# Fedora Magazine

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### Spam Classification with ML-Pack

Monday 20th of July 2020 08:00:00 AM
Introduction

ML-Pack is a small footprint C++ machine learning library that can be easily integrated into other programs. It is an actively developed open source project and released under a BSD-3 license. Machine learning has gained popularity due to the large amount of electronic data that can be collected. Some other popular machine learning frameworks include TensorFlow, MxNet, PyTorch, Chainer and Paddle Paddle, however these are designed for more complex workflows than ML-Pack. On Fedora, ML-Pack is packaged by its lead developer Ryan Curtin. In addition to a command line interface, ML-Pack has bindings for Python and Julia. Here, we will focus on the command line interface since this may be useful for system administrators to integrate into their workflows.

Installation

You can install ML-Pack on the Fedora command line using

$sudo dnf -y install mlpack mlpack-bin You can also install the documentation, development headers and Python bindings by using …$ sudo dnf -y install mlpack-doc \ mlpack-devel mlpack-python3

though they will not be used in this introduction.

Example

As an example, we will train a machine learning model to classify spam SMS messages. To keep this article brief, linux commands will not be fully explained, but you can find out more about them by using the man command, for example for the command first command used below, wget

$man wget will give you information that wget will download files from the web and options you can use for it. Get a dataset We will use an example spam dataset in Indonesian provided by Yudi Wibisono$ wget https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-stKadfTgJLtYsHWqXhGO3nTjKVFxm_Q/view
$unzip dataset_sms_spam_bhs_indonesia_v1.zip Pre-process dataset We will try to classify a message as spam or ham by the number of occurrences of a word in a message. We first change the file line endings, remove line 243 which is missing a label and then remove the header from the dataset. Then, we split our data into two files, labels and messages. Since the labels are at the end of the message, the message is reversed and then the label removed and placed in one file. The message is then removed and placed in another file.$ tr '\r' '\n' < dataset_sms_spam_v1.csv > dataset.txt $sed '243d' dataset.txt > dataset1.csv$ sed '1d' dataset1.csv > dataset.csv $rev dataset.csv | cut -c1 | rev > labels.txt$ rev dataset.csv | cut -c2- | rev > messages.txt $rm dataset.csv$ rm dataset1.csv $rm dataset.txt Machine learning works on numeric data, so we will use labels of 1 for ham and 0 for spam. The dataset contains three labels, 0, normal sms (ham), 1, fraud (spam), and 2 promotion (spam). We will label all spam as 1, so promotions and fraud will be labelled as 1.$ tr '2' '1' < labels.txt > labels.csv $rm labels.txt The next step is to convert all text in the messages to lower case and for simplicity remove punctuation and any symbols that are not spaces, line endings or in the range a-z (one would need expand this range of symbols for production use)$ tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' < \ messages.txt > messagesLower.txt $tr -Cd 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz n' < \ messagesLower.txt > messagesLetters.txt$ rm messagesLower.txt

We now obtain a sorted list of unique words used (this step may take a few minutes, so use nice to give it a low priority while you continue with other tasks on your computer).

$nice -20 xargs -n1 < messagesLetters.txt > temp.txt$ sort temp.txt > temp2.txt $uniq temp2.txt > words.txt$ rm temp.txt $rm temp2.txt We then create a matrix, where for each message, the frequency of word occurrences is counted (more on this on Wikipedia, here and here). This requires a few lines of code, so the full script, which should be saved as ‘makematrix.sh’ is below #!/bin/bash declare -a words=() declare -a letterstartind=() declare -a letterstart=() letter=" " i=0 lettercount=0 while IFS= read -r line; do labels[$((i))]=$line let "i++" done < labels.csv i=0 while IFS= read -r line; do words[$((i))]=$line firstletter="$( echo $line | head -c 1 )" if [ "$firstletter" != "$letter" ] then letterstartind[$((lettercount))]=$((i)) letterstart[$((lettercount))]=$firstletter letter=$firstletter let "lettercount++" fi let "i++" done < words.txt letterstartind[$((lettercount))]=$((i)) echo "Created list of letters" touch wordfrequency.txt rm wordfrequency.txt touch wordfrequency.txt messagecount=0 messagenum=0 messages="$( wc -l messages.txt )" i=0 while IFS= read -r line; do let "messagenum++" declare -a wordcount=() declare -a wordarray=() read -r -a wordarray <<< "$line" let "messagecount++" words=${#wordarray[@]} for word in "${wordarray[@]}"; do startletter="$( echo$word | head -c 1 )" j=-1 while [ $((j)) -lt$((lettercount)) ]; do let "j++" if [ "$startletter" == "${letterstart[$((j))]}" ] then mystart=$((j)) fi done myend=$((mystart))+1 j=${letterstartind[$((mystart))]} jend=${letterstartind[$((myend))]} while [$((j)) -le $((jend)) ]; do wordcount[$((j))]=0 if [ "$word" == "${words[$((j))]}" ] then wordcount[$((j))]="$( echo$line | grep -o $word | wc -l )" fi let "j++" done done for j in "${!wordcount[@]}"; do wordcount[$((j))]=$(echo " scale=4; \ $((${wordcount[$((j))]})) /$((words))" | bc) done wordcount[$((words))+1]=$((words)) echo "${wordcount[*]}" >> wordfrequency.txt echo "Processed message ""$messagenum" let "i++" done < messagesLetters.txt # Create csv file tr ' ' ',' < wordfrequency.txt > data.csv

Since Bash is an interpreted language, this simple implementation can take upto 30 minutes to complete. If using the above Bash script on your primary workstation, run it as a task with low priority so that you can continue with other work while you wait:

$nice -20 bash makematrix.sh Once the script has finished running, split the data into testing (30%) and training (70%) sets:$ mlpack_preprocess_split \ --input_file data.csv \ --input_labels_file labels.csv \ --training_file train.data.csv \ --training_labels_file train.labels.csv \ --test_file test.data.csv \ --test_labels_file test.labels.csv \ --test_ratio 0.3 \ --verbose Train a model

Now train a Logistic regression model:

