The Final Zone project

Since applying fix related to the ACPI from Linux kernel (future 4.8.0) , ASUS kernel laptop runs smoother on Gnome Shell inside Fedora 24 Design Suite. Based on the following observation: The delay of pluggin on/off the power is gone. Without the fix, it took about ten seconds before the system switched the status. Power management has drastically improved.  Closing the lid will automatically suspend the laptop. Multimedia control now works on all applications. Brightness control properly works. For Fedora users having similar issue with X550Z (also F550Z on some countries), a COPR repository is created for that purpose until upstream release the fix version on the kernel. Other distributions can look at the patch and provide feedback for testing and improvement. A big thanks to Peter Wu and Lv Zheng for investigating the issue which turned out bigger than expected: the discovery of new ACPI scheme on some modern laptops .

Following previous topic , testing the build kernel 4.8.0rc4 with the patch related to ACPI EC allow unlocking the functionality of hotkeys. For the first time, ASUS X550ZE has nearly full functionality from keyboard in Linux operating system (Fedora in my case) on par with Microsoft Windows 8.1 and 10.  Hopefully other laptops having similar problem will regain that access. For that learned experience, that bug turned out more complex than expected revealing a different ACPI scheme used in Microsoft Windows 10 and a bad practice from BIOS vendor. It also shows how some vendors ignore standard procedure thus making harder to find the problem. The important lesson is the cooperation between users and developers exchanging knowledge and discovering new elements never seen before. One day, vendors will open themselves approaching the kernel community to improve their products. Now the hotkeys saga comes to the end, the next step is the support of AMD hybrid graphic card. This...

Resuming for the previous topic , with the help of an Arch user and one of kernel maintainers, it turned out the failure of hotkeys functions [Fn] is due to a Linux ACPI bug. Further investigation revealed a bad practice from BIOS vendor and unexpectedly a new challenge in Linux kernel world as quoted: However this report indicates us another gap (except the enumeration order gap): If the namespace EC (DSDT EC in short) is not ready, EC access availability can be kept using the ECDT EC. In Linux, that requres _Qxx control methods to be registered for the ECDT EC. I have never seen a Linux EC driver version doing this before, _Qxx registration is only invoked in acpi_ec_add(). So this bug indicates a gap for Linux. Essentially, what is initially a bug related for non-functional hotkeys for ASUS X550Z laptop revealed a much more deeper issue related Linux ACPI. It is the first time I reached that level of testing in kernel world with the help from upstream kernel. A built kernel...

With the help of an Arch Linux user , we managed to extract input of  hotkeys and closing lid to suspend on several ASUS laptops which required ATKACPI driver to properly function otherwise they will not work despite the availability of asus-nb-wmi module. I made a tracker to alert that discovery so hopefully kernel maintainers will notice.

RadeonTop landed on Fedora repository for some time. It is a text user interface input displaying the information of AMD Radeon graphic card. To use it, first install from the terminal sudo dnf install radeontop Then start sudo radeontop Bonus, radeontop can display information in colour as well by simply executing sudo radeontop -c

Following the previous blog about missing Design Suite on the release, the Quality Assurance team made it possible for Fedora 24. Feel free to download it , play with it and read about the features . Sadly due to a bug from the new Fedora building system caused by dnf, all plugins for Gimp, Inkscape and Blender are missing for this Design Suite. They can be installed via Gnome Software or through command line.

Bad news: Design Suite image for Fedora 24 will be unavailable as default on the official release due to several issues linked to the livemedia building system I have no control. Possible workaround: on the slight good news, recent successful built image is available for testing although it did not make the cut for the general release. Unfortunately, due to a bug inside the packaging manager dnf , add-ons are missing for both Blender, Gimp and Inkscape. Worse, by the time I applied the workaround , the freeze status for Labs release was in effect with the migration of kickstart system to Pagure . Alternate method will be to download and install Fedora Workstation then apply the command from the terminal sudo dnf group install design-suite Difference is missing documentations related to Design Suite and supplemental wallpapers. The focus is now toward Fedora 25 where all unexpected kinks will be sorted out.

