[Howto] Create your own cloud gaming server to stream games to Fedora

A few months back I wanted to give a game a try which only runs on Windows and requires a dedicated GPU. Since I have neither of those, a decided to set up my own Windows cloud gaming server to stream the game to my Linux machine.

Dozens of years ago there was one game I played day and night. For weeks, months, maybe even years. Till today I can still remember the distinct soundtrack which makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck: UFO: Enemy Unknown. I loved the game! A few years ago I also played one of the open source games inspired by UFO quite some time, UFO: AI. That was fun.

Sequels to the original game were released, two over the last couple of years. But they never really were an option since they required Windows (or so I thought) and above all, time. However, few months ago I first realized that one of the sequels, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, was available for Android. Since I have a brand new flagship Android tablet I gave it a shot – and it was great! But since the Android version was seriously limited, I played it again on Linux. That barely worked with my limited Intel GPU. But it was playable, and I had fun.

I was infected with the urge to play the game more – and when a thid sequel was announced, I at least wanted to play the second one, XCOM 2. But how? My GPU was too limited and eGPUs are expensive and often involve a lot of hassle – even if I would be willing to buy a Windows license. So I searched if cloud gaming could do the trick.

Cloud Gaming Services

The idea of cloud gaming is that heavy machines in the data center do the rendering, and the client machine only displays the end result. That shifts the burden of the powerful GPU towards the data center, and the client only needs to have simple graphics to show a stream of images. This does however require a rather responsive broad band connection between the client and the data center.

This principle is not new, but got new attention recently when Google announced their cloud gaming offer Stadia. I checked if any cloud gaming services offered my game of choice – and was available on Linux. Unfortunately, the results were disappointing:

• Stadia: no XCOM2, no Linux client via Chrome Browser (thanks to zesoup)
• GeForce Now: no XCOM2, no Linux client
• Playstation Now: XCOM2 available, but no Linux client
• Vortex: no XCOM2, no Linux client

Some of the above can be used on Linux with the help of Lutris, which uses Wine in the background. But for me that would only count as a last resort. I was not that desperate yet.

However, not all was lost yet: some services are not tied to a certain game catalog, but instead offer a generic server and client onto which you can install your games. The research results were first promising: shadow.tech offers machines for just that and a working Linux client! However, they are not available at my place.

The solution: Parsec

So with all ready-to-consume options out of the picture, I was almost willing to give up (or give Lutris and Playstation Now a chance, or even buy a eGPU). But then I stumbled upon something interesting: Parsec, a client for interactive game streaming.

Parsec is a high performance, low latency 60 FPS remote access product connecting you to your computer from anywhere.

Parsec features

That itself didn’t solve my problem. But it opened a window to a new solution: in the past, the company offered cloud hosted game servers on their own. Players could connect to it with their Parsec client and play games on them together – or on their own. The Parsec promise is that their client is fast enough for a reasonable good experience.

The server offer was canceled some time ago – but there was no one stopping me launching my own server and connect the Parsec client to it. And that is what I did. Read on to learn how to do that yourself.

Step 1: Getting a Windows cloud server with a reasonable GPU

What is needed is a cloud hosted Windows machine with a reasonable GPU. In best case the data center hosting the machine should not be on the other side of the planet. AWS, Azure, GCP and other have such offers. But there is even a better route: during my research I found Paperspace, a company specialized on providing access to GPU or AI cloud platforms. That is perfect for this use case!

Paperspace does not really advertise their support for gaming platforms. But after I signed up and looked what was needed to create my first cloud server I found a Parsec template:

That makes the entire process very easy!

• Sign up with Paperspace, get billing sorted out (yes, this stuff costs money)
• Get to Core -> Compute -> Machines, create a new machine
• From Public Templates, get the Parsec cloud gaming template
• Pick the right size for your games; for me a P4000 was enough.
• Make sure to add a public IP and enough storage. Many today’s games easily consume dozens of GB
• Set the auto-shutdown timer. No need to waste money.
• Start the machine.

And that’s it already. Once the machine starts, you will notice a Parsec icon on the home screen. Time to get that working.

Step 2: Get Parsec

Parsec has clients for Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu and Raspberry. There is even an AppImage or a Snap – unfortunately not a Flatpak yet. Update: there is now even a Flatpak package available! Thanks Sheogorath for the hint!

And if you are not willing to use Flatpak, AppImage or Snap for whatever reason, you can download the Ubuntu deb and create a RPM out of it. There is even a handy script for that. Any way, get it installed.

Sign up to Parsec, start the client, log in, and you are almost there:

Step 3: Play

After Parsec is all set, just start the cloud server, start Parsec there (maybe log in to your Parsec account), connect to the session on your client – and you are good to go: You can start playing!

For a first test I just watched some Youtube videos and was surprised by the quality. Next I logged in to my Steam account, got my XCOM2 installed and played along happily!

Performance and user experience

But how good is the performance? Well, that depends mostly on one factor: network. Due to unfortunate circumstances I was “able” to test this setup with three very distinct networks in a short time frame:

• A rather slowish, unstable WiFi with a lot of jitter
• A LTE connection, provided to me via WiFi hotspot
• A top-notch, high performance mesh WiFi

When you have slow pings (everything below 25 ms) and/or a lot of jitter, I cannot recommend that you go this path. Otherwise it can be a serious option!

The first network I was on was horrible slow, and the experience was horrible. XCOM2 has basically permanent background music, and the constant interruptions in the music and audio sequences were in fact the worst for me.

The LTE based network was slightly better, but still far from a native feeling. I was able to get a good experience out of this and have fun, but that about was it.

However, the third option, WiFi on almost wired quality, was so good that in times I forgot that I was not playing the game natively. There was no visible lag, the graphics were crystal clear, the music was never interrupted, etc. I was impressed – and had great sessions that way!

I can only recommend to always keep an eye on the connection quality reported in the Parsec overlay:

As Parsec mentions:

At 60 frames per second, 1 frame is around 16ms. By combining decode, encode and network, you’ll have the amount of frames the client lags behind.

Parsec about lag latency

Having this in mind, the above screenshot shows a connection with an unfortunate lag, leading to a not-that-good experience.

Recap

If you don’t have the hardware and/or software to play your favorite game, cloud gaming can be a solution for your problem. And if there is no proper offering out there, it is possible to get this working on your own.

Running your own cloud gaming server is surprisingly easy and not too expensive. It does feel somewhat weird in the beginning especially if you usually only use clouds for your professional work. But it is a fun experience, and the results can be staggering – if your network is up for the job!

Featured image by Martin Str from Pixabay

[Howto] Using the new Podman API

Podman is a daemonless container engine to develop, run and manage OCI containers. In a recent version the API was rewritten and now offers a REST interface as well as a docker compatible endpoint.

In case you never heard of Podman before, it is certainly worth a look. Besides offering a more secure drop-in-replacement for many docker functions, it can also manage pods and thus provides a container experience more aligned with what Kubernetes uses. It even can understand Kubernetes yaml (see podman-play-kube), easing the transition from single host container development over to fully fledged container management environments. Last but not least it is among the tools supporting newest features in the container space like cgroups v2.

Background: Podman API

Of course Podman is not perfect – due to the focus on Kubernetes yaml there is no support for docker-compose files (though alternatives exist), networking and routing based on names is not as simple as on Docker (read more about Podman container networking) and last but not least, the API was different – making it hard to migrate solutions dependent on the docker API.

This changed: recently, a new API was merged:

The new API is a simpler implementation based on HTTP/REST. We provide two basic groups of endpoints. The first one is for libpod; the second is for Docker compatibility, to ease adoption. 

New API coming for Podman

So how can I access the new API and fool around with it?

If you are familiar with Podman, or read carefully, the first question is: where is this API running if Podman is daemonless? And in fact, an API service needs to be started explicitly:

$ podman system service --timeout 5000

This starts the API on a UNIX socket. Other options, like a TCP socket or to run this without a timeout are also possible, the documentation provides examples.

How to use the Docker API endpoint

Let’s use the Docker API endpoint. To talk to a UNIX socket based REST API a recent curl (version >= 7.40) is quite helpful:

$ curl --unix-socket /$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/podman/podman.sock http://localhost/images/json
[{"Containers":1,"Created":1583300892,"Id":"8c2e0da7c436e45be5ebf2adf26b41d13939190bd186214a4d45c30485071f9f","Labels":{"license":"MIT","name":"fedora","vendor":"Fedora Project","version":"31"},"ParentId":...

Note that here we are speaking to the rootless container, thus the unix domain socket is in the user runtime directory. Also, localhost has to be provided in the URL for very recent curl versions, otherwise it does not output anything!

The answer is a JSON listing, which is not easily readable. Simplify it with the help of Python (and silence curl info with the silent flag):

$ curl -s --unix-socket /$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/podman/podman.sock http://localhost/containers/json|python -m json.tool
[
    {
        "Id": "4829e030ab1beb83db07dbc5e51481cb66562f57b79dd9eb3069dfcde91019ed",
        "Names": [
            "/87faf76aea6a-infra"
...

So what can you do with the API? Podman tries to recreate most of the docker API, so you can basically use the docker API documentation to see what should be possible. Note though that not all API endpoints are supported since Podman does not provide all functions Docker offers.

How to use the Podman API endpoint

As mentioned the API does provide two endpoints: the Docker endpoint, and a Podman specific endpoint. This second API is necessary for multiple reasons: first, Podman has functions which are alien to Docker and thus not part of the Docker API. The pod function is the most notable here. Another reason is that an independent API enables the Podman developers to further innovate in their own way and velocity, and to change the API when needed or wanted.

The API for Podman can be reached via curl as mentioned above. However, there are two notable differences: first, the Podman endpoint is marked via an additional “podman” string in the API URI, and second the Podman API is always versioned. To list the images as shown above, but via podman’s own API, the following call is necessary:

$ curl -s --unix-socket /$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/podman/podman.sock http://localhost/v1.24/libpod/images/json
[{"Id":"8c2e0da7c436e45be5ebf2adf26b41d13939190bd186214a4d45c30485071f9f","RepoTags":["registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:latest"],"Created":1583300892,"Size":199632198,"Labels":{"license":"MIT","name":"fedora","vendor":"Fedora ...

For pods, the endpoint is for example /pods instead of /images:

$ curl -s --unix-socket /$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/podman/podman.sock http://localhost/v1.24/libpod/pods/json|python -m json.tool
[
    {
        "Cgroup": "user.slice",
        "Containers": [
            {
                "Id": "1510dca23d2d15ae8be1eeadcdbfb660cbf818a69d5780705cd6535d97a4a578",
                "Names": "wonderful_ardinghelli",
                "Status": "running"
            },
            {
                "Id": "6c05c20a42e6987ac9f78b277a9d9152ab37dd05e3bfd5ec9e675979eb93bf0e",
                "Names": "eff81a37b4b8-infra",
                "Status": "running"
            }
        ],
        "Created": "2020-04-19T21:45:17.838549003+02:00",
        "Id": "eff81a37b4b85e92916613239001cddc2ba42f3595236586f7462492be0ac5fc",
        "InfraId": "6c05c20a42e6987ac9f78b277a9d9152ab37dd05e3bfd5ec9e675979eb93bf0e",
        "Name": "testme",
        "Namespace": "",
        "Status": "Running"
    }
]

Currently there is no documentation of the API available – or at least none of the level of the current Docker API documentation. But hopefully that will change soon.

Takeaways

Podman providing a Docker API is a great step for people who are dependent on the Docker API but nevertheless want switch to Podman. But providing a unique, but simple to consume REST API for Podman itself is equally great because it makes it easy to integrate Podman processes into existing tools and frameworks.

Just don’t forget that the API is still in development!

Featured image by Magnascan from Pixabay

[Howto] Using toolbox in Fedora / RHEL 8 for easy management of CLI tools

Running CLI tools like ansible often requires a specific environment with dependencies on the core operating system libraries. That makes it hard to run different versions in parallel – or test the newest updates. And it might clutter the OS. Toolbox offers simple container management to avoid these shortcomings.

The recent development of Linux distributions has seen a shift away from all-purpose distributions towards stable core distributions with limited packages and additional sand-boxed tooling running on top to enable management of applications. One of the most advanced distributions here is for sure Fedora Silverblue, but even the enterprise distribution Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 brings a lot of changes which aim into the right direction. Technologies in this context are for example rpm-ostree for the management of immutable OS images and Flatpak for the management of GUI applications. Additionally, RHEL 8 comes along with so called app-streams – and of course there is always the option of using containers with for example podman.

In this blog post I want to focus on the last one: using containers to manage your CLI tools, thus keeping them independent of your operating system packaging and libraries. With Fedora and RHEL, there is tooling provided which makes this even easier: Toolbox.

The rational

The basic idea for using containers, and especially Toolbox, is similar to the one about Flatpak: it solves many problems of the Linux packaging problem. This means essentially:

• Independence from OS libraries and their versions
• Sand-boxing, meaning better protection of the OS
• Multi-version support
• Less OS clutter through isolated installation of dependencies
• Easy to recreate environments (think of “works on my machine”)
• Immutable environments possible

Think of it that way: with complex applications, behavior sometimes depends on certain versions of some libraries. When those are managed by the OS packaging system, it is hard to keep them up2date or just in the same version across multiple machines, not to speak about multiple distributions. Also, I don’t want my OS to be cluttered with weird dependencies which I might not even trust just to justify a weird application’s requirements. And I might want to install different versions of a tool to test them, – with different libraries as well, which is often impossible with OS package management.

Toolbox

In comes Toolbox:

Toolbox is a tool that offers a familiar package based environment for developing and debugging software that runs fully unprivileged using Podman.

The toolbox container is a fully mutable container; when you see yum install ansible for example, that’s something you can do inside your toolbox container, without affecting the base operating system.

Toolbox on Github

While Toolbox is particularly interesting for immutable systems like Fedora Silverblue, it even makes sense to run it on other distributions. I started using it on my regular Fedora for example just to have certain tools available in certain versions for tests.

And why use Toolbox, and not just the usual container tools? Toolbox takes care of volume mounting and all the other necessary bits of container management, and enables you to just use a very basic set of commands to create – and reuse – your tool containers. It is simpler and easier than always typing in fully fledged podman or docker commands all the time.

You can read more about Toolbox in the Fedora Silverblue Toolbox docs or the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Toolbox docs.

Getting started

It is very easy to get started with Toolbox. First, it needs to be installed on the system. For example, on Fedora 31, this can be done via:

$ sudo dnf install toolbox

After that, you are good to go. Since the idea is to have re-usable containers, let’s create the first. In my example I want to have a container with the newest Ansible version to run some automation. So we just create a new container called ansible:

$ toolbox create --container ansible
Image required to create toolbox container.
Download registry.fedoraproject.org/f31/fedora-toolbox:31 (500MB)? [y/N]: y
Created container: ansible

As you see, a base image for my distribution was downloaded, and the container created. Next, let’s access it and look around:

$ toolbox enter --container ansible

Welcome to the Toolbox; a container where you can install and run
all your tools.

 - Use DNF in the usual manner to install command line tools.
 - To create a new tools container, run 'toolbox create'.

For more information, see the documentation.

⬢[liquidat@toolbox ~]$

We are greeted with a short message and then dropped to a shell. Note the bubble at the start of the command prompt – a nice touch to differentiate if you are inside a toolbox or not. Next, let’s look at our environment:

⬢[liquidat@toolbox ~]$ pwd
/home/liquidat
⬢[liquidat@toolbox ~]$ ls
bin  development  documents  downloads  ...
⬢[liquidat@toolbox ~]$ ls /
README.md  bin  boot  dev  etc  home  lib  lib64  lost+found  media  mnt  opt  proc  root  run  sbin  srv  sys  tmp  usr  var
⬢[liquidat@toolbox ~]$ cat /README.md 
# Toolbox — Unprivileged development environment

[Toolbox](https://github.com/debarshiray/toolbox) is a tool that offers a
[...]

As you see, the toolbox has actual access to the file system. That way we can use the tools just like normal shell tools, interact with things we have in our environment. However, at the same time we have limited access to the root system since we see the container root system (as identified by the readme), not the host root system.

Getting my first tool ready

As mentioned I’d like to have a container with the newest Ansible. Let’s install it:

⬢[liquidat@toolbox ~]$ pip install --user ansible
Collecting ansible
Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/ae/b7/c717363f767f7af33d90af9458d5f1e0960db9c2393a6c221c2ce97ad1aa/ansible-2.9.6.tar.gz
Collecting jinja2 (from ansible)
[...]
Running setup.py install for ansible … done
Successfully installed MarkupSafe-1.1.1 PyYAML-5.3 ansible-2.9.6 cffi-1.14.0 cryptography-2.8 jinja2-2.11.1 pycparser-2.20
⬢[liquidat@toolbox ~]$ ansible --version
ansible 2.9.6
config file = /home/liquidat/.ansible.cfg
configured module search path = ['/home/liquidat/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
ansible python module location = /home/liquidat/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/ansible
executable location = /home/liquidat/.local/bin/ansible
python version = 3.7.6 (default, Jan 30 2020, 09:44:41) [GCC 9.2.1 20190827 (Red Hat 9.2.1-1)]

As you see, Ansible was properly installed. And with this we are already done – we have our first tool ready, name “ansible”.

Using our tool

Now let’s assume I use the container for some things, exit it – and want to reuse it later on. This is no problem at all, since that is exactly what Toolbox was built for. And we have a name, which makes it fairly easy to remember how to access it. But even if we do not remember the name, we can easily list all available tools:

$ toolbox list
IMAGE ID      IMAGE NAME                                        CREATED
64e68e194389  registry.fedoraproject.org/f31/fedora-toolbox:31  2 weeks ago

CONTAINER ID  CONTAINER NAME  CREATED         STATUS             IMAGE NAME
8ec117845e06  ansible         47 minutes ago  Up 47 minutes ago  registry.fedoraproject.org/f31/fedora-toolbox:31
$ toolbox enter -c ansible
⬢[liquidat@toolbox ~]$ ansible --version
ansible 2.9.6
  config file = /home/liquidat/.ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = ['/home/liquidat/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /home/liquidat/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/ansible
  executable location = /home/liquidat/.local/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.7.6 (default, Jan 30 2020, 09:44:41) [GCC 9.2.1 20190827 (Red Hat 9.2.1-1)]

As you see the container is in the same state as we left it: Ansible is still installed in the proper way, and ready to be used. And we can do this now with all kinds of other tools: be it another version of Ansible, or even some daemon we want to experiment with. It can all be easily installed and run and re-used, without worrying of cluttering the OS, or having the wrong library versions installed, or not being able to update some library because of a system dependency.

Summary

Toolbox is an interesting approach to simplify container management to fool around with CLI based tools. If you have an immutable environment like Fedora Silverblue, it might become a crucial piece in your daily operations since it is a pain to install additional packages on top of Silverblue’s ostree infrastructure. But even for “normal” distributions it is worth a try!

[Howto] Three commands to update Fedora

These days using Fedora Workstation there are multiple commands necessary to update the entire software on the system: not everything is installed as RPMs anymore – and some systems hardly use RPMs at all anyway.

Background

In the past all updates of a Fedora system were easily applied with one single command:

$ yum update

Later on, yum was replaced by DNF, but the idea stayed the same:

$ dnf update

Simple, right? But not these days: Fedora recently added capabilities to install and manage code via other ways: Flatpak packages are not managed by DNF. Also, many firmware updates are managed via the dedicated management tool fwupd. And lost but not least, Fedora Silverblue does not support DNF at all.

GUI solution Gnome Software – one tool to rule them all…

To properly update your Fedora system you have to check multiple sources. But before we dive into detailed CLI commands there is a simple way to do that all in one go: The Gnome Software tool does that for you. It checks all sources and just provides the available updates in its single GUI:

The above screenshot highlights that Gnome Software just shows available updates and can manage those. The user does not even know where those come from.

If we have a closer look at the configured repositories in Gnome Software we see that it covers main Fedora repositories, 3rd party repositories, flatpaks, firmware and so on:

• 

  Third party RPM repositories

• 

  Fedora default repositories

• 

  Flatpak and firmware sources

Using the GUI alone is sufficient to take care of all update routines. However, if you want to know and understand what happens underneath it is good to know the separate CLI commands for all kinds of software resources. We will look at them in the rest of the post.

System packages

Each and every system is made up at least of a basic set of software. The Kernel, a system for managing services like systemd, core libraries like libc and so on. With Fedora used as a Workstation system there are two ways to manage system packages, because there are two totally different spins of Fedora: the normal one, traditionally based on DNF and thus comprised out of RPM packages, and the new Fedora Silverblue, based on immutable ostree system images.

Traditional: DNF

Updating a RPM based system via DNF is easy:

$ dnf upgrade
[sudo] password for liquidat: 
Last metadata expiration check: 0:39:20 ago on Tue 18 Jun 2019 01:03:12 PM CEST.
Dependencies resolved.
================================================================================
 Package                      Arch       Version             Repository    Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 kernel                       x86_64     5.1.9-300.fc30      updates       14 k
 kernel-core                  x86_64     5.1.9-300.fc30      updates       26 M
 kernel-modules               x86_64     5.1.9-300.fc30      updates       28 M
 kernel-modules-extra         x86_64     5.1.9-300.fc30      updates      2.1 M
[...]

This is the traditional way to keep a Fedora system up2date. It is used for years and well known to everyone.

And in the end it is analogue to the way Linux distributions are kept up2date for ages now, only the command differs from system to system (apt-get, etc.)

Silverblue: OSTree

With the recent rise of container technologies the idea of immutable systems became prominent again. With Fedora Silverblue there is an implementation of that approach as a Fedora Workstation spin.

[Unlike] other operating systems, Silverblue is immutable. This means that every installation is identical to every other installation of the same version. The operating system that is on disk is exactly the same from one machine to the next, and it never changes as it is used.

Silverblue’s immutable design is intended to make it more stable, less prone to bugs, and easier to test and develop. Finally, Silverblue’s immutable design also makes it an excellent platform for containerized apps as well as container-based software development development. In each case, apps and containers are kept separate from the host system, improving stability and reliability.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/

Since we are dealing with immutable images here, another tool to manage them is needed: OSTree. Basically OSTree is a set of libraries and tools which helps to manage images and snapshots. The idea is to provide a basic system image to all, and all additional software on top in sandboxed formats like Flatpak.

Unfortunately, not all tools can be packages as flatpak: especially command line tools are currently hardly usable at all as flatpak. Thus there is a way to install and manage RPMs on top of the OSTree image, but still baked right into it: rpm-ostreee. In fact, on Fedora Silverblue, all images and RPMs baked into it are managed by it.

Thus updating the system and all related RPMs needs the command rpm-ostreee update:

$ rpm-ostree update
⠂ Receiving objects: 98% (4653/4732) 4,3 MB/s 129,7 MB 
Receiving objects: 98% (4653/4732) 4,3 MB/s 129,7 MB... done
Checking out tree 209dfbe... done
Enabled rpm-md repositories: fedora-cisco-openh264 rpmfusion-free-updates rpmfusion-nonfree fedora rpmfusion-free updates rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
rpm-md repo 'fedora-cisco-openh264' (cached); generated: 2019-03-21T15:16:16Z
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-free-updates' (cached); generated: 2019-06-13T10:31:33Z
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree' (cached); generated: 2019-04-16T21:53:39Z
rpm-md repo 'fedora' (cached); generated: 2019-04-25T23:49:41Z
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-free' (cached); generated: 2019-04-16T20:46:20Z
rpm-md repo 'updates' (cached); generated: 2019-06-17T18:09:33Z
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree-updates' (cached); generated: 2019-06-13T11:00:42Z
Importing rpm-md... done
Resolving dependencies... done
Checking out packages... done
Running pre scripts... done
Running post scripts... done
Running posttrans scripts... done
Writing rpmdb... done
Writing OSTree commit... done
Staging deployment... done
Freed: 50,2 MB (pkgcache branches: 0)
Upgraded:
  gcr 3.28.1-3.fc30 -> 3.28.1-4.fc30
  gcr-base 3.28.1-3.fc30 -> 3.28.1-4.fc30
  glib-networking 2.60.2-1.fc30 -> 2.60.3-1.fc30
  glib2 2.60.3-1.fc30 -> 2.60.4-1.fc30
  kernel 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-core 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-devel 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-headers 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-modules 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  kernel-modules-extra 5.1.8-300.fc30 -> 5.1.9-300.fc30
  plymouth 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-core-libs 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-graphics-libs 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-plugin-label 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-plugin-two-step 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-scripts 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-system-theme 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
  plymouth-theme-spinner 0.9.4-5.fc30 -> 0.9.4-6.fc30
Run "systemctl reboot" to start a reboot

Desktop applications: Flatpak

Installing software – especially desktop related software – on Linux is a major pain for distributors, users and developers alike. One attempt to solve this is the flatpak format, see also Flatpak – a solution to the Linux desktop packaging problem.

