Fedora

I spent the last month building what should have been a simple update checker for my G4 Fedora 44 box. Turned into a proper rabbit hole once I discovered the system was hanging after three days of suspend. Here’s what I learned. The Problem I run a lot of machines. Rather than babysitting each one for updates, I wanted something like CachyOS has: a tray icon that checks hourly, shows a green dot when up to date, red when updates are pending, and handles the background automation so I never have to think about it. ...

Every time a new kernel arrives via dnf upgrade, your Fedora EFI boot entry disappears. You reboot and the UEFI firmware can’t find Fedora anymore. You have to manually regenerate GRUB and recreate the boot entry. Again. This is a Fedora issue with duplicate or malformed boot entries in the UEFI firmware. The kernel update process has hooks that regenerate GRUB, but if you have bad entries sitting there, the system gets confused and deletes the good one instead of refreshing it. ...

Reboot the system. It hangs. Doesn’t crash, doesn’t give an error on screen, just sits there for what feels like forever. Eventually it times out and reboots anyway. But every single reboot does this. Check the logs and you see this: plasma-plasmashell.service: State 'stop-sigterm' timed out. Aborting. plasma-plasmashell.service: Failed with result 'timeout'. KDE Plasma is not shutting down in time. The system gives it a timeout to close gracefully, and Plasma needs more time than that timeout allows. ...

G4 desktop, Fedora 44 on SDA. Decided to try RakuOS on a spare NVMe. Booted the G4 again and Fedora wouldn’t boot from SDA. The EFI entry exists. The files are there. But the UEFI firmware just skips SDA and boots something else. understanding the problem Your computer’s EFI system (UEFI firmware) has a boot order list. That list points to files on disk that tell the firmware how to boot each OS. If that pointer gets broken or the bootloader itself isn’t properly initialized, the entry becomes dead weight. It exists but doesn’t work. ...

Fedora 44, KDE Plasma, Wayland session. Simple thing, holding a key down. 7777777777777777777 Except it wasn’t doing that anymore. Hold 7, get one 7, and instead of it repeating I’d get a little popup underneath the cursor with a handful of characters sitting in it. Looked exactly like one of those mobile long-press accent menus. Checked System Settings → Input Devices → Keyboard → Key repeat. All fine, delay and rate both set correctly. Tried the Test area right there in Settings, same thing happened, single character then that popup. Tried it in a terminal, tried it in the browser, tried it in an editor. Everywhere. Not one app misbehaving, the whole session. ...

Brian’s running Ultramarine, which is Fedora underneath, and wanted SELinux disabled outright. Fair enough, plenty of people go straight for that. the disable route Two ways to actually do it. The config file way: sudo sed -i 's/^SELINUX=.*/SELINUX=disabled/' /etc/selinux/config sudo reboot Or through grubby instead, setting it as a kernel argument, which survives even if the config file gets reverted or overwritten somehow: sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="selinux=0" sudo reboot Check it landed after reboot: ...

Simple job. Copy Videos folder from G4 over to JackSparrow2 with rsync. Done this a hundred times. rsync -avP Videos/ tolga@100.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/tolga/rsync/ protocol version mismatch, is your shell clean? (see the rsync manpage for an explanation) rsync error: protocol incompatibility (code 2) at compat.c(625) [sender=3.4.4] Never seen that one before. Password prompt worked fine, so the connection itself was good. Something after that was the problem. first thing i found SSH’d in normally to have a look and there it was, plain as day. Every time I log into JackSparrow2 I get a full ASCII banner, box drawing characters, the works. Looks great for a normal login. But rsync uses SSH under the hood too, to spawn a remote process, and it does not want anything on that connection except rsync’s own protocol data. Any stray text before the handshake and it falls over exactly like this. So the banner was my first suspect. Went looking in /etc/motd, that’s the Cockpit and Jellyfin links box, not what was printing. Checked /etc/motd.d/, just a Cockpit symlink, nothing there either. Grepped for the actual banner text and found it in /etc/ssh/banner, being force fed on every single SSH connection through a Banner directive sitting in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/99-jacksparrow2.conf. That directive does not care whether the session is interactive or not, it just fires. Commented it out, restarted sshd. Ran the rsync again. ...

Started with something dumb. Facebook wouldn’t load in Vivaldi or Firefox on the desktop. Worked fine on mobile. Figured it was a browser thing at first. Extension, cookies, the usual 💨 . Wasn’t that. why i thought i might need ipv6 Ran a curl test forcing each protocol separately, just to rule stuff in or out: curl -4 -I https://www.facebook.com curl -6 -I https://www.facebook.com IPv4 came back clean. HTTP/2 200, instant. IPv6 flat out refused to connect: ...

Why I’m writing this one down properly This site you’re reading right now runs on the same T620 as everything else … the NAS, the Samba shares, all of it. I got it working, but not in a straight line, and I want an actual record of the steps that worked, not a cleaned-up version that pretends I got it right first try. If I ever rebuild this box, this is the post I want to follow. ...

Same symptom, completely different machine I already wrote about the remount script I built for my NixOS desktop … clearing stale network mount units through systemd when a share drops. This is the other half of that same story, except this one lives on JackSparrow2 itself (the T620 server) and fixes a genuinely different failure, even though the symptom looks identical from the client side: a share that used to work suddenly doesn’t. ...