$mlpack_logistic_regression \ --training_file train.data.csv \ --labels_file train.labels.csv --lambda 0.1 \ --output_model_file lr_model.bin Test the model Finally we test our model by producing predictions,$ mlpack_logistic_regression \ --input_model_file lr_model.bin \ --test_file test.data.csv \ --output_file lr_predictions.csv

and comparing the predictions with the exact results,

$export incorrect=$(diff -U 0 lr_predictions.csv \ test.labels.csv | grep '^@@' | wc -l) $export tests=$(wc -l < lr_predictions.csv) $echo "scale=2; 100 * ( 1 -$((incorrect)) \ / $((tests)))" | bc This gives approximately 90% validation rate, similar to that obtained here. The dataset is composed of approximately 50% spam messages, so the validation rates are quite good without doing much parameter tuning. In typical cases, datasets are unbalanced with many more entries in some categories than in others. In these cases a good validation rate can be obtained by mispredicting the class with a few entries. Thus to better evaluate these models, one can compare the number of misclassifications of spam, and the number of misclassifications of ham. Of particular importance in applications is the number of false positive spam results as these are typically not transmitted. The script below produces a confusion matrix which gives a better indication of misclassification. Save it as ‘confusion.sh’ #!/bin/bash declare -a labels declare -a lr i=0 while IFS= read -r line; do labels[i]=$line let "i++" done < test.labels.csv i=0 while IFS= read -r line; do lr[i]=$line let "i++" done < lr_predictions.csv TruePositiveLR=0 FalsePositiveLR=0 TrueZeroLR=0 FalseZeroLR=0 Positive=0 Zero=0 for i in "${!labels[@]}"; do if [ "${labels[$i]}" == "1" ] then let "Positive++" if [ "${lr[$i]}" == "1" ] then let "TruePositiveLR++" else let "FalseZeroLR++" fi fi if [ "${labels[$i]}" == "0" ] then let "Zero++" if [ "${lr[$i]}" == "0" ] then let "TrueZeroLR++" else let "FalsePositiveLR++" fi fi done echo "Logistic Regression" echo "Total spam" $Positive echo "Total ham"$Zero echo "Confusion matrix" echo " Predicted class" echo " Ham | Spam " echo " ---------------" echo " Actual| Ham | " $TrueZeroLR "|"$FalseZeroLR echo " class | Spam | " $FalsePositiveLR " |"$TruePositiveLR echo ""

then run the script

$bash confusion.sh You should get output similar to Logistic Regression Total spam 183 Total ham 159 Confusion matrix Predicted class HamSpamActual classHam12826Spam31157 which indicates a reasonable level of classification. Other methods you can try in ML-Pack for this problem include Naive Bayes, random forest, decision tree, AdaBoost and perceptron. To improve the error rating, you can try other pre-processing methods on the initial data set. Neural networks can give upto 99.95% validation rates, see for example here, here and here. However, using these techniques with ML-Pack cannot be done on the command line interface at present and is best covered in another post. For more on ML-Pack, please see the documentation. ### How to configure an SSH proxy server with Squid Friday 17th of July 2020 08:00:00 AM Sometimes you can’t connect to an SSH server from your current location. Other times, you may want to add an extra layer of security to your SSH connection. In these cases connecting to another SSH server via a proxy server is one way to get through. Squid is a full-featured proxy server application that provides caching and proxy services. It’s normally used to help improve response times and reduce network bandwidth by reusing and caching previously requested web pages during browsing. However for this setup you’ll configure Squid to be used as an SSH proxy server since it’s a robust trusted proxy server that is easy to configure. Installation and configuration Install the squid package using sudo:$ sudo dnf install squid -y

The squid configuration file is quite extensive but there are only a few things we need to configure. Squid uses access control lists to manage connections.

Edit the /etc/squid/squid.conf file to make sure you have the two lines explained below.

First, specify your local IP network. The default configuration file already has a list of the most common ones but you will need to add yours if it’s not there. For example, if your local IP network range is 192.168.1.X, this is how the line would look:

acl localnet src 192.168.1.0/24

Next, add the SSH port as a safe port by adding the following line:

acl Safe_ports port 22

Save that file. Now enable and restart the squid proxy service:

$sudo systemctl enable squid$ sudo systemctl restart squid

4.) By default squid proxy listens on port 3128. Configure firewalld to allow for this:

$sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=squid --perm$ sudo firewall-cmd --reload Testing the ssh proxy connection

To connect to a server via ssh through a proxy server we’ll be using netcat.

Install nmap-ncat if it’s not already installed:

$sudo dnf install nmap-ncat -y Here is an example of a standard ssh connection:$ ssh user@example.com

Here is how you would connect to that same server using the squid proxy server as a gateway.

This example assumes the squid proxy server’s IP address is 192.168.1.63. You can also use the host-name or the FQDN of the squid proxy server:

$ssh user@example.com -o "ProxyCommand nc --proxy 192.168.1.63:3128 %h %p" Here are the meanings of the options: • ProxyCommand – Tells ssh a proxy command is going to be used. • nc – The command used to establish the connection to the proxy server. This is the netcat command. • %h – The placeholder for the proxy server’s host-name or IP address. • %p – The placeholder for the proxy server’s port number. There are many ways to configure an SSH proxy server but this is a simple way to get started. ### Fedora Classroom Session: Git 101 with Pagure Wednesday 15th of July 2020 08:00:00 AM The Fedora Classroom is a project to help people by spreading knowledge on subjects related to Fedora for others, If you would like to propose a session, feel free to open a ticket here with the tag classroom. If you’re interested in taking a proposed session, kindly let us know and once you take it, you will be awarded the Sensei Badge too as a token of appreciation. Recordings from the previous sessions can be found here. We’re back with another awesome classroom on Git 101 with Pagure led by Akashdeep Dhar (t0xic0der). About the session In short, the Git 101 with Pagure session will be a guide for newcomers on how to get started with Git with the git forge Pagure used by the Fedora community. After finishing the session you will have the knowledge to manage Git and Pagure and generate the first contributions on the Fedora Project. When and where The Classroom session will be organized on Jul 17th, 17:00 UTC. Here’s a link to see what time it is in your timezone. The session will be streamed on Fedora Project’s YouTube channel. Topics covered in the session • Version Control Systems • Why Git? • VCS Hosting Sites • Fedora Pagure • Exploring Pagure • Git Fundamentals About the instructor Akashdeep Dhar is a cybersecurity enthusiast with keen interests in networking, cloud computing and operating systems. He is currently in the final year of his computer science major with cybersecurity minor bachelor degree. He has over five years of experience in using GNU/Linux systems and is new to the Fedora community with contributions made so far in infrastructure, classroom and documentation. If you miss the session, the recording will also be uploaded in the Fedora Project‘s YouTube channel. We hope you can attend and enjoy this experience from some of the awesome people that work in Fedora Project. We look forward to seeing you in the Classroom session. Photograph used in feature image is San Simeon School House by Anita RitenourCC-BY 2.0. ### Automating Network Devices with Ansible Monday 13th of July 2020 03:31:21 PM Ansible is a great automation tool for system and network engineers, with Ansible we can automate small network to a large scale enterprise network. I have been using Ansible to automate both Aruba, and Cisco switches from my Fedora powered laptops for a couple of years. This article covers the requirements and executing a couple of playbooks. Configuring Ansible If Ansible is not installed, it can be installed using the command below$ sudo dnf -y install ansible