Basically Flatpak is a distribution independent packaging format targeted at desktop applications. It does come along with sandboxing capabilities and the packages usually have hardly any dependencies at all besides a common set provided to all of them.

Flatpak also provide its own repository format thus Flatpak packages can come with their own repository to be released and updated independently of a distribution release cycle.

In fact, this is what happens with the large Flatpak community repository flathub.org: all packages installed from there can be updated via flathub repos fully independent from Fedora – which also means independent from Fedora security teams, btw….

So Flatpak makes developing and distributing desktop programs much easier – and provides a tool for that. Meet flatpak!

$ flatpak update
Looking for updates…

        ID                                            Arch              Branch            Remote            Download
 1. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale               x86_64            1.6               flathub            1.0 kB / 177.1 MB
 2. [✓] org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale               x86_64            18.08             flathub            1.0 kB / 315.9 MB
 3. [✓] org.libreoffice.LibreOffice.Locale            x86_64            stable            flathub            1.0 MB / 65.7 MB
 4. [✓] org.freedesktop.Sdk.Locale                    x86_64            1.6               flathub            1.0 kB / 177.1 MB
 5. [✓] org.freedesktop.Sdk.Locale                    x86_64            18.08             flathub            1.0 kB / 319.3 MB

Firmware

And there is firmware: the binary blobs that keep some of our hardware running and which is often – unfortunately – closed source.

A lot of Kernel related firmware is managed as system packages and thus part of the system image or packaged via RPM. But device related firmware (laptops, docking stations, and so on) is often only provided in Windows executable formats and difficult to handle.

Luckily, recently the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) gained quite some traction as the default way for many vendors to make their device firmware consumable to Linux users:

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service is a secure portal which allows hardware vendors to upload firmware updates.

This site is used by all major Linux distributions to provide metadata for clients such as fwupdmgr and GNOME Software.

https://fwupd.org/

End users can take advantage of this with a tool dedicated to identify devices and manage the necessary firmware blobs for them: meet fwupdmgr!

$ fwupdmgr update                                                                                                                                                         No upgrades for 20L8S2N809 System Firmware, current is 0.1.31: 0.1.25=older, 0.1.26=older, 0.1.27=older, 0.1.29=older, 0.1.30=older
No upgrades for UEFI Device Firmware, current is 184.65.3590: 184.55.3510=older, 184.60.3561=older, 184.65.3590=same
No upgrades for UEFI Device Firmware, current is 0.1.13: 0.1.13=same
No releases found for device: Not compatible with bootloader version: failed predicate [BOT01.0[0-3]_* regex BOT01.04_B0016]

In the above example there were no updates available – but multiple devices are supported and thus were checked.

Forgot something? Gnome extensions…

The above examples cover the major ways to managed various bits of code. But they do not cover all cases, so for the sake of completion I’d like to highlight a few more here.

For example, Gnome extensions can be installed as RPM, but can also be installed via extensions.gnome.org. In that case the installation is done via a browser plugin.

The same is true for browser plugins themselves: they can be installed independently and extend the usage of the web browser. Think of the Chrome Web Store here, or Firefox Add-ons.

Conclusion

Keeping a system up2date was easier in the past – with a single command. However, at the same time that meant that those systems were limited by what RPM could actually deliver.

With the additional ways to update systems there is an additional burden on the system administrator, but at the same time there is much more software and firmware available these ways – code which was not available in the old RPM times at all. And with Silverblue an entirely new paradigm of system management is there – again something which would not have been the case with RPM at all.

At the same time it needs to be kept in mind that these are pure desktop systems – and there Gnome Software helps by being the single pane of glas.

So I fully understand if some people are a bit grumpy about the new needs for multiple tools. But I think the advantages by far outweigh the disadvantages.

[Howto] Rebasing Fedora Silverblue – even from Rawhide to Fedora 30

I recently switched to Fedora Silverblue, the immutable desktop version of Fedora. With Silverblue, rebasing is easy – even when I had to downgrade from Rawhide to a stable release!

