KDE Plasma windows force resize – iKVM virtual keyboard

If you happen to use KDE Plasma these days and you encounter view problems like you cannot see the whole viewpoint of a window (especially JAVA/GTK based programs?).

KDE Plasma Desktop offers the ability to force a window to expand to new dimensions.

STEP 1) The Java-based iKVM program window has a handful virtual keyboard.

It could be used to “click on” specific key combinations, which otherwise could be caught by your system. But in sometimes the virtual keyboad window is trimmed and you lose some important keys like Ctrl, Alt, Space, arrow keys and more (the last line of buttons).

main menu
iKVM virtual keyboard trimmed keys

Keep on reading!

Review of freshly installed Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)

After the tutorial of Install Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop this tutorial is mainly to see what to expect from a freshly installed Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop – the look and feel of the new KDE GUI (version 5.13.5 of KDE Plasma).
Here you can find how to Install Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI). Here it worth mentioning the included versions of KDE software for Fedora 31:
The Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop comes with

  • KDE Plasma version: 5.16.5
  • KDE Frameworks version: 5.61.0
  • QT version: 5.12.5

The idea of this tutorial is just to see what to expect from Fedora 31 KDE Plasma – the look and feel of the GUI, the default installed programs and their look and how to do some basic steps with them, it is included also screenshots of the KDE settings program. Here you’ll find more than 200 screenshots and not so many texts we do not want to turn this review of many texts and version information and 3 meaningless screenshots, which you could not see anything for the user interface because these days it is the primary goal of a Desktop system. You can expect more of this kind of review in the future.
It may be interesting to compare with the Fedora 29 review – Review of freshly installed Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)

SCREENSHOT 1) Fedora (5.3.7-301.fc31.x86_64) 31 (Thirty One)

main menu
grub entry boot

Keep on reading!

Remove disk (all partitions) from software RAID1 with mdadm and change layout of the disk

The following article is to show how to remove healthy partitions from software RAID1 devices to change the layout of the disk and then add them back to the array.
The mdadm is the tool to manipulate the software RAID devices under Linux and it is part of all Linux distributions (some don’t install it by default so it may need to be installed).

Software RAID layout

[root@srv ~]# cat /proc/mdstat 
Personalities : [raid1] 
md125 : active raid1 sda4[1] sdb3[0]
      1047552 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md126 : active raid1 sdb2[0] sda3[1]
      32867328 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      
md127 : active raid1 sda2[1] sdb1[0]
      52427776 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      bitmap: 0/1 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

unused devices: <none>

STEP 1) Make the partitions faulty.

The partitions cannot be removed if they are not faulty.

[root@srv ~]# mdadm --fail /dev/md125 /dev/sdb3
mdadm: set /dev/sdb3 faulty in /dev/md125
[root@srv ~]# mdadm --fail /dev/md126 /dev/sdb2
mdadm: set /dev/sdb2 faulty in /dev/md126
[root@srv ~]# mdadm --fail /dev/md127 /dev/sdb1
mdadm: set /dev/sdb1 faulty in /dev/md127

Keep on reading!

Install Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI)

This tutorial will show you the simple steps of installing a modern Linux Distribution Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop with KDE for the user graphical interface. First, we present the basic steps for installing the Operating system in addition to your present operating systems (here we have two: Windows 10) and then you can see some screenshots of the installed system and the look and feel of it. We have another tutorial showing more screenshots of the installed and working Fedora 31 (Gnome and KDE plasma) – so you can decide which of them to try first – coming soon.

The Fedora 31 KDE Plasma Desktop comes with

  • Xorg X server – 1.20.5 XWayland is used by default
  • linux kernel – 5.3.7
  • KDE Plasma version: 5.16.5
  • KDE Frameworks version: 5.61.0
  • QT version: 5.12.5

The installation process is very similar to the old Install Fedora 27 KDE Plasma Desktop and Install Fedora 29 KDE Plasma Desktop (KDE GUI). Our system is relatively new – Asus X399 with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and NVIDIA 1080 TI and the setup loaded successfully and there were no problems till the end.

We used the following ISO for the installation process:

https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/31/Spins/x86_64/iso/Fedora-KDE-Live-x86_64-31-1.9.iso

It is a LIVE image so you can try it before installing it. The easiest way is just to download the image and burn it to a DVD disk and then follow the installation below:

SCREENSHOT 1) Here is our “UEFI BIOS->Boot->Boot Override” and in most modern motherboard you can choose to override the default boot devices.

Choose the “UEFI: HL-DT-STDVDRAM…” to boot and install Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 31 with UEFI support. You should do this, because most of the new hardware like video cards would not work properly without beeing in UEFI mode.

main menu
Boot from DVD/USB Installation

Keep on reading!