Once installed, create a folder in your home directory or a directory of your preference and copy the ansible configuration file. For this demonstration, I will be using the following.

$mkdir -pv /home/$USER/network_automation $sudo cp -v /etc/ansible.cfg /home/$USER/network_automation $cd /home/$USER/network_automation $sudo chown$USER:$USER ansible.cfg && chmod 0600 ansible.cfg To prevent lengthy commands from failing, edit the ansible.cfg and append the following lines. We must add the persistent connection and set the desired time in seconds for the command_timeout as demonstrated below. A use case where this is useful is when you are performing backups of a network device that has a lengthy configuration.$ vim ansible.cfg [persistent_connection] command_timeout = 300 connection_timeout = 30 Requirements

If SELinux is enabled, you will need to install SELinux binding, which is required when using the copy module.

# Install SELinux bindings $sudo dnf -y install python3-libselinux python3-libsemanage Creating the inventory The inventory holds the names of the network assets, and grouping of the assets are in square brackets [], below is a sample inventory. [site_a] Core_A ansible_host=192.168.122.200 Distro_A ansible_host=192.168.122.201 Distro_B ansible_host=192.168.122.202 Group vars can be used to address the common variables, for example, credentials, network operating system, and so on. Ansible document on inventory provides additional details. Playbook Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. They can describe a policy you want your remote systems to enforce, or a set of steps in a general IT process. Ansible Playbook Read Operations Let us create a simple playbook to run a show command to read the configuration on a few switches. 1 --- 2 - name: Basic Playbook 3 hosts: site_a 4 connection: local 5 6 tasks: 7 - name: Get Interface Brief 8 ios_command: 9 commands: 10 - show ip interface brief | e una 11 register: interfaces 12 13 - name: Print results 14 debug: 15 msg: "{{ interfaces.stdout[0] }} The above images show the differences without and with the debug module respectively. Let’s break the playbook into three blocks, starting with lines 1 to 4. • The three dashes/hyphens starts the YAML document • The hosts defines the hosts or host groups, multiple groups are comma-separated • Connection defines the methodology to connect to the network devices. Another option is network_cli (recommended method) and will be used later in this article. See IOS Platform Options for more details. Lines 6 to 11 starts the tasks, we will be using ios_command and ios_config. This play will execute the show command show ip interface brief | e una and save the output from the command into the interfaces variable, with the register key. Lines 13 to 15, by default, when you execute a show command you will not see the output, though this is not used during automation. It is very useful for debugging; therefore, the debug module was used. The below video shows the execution of the playbook. There are a couple of ways you can execute the playbook. • Passing arguments to the command line, for example, include -u <username> -k to prompt for the remote user credentials ansible-playbook -i inventory show_demo.yaml -u admin -k • Include the credentials in the host or group vars ansible-playbook -i inventory show_demo.yaml Never store passwords in plain text. We recommend using SSH keys to authenticate SSH connections. Ansible supports ssh-agent to manage your SSH keys. If you must use passwords to authenticate SSH connections, we recommend encrypting them with Using Vault in Playbooks Passing arguments to the command line Credentials in the inventory If we want to save the output to a file, we will use the copy module as shown in the playbook below. In addition to using the copy module, we will include the backup_dir variable to specify the directory path. --- - name: Get System Infomation hosts: site_a connection: network_cli gather_facts: no vars: backup_dir: /home/eramirez/dev/ansible/fedora_magazine tasks: - name: get system interfaces ios_command: commands: - show ip int br | e una register: interface - name: Save result to disk copy: content: "{{ interface.stdout[0] }}" dest: "{{ backup_dir }}/{{ inventory_hostname }}.txt" To demonstrate the use of variables in the inventory, we will use plain text. This method Must not be used in production. [site_a] Core_A ansible_host=192.168.122.200 Distro_A ansible_host=192.168.122.201 Distro_B ansible_host=192.168.122.202 [all:vars] ansible_connection=network_cli ansible_network_os=ios ansible_user=admin ansible_password=fedora ansible_become=yes ansible_become_password=yes ansible_become_method=enable Write Operations In the previous section, we saw that we could get information from the network devices; in this section, we will write (add/modify) the configuration on these network devices. To make changes to the network device, we will be using the ios config module. Let us create a playbook to configure a couple of interfaces in all of the network devices in site_a. We will first take a backup of the current configuration of all devices in site_a. Lastly, we will save the configuration. --- - name: Get System Infomation hosts: site_a connection: network_cli gather_facts: no vars: backup_dir: /home/eramirez/dev/ansible/fedora_magazine tasks: - name: Backup configs ios_config: backup: yes backup_options: filename: "{{ inventory_hostname }}_running_cfg.txt" dir_path: "{{ backup_dir }}" - name: get system interfaces ios_config: lines: - description Raspberry Pi - switchport mode access - switchport access vlan 100 - spanning-tree portfast - logging event link-status - no shutdown parents: "{{ item }}" with_items: - interface FastEthernet1/12 - interface FastEthernet1/13 - name: Save switch configuration ios_config: save_when: modified Before we execute the playbook, we will first validate the interface configuration. We will then run the playbook and confirm the changes as illustrated below. Conclusion This article is a basic introduction to whet your appetite that demonstrates how Ansible is used to manage network devices. Ansible is capable of automating a vast network, which includes MPLS routing and performing validation before executing the next task. ### Use DNS over TLS Friday 10th of July 2020 08:00:00 AM The Domain Name System (DNS) that modern computers use to find resources on the internet was designed 35 years ago without consideration for user privacy. It is exposed to security risks and attacks like DNS Hijacking. It also allows ISPs to intercept the queries. Luckily, DNS over TLS and DNSSEC are available. DNS over TLS and DNSSEC allow safe and encrypted end-to-end tunnels to be created from a computer to its configured DNS servers. On Fedora, the steps to implement these technologies are easy and all the necessary tools are readily available. This guide will demonstrate how to configure DNS over TLS on Fedora using systemd-resolved. Refer to the documentation for further information about the systemd-resolved service. Step 1 : Set-up systemd-resolved Modify /etc/systemd/resolved.conf so that it is similar to what is shown below. Be sure to enable DNS over TLS and to configure the IP addresses of the DNS servers you want to use.$ cat /etc/systemd/resolved.conf [Resolve] DNS=1.1.1.1 9.9.9.9 DNSOverTLS=yes DNSSEC=yes FallbackDNS=8.8.8.8 1.0.0.1 8.8.4.4 #Domains=~. #LLMNR=yes #MulticastDNS=yes #Cache=yes #DNSStubListener=yes #ReadEtcHosts=yes

