Finally

After some contemplating, and dilemmas if would do it or not, I’ve finally decided to get rid of the initial Windows 10 installation of my work laptop (Dell Latitude E7440). The reason for this is I needed a freshly installed laptop for conferences, and while at the time of writing, there’s FOSDEM, which I couldn’t attend, there’s also CfgMgmtCamp, which I will attend.

As most services that were used for work, via Office 365, have a pretty decent web-alternative now, it was not really necessary to keep a native client anymore. The only thing that I will miss is some of the games that are Windows-only, so since this is my only Windows host, they were installed on there. I’m sure I’ll find some alternative for these later on.

So, after backing up all the necessary data (and what a PITA that can be on Windows 10, towards a NAS, and don’t go via SMB… ), I plugged in my small USB drive with a fresh Fedora 31 image. It boots a live-image, so if you want to get to know the environment without installing anything, you’re free to do so. Yes this has been around for ages since Knoppix came out, but it’s always good to have a bit of a feel to it, beforehand 😁
The installation itself was pretty smooth, no real hurdles to tackle. Always great to have things go well. 😄

Some personal preferences

Over the past years, I’ve grown fond of using zsh over bash, and I’ve added the oh-my-zsh repository, to easily activate some plugins/aliases.

Another thing I like is a tiling windowmanager. On my desktop PC, I’ve been using AwesomeWM, at work, where I have a CentOS host, it’s i3. As a reinstallation of that host is also in the pipeline, moving away from CentOS 7 to Fedora 31, I’ll most probably switch to AwesomeWM on that one as well.
That said, a little extra theming by adding the awesome-copycats repository, and after adapting the number of virtual desktops from 5 to 9 I’m all set.

I got to like VSCode as editor as well. Nothing wrong with vi(m), or git commands or any CLI stuff, and they’re still a big part of my daily toolbox, but sometimes it’s nice to have a bit more visual aid. Maybe I’ve been influenced too much by a couple of podcasts here and there. I have the impressions that MSFT is pumping big money into advertising via those channels. 😄

Pairing my wireless headset (QC35) via Bluetooth didn’t pose much of an issue either. In discovery mode, it was easily found, and the pairing and connectivity went smoothly. It was immediately recognized as audio output. That said, the microphone input is something I still need to test later on.

Post-installation hurdles

While the headset was easily recognized, testing some sites like YouTube to listen to the audio via the QC35 gave me a stuttering sound. Fortunately it got easily fixed by activating the RPM Fusion repositories and switching the PulseAudio module for the “freeworld” version in RPM Fusion. YouTube was not the only culprit, but it was a broader problem that I experienced on a training site as well.

For the training site, the video presentations were met not with sound and image, but with a neat “No video with supported format and MIME type found”. We all know (and if not, now you do) that some Linux distributions don’t always come with all the audio/video codecs needed to play the content you can find online. In this case it was easily solved by adding the RPM Fusion repositories, and installing the codecs as mentioned here.

Work In Progress and To Do

While this as a fun weekend project (I lost most time on the backup of the old data..), there are still some topics to fix.

• Lockscreen on Laptop Suspend in AwesomeWM
  In the default GNOME installation it works fine, but for AwesomeWM, the sessions is not automatically locked when closing the laptop lid. For now a manual ‘slock’ is needed before closing the lid.

• Wireguard
  I have a Wireguard VPN to log in at home. While trying to install this on Fedora 31, with the latest kernel at the time of writing (5.4.15-200-fc31.x86_64), I encountered an issue where it couldn’t launch the wg0 interface. It looks like the module for the kernel is not properly built. Unfortunately, in the packaging, there are no kernel headers available yet for 5.4.15-200-fc31.

  Available Packages
  kernel-headers.x86_64   5.3.6-300.fc31   fedora
  kernel-headers.x86_64   5.4.7-200.fc31   updates
  

  The good news is that Wireguard has been accepted in the 5.6 kernel, which will definitely be included in Fedora 32. That would mean no DKMS module would be necessary anymore.

• BorgBackup
  Of course backups are needed.

• Other stuff