Review of freshly installed Fedora 31 Workstation (Gnome GUI)

After the tutorial of Install Fedora Workstation 31 (Gnome GUI) this tutorial is mainly to see what to expect from a freshly installed Fedora 36 Workstation – the look and feel of the GUI (Gnome – version 3.30).

  • Xorg X server – 1.20.5
  • GNOME (the GUI) – 3.34.1
  • linux kernel – 5.3.7

More technical details here – Technical details of Fedora Workstation 31 (Gnome GUI).
The idea of this tutorial is just to see what to expect from Fedora 31 Workstation (Gnome)the look and feel of the GUI, the default installed programs and their look and how to do some basic steps with them. Here you’ll find more than 150 screenshots and not so many text we do not want to turn this review of many text and version information and 3 meaningless screenshot, which you cannot see anything for the user interface, which these days is the primary goal of a Desktop system. You can expect more of this kind of reviews in the future…
You can find similar article for Fedora Workstation 27 – Review of freshly installed Fedora 27 Workstation (Gnome GUI), Review of freshly installed Fedora 29 Workstation (Gnome GUI)
And for all installation and review tutorials we use real workstations not virtual environments!

SCREENSHOT 1) Fedora (5.3.7-301.fc31.x86_64) 31 (Thirty One)

main menu
grub entry boot

Keep on reading!

Gentoo – UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode character ‘\xc4’ in position 83: ordinal not in range(128)

Recently emerging package =dev-lang/go-1.13.4 under Gentoo failed on one of our virtual servers with:

--- /usr/lib/go/test/fixedbugs/issue27836.dir/
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/portage/dbapi/_MergeProcess.py", line 234, in _spawn
    prev_mtimes=self.prev_mtimes, counter=counter)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/portage/dbapi/vartree.py", line 1788, in wrapper
    return f(self, *args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/portage/dbapi/vartree.py", line 5385, in merge
    counter=counter)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/portage/dbapi/vartree.py", line 4548, in treewalk
    rval = self._merge_contents(srcroot, destroot, cfgfiledict)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/portage/dbapi/vartree.py", line 4828, in _merge_contents
    self.settings["EPREFIX"].lstrip(os.sep), cfgfiledict, mymtime):
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/portage/dbapi/vartree.py", line 5225, in mergeme
    encoding=_encodings['merge'])
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/portage/util/movefile.py", line 256, in movefile
    selinux.rename(src, dest)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/portage/__init__.py", line 246, in __call__
    rval = self._func(*wrapped_args, **wrapped_kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/portage/_selinux.py", line 71, in rename
    os.rename(src, dest)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xc4' in position 83: ordinal not in range(128)

>>> Failed to install dev-lang/go-1.13.4, Log file:

>>>  '/var/tmp/portage/dev-lang/go-1.13.4/temp/build.log'

The above log shows that the emerge fails in the installation phase when moving the files to the proper path in the system. The problem there is a non-ASCII character in the file name or path, but the environment is set to use ASCII as language.

The solution is to check if the environment LANG is set and what it contains. In this case, we should set the LANG environment to utf8.

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Most of the cases this kind of error could occur with virtual servers, docker (or the other kind of containers like lxc, podman and so on) containers and chroot jails or screens with changed user with su or sudo! In our case, the LANG just got missed because of a switch user procedure in a container and the emerge failed with the above error. When the LANG is missing probably the default value is “C”. In fact, check not only LANG but also the “LC_ALL” environment variable (it may have different value, which is wrong!), which also should be “en_US.UTF-8”:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Or try removing it at all with

unset LC_ALL

Keep on reading!

Build docker image with custom Dockerfile name – docker build requires exactly 1 argument

Docker uses the Dockerfile to build docker images, but what if you want to change the name and (or) the path of this file?
By default “docker build” command uses a file named Dockerfile on the same directory you execute the “docker build“. There is an option to change the path and name of this special file:

  -f, --file string             Name of the Dockerfile (Default is 'PATH/Dockerfile')

And the “-f” may include path and file name but it is mandatory to specify the path at the end “docker build” usually the current directory (context by the docker terminology) by adding “.” (the dot at the end of the command)

So if you want to build with a docker file mydockerfile in the current directory you must execute:

docker build -f mydockerfile .

If your file is in a sub-directory execute:

docker build -f subdirectory/mydockerfile .

The command will create a docker image in your local repository. Here is the output of the first command:

root@srv:~/docker# docker build -f mydockerfile .
Sending build context to Docker daemon  2.048kB
Step 1/3 : FROM ubuntu:bionic-20191029
bionic-20191029: Pulling from library/ubuntu
7ddbc47eeb70: Pull complete 
c1bbdc448b72: Pull complete 
8c3b70e39044: Pull complete 
45d437916d57: Pull complete 
Digest: sha256:6e9f67fa63b0323e9a1e587fd71c561ba48a034504fb804fd26fd8800039835d
Status: Downloaded newer image for ubuntu:bionic-20191029
 ---> 775349758637
Step 2/3 : MAINTAINER test@example.com
 ---> Running in 5fa42bca749c
Removing intermediate container 5fa42bca749c
 ---> 0a1ffa1728f4
Step 3/3 : RUN apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get install -y git wget
 ---> Running in 2e35040f247c
Get:1 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security InRelease [88.7 kB]
Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease [242 kB]
Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease [88.7 kB]
Get:4 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelease [74.6 kB]
.....
.....
Processing triggers for ca-certificates (20180409) ...
Updating certificates in /etc/ssl/certs...
0 added, 0 removed; done.
Running hooks in /etc/ca-certificates/update.d...
done.
Removing intermediate container 2e35040f247c
 ---> 2382809739a4
Successfully built 2382809739a4

Here is the image:

REPOSITORY                            TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED              SIZE
root@srv:~# docker images
<none>                                <none>              2382809739a4        About a minute ago   186MB

Build command with custom name and registry URL and TAG

root@srv:~# docker build -t gitlab.ahelpme.com:4567/root/ubuntu-project/ubuntu18-manual-base:v0.1 -f mydockerfile .
Sending build context to Docker daemon  2.048kB
Step 1/3 : FROM ubuntu:bionic-20191029
 ---> 775349758637
Step 2/3 : MAINTAINER test@example.com
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 0a1ffa1728f4
Step 3/3 : RUN apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get install -y git wget
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 2382809739a4
Successfully built 2382809739a4
Successfully tagged gitlab.ahelpme.com:4567/root/ubuntu-project/ubuntu18-manual-base:v0.1
root@srv:~# docker push gitlab.ahelpme.com:4567/root/ubuntu-project/ubuntu18-manual-base:v0.1
The push refers to repository [gitlab.ahelpme.com:4567/root/ubuntu-project/ubuntu18-manual-base]
7cebba4bf6c3: Pushed 
e0b3afb09dc3: Pushed 
6c01b5a53aac: Pushed 
2c6ac8e5063e: Pushed 
cc967c529ced: Pushed 
v0.1: digest: sha256:acf42078bf46e320c402f09c6417a3dae8992ab4f4f685265486063daf30cb13 size: 1364

the registry URL is “gitlab.ahelpme.com:4567” and the project path is “/root/ubuntu-project/” and the name of the image is “ubuntu18-manual-base” with tag “v0.1“. The build command uses the cache from our first build example here (because the docker file is the same).

Typical errors with “-f”

Two errors you may encounter when trying the “-f” to change the name of the default Dockerfile name:

$ docker build -t gitlab.ahelpme.com:4567/root/ubuntu-project/ubuntu18-manual-base:v0.1 -f mydockerfile subdirectory/
unable to prepare context: unable to evaluate symlinks in Dockerfile path: lstat /builds/dev/docker-containers/mydockerfile: no such file or directory

$ docker build -t gitlab.ahelpme.com:4567/root/ubuntu-project/ubuntu18-manual-base:v0.1 -f subdirectory/mydockerfile
"docker build" requires exactly 1 argument.
See 'docker build --help'.

Usage:  docker build [OPTIONS] PATH | URL | -

First, you might think the -f would take the path and file name and this should be enough, but the errors above appears!

Our example Dockerfile

This is our simple example docker file:

FROM ubuntu:bionic-20191029
MAINTAINER test@example.com

RUN apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get install -y git wget

We are using the official docker image from Ubuntu. Always use official docker images!

autorelabel failed to relabel the root filesystem on boot when enabling the selinux on CentOS 8

This article is of a kind – “/.autorelabel” file does not work, because the enable of SELINUX ended with unreachable server.

Enabling the SELINUX should be easy as

  1. just editing a text file – /etc/selinux/config to include
    SELINUX=enforcing
    
  2. relabel all (or at least the root) file systems by creating the “/.autorelabel” file.
  3. restarting the system. The boot process will detect the “/.autorelabel” file and relabel the file systems and then it will restart the system in the normal boot order.

But this time the relabeling did not happen as usual (It happened on CentOS 8, but probably could happen in any Linux distribution?). The server never got reachable again and on the screen, there were multiple errors – all of “Permission denied”!

It is better when enabling SELINUX to set “permissive” mode at first and relabel the root file system with “/.autorelabel” and then to enable “enforcing” mode of SELINUX.

Using “permissive” first for the relabel process guarantees you would have your server back after the process because the SELINUX rules are not enforced.
Here is the better procedure of enabling the SELINUX:

  1. just editing a text file – /etc/selinux/config to include
    SELINUX=permissive
    
  2. relabel all (or at least the root) file systems by creating the “/.autorelabel” file.
  3. restarting the system. The boot process will detect the “/.autorelabel” file and relabel the file systems and then it will restart the system in normal boot order.
  4. edit the /etc/selinux/config to enable “enforcing” mode
    SELINUX=enforcing
    
  5. Restart (it’s better) or just enable SELINUX enforcing live with:
    setenforce 1
    

Our screenshots log of the relabel failure process

SCREENSHOT 1) No autorelabel initiated on boot despite the presence of “/.autorelabel” file.

Multple “Permission Denied” errors and many reports from “audit” – the SELINUX log daemon. The host is unreachable – no network started. No logging is possible!

main menu
boot freezing

SCREENSHOT 2) A page up above the first screen – more “Permission Denied” errors.

main menu
boot freezing 2

SCREENSHOT 3) Second page up above the first screen – the SELINUX rules loaded successfully but no autorelabel process initiated.

main menu
boot freezing 3

A successful relabel process on boot

SCREENSHOT 1) Successful start of the relabel process.

We’ve changed the SELINUX mode to be “permissive” and everything is back to normal, the “/.autorelabel” file initiated the relabel on the next boot.

main menu
relabel process on boot initiated

SCREENSHOT 2) The relabeling of the file system is in progress.

There is a progress counter.

main menu
relabel process in progress

SCREENSHOT 3) The relabel process finished successfully and the reboot is initiated.

The next reboot the “/.autorelabel” file won’t exists and the system will boot normally.

main menu
relabel process success and last screen before reboot

SSD cache device to a software RAID5 using LVM2

Continuing our series LVM2 plus cache device:

  1. single hard disk with a SSD device SSD cache device to a hard disk drive using LVM, which uses SSD drive as a cache device to a single hard drive.
  2. Mirror LVM2 device with a SSD device for cache – SSD cache device to a software raid using LVM2 – software mirror across two devices with an additional SSD cache device over the mirror.

And now we show you how to do software RAID5 with SSD cache nvme using LVM2.

The goal:
Caching RAID5 consisting of three 8T hard drives with a single 1T NVME SSD drive. Caching reads, i.e. the write-through is enabled ().
Our setup:

  • 1 NVME SSD disk Samsung 1T. It will be used for writethrough cache device (you may use writeback, too, you do not care for the data if the cache device fails)!
  • 3 Hard disk drive 8T grouped in RAID5 for redundancy.

Keep on reading!

Technical details of Fedora Workstation 31 (Gnome GUI)

This article is for those of you who do not want to install a whole new operating system only to discover some technical details about the default installation like disk layout, packages included, software versions, and so on. Here we are going to review in several sections what is like to have a default installation of Fedora Workstation 31 (Gnome) using a real not virtual machine!
The kernel is 5.3.7 it detects successfully the Threadripper 1950X AMD and the system is stable (we booted in UEFI mode).

Software

With Fedora 31 (Workstation Edition) you can have

  • linux kernel – 5.3.7 (5.3.7-301.fc31.x86_64)
  • Graphical User Interface
    • Xorg X server (Xwayland) – 1.20.5
    • GNOME (the GUI) – 3.34.1
    • K Desktop Environment – ships with https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/kde/ Use this spin to install KDE.
  • System
    • linux-firmware – version: 20190923, release: 20191022-103.fc31.
    • QT – 5.12.5
    • libc – 2.30
    • GNU GCC – 9.2.1
    • OpenSSL – 1.1.1d
    • coreutils – 8.31
    • yum – Depricated and replaced with dnf
    • dnf – 4.2.9
    • cups – 2.2.12
    • rsyslog – 8.1907.0
    • NetworkManager – 1.20.4
  • Servers
    • Apache – 2.4.41
    • Nginx – 1.16.1
    • MySQL server – 8.0.17
    • MariaDB server – 10.3.17
    • PostgreSQL – 11.5
  • Programming
    • PHP – 7.3.10
    • python – 2.7.17 and also includes 3.7.4
    • perl – 5.30.0
    • ruby – 2.6.5
    • OpenJDK – 11.0.4.11 and also includes 1.8.0.222.b10
    • Go – 1.13.1
    • Rust – 1.38.0
    • Subversion – 1.12.2
    • Git – 2.23.0

Note: Not all of the above software comes installed by default. The versions above are valid for the intial release so in fact, these are the minimal versions you get with Fedora 31and installing and updating it after the initial date may update some of the above packages with new versions.
The installation procedure you can find here – Install Fedora Workstation 31 (Gnome GUI).
Installed packages are 1653 occupying 6.9G space:.

[root@srv ~]# dnf list installed|wc -l
1653
[root@srv ~]# df -h /
Filesystem                               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root   69G  6.9G   59G  11% /

Keep on reading!