I was able to get Kurio, my netbook, to upgrade to Fedora 23 without issue. BlueYoshi, the living computer, is still unable to upgrade. So far it’s tripping up on dolphin-emu, OBS-MP, and some Gnome package. I’m not sure if that’s something that’ll be fixed as RPMFusion continues to update their Fedora 23 packages or if I’ll have to do the old uninstall/reinstall dance that I sometimes have to do with these non-free packages that don’t get QA’d for a Fedora release. Not going to be doing my main computer any time soon.

Tried to upgrade the living room computer to Fedora 23. As of the time when I tried, because the RPMFusion repo wasn’t ready for Fedora 23, it couldn’t upgrade. I’ll try again in a day or two if the repo is up.

I recently had to reinstall an OS on the wife’s Dell Inspiron 17. I was unable to complete an install for Fedora 22, but Fedora 21 and Fedora 23 beta were able to install. It would always freeze mid-install - usually around 70 or 80%. From what I could gleam on the net, it has to do with a kernel issue. But I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, just putting this out there for anyone trying to get Fedora 22 on a Dell Inspiron 17.

The wife told me she couldn’t print from her computer. Sure enough, I couldn’t print from mine either. I tried the trick from last time and ran

system-config-selinux

but selinux wasn’t responsible this time. So I removed the printer and this time I added it through the cups website: localhost:631. After doing that it worked.

Back when I was looking into doing all my photography on Linux I saw that whenever I would add a tag to a bunch of photos that it would crash Digikam. I filed a bug and was told it was a problem with Baloo that would be fixed in Digikam 5. I wanted my photos to have metadata that would be indexed in Dolphin and Baloo search, so I tried to deal with it as I moved to doing all my photography on Linux. But after it kept crashing as I worked on my July photos, I had enough. I turned off Digikam and Baloo integration and am no longer having crashes. Here’s what it needs to look like in the settings if you’d like to do this too:

I was having trouble printing and couldn’t figure out what was going on. I tried everything, including reinstalling the printer and reinstalling the driver. I was getting a misleading “you are using the wrong driver” message. Turns out SELinux was to blame! I happened to check dmesg and see some audit messages. Then I did a

setenforce 0

to turn it off and printing worked. I tried some restorecons on some directories, but I don’t think that fixed it. What I think fixed it was going into the policycoreutils gui and checking as active the cups module “Allow cups execmem/execstack.” Obviously, I turned setenforce back on after checking the box.

Today I was banging my head against the desk trying to figure out why I couldn’t ssh to one of my Fedora machines. I knew that while Fedora wasn’t the most secure Linux distro out there, it was more secure than many by default. That includes having a strict firewall set up. But I had already enabled ssh. What was going wrong? Well, it turns out that the ssh daemon is disabled by default! Just typing the following:

I spent the weekend trying to figure out why SuperMario boots so slowly. I ended up overturning my ideas about what the problem was and learned a lot of new techniques. The only bad thing is that while I’m a lot closer to the problem, I’m still unsure of the root cause. So that the proper helpers can get credit, let me point you to the LinuxQuestions.org thread in which I worked this out. If you haven’t already clicked, don’t worry, I’m going to bring the relevant info over.

SDDM just kept crashing on my system. I can’t figure out what’s screwed up about it. And when it would get me to a KDE desktop, I couldn’t click on anything. So it’s back to KDM for now…

I have KDE connect installed on my computer and phone. KDE connect allows phone alerts to appear on my computer - letting me see if I’m getting a text or something. It just went off, letting me know I had a phone call. What’s neat is that I was listening to music and it paused the music until the phone call was over. While there might be some circumstances where that wouldn’t be the best default (say a party where I was playing the music), it’s certainly neat in the context of a personal computer.