
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November 28, 2022
As discusse in a previous post, I use nebula to create a VPN connection between the various machines I use. Usually what I really care about this setup is the ability of consuming services those machine expose on my nebula network.
When I travel, I prefer to proxy my data through my nebula network. This allows me to not have to care about the limitations imposed in those networks, as long as I’m able to open my tunnel. The second advantage I have, is that I can choose the location where my traffic leaves my VPN, since I have multiple machines in multiple nations. Another advantage is that I can be sure that no data is visibile by the network manager, even if this is becoming less and less relevant, since the majority of the traffic is encrypted nowadays.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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