The Final Zone project

 While waiting for a bug fix affecting majority of 2-in-1 laptops running on GNOME Wayland session, gnome-shell-extension-screen-autorotate is now available in Fedora repository and EPEL 9 . Give a try on your device Possibly this extension will get added on the incoming Fedora Design Suite 39 as default for the owners of convertible laptops.

As mentioned on Phoronix' article ,  Blender received Wayland support on Blender 3.3.1 for Fedora 37 as an update in preparation of the incoming version 3.4 next month. The update has a dependency of libdecor , a client-side decoration for Wayland in addition of DBus for the cursor theme. Currently, the window decoration may have yet to use the system theme but remains functional as intended.

With Hans' help, an old bug related to ACPI impacting majority of HP laptops running on any Linux distribution is finally resolved on both kernel 5.4.2 and 5.3.15. Some models may have an odd issue on boot like hp_wmi: query 0xd returned error 0x5 due to a too small buffer passing in for HPWMI_FEATURE2_QUERY. A fix is on the way for the next update and a test kernel from scratch-build is available (make sure to download first as the scratch build gets erased in a few days).

As announced on Fedora Magazine , Design Suite 31 is now available for users like graphic artists and photographers among them. Notable update is the availability of Blender 2.80 featuring a revamped user interface. Other applications are mostly improved stability. Users with touch screen devices will notice an improved performance from the Fedora Workstation from which Design Suite is based. Due to a bug related to desktop environment (Gnome Shell running on Wayland), using a stylus can cause applications to crash so the workaround is to run on Gnome on Xorg until the fix lands on a future update. Full details published on the wiki section .

The HP Envy x360 Convertible powered with Ryzen 2500U turned out an impressive laptop for Fedora 29 despite some issues like lack of accelerometer driver for Linux kernel and some ACPI related problems seemly affecting majority of HP laptops. AMD recently released ROCm 2.0 enabling the support of Raven Ridge Mobile for the first time. The installation has to be clean (remove beignet and pocl)  and requires additional dependency not found on Fedora repository, pth located on COPR . Once completed and rebooted, rocminfo should runs as follow: /opt/rocm/bin/rocminfo  =====================     HSA System Attributes     =====================     Runtime Version:         1.1 System Timestamp Freq.:  1000.000000MHz Sig. Max Wait Duration:  18446744073709551615 (number of timestamp) Machine Model:           LARGE...

If you own an HP laptop equipped with AMD processor, you may find out the auto-rotation will not work as intended. It turned out that sensor is missing a driver not currently available on Linux kernel using the lspci -nn command from the terminal 03:00.7 Non-VGA unclassified device [0000]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:15e4]     That driver in question is AMD Sensor Fusion HUB . Unfortunately, researching it turned out harder even on AMD own website . Bug is already filed without answer yet from one of AMD representative.

Thanks to the tips from Peter Hutterer , the author of libinput and libwacom , enabling the configuration of the stylus for the HP Envy x360 Convertible is very simple. Create a table file i.e. elan-264c.tablet in this example using this template and look at the dmesg output like: [    3.014612] input: ELAN0732:00 04F3:264C Pen as /devices/platform/AMDI0010:00/i2c-0/i2c-ELAN0732:00/0018:04F3:264C.0001/input/input15  Now the name is found as an ELAN device, include the following information # ELAN touchscreen/pen sensor present in the HP Envy x360 Convertible 15-cp0XXX  [Device]  Name=ELAN 264C  DeviceMatch=i2c:04f3:264c  Class=ISDV4  Width=14  Height=8  IntegratedIn=Display;System  [Features]  Stylus=true  Touch=true  Buttons=0 Copy the new created file to /usr/share/libwacom/ path. Gnome Shell will automatically detect the new tablet file and display the new information. Below is the...

