Yesterday I received a package that contained a new ARM-based hardware - an Efika MX Developer Edition as a part of the developer program run by PowerDeveloper.org. My project is to run Fedora/ARM on it and after obtaining HDMI-DVI cable and EU power cord I could first start it up. The work has begun :-)

Reference manual for the Freescale i.MX515 SoC

kernel patches for the i.MX51 SoC platform on the way to upstream

Just an update to 2.6.31.7, no changes in the content. Download as always from http://fedora.danny.cz/arm/kirkwood/2.6.31

This is an update to the recently published 2.6.32 kernel. No major changes were done in the packaging, but upstream brings support for the Marvell OpenRD platform and I have enabled few additional drivers.
Download from http://fedora.danny.cz/arm/kirkwood/2.6.32, the 2.6.31.x series is now available under http://fedora.danny.cz/arm/kirkwood/2.6.31

I was notified that the Fedora/ARM kernel I provide doesn't include conntrack-related netfilter modules. And because it was really an omission, I have built an updated kernel and modules. I have also enabled drivers for IrDA and Bluetooth USB devices. Download as always from http://fedora.danny.cz/arm/kirkwood

Running a private Koji instance with an external repository connected requires downloading repeatedly a lot of data from the Internet for the buildroots. Creating a regular local Fedora mirror will naturally help a lot, but on the other side the space required for such mirror is very large. For 2 releases and Rawhide for all primary architectures it goes into hundreds of GB, secondary architectures will add other tens or hundreds of GB. But only a rather small part will be actually used by the buildroots, there are packages with games data and other stuff that will not serve as a build requirement for the built rpms. Other typical use of a private mirror is feeding hosts on local networks with updates, but here also only a small part of the content will be used. So instead of doing a full mirror I have chosen to run a virtual mirror with squid instance working as a reverse proxy for multiple sites.

The whole process looks like:
- listen on port 80 and local IP address and hostname (http://mirror.danny.cz:80)
- rewrite the incoming "virtual" URL to a real one (http://mirror.danny.cz/fedora/* => http://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/fedora/*)
- fetch the object from the real site

All config files are available here

And what is missing? It's a registration of the mirror into Fedora's official MirrorManager so the clients can work without touching any config file. But I don't know yet whether a virtual mirror qualifies.

EDIT: I had a discussion with Matt Domsch, the MirrorManager master, how the virtual mirror can work together with mirrormanager. You should follow the official steps, but you can't run the report_mirror utility, because it checks the actual layout on your disk. Instead you should add the required categories (e.g. Fedora Linux) with their local URLs manually and then ask the Fedora MirrorManager admins to mark your mirror as "alway up-to-date".

Xorg correctly computes the DPI settings from the size and resolution of the display. But I find useful to increase DPI on laptop's display so the fonts are smaller and more text can be visible.
Just append the following section into your xorg.conf (real display size is 331 mm x 207 mm)

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "LCD"
DisplaySize 400 250
EndSection

and modify the "Device" section so it looks like

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Monitor-LVDS" "LCD" # <<< this line is added
EndSection


There is no simple way to start a network installation of Fedora from USB stick. I have found a blog post that makes possible to transform a boot.iso image into a bootable USB stick. But it still requires to download the 200+ MB large iso file, while in theory only initrd.img and vmlinuz files should be needed. So I have created mkbootimg.sh script that automates all required steps and has a bootable disk image as a result. It can be transferred to real USB disk by the dd command. There is no warranty for the script, it can eat your system :-)

Red Hat Czech Republic is organizing a Developer Conference 2009 for Fedora developers, administrators and users during September. I plan to organize a workshop focused on secondary architectures in Fedora - s390, ARM, SPARC, building packages in Koji, preparing kernels for ARM platforms, etc. So if you are interested in participating in such event, let me know or just come in.

I was upgrading my workstation yesterday, only the case and harddisks remained the same. Almost everything went well, even new init ramdisk wasn't required, but I was stuck on networking for a while. And the problem was called "eth0_rename". After querying google it was clear that this is the result of "network device persistency" feature and the cause is different MAC address assigned to the new eth0 device. Solution was easy - remove the old records from
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

The conservative side of Fedora called the Server SIG has been announced on the fedora-devel mailing list.

---
There were many discussions in the past few days and weeks about the orientation Fedora currently has. It is a fact that currently Fedora is primarily desktop oriented.

We agree that Desktop is important part of the system, it is highly visible to the public and large number of Fedora users. But we also see a large number of Fedora and CentOS users and RHEL customers with very specific needs and demands. We can not omit the server fundamentals that later create a successful enterprise product and in our opinion a formal entity must exist to coordinate these efforts.

That's why we started work on establishing the Fedora Server SIG. The draft is available at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DanHorak/ServerSIG
Any constructive ideas are welcome :-)

I am using stable (and quite old :-) ) Fedora 8 for doing my development work, but sometimes it is useful to run an application on Rawhide, for example during Package Reviews. And this task can be successfully accomplished using mock even for GUI applications.

Here are the required steps, first run in your host:
xhost +localhost (GUI only) + enable network connections to your X server
mock -r fedora-devel-x86_64 init
mock -r fedora-devel-x86_64 install app_you_want_to_run
cp -a /usr/share/X11/fonts /var/lib/mock/fedora-devel-x86_64/root/usr/share/X11 (GUI only)
mock -r fedora-devel-x86_64 shell

And then run in mock shell:
export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0 (GUI only)
app_you_want_to_run

A new window should appear on your desktop, when you are running a GUI application.

When I was working as a system/network admin, I used to have miscellaneous network configurations stored in my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files. There was a default DHCP config and some special setups with static IP addresses and gateways, all bound to the eth0 interface. It was in early Fedora 8 days and such setup was not compatible with NetworkManager I was using mainly for the easy setup of wifi networking. So I have wanted to know whether there was an improvement. Now I have used recent Fedora Rawhide, created ifcfg-test as a copy of ifcfg-eth0, but with staticly defined IP address/netmask and restarted NetworkManager and checked the applet. And voila - there were "System eth0" and "System test" items now and I could easily switch between them.