A quick note about the options:

• DNS: A space-separated list of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to use as system DNS servers
• FallbackDNS: A space-separated list of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to use as the fallback DNS servers.
• Domains: These domains are used as search suffixes when resolving single-label host names, ~. stand for use the system DNS server defined with DNS= preferably for all domains.
• DNSOverTLS: If true all connections to the server will be encrypted. Note that this mode requires a DNS server that supports DNS-over-TLS and has a valid certificate for it’s IP.

NOTE: The DNS servers listed in the above example are my personal choices. You should decide which DNS servers you want to use; being mindful of whom you are asking IPs for internet navigation.

Step 2 : Tell NetworkManager to push info to systemd-resolved

Create a file in /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d named 10-dns-systemd-resolved.conf.

$cat /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/10-dns-systemd-resolved.conf [main] dns=systemd-resolved systemd-resolved=false The setting shown above (dns=systemd-resolved) will cause NetworkManager to push DNS information acquired from DHCP to the systemd-resolved service. This will override the DNS settings configured in Step 1. This is fine on a trusted network, but feel free to set dns=none instead to use the DNS servers configured in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf. Step 3 : start & restart services To make the settings configured in the previous steps take effect, start and enable systemd-resolved. Then restart NetworkManager. CAUTION: This will lead to a loss of connection for a few seconds while NetworkManager is restarting.$ sudo systemctl start systemd-resolved $sudo systemctl enable systemd-resolved$ sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager

NOTE: Currently, the systemd-resolved service is disabled by default and its use is opt-in. There are plans to enable systemd-resolved by default in Fedora 33.

Step 4 : Check if everything is fine

Now you should be using DNS over TLS. Confirm this by checking DNS resolution status with:

$resolvectl status MulticastDNS setting: yes DNSOverTLS setting: yes DNSSEC setting: yes DNSSEC supported: yes Current DNS Server: 1.1.1.1 DNS Servers: 1.1.1.1 9.9.9.9 Fallback DNS Servers: 8.8.8.8 1.0.0.1 8.8.4.4 /etc/resolv.conf should point to 127.0.0.53$ cat /etc/resolv.conf # Generated by NetworkManager search lan nameserver 127.0.0.53

To see the address and port that systemd-resolved is sending and receiving secure queries on, run:

$sudo ss -lntp | grep '$$State\|:53$$' State Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address:Port Peer Address:Port Process LISTEN 0 4096 127.0.0.53%lo:53 0.0.0.0:* users:(("systemd-resolve",pid=10410,fd=18)) To make a secure query, run:$ resolvectl query fedoraproject.org fedoraproject.org: 8.43.85.67 -- link: wlp58s0 8.43.85.73 -- link: wlp58s0 [..] -- Information acquired via protocol DNS in 36.3ms. -- Data is authenticated: yes BONUS Step 5 : Use Wireshark to verify the configuration

First, install and run Wireshark:

$sudo dnf install wireshark$ sudo wireshark

It will ask you which link device it have to begin capturing packets on. In my case, because I use a wireless interface, I will go ahead with wlp58s0. Set up a filter in Wireshark like tcp.port == 853 (853 is the DNS over TLS protocol port). You need to flush the local DNS caches before you can capture a DNS query:

$sudo resolvectl flush-caches Now run:$ nslookup fedoramagazine.org

You should see a TLS-encryped exchange between your computer and your configured DNS server:

Poster in Cover Image Approved for Release by NSA on 04-17-2018, FOIA Case # 83661

### Running Rosetta@home on a Raspberry Pi with Fedora IoT

Wednesday 8th of July 2020 08:00:00 AM

The Rosetta@home project is a not-for-profit distributed computing project created by the Baker laboratory at the University of Washington. The project uses idle compute capacity from volunteer computers to study protein structure, which is used in research into diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

In common with many other scientific organizations, Rosetta@home is currently expending significant resources on the search for vaccines and treatments for COVID-19.

Rosetta@home uses the open source BOINC platform to manage donated compute resources. BOINC was originally developed to support the SETI@home project searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. These days, it is used by a number of projects in many different scientific fields. A single BOINC client can contribute compute resources to many such projects, though not all projects support all architectures.

For the example shown in this article a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B was used, which is one of the tested reference devices for Fedora IoT. This device, with only 1GB of RAM, is only just powerful enough to be able to make a meaningful contribution to Rosetta@home, and there’s certainly no way the Raspberry Pi can be used for anything else – such as running a desktop environment – at the same time.

It’s also worth mentioning at this point that the first rule of Raspberry Pi computing is to get the recommended power supply. It is important to get as close to the specified 2.5A as you can, and use a good quality micro-usb cable.

Getting Fedora IoT

To install Fedora IoT on a Raspberry Pi, the first step is to download the aarch64 Raw Image from the iot.fedoraproject.org download page.

Then use the arm-image-installer utility (sudo dnf install fedora-arm-installer) to write the image to the SD card. As always, be very sure which device name corresponds to your SD Card before continuing. Check the device with the lsblk command like this:

$lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sdb 8:16 1 59.5G 0 disk └─sdb1 8:17 1 59.5G 0 part /run/media/gavin/154F-1CEC nvme0n1 259:0 0 477G 0 disk ├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 600M 0 part ... If you’re still not sure, try running lsblk with the SD card removed, then again with the SD card inserted and comparing the outputs. In this case it lists the SD card as /dev/sdb. If you’re really unsure, there are some more tips described in the Getting Started guide. We need to tell arm-image-installer which image file to use, what type of device we’re going to be using, and the device name – determined above – to use for writing the image. The arm-image-installer utility is also able to expand the filesystem to use the entire SD card at the point of writing the image. Since we’re not going to use the zezere provisioning server to deploy SSH keys to the Raspberry Pi, we need to specify the option to remove the root password so that we can log in and set it at first boot. In my case, the full command was: sudo arm-image-installer --image ~/Downloads/Fedora-IoT-32-20200603.0.aarch64.raw.xz --target=rpi3 --media=/dev/sdb --resizefs --norootpass After a final confirmation prompt: = Selected Image: = /var/home/gavin/Downloads/Fedora-IoT-32-20200603.0.aarc... = Selected Media : /dev/sdb = U-Boot Target : rpi3 = Root Password will be removed. = Root partition will be resized ===================================================== ***************************************************** ***************************************************** ******** WARNING! ALL DATA WILL BE DESTROYED ******** ***************************************************** ***************************************************** Type 'YES' to proceed, anything else to exit now the image is written to the SD Card. ... = Installation Complete! Insert into the rpi3 and boot. Booting the Raspberry Pi For the initial setup, you’ll need to attach a keyboard and mouse to the Raspberry Pi. Alternatively, you can follow the instructions for connecting with a USB-to-Serial cable. When the Raspberry Pi boots up, just type root at the login prompt and press enter. localhost login: root [root@localhost~]# The first task is to set a password for the root user. [root@localhost~]# passwd Changing password for user root. New password: Retype new password: passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully [root@localhost~]# Verifying Network Connectivity To verify the network connectivity, the checklist in the Fedora IoT Getting Started guide was followed. This system is using a wired ethernet connection, which shows as eth0. If you need to set up a wireless connection this can be done with nmcli. ip addr will allow you to check that you have a valid IP address. [root@localhost ~]# ip addr 1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000 link/ether b8:27:eb:9d:6e:13 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 192.168.178.60/24 brd 192.168.178.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute eth0 valid_lft 863928sec preferred_lft 863928sec inet6 fe80::ba27:ebff:fe9d:6e13/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 3: wlan0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state DOWN group default qlen 1000 link/ether fe:d3:c9:dc:54:25 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff ip route will check that the network has a default gateway configured. [root@localhost ~]# ip route default via 192.168.178.1 dev eth0 proto dhcp metric 100 192.168.178.0/24 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 192.168.178.60 metric 100 To verify internet access and name resolution, use ping [root@localhost ~]# ping -c3 iot.fedoraproject.org PING wildcard.fedoraproject.org (8.43.85.67) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from proxy14.fedoraproject.org (8.43.85.67): icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=93.4 ms 64 bytes from proxy14.fedoraproject.org (8.43.85.67): icmp_seq=2 ttl=46 time=90.0 ms 64 bytes from proxy14.fedoraproject.org (8.43.85.67): icmp_seq=3 ttl=46 time=91.3 ms --- wildcard.fedoraproject.org ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 90.043/91.573/93.377/1.374 ms Optional: Configuring sshd so we can disconnect the keyboard and monitor Before disconnecting the keyboard and monitor, we need to ensure that we can connect to the Raspberry Pi over the network. First we verify that sshd is running [root@localhost~]# systemctl is-active sshd active and that there is a firewall rule present to allow ssh. [root@localhost ~]# firewall-cmd --list-all public (active) target: default icmp-block-inversion: no interfaces: eth0 sources: services: dhcpv6-client mdns ssh ports: protocols: masquerade: no forward-ports: source-ports: icmp-blocks: rich rules: In the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config, find the section named # Authentication and add the line PermitRootLogin yes There will already be a line #PermitRootLogin prohibit-password which you can edit by removing the # comment character and changing the value to yes. Restart the sshd service to pick up the change [root@localhost ~]# systemctl restart sshd If all this is in place, we should be able to ssh to the Raspberry Pi. [gavin@desktop ~]$ ssh root@192.168.178.60 The authenticity of host '192.168.178.60 (192.168.178.60)' can't be established. ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:DLdFaYbvKhB6DG2lKmJxqY2mbrbX5HDRptzWMiAUgBM. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes Warning: Permanently added '192.168.178.60' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts. root@192.168.178.60's password: Boot Status is GREEN - Health Check SUCCESS Last login: Wed Apr 1 17:24:50 2020 [root@localhost ~]#

It’s now safe to log out from the console (exit) and disconnect the keyboard and monitor.

Disabling unneeded services

Since we’re right on the lower limit of viable hardware for Rosetta@home, it’s worth disabling any unneeded services. Fedora IoT is much more lightweight than desktop distributions, but there are still a few optimizations we can do.

Like disabling bluetooth, Modem Manager (used for cellular data connections), WPA supplicant (used for Wi-Fi) and the zezere services, which are used to centrally manage a fleet of Fedora IoT devices.

[root@localhost /]# for serviceName in bluetooth ModemManager wpa_supplicant zezere_ignition zezere_ignition.timer zezere_ignition_banner; do sudo systemctl stop $serviceName; sudo systemctl disable$serviceName; sudo systemctl mask $serviceName; done Getting the BOINC client Instead of installing the BOINC client directly onto the operating system with rpm-ostree, we’re going to use podman to run the containerized version of the client. This image uses a volume mount to store its data, so we create the directories it needs in advance. [root@localhost ~]# mkdir -p /opt/appdata/boinc/slots /opt/appdata/boinc/locale We also need to add a firewall rule to allow the container to resolve external DNS names. [root@localhost ~]# firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=trusted --add-interface=cni-podman0 success [root@localhost ~]# systemctl restart firewalld Finally we are ready to pull and run the BOINC client container. [root@localhost ~]# podman run --name boinc -dt -p 31416:31416 -v /opt/appdata/boinc:/var/lib/boinc:Z -e BOINC_GUI_RPC_PASSWORD="blah" -e BOINC_CMD_LINE_OPTIONS="--allow_remote_gui_rpc" boinc/client:arm64v8 Trying to pull... ... ... 787a26c34206e75449a7767c4ad0dd452ec25a501f719c2e63485479f... We can inspect the container logs to make sure everything is working as expected: [root@localhost ~]# podman logs boinc 20-Jun-2020 09:02:44 [---] cc_config.xml not found - using defaults 20-Jun-2020 09:02:44 [---] Starting BOINC client version 7.14.12 for aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu ... ... ... 20-Jun-2020 09:02:44 [---] Checking presence of 0 project files 20-Jun-2020 09:02:44 [---] This computer is not attached to any projects 20-Jun-2020 09:02:44 Initialization completed Configuring the BOINC container to run at startup We can automatically generate a systemd unit file for the container with podman generate systemd. [root@localhost ~]# podman generate systemd --files --name boinc /root/container-boinc.service This creates a systemd unit file in root’s home directory. [root@localhost ~]# cat container-boinc.service # container-boinc.service # autogenerated by Podman 1.9.3 # Sat Jun 20 09:13:58 UTC 2020 [Unit] Description=Podman container-boinc.service Documentation=man:podman-generate-systemd(1) Wants=network.target After=network-online.target [Service] Environment=PODMAN_SYSTEMD_UNIT=%n Restart=on-failure ExecStart=/usr/bin/podman start boinc ExecStop=/usr/bin/podman stop -t 10 boinc PIDFile=/var/run/containers/storage/overlay-containers/787a26c34206e75449a7767c4ad0dd452ec25a501f719c2e63485479fbe21631/userdata/conmon.pid KillMode=none Type=forking [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target We install the file by moving it to the appropriate directory. [root@localhost ~]# mv -Z container-boinc.service /etc/systemd/system [root@localhost ~]# systemctl enable /etc/systemd/system/container-boinc.service Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/container-boinc.service → /etc/systemd/system/container-boinc.service. Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/default.target.wants/container-boinc.service → /etc/systemd/system/container-boinc.service. Connecting to the Rosetta Stone project You need to create an account at the Rosetta@home signup page, and retrieve your account key from your account home page. The key to copy is the “Weak Account Key”. Finally, we execute the boinccmd configuration utility inside the container using podman exec, passing the Rosetta@home url and our account key. [root@localhost ~]# podman exec boinc boinccmd --project_attach https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ 2160739_cadd20314e4ef804f1d95ce2862c8f73 Running podman logs –follow boinc will allow us to see the container connecting to the project. You will probably see errors of the form 20-Jun-2020 10:18:40 [Rosetta@home] Rosetta needs 1716.61 MB RAM but only 845.11 MB is available for use. This is because most, but not all, of the work units in Rosetta@Home require more memory than we have to offer. However, if you leave the device running for a while, it should eventually get some jobs to process. The polling interval seems to be approximately 10 minutes. We can also tweak the memory settings using BOINC manager to allow BOINC to use slightly more memory. This will increase the probability that Rosetta@home will be able to find tasks for us. Installing BOINC Manager for remote access You can use dnf to install the BOINC manager component to remotely manage the BOINC client on the Raspberry Pi. [gavin@desktop ~]$ sudo dnf install boinc-manager

If you switch to “Advanced View” , you will be able to select “File -> Select Computer” and connect to your Raspberry Pi, using the IP address of the Pi and the value supplied for BOINC_GUI_RPC_PASSWORD in the podman run command, in my case “blah“.

Press Shift+Ctrl+I to connect BOINC manager to a remote computer

Under “Options -> Computing Preferences”, increase the value for “When Computer is not in use, use at most _ %”. I’ve been using 93%; this seems to allow Rosetta@home to schedule work on the pi, whilst still leaving it just about usable. It is possible that further fine tuning of the operating system might allow this percentage to be increased.

Using the Computing Preferences Dialog to set the memory threshhold

These settings can also be changed through the Rosetta@home website settings page, but bear in mind that changes made through the BOINC Manager client override preferences set in the web interface.

Wait

It may take a while, possibly several hours, for Rosetta@home to send work to our newly installed client, particularly as most work units are too big to run on a Raspberry Pi. COVID-19 has resulted in a large number of new computers being joined to the Rosetta@home project, which means that there are times when there isn’t enough work to do.

When we are assigned some work units, BOINC will download several hundred megabytes of data. This will be stored on the SD Card and can be viewed using BOINC manager.

We can also see the tasks running in the Tasks pane:

The client has downloaded four tasks, but only one of them is currently running due to memory constraints. At times, two tasks can run simultaneously, but I haven’t seen more than that. This is OK as long as the tasks are completed by the deadline shown on the right. I’m fairly confident these will be completed as long as the Raspberry Pi is left running. I have found that the additional memory overhead created by the BOINC Manager connection and sshd services can reduce parallelism, so I try to disconnect these when I’m not using them.

Conclusion

Rosetta@home, in common with many other distributed computing projects, is currently experiencing a large spike in participation due to COVID-19. That aside, the project has been doing valuable work for many years to combat a number of other diseases.

Whilst a Raspberry Pi is never going to appear at the top of the contribution chart, I think this is a worthwhile project to undertake with a spare Raspberry Pi. The existence of work units aimed at low-spec ARM devices indicates that the project organizers agree with this sentiment. I’ll certainly be leaving mine running for the foreseeable future.

### Demonstrating Perl with Tic-Tac-Toe, Part 3

Friday 3rd of July 2020 08:00:00 AM

The articles in this series have mainly focused on Perl’s ability to manipulate text. Perl was designed to manipulate and analyze text. But Perl is capable of much more. More complex problems often require working with sets of data objects and indexing and comparing them in elaborate ways to compute some desired result.

For working with sets of data objects, Perl provides arrays and hashes. Hashes are also known as associative arrays or dictionaries. This article will prefer the term hash because it is shorter.

The remainder of this article builds on the previous articles in this series by demonstrating basic use of arrays and hashes in Perl.

An example Perl program

Copy and paste the below code into a plain text file and use the same one-liner that was provided in the the first article of this series to strip the leading numbers. Name the version without the line numbers chip2.pm and move it into the hal subdirectory. Use the version of the game that was provided in the second article so that the below chip will automatically load when placed in the hal subdirectory.

00 # advanced operations chip 01 02 package chip2; 03 require chip1; 04 05 use strict; 06 use warnings; 07 08 use constant SCORE=>' 09 ┌───┬───┬───┐ 10 │ 3 │ 2 │ 3 │ 11 ├───┼───┼───┤ 12 │ 2 │ 4 │ 2 │ 13 ├───┼───┼───┤ 14 │ 3 │ 2 │ 3 │ 15 └───┴───┴───┘ 16 '; 17 18 sub get_prob { 19 my $game = shift; 20 my @nums; 21 my %odds; 22 23 while ($game =~ /[1-9]/g) { 24 $odds{$&} = substr(SCORE, $-[0], 1); 25 } 26 27 @nums = sort {$odds{$b} <=>$odds{$a} } keys %odds; 28 29 return$nums[0]; 30 } 31 32 sub win_move { 33 my $game = shift; 34 my$mark = shift; 35 my $tkns = shift; 36 my @nums =$game =~ /[1-9]/g; 37 my $move; 38 39 TRY: for (@nums) { 40 my$num = $_; 41 my$try = $game =~ s/$num/$mark/r; 42 my$vic = chip1::get_victor $try,$tkns; 43 44 if (defined $vic) { 45$move = $num; 46 last TRY; 47 } 48 } 49 50 return$move; 51 } 52 53 sub hal_move { 54 my $game = shift; 55 my$mark = shift; 56 my @mark = @{ shift; }; 57 my $move; 58 59$move = win_move $game,$mark, \@mark; 60 61 if (not defined $move) { 62$mark = ($mark eq$mark[0]) ? $mark[1] :$mark[0]; 63 $move = win_move$game, $mark, \@mark; 64 } 65 66 if (not defined$move) { 67 $move = get_prob$game; 68 } 69 70 return $move; 71 } 72 73 sub complain { 74 print "My mind is going. I can feel it.\n"; 75 } 76 77 sub import { 78 no strict; 79 no warnings; 80 81 my$p = __PACKAGE__; 82 my $c = caller; 83 84 *{$c . '::hal_move' } = \&{ $p . '::hal_move' }; 85 *{$c . '::complain' } = \&{ $p . '::complain' }; 86 } 87 88 1; How it works In the above example Perl module, each position on the Tic-Tac-Toe board is assigned a score based on the number of winning combinations that intersect it. The center square is crossed by four winning combinations – one horizontal, one vertical, and two diagonal. The corner squares each intersect one horizontal, one vertical, and one diagonal combination. The side squares each intersect one horizontal and one vertical combination. The get_prob subroutine creates a hash named odds (line 21) and uses it to map the numbers on the current game board to their score (line 24). The keys of the hash are then sorted by their score and the resulting list is copied to the nums array (line 27). The get_prob subroutine then returns the first element of the nums array ($nums[0]) which is the number from the original game board that has the highest score.

The algorithm described above is an example of what is called a heuristic in artificial intelligence programming. With the addition of this module, the Tic-Tac-Toe game can be considered a very rudimentary artificial intelligence program. It is really just playing the odds though and it is quite beatable. The next module (chip3.pm) will provide an algorithm that actually calculates the best possible move based on the opponent’s counter moves.

The win_move subroutine simply tries placing the provided mark in each available position and passing the resulting game board to chip1’s get_victor subroutine to see if it contains a winning combination. Notice that the r flag is being passed to the substitution operation (s/$num/$mark/r) on line 41 so that, rather than modifying the original game board, a new copy of the board containing the substitution is created and returned.

Arrays

It was mentioned in part one that arrays are variables whose names are prefixed with an at symbol (@) when they are created. In Perl, these prefixed symbols are called sigils.

Context

In Perl, many things return a different value depending on the context in which they are accessed. The two contexts to be aware of are called scalar context and list context. In the following example, $value1 and$value2 are different because @nums is accessed first in scalar context and then in list context.

$value1 = @nums; ($value2) = @nums;

In the above example, it might seem like @nums should return the same value each time it is accessed, but it doesn’t because what is accessing it (the context) is different. $value1 is a scalar, so it receives the scalar value of @nums which is its length. ($value2) is a list, so it receives the list value of @nums. In the above example, $value2 will receive the value of the first element of the nums array. In part one, the below statement from the get_mark subroutine copied the numbers from the current Tic-Tac-Toe board into an array named nums. @nums =$game =~ /[1-9]/g

Since the nums array in the above statement receives one copy of each board number in each of its elements, the count of the board numbers is equal to the length of the array. In Perl, the length of an array is obtained by accessing it in scalar context.

Next, the following formula was used to compute which mark should be placed on the Tic-Tac-Toe board in the next turn.

$indx = (@nums+1) % 2; Because the plus operator requires a single value (a scalar) on its left hand side, not a list of values, the nums array evaluates to its length, not the list of its values. The parenthesis, in the above example, are just being used to set the order of operations so that the addition (+) will happen before the modulo (%). Copying In Perl you can create a list for immediate use by surrounding the list values with parenthesis and separating them with commas. The following example creates a three-element list and copies its values to an array. @nums = (4, 5, 6); As long as the elements of the list are variables and not constants, you can also copy the elements of an array to a list: ($four, $five,$six) = @nums;

If there were more elements in the array than the list in the above example, the extra elements would simply be discarded.

Different from lists in scalar context

Be aware that lists and arrays are different things in Perl. A list accessed in scalar context returns its last value, not its length. In the following example, $value3 receives 3 (the length of @nums) while$value4 receives 6 (the last element of the list).

$value3 = @nums;$value4 = (4, 5, 6); Indexing

To access an individual element of an array or list, suffix it with the desired index in square brackets as shown on line 29 of the above example Perl module.

