May 29, 2023
Recently, I was looking for a couple of Single Board Computers (SBCs) for a project I’m working on.
Given the characteristics I was looking for, there were not many options; in the end, I opted for the ROCKPro64 by Pine64.
Once I received the SBC, I immediately tried to put Fedora on it.
The process proved slightly more complex than I was expecting since I assumed that U-Boot (or some other boot loader) was already present on the board.
Turns out, it is not!
So, the first step became installing U-Boot.
An aspect I really like about the ROCKPro64 is that it has 128Mb of Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) Flash memory.
I appreciate this fact because it allows me to install U-Boot there and then a standard OS on another storage device.
Speaking of other storage devices, the ROCKPro64 features both an optional eMMC and the mSD Card slot.
The process turned out more complex than I initially thought since my goal was to use Fedora on the eMMC, but I forgot to get the eMMC USB adapter, so I had to leverage the mSD Card as well.
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May 24, 2023
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has evaluated the legality of Facebook’s (now Meta Platforms) data transfer for over 10 years.
In those 10 years, we have seen the Irish DPC trying to avoid ruling on the matter multiple times and the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) forcing them to do it.
We now have a final ruling on the matter, which is unfavorable to Meta.
In fact, in addition to having to stop the data transfer within 5 months and having to move back all data within 6 months, Meta has to pay a € 1.2 billion fine.
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May 17, 2023
Until a few months ago, the only option to start containers from Systemd was to create a Systemd unit which called podman (or docker) with the run sub-command.
Podman was also providing podman generate systemd to easily create such Systemd file.
This has now changed.
From version 4.4 of Podman, in addition to the mentioned method, it is possible to use Quadlet to simplify the execution of containers from Systemd.
Quadlet allows you to create additional kinds of Systemd units to manage your container needs:
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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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April 17, 2023
GitHub Actions allows the use of containers with different Operating Systems.
Although, it does not mean that everything is seamless when you are using them.
I’ve discovered this the hard way!
Below are my findings and the process I followed to make the GitHub Action pipeline work properly with containers.
It all started with the addition of a new tool in the pipeline, which was not installable on Ubuntu (the GitHub Actions default operating system), due to a packaging issue.
Therefore, I decided to use a Fedora container since I was sure that our toolchain was present and well-maintained in Fedora.
After adding the container definition and changing the toolchain installation command from apt to dnf, the pipeline seemed to be working properly.
After a few days, it was noticed that the pipeline did not fail but was not working.
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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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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.
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February 27, 2023
Last week, I completed the Red Hat EX188 exam, which allowed me to become Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers.
I think that Red Hat has been able to improve the quality of its exams over time.
Newer exams tend to have better explanations of the required tasks.
It could also be that this feeling is partially due to my increasing familiarity with those kinds of exercises.
This exam is very new; in fact, I believe it was released at the beginning of the year, and this is by far the more user-friendly Red Hat exam I’ve ever done.
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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.
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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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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog