contribution – Sick Gaming

Posted on August 18, 2020 by — Leave a comment

Contribute at the Fedora Kernel and GNOME test days

Fedora test days are events where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed to Fedora before, this is a perfect way to get started.

There are two upcoming test days in the upcoming week. The first, starts on Monday 17 August through Monday 24 August, is to test the Kernel 5.8. Wednesday August 19, the test day is focusing on testing GNOME. Come and test with us to make the upcoming Fedora 33 even better. Read more below on how to do it.

Kernel test week

The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.8. This version was just recently released and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week for Monday, August 17 through Monday, August 24. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. This document clearly outlines the steps.

GNOME test day

GNOME is the default desktop environment for Fedora Workstation and thus for many Fedora users. As a part of the planned change the GNOME megaupdate will land on Fedora which then will be shipped with Fedora 33. To ensure that everything works fine The Workstation WG and QA team will have this test day for on Wednesday, August 19. Refer to the wiki page for links and resources to test the GNOME test day.

How do test days work?

A test day is an event where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed before, this is a perfect way to get started.

To contribute, you only need to be able to download test materials (which include some large files) and then read and follow directions step by step.

Detailed information about both test days are on the wiki pages above. If you’re available on or around the days of the events, please do some testing and report your results.

Posted on June 19, 2020 by — Leave a comment

Contribute at the Fedora Test Week for Kernel 5.7

The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.7. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, June 22, 2020 through Monday, June 29, 2020. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.

How does a test week work?

A test week is an event where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed before, this is a perfect way to get started.

To contribute, you only need to be able to do the following things:

Download test materials, which include some large files
Read and follow directions step by step

The wiki page for the kernel test day has a lot of good information on what and how to test. After you’ve done some testing, you can log your results in the test day web application. If you’re available on or around the day of the event, please do some testing and report your results. We have a document which provides all the steps written.

Happy testing, and we hope to see you on test day.

Posted on April 13, 2020 by — Leave a comment

How to contribute to Folding@home on Fedora

What is Folding@home?

Folding@home is a distributed computing network for performing biomedical research. Its intent is to help further understand and develop cures for a range of diseases. Their current priority is understanding the behavior of COVID-19 and the virus that causes COVID-19. This article will show you how you can get involved by donating your computer’s idle time.

Sounds cool, how do I help?

In order to donate your computational power to Folding@home, download the FAHClient package from this page. Once you’ve downloaded the package, open your Downloads folder and double click it to open. For instance, on standard Fedora Workstation, this opens GNOME Software, which prompts you to install the package.

Click install and enter your password to continue from here.

How to start Folding@home

Folding@home starts folding as soon as it is installed. In order to control how much CPU/GPU is using you must open the web control interface, available here.

The interface contains information about what project you are contributing to. In order to track “points,” the scoring system of Folding@home, you must set up a user account with Folding@home.

Tracking your work

Now that everything’s done, you may be wondering how you can track the work your computer is doing. All you need to is request a passkey from this page. Enter your email and your desired username. Once you have received the passkey in email, you can enter that into the client settings.

Click on the Change Identity button, and this page appears:

You can also put in a team number here like I have. This allows your points to go towards a group that you support.

Enter the username you gave when you requested a passkey, and then enter the passkey you received.

What next?

That’s all there is to it. Folding@home runs in the background automatically on startup. If you need to pause or lower how much CPU/GPU power it uses, you can change that via the web interface linked above.

You may notice that you don’t receive many work units. That’s because there is currently a shortage of work units to distribute due to a spike of computers being put onto the network. However, different efforts are emerging all the time.

You can visually see the spike in computers on the network from last year at the same time to 4/4/2020

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

Posted on March 13, 2020 by — Leave a comment

Submit a supplemental wallpaper for Fedora 32

Attention Fedora community members: Fedora is seeking submissions for supplemental wallpapers to be included with the Fedora 32 release. Whether you’re an active contributor, or have been looking for a easy way to get started contributing, submitting a wallpaper is a great way to help. Read on for more details.

Each release, the Fedora Design Team works with the community on a set of 16 additional wallpapers. Users can install and use these to supplement the standard wallpaper.

Dates and deadlines

The submission phase opened as of March 7, 2020 and ends March 21, 2020 at 23:59 UTC.

Important note: In some circumstances, submissions during the final hours may not get into the election, if there is insufficient time to do legal research. Please help by following the guidelines correctly, and submit only work under a correct license.

The voting phase will open the Monday following the close of submissions, March 23, 2020, and will be open until the end of the month on March 31, 2020 at 23:59 UTC.

How to contribute a wallpaper

Fedora uses the Nuancier application to manage the submissions and the voting process. To submit, you need a Fedora account. If you don’t have one, create one here in the Fedora Account System (FAS). To vote you must have a signed contributor agreement (also accessible in FAS) which only takes a few moments.

You can access Nuancier here along with detailed instructions for submissions.

Posted on November 22, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Sharing Fedora

After being a Fedora user for a while, you may have come to enjoy it. And in fact you might want to encourage others to try Fedora. You don’t need any special privileges or to become a Fedora Ambassador to do that. As it turns out, anyone can help others get started with Fedora just by sharing information about it.

Having the conversation

For example, if you go out to lunch with a group of colleagues periodically, you might find it natural to talk about Fedora with them. If someone shows interest, you can suggest to get together with them for a Fedora show and tell. There isn’t any need for formal presentations or prepared talks. This is just having lunch and sharing information with people you know.

When you’re with friends, relatives, colleagues, or neighbors, conversation often turns to things computer related, and you can bring up Fedora. There are usually opportunities to point out how Fedora would partially if not completely address their concerns or provide something they want.

These are people you know so talking with them is easy and natural. You probably know the kind of things they use PCs for, so you know the features of Fedora that will be attractive to them. Such conversations can start anytime you see someone you know. You don’t need to steer conversations toward Fedora — that might be impolite, depending on the situation. But if they bring up computer related issues, you might find an opportunity to talk about Fedora.

Taking action

If a friend or colleague has an unused laptop, you could offer to show them how easy it is to load Fedora. You can also point out that there’s no charge and that the licenses are friendly to users. Sharing a USB key or a DVD is almost always helpful.

When you have someone setup to use Fedora, make sure they have the URLs for discussions, questions, and other related websites. Also, from time to time, let them know if you’ve seen an application they might find useful. (Hint: You might want to point them at a certain online magazine, too!)

The next time you’re with someone you know and they start talking about a computer related issue, tell them about Fedora and how it works for you. If they seem interested, give them some ideas on how Fedora could be helpful for them.

Open source may be big business nowadays, but it also remains a strong grassroots movement. You too can help grow open source through awareness and sharing!

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon from Unsplash.

Posted on November 20, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Set up single sign-on for Fedora Project services

In addition to an operating system, the Fedora Project provides services for users and developers. Services such as Ask Fedora, the Fedora Project wiki and the Fedora Project mailing lists help users learn how to best take advantage of Fedora. For developers of Fedora, there are many other services such as dist-git, Pagure, Bodhi, COPR and Bugzilla for the packaging and release process.

These services are available with a free account from the Fedora Accounts System (FAS). This account is the passport to all things Fedora! This article covers how to get set up with an account and configure Fedora Workstation for browser single sign-on.

Signing up for a Fedora account

To create a FAS account, browse to the account creation page. Here, you will fill out your basic identity data:

Once you enter your data, the account system sends an email to the address you provided, with a temporary password. Pick a strong password and use it.

Next, the account details page appears. If you want to contribute to the Fedora Project, you should complete the Contributor Agreement now. Otherwise, you are done and you can use your account to log into the various Fedora services.

Configuring Fedora Workstation for single sign-On

Now that you have your account, you can sign into any of the Fedora Project services. Most of these services support single sign-on (SSO), so you can sign in without re-entering your username and password.

Fedora Workstation provides an easy workflow to add your Fedora credentials. The GNOME Online Accounts tool helps you quickly set up your system to access many popular services. To access it, go to the Settings menu.

Click on the option labeled Fedora. A prompt opens for you to provide your username and password for your Fedora Account.

GNOME Online Accounts stores your password in GNOME Keyring and automatically acquires your single-sign-on credentials for you when you log in.

Single sign-on with a web browser

Today, Fedora Workstation supports three web browsers out of the box with support for single sign-on with the Fedora Project services. These are Mozilla Firefox, GNOME Web, and Google Chrome.

Due to a bug in Chromium, single sign-on doesn’t work currently if you have more than one set of Kerberos (SSO) credentials active on your session. As a result, Fedora doesn’t enable this function out of the box for Chromium in Fedora.

To sign on to a service, browse to it and select the login option for that service. For most Fedora services, this is all you need to do; the browser handles the rest. Some services such as the Fedora mailing lists and Bugzilla support multiple login types. For them, select the Fedora or Fedora Account System login type.

That’s it! You can now log into any of the Fedora Project services without re-entering your password.

Special consideration for Google Chrome

To enable single sign-on out of the box for Google Chrome, Fedora takes advantage of certain features in Chrome that are intended for use in “managed” environments. A managed environment is traditionally a corporate or other organization that sets certain security and/or monitoring requirements on the browser.

Recently, Google Chrome changed its behavior and it now reports Managed by your organization or possibly Managed by fedoraproject.org under the ⋮ menu in Google Chrome. That link leads to a page that says, “If your Chrome browser is managed, your administrator can set up or restrict certain features, install extensions, monitor activity, and control how you use Chrome.” However, Fedora will never monitor your browser activity or restrict your actions.

Enter chrome://policy in the address bar to see exactly what settings Fedora has enabled in the browser. The AuthNegotiateDelegateWhitelist and AuthServerWhitelist options will be set to *.fedoraproject.org. These are the only changes Fedora makes.

Posted on September 30, 2019 by — Leave a comment

Contribute at the kernel and IoT edition Fedora test days

There are two upcoming test days in the upcoming week. The first, starts on Monday 30 September through Monday 07 October, is to test the Kernel 5.3. Wednesday October 02, the test day is focusing on Fedora 31 IoT Edition. Come and test with us to make the upcoming Fedora 31 even better.

Kernel test week

The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.3. This version was just recently released and will arrive soon in Fedora. This version will also be the shipping kernel for Fedora 31. As a
result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week for
Monday, Sept 30 through Monday, October 07. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. The steps are clearly outlined in this document.

Fedora IoT Edition test day

Fedora Internet of Things is a variant of Fedora focused on IoT ecosystems. Whether you’re working on a home assistant, industrial gateways, or data storage and analytics, Fedora IoT provides a trusted open source platform to build on. Fedora IoT produces a monthly rolling release to help you keep your ecosystem up-to-date. The IoT and QA teams will have this test day for on Wednesday, October 02. Refer to the wiki page for links and resources to test the IoT Edition.

How do test days work?

To contribute, you only need to be able to download test materials (which include some large files) and then read and follow directions step by step.

Detailed information about both test days are on the wiki pages above. If you’re available on or around the days of the events, please do some testing and report your results.