The Fedora version on kernel 4.19.3 includes a patch allowing both stylus and touchscreen to properly run on AMD processor based HP touchscreen thanks to the combined effort from Hans , Lukas and Marc for finding the root cause and testing the fix. A few scary moment on HP Envy x360 15-cp0xxx Ryzen 2500U was a conflicting IRQ handling due to possibly booting on Windows 10 used to get all feature parity to Linx counterpart i.e. Fedora 29 in this case. Fortunately, power off somewhat did the trick. Since then, both stylus and touchscreen run without a hitch. A minor issue was the Gnome Settings does not display information of both devices due to the missing data from Elan driver thus meaning no configuration possible like assigning buttons and no possible way to test touchscreen. Additionally, Gnome Shell assumed the battery still at 1% capacity and the bug is filed for that reason . Detected Stylus displayed with incorrect battery status Nevertheless, the stylus with some co...

Revisiting the previous blog and freshly reinstalling Fedora Design Suite due to a busted boot, I look at the official guideline from AMD Driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 and write a way to improve the process of installing on Fedora 29 in this example. Extracting the tarball contains the following: amdgpu-install amdgpu-pro-install symlink to amdgpu doc folder repodata folder RPMS folder containing rpm package Executing the command ./amdgpu-install -opencl=pal --headless sadly failed on Fedora on that line: ./amdgpu-install -y --opencl=pal --headless Last metadata expiration check: 0:30:51 ago on Mon 19 Nov 2018 07:13:43 PM PST. No match for argument: amdgpu Upon closer look, the script failed to created a temporary repository on /var/opt/amdgpu-pro-local probably explaining why amdgpu metapackage name failed to display. Someone should investigate and provide a fix. At least, we find out Fedora support is available but unofficial. Due to its design, Gnome ...

The Raven Ridge APU is very capable processor to handle OpenCL inside some applications like Blender, Darktable and Gimp. Unfortunately, the current implementation from Mesa, clover, stuck to 1.3, is not supported. AMD released their driver 18.40 with OpenCL2.0+ targeting only Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Cent OS 6.10 and 7.5 in addition of Ubuntu LTS. The good new is the former rpm format can be used on Fedora. The graphical part of Raven Ridge is Vega 8, basically a cut-down of Vega56 or Vega64 meaning choosing either driver for RX Vega . The instruction is provided for extracting the rpm files but here is  some requirements for OpenCL: kernel-devel (provided by Fedora repository) amdgpu-dkms dkms libopencl-amdgpu-pro opencl-amdgpu-pro-icd Once done, applications needing OpenCL will automatically detect the driver located on /opt/amdgpu/lib64 . Blender will list as unknown AMD GPU and Darktable will enable it. OpenCL from official AMD driver enabled on Darktable ...

Replacing the 1TB 7200rpm HDD with a well reviewed  Samsung 860 EVO 1TB HDD turned out a drastic improvement in term of speed caught me by surprise. Noticeable effect was the nearly five seconds boot straight to the login screen and the response time of opening and closing applications. Envy x360 Ryzen 5 feels snappy now. On a side note, Windows 10 has a nice app called Windows Hello to authenticate with face similar to facial recognition founds on Android device. A similar open source application called howdy is available but not packaged for Fedora yet. 

What a surprise to see 1000 download of Fedora 28 repository for Scribus Unstable! Thanks a million.

For users finding Scribus 1.4.7 lacking in features notably the complex text layout for Asian languages, Scribus 1.5.4 is available via COPR repository from Fedora 26 (soon reaching end of life) to Rawhide.   Additionally, a snapshot for the future 1.6.0 ( currently 1.5.5 ) is also available for improving the experience to upstream.

South Island (Hainan) and Sea Island (Kaveri) functional with RADV Running Fedora 28 Design Suite post beta shows a nice surprise: Vulkan with RADV is fully functional on both South Island (Hainan) and Sea Island (Kaveri) cards on ASUS X550ZE laptop. amdgpu driver is needed to enable the feat in combination of boot parameter (cik.amdgpu_support=1 cik.radeon_support=0 si.amdgpu_support=1 si.radeon_support=0) Vulkan smoketest running on RADV Some minor issues need be to addressed like occasional glitches. Otherwise the performance is stable enough for dail use.

