Fedora 40 : Find version and GlibC flaw !

Because today I saw a video about the GlibC flaw that lets attackers get root on major distros, I will show an easy way to find the version of this lib with dnf and dnf5 tools:

[root@fedora var]# dnf in glibc
Last metadata expiration check: 0:04:06 ago on Wed 31 Jan 2024 10:25:13 PM EET.
Package glibc-2.38.9000-35.fc40.x86_64 is already installed.
Package glibc-2.38.9000-35.fc40.i686 is already installed.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!
[root@fedora var]# dnf5 in glibc
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Package "glibc-2.38.9000-35.fc40.x86_64" is already installed.
Package "glibc-2.38.9000-35.fc40.i686" is already installed.

You can see in the name is add the version: 2.38.9000-35.fc40.x86_64.

This is the video about GlibC from Bits inside by René Rebe.

Fedora 39 : Fixing common upgrade issues.

The most common issue is that the Linux system hangs due to disk space and upgrades.

Here's what you need to do:

Ensure you have root access by editing the boot sequence from the boot menu with the word single and entering the root password.

... start the network in the maintenance environment with the command:

# systemctl restart NetworkManager

Check if you can update with the DNF5 tool or DNF , see this webpage:

# dnf5 upgrade --refresh

If the update tool tells you that you have no space available, then you can clean up with:

# journalctl --disk-usage
# journalctl --vacuum-size=16M

The size of 16M is a relative size related to how the resource is allocated!

Another possibility would be to reallocate the space.

NOTE: If you are using a virtual disk with .vdi extension on Windows OS, then I don't have a solution.

Although virtualbox has an interface that would allow resizing the virtual disk, it didn't work for me.

Fedora 39 : Foot - the sway terminal.

Today, I will show how to use a fast, lightweight, and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator named Foot.

You can install it easily with the DNF5 tool :

The project can be found on this codeberg repo.

On the sawy desktop environment, you can use Win+D keys just to type a command to start an application.

You can start easily by typing foot or you can type on an open terminal, see:

[mythcat@fedora ~]$ foot
warn: wayland.c:1509: fractional scaling not available
warn: wayland.c:1512: no server-side cursors available, falling back to client-side cursors
warn: fcft.c:583: failed to get full font name
warn: fcft.c:583: failed to get full font name

I used updatedb and locate commands to find the foot.ini file and change some settings like font size, and more :

Fedora 39 : Issues in Fedora with PyGobject and sway-tests.

Today I wanted to test this repo named sway-tests.

I followed the steps there and received an error from gi.repository.

This error is related to another issue related to PyGobject.

In Fedora Linux distro, installing PyGobject is done with pip like this:

$ pip install PyGobject

In order to have no errors, the dnf or dnf5 tool should be used like this ...

I tested the functionality of this installation with a simple example:

import gi

gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
from gi.repository import Gtk

win = Gtk.Window()
win.connect("destroy", Gtk.main_quit)
win.show_all()
Gtk.main()

It worked very well.

After solving this issue, I returned to the initial one and tested the sway-tests.

$ whereis sway
$ env/bin/pytest --sway=/usr/bin/sway
$ sudo env/bin/pytest --sway=/usr/bin/sway

I used the command both with and without sudo.

Both generated the same errors.

For the following command I had to install ... xorg-x11-server-Xephyr:

Xephyr is an X server which has been implemented as an ordinary X application. It runs in a window just like other X applications, but it is an X server ...

... the fixed centered black window specific to the xorg runtime appeared and somewhere on the side the terminal showed me a bunch of errors.

... obviously, I don't know how well sway-tests is implemented, now it's an archived repo, but I solved the use of PyGobject in python on the Fedora linux distribution.

Fedora 39 : testing Godot on Laptop and VirtualBox.

Today I watched a bit of the video series on the YouTube channel Fedora.

It's a whole team that maintains the Fedora packages and their development. I thought to check if I have the possibility to effectively use it in the development of software on Linux that has multiple functionalities. And because I currently work on Windows with Godot version 4.1.1 and C#, I took the first steps for installation and testing.

Let's install the Godot game engine tool on Fedora Distro Linux.

$ sudo su 
# dnf5 search godot
# dnf5 install godot.x86_64
# exit

Let's open and test with this command:

$ godot

The Godot interface comes with version 4.0.3 and is functional on my laptop with Fedora. Obviously, I have not tested all the implemented functionalities, but they seem to be good and ready to work.