Fedora Silverblue is an interesting attempt at providing an immutable operating system – targeted at desktop users. Using it on a daily base helps me to get more familiar with the toolset and the ideas behind it which are also used in other projects like Fedora Atomic or Fedora CoreOS.

When Fedora 30 was released I decided to give it a try, went to the Silverblue download page – and unfortunately picked the wrong image: the one for Rawhide.

Rawhide is the rolling release/development branch of Fedora, and is way too unstable for my daily usage. But I only discovered this when I had it already installed and spent quite some time on customizing it.

But Silverblue is an immutable distribution, so switching to a previous version should be no problem, right? And in fact, yes, it is very easy!

Silverblue supports rebasing, switching between different branches. To get a list of available branches, first list the name of the remote source, and afterwards query the available references/branches:

[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ ostree remote list
fedora
[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ ostree remote refs fedora
[...]
fedora:fedora/30/x86_64/silverblue
fedora:fedora/30/x86_64/testing/silverblue
fedora:fedora/30/x86_64/updates/silverblue
[...]
fedora:fedora/rawhide/x86_64/silverblue
fedora:fedora/rawhide/x86_64/workstation

The list is quite long, and does list multiple operating system versions.

In my case I was on the rawhide branch and tried to rebase to version 30. That however failed:

[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora/30/x86_64/silverblue
1 metadata, 0 content objects fetched; 569 B transferred in 4 seconds
Checking out tree 7420c3a... done
Enabled rpm-md repositories: rawhide
Updating metadata for 'rawhide'... done
rpm-md repo 'rawhide'; generated: 2019-05-13T08:01:20Z
Importing rpm-md... done
⠁  
Forbidden base package replacements:
  libgcc 9.1.1-1.fc30 -> 9.1.1-1.fc31 (rawhide)
  libgomp 9.1.1-1.fc30 -> 9.1.1-1.fc31 (rawhide)
This likely means that some of your layered packages have requirements on newer or older versions of some base packages. `rpm-ostree cleanup -m` may help. For more details, see: https://githResolving dependencies... done
error: Some base packages would be replaced

The problem was that I had installed additional packages in the meantime. Note that there are multiple ways to install packages in Silverblue:

– Flatpak apps: this is the primary way that apps get installed on Silverblue.
– Containers: which can be installed and used for development purposes.
– Toolbox containers: a special kind of container that are tailored to be used as a software development environment.

The other method of installing software on Silverblue is package layering. This is different from the other methods, and goes against the general principle of immutability. Package layering adds individual packages to the Silverblue system, and in so doing modifies the operating system.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/getting-started/

While Flatpak in itself is a pretty cool solution to the Linux desktop packaging problem it usually comes with sandboxed environments, making it less usable for integrated tools and libraries.

For that reason it is still possible to install RPMs on top, in a layered form. This however might result in dependency issues when the underlying image is supposed to change.

This is exactly what happened here: I had additional software installed, which depended on some specific versions of the underlying image. So I had to remove those:

[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ rpm-ostree uninstall fedora-workstation-repositories golang pass vim zsh

Afterwards it was easy to rebase the entire system onto a different branch or – in my case – a different version of the same branch:

[liquidat@heisenberg ~]$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora/30/x86_64/silverblue
1 metadata, 0 content objects fetched; 569 B transferred in 2 seconds
Staging deployment... done
Freed: 47,4 MB (pkgcache branches: 0)
  liberation-fonts-common 1:2.00.3-3.fc30 -> 1:2.00.5-1.fc30
  [...]
Downgraded:
  GConf2 3.2.6-26.fc31 -> 3.2.6-26.fc30
  [...]
Removed:
  fedora-repos-rawhide-31-0.2.noarch
  [...]
Added:
  PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin-1.1.12-5.fc30.x86_64
  [...]
Run "systemctl reboot" to start a reboot

And that’s it – after a short systemctl reboot the machine was back, running Fedora 30. And since ostree works with images the reboot went smooth and quick, long sessions of installing/updating software during shutdown or reboot are not necessary with such a setup!

In conclusion I must say that I am pretty impressed – both by the concept as well as the execution on the concept, how well Silverblue works in a day to day situation even as a desktop. My next step will be to test it on a Laptop on the ride, and see if other problems come up there.