It’s the intersection of three of my hobbies - computers, Linux, and photography! Ever since I learned how to compile source code from the net, about a decade ago, I’ve wanted to create RPMs to help those who aren’t comfortable with compiling or simply don’t want to bother with compiling. But, for some reason, RPM creation was always something I struggled to get right. Nearly once a year I’d try and do it, but always failed. But recently, when reading the instructions on how to do it, it just clicked.

After daydreaming about running my Linux computer from an SSD for years (ever since I saw how fast it made my wife’s Linux install), I finally did it on the main Linux computer (SuperMario) as the root hard drive was getting old and was liable to die at any moment. The last time I’d installed my main Linux computer from scratch was in 2009 when I went from an old eMachine to the computer I’d built for my wife when I was going to ease her from Windows on her Dell computer over to Linux on a custom built computer. Lots had changed since then (like going to SystemD, for example) and I also wanted to move to a larger hard drive. So just copying everything over was out of the question. I figured a fresh install would get rid of a lot of the cruft I’d picked up in the last 7 years. Additionally, this time I would start with an install of the KDE spin of Fedora and I’m not planning on adding in other desktop environments or Window managers unless I am ready to ditch KDE. If I want to dabble in other desktops, I can always run a VM.

I used to have a Team Fortress 2 server on CentOS 6 with Virtual Box. Now that I’m using KVM/QEMU/Libvirt, I wanted to set up a new one. Also, Valve somewhat changed how they worked a few years ago and I wanted a clean slate. I started with a VM with 40GB. It’s not supposed to take that much, but I remember last time it took much more than the 10GB I’d given the VM and I don’t want to have to increase the disk size again.

I have  VM running Emby that I set up a while ago on an low spec machine that had been the guest computer before everyone got Chromebooks and tablets. But it only had 2GB of RAM and I gave 1GB to the VM. So I added some new RAM to bring the system up to 8GB and wanted to start off by giving the VM 4GB to see if that improved performance.

Recently I’ve been having a problem where the Emby server kept dying. I haven’t been able to figure out what is causing it. So while I’ve been trying to figure it out with the Emby folks, I fixed up the systemd script for Emby so that it would restart itself whenever it died. It was incredibly simple to do this. Here’s the original script:

[Unit]
 Description=Emby Media Server
 After=network.target

[Service]
 EnvironmentFile=/etc/emby-server.conf
 ExecStart=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh start
 Restart=on-abort
 TimeoutSec=20
 ExecStopPost=/usr/lib/emby-server/emby-server.sh clear

[Install]
 WantedBy=multi-user.target

And here’s how I fixed it:

Upgraded the final computer - the server host that has the VM with our Kodi stuff. It was the least complicated upgrade - didn’t have to remove anything - it just worked. And that was a great change, for once. (Not that the others were too much of a pain).

For some reason gazebo-doc the Fedora 22 version conflicted with the Fedora 23 version so I had to delete that. Also, despite the system claiming that it would not have to download the packages again, it appeared to not actually work that way - at least the second time I ran things. (After removing Kernel-debug packages to get more space in /boot)

Overall, everything went relatively well. The only bad thing is that there was not a kmod-nvidia available for my current kernel in Fedora 23 so I had to boot into my old kernel in order to have the benefits of the proprietary driver. So later today if there’s time I’m going to see if there’s a kmod-nvidia for this kernel in rpmfusion-testing that I could install. Otherwise, I’ll just keep checking every few days and stay on the older kernel until then.

Now that it seems the nvidia driver that deals with the latest Xorg is available, I decided to try and upgrade my main computer, SuperMario. I started with the dnf commands:

dnf update --refresh
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=23

As usual, old packages reared their ugly heads. They’d made it this far, but it was time to banish packages from Fedora 20 and even Fedora 15 that had survived this long.

People often recommend using CentOS for your desktop machine if you find Fedora’s pace to be too fast. Does this even make sense? I decided to explore the idea of CentOS 7 as a desktop computer using my wife’s requirements as the benchmark. Why? Because my wife likes long term support distros. What’s more long term support than Red Hat/CentOS’s 10 years of support for each version?

https://youtu.be/1eYBgqAsEdU

I wanted to play a bit with Fedora Rawhide so I installed Fedora 23 to a VM. I named it Blargg after the Fire Dragon in Super Mario World. (See video below) I used the following commands from the Fedora wiki:

# dnf upgrade dnf
# dnf install dnf-plugins-core fedora-repos-rawhide
# dnf config-manager --set-disabled fedora updates updates-testing
# dnf config-manager --set-enabled rawhide
# dnf clean -q dbcache plugins metadata
# dnf --releasever=rawhide --setopt=deltarpm=false distro-sync --nogpgcheck

## Optional: it is generally advised to do a selinux autorelabel and reboot
# touch /.autorelabel

https://youtu.be/K7H6f_wGJZQ?t=12m10s