Inspired by the article from Fedora Magazine , Design Suite received more treatment for Fedora 24 release. Among the features are: Gimp gained new plugins: Layer via Copy/Cut and Save on Web now available on Fedora repository gimpfx-foundry returns from retirement in repository Resynthesizer for Gimp in Fedora now updated to 2.0 Inclusion Gthumb for easier renaming image files on the live media Darktable is now easier to access via the main dock on Gnome Shell. A big thanks to Riley Brandt for the feedback , Design Team other Fedora contributors notably  Gil Cattaneo and Mukundan Ragavan for making missing packages available.

Gnokii tags me about Riley Brandt Photography Youtube video featuring Fedora 23 Design Suite first look . Highlighted positive comments are the default applications, plugins and more color management for photographers. Enjoy!

Scribus 1.5.1svn running on Fedora 23 After several trials rebuilding Scribus 1.5.1 using Tom "Spot" Callaway 's spec file, the effort and patience finally paid off. The rpm version successfully compiled (I had to disable the devel package due to some odd built issue I have yet to find out) and is now available for Fedora 22, 23 and Rawhide under COPR repository . The reason for usinig the latest development version is mainly due to features not found on stable release which no longer cuts it: Cleaner user interface Better table implementation Orphan and widow control for better typography Ability to open/import other desktop publisher application like Adobe InDesgin, Quark Express and Microsoft Publisher Better import of Adobe Illustrator files ...and more An interesting feature is the chat system allowing to directly contact the community which is very helpful and should be standard to the majority of application. Download it , play with it, use it a...

Darktable is no longer available for 32-bits x86 devices since version 2.0. Calligra Krita will be available as default alongside MyPaint to match the Lab section website . Majority of features come from Fedora Workstation taking advantage of Gnome Shell technology. More tutorials . Users are welcome to add them. On technical side, the spec file uses design-suite group list for better synchronization (user can install the suite package with the command dnf install @design-suite ).

Talky.io have updated their website featuring their WebRTC chat. One of intriguing feature is the support up to 15 people highlighted below. Revamped Talky.io website featuring WebRTC It appears their systems is a worthy alterntive of Google HangOut. It will be nice project like Empathy carries more love.

Stable release of Fedora 23  Design Suite is now available with minimal changes like the inclusion of supplemental wallpapers posted from Nuancier. After installation on ASUS X550ZE laptop , no apparent change of the status is in sight. However, some hotkeys (home,end,pgup,pgdn) are functional. The author of asus-nb-wmi allowing to setup these hotkeys mentioned the inability to reach ASUS developers to address these common issues plaguing many ASUS laptops users and the lack of documentation. Backlight is currently broken due to the controller issues as display on boot so bug is filed : [     7.684288] [drm:radeon_acpi_init [radeon]] *ERROR* Cannot find a backlight controller Battery optimization is still an issue due to the driver choosing to use a powerful GPU rather the power saving mode. AMD is currently working on new driver structure. Dual Radeon is currently unsupported but works are under way .

Users having installed SoundConverter on Fedora 23 may notice the app will silently fail to run. The issue is caused by gstreamer-python which possibly needs a rebuilt. Running via terminal lead with this message: SoundConverter needs python-gstreamer 0.10! Running python on terminal leads to the following result: $ python Python 2.7.10 (default, Sep  8 2015, 17:20:17) [GCC 5.1.1 20150618 (Red Hat 5.1.1-4)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import gst Traceback (most recent call last):   File " ", line 1, in   File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/gst-0.10/gst/__init__.py", line 193, in     from _gst import * ImportError: /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/gst-0.10/gst/_gst.so: undefined symbol: libxml_xmlDocPtrWrap >>> exit ()    Current workaround is to downgrade it using Fedora 22 package via dnf sudo dnf downgrade gstreamer-python --relea...

