The Final Zone project

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.

My Nvidia GTX 460 v2 card just died after six years of service after attempting to restore it. It was the last known Nvidia card that could work out of box with open source driver. I have used Nvidia for a long time but the behaviours from the company prompt me to no longer consider that option. Currently the GPU market is very expensive to afford a good AMD card. Additionally, the nine years old motherboard needs a replacement as the venerable AMD Phenom II 940X shows its age. The onboard Geforce 8300 is troublesome to run. For now, I use a laptop until I can afford a powerful custom built desktop this time will full AMD hardware.

Ctrl key buttons refused to work on laptop? Tried pressing Ctrl + Alt + Fn? Mixed result. Reboot hardware? No dice. Pressing Ctrl + Left click on Touchpad? Worked I am not sure what exactly caused the problem as the issue surprisingly affects more models than expected.

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...

Due to the legal matter related to FFMpeg, the video editor on Blender for Fedora will fail to run any video format. Tracking this bug report , it seems possible to build FFMPEG without the patented codecs thus possibly allow Blender video editor to properly run. For the time being, alternative is already available on Fedora repository like Pitivi bundled in Fedora Design Suite. The downside is the occasional crash while editing, the upside is the use of extensible Gstreamer on several plugins compared to FFMPEG although the latter is popular.

LuxRender plugin now selectable on Blender in Software The official release of Fedora 25 Design Suite is nearby with the following changes: Inheriting the features from Fedora Workstation, it is now possible to rename several files. Blender just reaches 2.78a with several bugs fixes. Non-western speaking users will delight the issues related to the interface is fixed. LuxRender plugin for Blender  is updated to 1.6 bring new features. That version no longer supports 32 bit architectures known as x86. In addition, the plugin is now visible as addon for Blender in Software . Sadly, Yafaray plugin for Blender is currently retired from the Fedora repository thus dropped from the default selection. It is still available for the previous release. The plan is to bring it back for the next release as I took over as packager. Some applications like Gpick are unable to properly run on the default Wayland session and needs X session. New fonts are available Grand Hotel and...

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...