Following the previous blog and some investigation, it turned out the kernel package from Mystro256 COPR repository based on agd5f kernel branch (one of AMD developers) resolves the blank screen issue. That could trigger a problem for users having a new AMD graphic hardware so perhaps a warning should be written on the release. Perhaps having one of contributors be part of kernel team bringing these improvement until those patches arrive to the mainline kernel for a better user experience. Past the issue, the desktop experience with Radeon RX 560 was tremendously improved compared to the retired GTX 460 v2. Gnome on Wayland on Fedora runs smooth showing how far the open source amdgpu driver went through compared to previous years. That was also the opportunity to run a vulkan based smoke test demo on RADV, which is a counterpart of glxgears. Overall the card is excellent once missing software are installed.

I bought a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 560 4GB to replace the broken Nvidia GTX 460 v2 after a long years of service. It is then my first ever dedicated AMD based video-card for a desktop. The boot sequence on Fedora 27 hit a problem: a plain blank screen suggesting the card is not yet supported. Looking at Phoronix website revealed one of possible requirement missed: LLVM 5.0 which is currently not available to Fedora repository save a failed built . I filed a bug report to address the issue. Hopefully that will land on time for the official release of Fedora 27.

Scribus 1.5.3 is now available on the new COPR repository while scribus-unstable is now switched to 1.5.4 snapshot. Highlighted featurese for 1.5.3 are: The most important change isn't immediately visible, namely a completely rewritten text layout engine, which supports complex scripts like Arabic, Hindi or Thai, as well as providing access to advanced OpenType features, such as ligatures and alternate glyphs. Scribus now follows the XDG standard for configuration files. Therefore, the Scribus preferences directory has moved from ~/.scribus/ to a new default location: ~/.config/scribus/ The performance of copying and pasting objects in/from/to files with huge color palettes has been vastly improved.    

Running the ASUS X550ZE laptop on latest Linux kernel 4.9 series from Mystro256 Copr repository based on AMD contributor Alexander Deucher's freedesktop branch within Fedora Design Suite 25. The hybrid support has improved now that the dedicated graphic card AMD R5 M230 Jet Pro (aka Hainan) is functional with enabled amdgpu module for both Sea Island (CIK) and South Island (SI) videocards thanks to the hard work from AMD developers. The latter was important in order to fully support all GCN (Graphics Core Next) chipset s as possible to allow future run on open source version of Vulkan , RADV (short for Radeon Vulkan). The power manager is functional and further optimization will be required in term on parity with Microsoft Windows version. According to Freedesktop Radeon list almost all features are implemented into the driver, hybrid graphic cards run fine, only OpenGL needs more work. As the desktop ecosystem in the freedesktop environment modernize to support Wayland pro...

Scribus 1.5.3svn snasphot with spellcheck running on Gnome Shell 3.22 Wayland Starting from 1.5.3-0.19 snapshot, Scribus now has spell check enabled, one of requested features for free and open source desktop publishing software. Additionally, this version includes appstream by default allowing visibility in both Gnome Software and Apper. The ability to read Microsoft Visio, Pagemaker and even Adobe InDesign files is a welcome addition to see the migration. More changelog available Users looking to try this snapshot can access COPR repository and install it alongside the stable version. On a side note, Scribus Generator is an excellent utility for mail-merge alternative.

This blog is written on Fedora 25 Design Suite running on ASUS X550ZE .The upgrade from Design Suite 24 to 25 using Gnome Software went smooth with very little impact to the entire system. Fedora 25 Design Suite with supported Dedicated Graphic card on a hybrid laptop Inheriting the features from Fedora 25 Workstation , Design Suite now gained further support of hybrid hardware notably laptops (see above feature). Following the release cycle, supplemental wallpapers from Fedora 23 are replaced by their 25th version to mark the end of life of the 23rd release next month. Design received new applications like Gnome Books useful for e-books and Calendar to easily manage the schedule.   To enable full support of hotkeys and optimal power management due to the boot scheme bug in Linux kernel, 4.9.0rc4 or above (currently residing in Rawhide nodebug repository at the time of writing) is required and will soon reach availability via update. The case applied to some hybrid...