Category: Science and Technology

  • Today’s Programming: Flowers in Scratch 3

    First of all, if you’re a Linux user and would like an offline version of Scratch 3, you can get it from https://scratux.org/. They make binaries for a few Linux distros plus an AppImage which works on any of them. On the Raspberry Pi Blog I saw that this week was about making art on…

  • So Long Katello Foreman!

    Last year when I went to Red Hat Summit, I saw a lot of use of Satellite. I’d tried the 5.x series’ upstream Spacewalk and it didn’t quite work out for me. But this time I would try it out, gosh darnit! I mean, with the Katello plugin it would even include Pulp, which I’d…

  • Upgrading my Katello-Foreman-Managed RPM build VM to Fedora 32

    Because I have this VM registered to Katello (Foreman plugin) to receive updates (basically as a way of both keeping track of the computers and VMs on my network and also to have a GUI to pulp for caching RPMs), I had to deal with Katello-Agent. The latest RPM in the official Foreman/Katello repos is…

  • Ubuntu 2020.04’s Server Install

    As I mentioned in my k3s on Ubuntu 2020.04 post, I really thought that Ubuntu 2020.04’s server install was prety slick. I’m used to text-only server installs looking like this: Here’s a step-by-step collection of screenshots and my thoughts on each step of Ubuntu 2020.04’s server install: Just starting off, with the language selection, you…

  • Checking out k3s and Ubuntu Server 2020.04 Part 2

    Clearly there’s a lot I don’t get about Kubernetes and I didn’t install a GUI in that VM so I can’t use the dashboard (which can only be viewed at localhost – or so the instructions seem to indicate) So I decided to go back to basics and look at the Hello Minikube tutorial, but…

  • Checking out k3s and Ubuntu Server 2020.04 Part 1

    As I’ve been working on learning server tech, I’ve gone from virtualization to Docker containers and now Podman containers and Podman pods. The pod in Podman comes from a view towards Kubernetes. I moved to Podman because of the cgroupsv2 issue in Fedora 31 and so I figured why not think about going all the…

  • Fedora Silverblue as an HTPC Part 3

    Yesterday I mentioned some issues with my Ortek MCE VRC-1100 remote and certain buttons not working. Figured out that in addition to removing the XF…. entries in dconf, also have to remove them in gsettings. Specifically, I had to use the commands: gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys stop-static [”] gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys play-static [”] gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys…

  • Fedora Silverblue as an HTPC Part 2

    One thing to know about Silverblue is that it’s a Gnome environment. I was already running Gnome for the HTPC, but I prefer KDE for my computers usually. When I was installing Silverblue there was no option to go for KDE or anything else. On Silverblue you install via Flatpaks. Any regular installs (ostree instead…

  • Fedora Silverblue as an HTPC Part 1

    Originally I was going to mess around with Silverblue in a VM before considering using it on my HTPC. In theory it sounded like it would work very well – an immutable, rollback-able OS seems like the perfect thing for the one computer that ALWAYS needs to work for less tech-savvy folks in the house.…

  • An Update on my Roll-Your-Own IoT

    As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go…

  • Recent Fedora 31 and Fedora 32 Upgrades

    Recently upgraded my server to Fedora 31 as the Fedora 30 support window had closed. All I had to do was disable the bat Modular Repo. It wasn’t obvious I needed to do this at first, but I found a bugzilla that covered it. Then everything proceeded. I also updated my main laptop to Fedora…

  • Installing KDE Plasma 5 on CentOS 8

    You can watch the following video. There are also text instructions below the video. (including getting sddm working) I started off with just a boot install of CentOS 8, so I wouldn’t have Gnome or any other unnecessary cruft installed. After installation, I enabled the EPEL repository – latest directions for that are here. After…

  • CentOS 8 on Acer Aspire One D255E

    A little over a year ago, I put CentOS 7 on my Acer Aspire One. We had no idea when RHEL 8 was coming out (turns out just a few months later when I was at the Red Hat Summit, it was the release party for RHEL 8), so 7 went on there. And at…

  • Coming Full Circle: Contributing to the Python Project Matrix-Nio

    Somewhere around 15 years ago, I started learning Python because I’d gotten deep into genealogy and started using the free and open source project Gramps. As I was also pretty deep into free software (somewhere around that time I became a supporting member of the FSF for a few years – and I think my…

  • Milestones reached in two of my Python Projects

    For my btrfs snapshot program, snapintime, I have reached version 1.1.1. About six years after starting this project, it now covers all the cases I wanted to back when I started. I’m very happy with where it’s now at. For my Extra Life Donation Tracker (PyPi page here), I’ve reached my v4.2.0 release. This release…