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Fedora 26 end of life approaching

UPDATE: Date corrected to May 29.

As readers may be aware, Fedora 28 recently released to great acclaim. That means Fedora 26 hits its End of Life (EOL) status on May 29, 2018. Read more here about what this means, and what steps you can take with your older Fedora systems.

After May 29, packages in the Fedora 26 repositories no longer receive any security, bugfix, or enhancement updates. Furthermore, at that point the community adds no new packages to the F26 collection.

The Fedora Project highly recommends you upgrade all systems to Fedora 28 or Fedora 27 before the EOL date. Upgrades are an easy way to keep your system setup while you move to the latest technology.

Looking back at Fedora 26

Fedora 26 was released in July 2017. During its lifetime, the Fedora community published nearly 10,000 updates to the F26 repositories. Fedora 26 Workstation featured version 3.24 of GNOME. The release also carried numerous improvements and highlights:

  • A new partitioning tool in Anaconda for expert setup
  • DNF 2.5 with new software management capabilities
  •  The Python Classroom Lab which helps educators introduce students to the latest technology

About the Fedora Release Cycle

The Fedora Project provides updates for a particular release until a month after the second subsequent version of Fedora is released. For example, updates for Fedora 26 continue until one month after the release of Fedora 28. Fedora 27 continues to be supported up until one month after the release of Fedora 29.

Since Fedora 28 released on time on May 1, 2018, Fedora 26 reaches EOL even though it’s been around less than 11 months. So if that lifecycle seems shorter than usual to you, you’re right!

The Fedora Project wiki contains more detailed information about the entire Fedora Release lifecycle. The lifecycle includes milestones from development to release, and the post-release support period.

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Set up zsh on your Fedora system

For some people, the terminal can be scary. But a terminal is more than just a black screen to type in. It usually runs a shell, so called because it wraps around the kernel. The shell is a text-based interface that lets you run commands on the system. It’s also sometimes called a command line interpreter or CLI. Fedora, like most Linux distributions, comes with bash as the default shell.  However, it isn’t the only shell available; several other shells can be installed. This article focuses on the Z Shell, or zsh.

Bash is a rewrite of the old Bourne shell (sh) that shipped in UNIX. Zsh is intended to be friendlier than bash, through better interaction. Some of its useful features are:

  • Programmable command line completion
  • Shared command history between running shell sessions
  • Spelling correction
  • Loadable modules
  • Interactive selection of files and folders

Zsh is available in the Fedora repositories. To install, run this command:

$ sudo dnf install zsh

Using zsh

To start using it, just type zsh and the new shell prompts you with a first run wizard. This wizard helps you configure initial features, like history behavior and auto-completion. Or you can opt to keep the rc file empty:

zsh First Run Wizzard

First-run wizard

If you type 1 the configuration wizard starts. The other options launch the shell immediately.

Note that the user prompt is % and not $ as with bash. A significant feature here is the auto-completion that allows you to move among files and directories with the Tab key, much like a menu:

zsh cd Feature

Using the auto-completion feature with the cd command

Another interesting feature is spelling correction, which helps when writing filenames with mixed cases:

zsh Auto Completion

Auto completion performing spelling correction

Making zsh your default shell

Zsh offers a lot of plugins, like zsh-syntax-highlighting, and the famous “Oh my zsh” (check out its page here). You might want to make it the default, so it runs whenever you start a session or open a terminal. To do this, use the chsh (“change shell”) command:

$ chsh -s $(which zsh)

This command tells your system that you want to set (-s) your default shell to the correct location of the shell (which zsh).

Photo by Kate Ter Haar from Flickr (CC BY-SA).

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Audacity quick tip: quickly remove background noise

When recording sounds on a laptop — say for a simple first screencast — many users typically use the built-in microphone. However, these small microphones also capture a lot of background noise. In this quick tip, learn how to use Audacity in Fedora to quickly remove the background noise from audio files.

Installing Audacity

Audacity is an application in Fedora for mixing, cutting, and editing audio files. It supports a wide range of formats out of the box on Fedora — including MP3 and OGG. Install Audacity from the Software application.

If the terminal is more your speed, use the command:

sudo dnf install audacity

Import your Audio, sample background noise

After installing Audacity, open the application, and import your sound using the File > Import menu item. This example uses a sound bite from freesound.org to which noise was added:


Next, take a sample of the background noise to be filtered out. With the tracks imported, select an area of the track that contains only the background noise. Then choose Effect >  Noise Reduction from the menu, and press the Get Noise Profile button.

Filter the Noise

Next, select the area of the track you want to filter the noise from. Do this either by selecting with the mouse, or Ctrl + a to select the entire track. Finally, open the Effect > Noise Reduction dialog again, and click OK to apply the filter.

Additionally, play around with the settings until your tracks sound better. Here is the original file again, followed by the noise reduced track for comparison (using the default settings):