On the other hand, testing on Virtualbox, it seems that it can't start the Godot interface.

It seems that Godot depends on OpenGL and needs some minimum requirements to work properly starting with OpenGL version 3.3.

Fedora 39 : How to start using cockpit tool in firefox.

Use lie any default installation like any Fedora Linux Distro package for cockpit tool with DNF or DNF5 tool.

$ sudo su
# dnf5 install cockpit
# systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket
# firewall-cmd --add-service=cockpit
# firewall-cmd --add-service=cockpit --permanent
# exit

The next step is to test if this runs well.

Get your ip address with netstat:

$ netstat nr

Because I used an virtual box for testing Fedora I get this ip 10.0.2.0

Use with firefox in the terminal:

$ firefox http://10.0.2.0:9090

The result will be the online cockpit tool.

Fedora 39 : Test Day:2023-08-11 Fedora 39 DNF 5

See more about this test with DNF5 on this wiki webpage and on this test results webpage.

Fedora 39 : DNF, DNF-3 and DNF5

Before installing DNF5 you should know that your installations with this tool in the fedora distribution may not work correctly

After implementation of dnf5 module install dnf and dnf5 cannot share the same location for storing state of modules, because dnf5 will store additional information about installed profiles (braking change). Modules enabled by DNF5 (dnf5 module enable <module>) will be not seen as enabled in DNF. Module profile installed by DNF5 will be not sees as installed in DNF. DNF will only see installed RPMs.

More details on this official webpage.

You can fix it with the dnf-3 tool if you accidentally modified or deleted the dnf tool.

A simple example is installing Deepin Desktop, which I could only install with DNF-3:

# dnf-3 install @deepin-desktop

The other dnf and dnf5 tools didn't work, I didn't wait to check if it's because of the repos. but it did not bring me the packets from the web and shows me transactions of 0 B.

Fedora 39 : Install and fix error with dotnet and copr.

Copr is an easy-to-use automatic build system providing a package repository as its output.

Free/Open source software that is harder to include in Fedora (usually because it is developed in a way that makes it difficult to package while implementing the Fedora packaging guidelines) is temporarily provided in an extra COPR repository, see the official webpage.

I tried to install dotnet following a tutorial on Fedora Magazine:

# dnf copr enable @dotnet-sig/dotnet

I obviously received errors related to copr, because is not install and I used Fedora 39, since Fedora 39 is still Rawhide.

I try to install copr with dnf5:

# dnf5 install copr

I got some errors on python-request-2.28.2-2.fc39.noarch conflicts with new one requested by dnf5 and I remove this package and I let to install the new one.

I try again with same command:

# dnf5 install copr

The next command was:

$ sudo dnf copr enable @dotnet-sig/dotnet fedora-38-x86_64

This allow me to use fedora-38-x86_64 and warn me about copr.

Enabling a Copr repository. Please note that this repository is not part
of the main distribution, and quality may vary ...

The last one is to install .NET Core:

# dnf5 install dotnet

This install all packages for .NET Core with SDK version 6.0 .

I tested with a simple project:

$ dotnet new console -o mythcat_console
$ cd mythcat_console
$ dotnet run 
Hello, World!

This is the way that can use Fedora packages with copr.

Fedora 39 : DNF5 error update.

Sometimes errors may occur when installing Fedora packages using the dnf or dnf5 utility. One of the reasons may result from the coincidence of the package installation process. If you know how to build packages, how to develop the Fedora team, and how many repositories you have set up in your Linux distribution, then such an error can be easily fixed. Here is the error:

First, install the dnf5 and dnf5-plugins with this command:

sudo dnf install dnf5 dnf5-plugins

One good way to fix error is to have defined settings in : /etc/dnf/dnf.conf in order to have a good installation flow and how to link packages to the interconnected job.

See my example that fix this error:

Some packages may conflict in the repo and you can check with the dnf info fedora_repo_package command.

For example, you can use exclude=*.noarch in the [main] area.

News : The new DNF5 tool is on Fedora .

The new DNF5 will provide a significant improvement in user experiences and performance. The replacement is the second step in upgrade of Fedora Software Management stack. Without the change there will be multiple software management tool (DNF5, old Microdnf, PackageKit, and DNF) based on different libraries (libdnf, libdnf5), providing a different behavior, and not sharing a history and module state. We can also expect that DNF will have only limited support from upstream. The DNF5 development was announced on Fedora-Devel list in 2020.

You can read more on the official webpage on Fedora area.