The current default layout Layout with the main toolbar Here is how LibreOffice Writer looks after removing the toolbar and only keep the sidebar located on the right. To achieve that result, set View -> Toolbars -> Standard unchecked. The benefit is a more focused and uncluttered layout without distraction and also more touchscreen friendly. It will be nice that user interface layout will be more responsive depending the size of the screen. This example is made with LibreOffice Writer 5.0.0.5 running on Fedora 23 Release Candidate 3.

F23-backgrounds is recently updated with the newest wallpapers including extra and is now available in stable repository. Simply update via Software application on latest Fedora 23 Workstation or command pkcon update f23-backgrounds-base f23-backgrounds-extras View the update In addition f22-backgrounds received a much needed update with the inclusion of previous supplemental wallpapers winnners . Please test them for all version to push them to stable release. Here is also the directory for distributions looking to package these wallpapers.

I upgraded the Asus X550ZE to Fedora 23 Beta Design Suite. So far, the majority of hardware is functional except the Fn hotkeys and the poor power optimization. For Fn hotkeys, after looking at all possible solutions, it turned out majority of Asus X series laptops is affected due to the lack of proper documentation of wapf function found within asus-nb-wmi module from the kernel. The ball is on ASUS to make hotkeys functional and provide needed information. The second case related to poor power optimization is due to radeon driver. In addition, the lack of functional hybrid driver only make the laptop running on R7 265 GPU for performance while the R5 230 is permanently disabled for better power saving. It will be a while before Linux kernel will support hybrid graphics for Dual AMD Radeon.

Fedora Magazine did a good job exposing more Fedora Labs notably Fedora 23 Design Suite Beta. No much update occurred other than the tutorial section currently under work thanks to one of notable contributors Andrew Walton, who also provided one of his excellent pictures available as part of Fedora 23 wallpaper. Final phase will be tweaking and update the tutorials on the wiki section before passing to the incoming 24 release. Feedback is welcome for users looking to have their favourites applications and fonts included by default as long they abide to Fedora Project policies .

Looking and talking at Ask Fedora , it will be nice to share suggestion for proper networked scanner support on HP all-in-one printers. One of solution is to install hplip-gui via terminal. sudo dnf install hplip-gui Or su -c "dnf install hplip-gui Unfortunately, the frontend is not listed on Gnome Software due to appdata missing. Another solution is to directly edit /etc/cups/printers.conf and change the device URI. To find the correct URI with HP protocol  of your networked HP all-in-one printer, use hp-setup -i or hp-setup hostname . The URI should be listed like hp:/net/name_of_hp_printer?zc=hostname Where hp:/net/ is the protocol replacing dnssd:// , zc=hostname is the name of hostmane for the all-in-one printer sometime subsituted by ip=ipaddress For example, the uri of Photosmart eStation C510 is  hp:/net/Photosmart_eStn_C510_series?zc=HPFFBBC9 hp:/Photosmart_eStn_C510_series?ip=192.168.1.64 Save the change and restart either the system or simply ...

Fedora 23 Rawhide within Gnome Boxes Gnome Boxes is an application similar to VirtualBox that allows installing a operating systems via virtualization or use it remotely. The main focus is the simplicity to casual users wanting to try their system.  One of new features is the ability to do an express installation with minimal interaction which is convenient for a quick setup for say Microsoft Windows system up to 8.1. One of weakness is the lack of transferring data within the virtualizer as done on VirtualBox useful to do the work on format not supported by applications on Linux distribution notable Fedora which is my main system. On some occasion, Boxes will not detect the existing virtualized system I installed on the main session until the restart. It can be annoying but not enough to detract the experience. Overall, Gnome Boxes is a very useful tool for developers and also designers wanting to run their operating system without dual boot. The test was done on ASUS X...