Notice that the nums array on line 29 is prefixed with the dollar sigil ($) rather than the at sigil (@). This is done because the get_prob subroutine is supposed to return a single value, not a list. If @nums[0] were used instead of$nums[0], the subroutine would return a one-element list. Since a list evaluates to its last element in scalar context, this program would probably work if I had used @nums[0], but if you mean to retrieve a single element from an array, be sure to use the dollar sigil ($), not the at sigil (@). It is possible to retrieve a subset from an array (or a list) rather than just one value in which case you would use the at sigil and you would provide a series of indexes or a range instead of a single index. This is what is known in Perl as a list slice. Hashes Hashes are variables whose names are prefixed with the percent sigil (%) when they are created. They are subscripted with curly brackets ({}) when accessing individual elements or subsets of elements (hash slices). Like arrays, hashes are variables that can hold multiple discrete data elements. They differ from arrays in the following ways: 1. Hashes are indexed by strings (or anything that can be converted to a string), not numbers. 2. Hashes are unordered. If you retrieve a list of their keys, values or key-value pairs, the order of the listing will be random. 3. The number of elements in the hash will be equal to the number of keys that have been assigned values. If a value is assigned to index 99 of an array that has only three elements (indexes 0-2), the array will grow to a length of 100 elements (indexes 0-99). If a value is assigned to a new key in a hash that has only three elements, the hash will grow by only one element. As with arrays, if you mean to access (or assign to) a single element of a hash, you should prefix it with the dollar sigil ($). When accessing a single element, Perl will go by the type of the subscript to determine the type of variable being accessed – curly brackets ({}) for hashes or square brackets ([]) for arrays. The get_prob subroutine in the above Perl module demonstrates assigning to and accessing individual elements of a hash.

Perl has two special built-in functions for working with hashes – keys and values. The keys function, when provided a hash, returns a list of all the hash’s keys (indexes). Similarly, the values function will return a list of all the hash’s values. Remember though that the order in which the list is returned is random. This randomness can be seen when playing the Tic-Tac-Toe game. If there is more than one move available with the highest score, the computer will chose one at random because the keys function returns the available moves from the odds hash in random order.

On line 27 of the above example Perl module, the keys function is being used to retrieve the list of keys from the odds hash. The keys of the odds hash are the numbers that were found on the current game board. The values of the odds hash are the corresponding probabilities that were retrieved from the SCORE constant on line 24.

Admittedly, this example could have used an array instead of a string to store and retrieve the scores. I chose to use a string simply because I think it presents the layout of the board a little nicer. An array would likely perform better, but with such a small data set, the difference is probably too small to measure.

Sort

On line 27, the list of keys from the odds hash is being feed to Perl’s built-in sort function. Beware that Perl’s sort function sorts lexicographically by default, not numerically. For example, provided the list (10, 9, 8, 1), Perl’s sort function will return the list (1, 10, 8, 9).

The behavior of Perl’s sort function can be modified by providing it a code block as its first parameter as demonstrated on line 27. The result of the last statement in the code block should be a number less-than, equal-to, or greater-than zero depending on whether element $a should be placed before, concurrent-with, or after element$b in the resulting list respectively. $a and$b are pairs of elements from the provided list. The code in the block is executed repeatedly with $a and$b set to different pairs of elements from the original list until all the pairs have been compared and sorted.

The <=> operator is a special Perl operator that returns -1, 0, or 1 depending on whether the left argument is numerically less-than, equal-to, or greater-than the right argument respectively. By using the <=> operator in the code block of the sort function, Perl’s sort function can be made to sort numerically rather than lexicographically.

Notice that rather than comparing $a and$b directly, they are first being passed through the odds hash. Since the values of the odds hash are the probabilities that were retrieved from the SCORE constant, what is being compared is actually the score of $a versus the score of$b. Consequently, the numbers from the original game board are being sorted by their score, not their value. Numbers with an equal score are left in the same random order that the keys function returned them.

Notice also that I have reversed the typical order of the parameters to <=> in the code block of the sort function ($b on the left and$a on the right). By switching their order in this way, I have caused the sort function to return the elements in reverse order – from greatest to least – so that the number(s) with the highest score will be first in the list.

References

References provide an indirect means of accessing a variable. They are often used when making copies of the variable is either undesirable or impractical. References are a sort of short cut that allows you to skip performing the copy and instead provide access to the original variable.

Why to use references

There is a cost in time and memory associated with making copies of variables. References are sometimes used as a means of reducing that cost. Be aware, however, that recent versions of Perl implement a technology called copy-on-write that greatly reduces the cost of copying variables. This new optimization should work transparently. You don’t have to do anything special to enable the copy-on-write optimization.

Why not to use references

References violate the action-at-a-distance principle that was mentioned in part one of this series. References are just as bad as global variables in terms of their tendency to trip up programmers by allowing data to be modified outside the local scope. You should generally try to avoid using references. But there are times when they are necessary.

How to create references

An example of passing a reference is provided on line 59 of the above Perl module. Rather than placing the mark array directly in the list of parameters to the win_move subroutine, a reference to the array is provided instead by prefixing the variable’s sigil with a backslash (\).

It is necessary to use a reference (\@mark) on line 59 because if the array were placed directly on the list, it would expand such that the first element of the mark array would become the third parameter to the win_move function, the second element of the mark array would become the fourth parameter to the win_move function, and so on for as many elements as the mark array has. Whereas an array will expand in list context, a reference will not. If the array were passed in expanded form, the receiving subroutine would need to call shift once for each element of the array. Also, the receiving function would not be able to tell how long the original array was.

Three ways to dereference references

In the receiving subroutine, the reference has to be dereferenced to get at the original values. An example of dereferencing an array reference is provided on line 56. On line 56, the shift statement has been enclosed in curly brackets and the opening bracket has been prefixed with the array sigil (@).

There is also a shorter form for dereferencing an array reference that is demonstrated on line 43 of the chip1.pm module. The short form allows you to omit the curly brackets and instead place the array sigil directly in front of the sigil of the scalar that holds the array reference. The short form only works when you have an array reference stored in a scalar. When the array reference is coming from a function, as it is on line 56 of the above Perl module, the long form must be used.

There is yet a third way of dereferencing an array reference that is demonstrated on line 29 of the game script. Line 29 shows the MARKS array reference being dereferenced with the arrow operator (->) and an index enclosed in square brackets. The MARKS array reference is missing its sigil because it is a constant. You can tell that what is being dereferenced is an array reference because the arrow operator is followed by square brackets ([]). Had the MARKS constant been a hash reference, the arrow operator would have been followed by curly brackets ({}).

There are also corresponding long and short forms for dereferencing hash references that use the hash sigil (%) instead of the array sigil. Note also that hashes, just like arrays, need to be passed by reference to subroutines unless you want them to expand into their constituent elements. The latter is sometimes done in Perl as a clever way of emulating named parameters.

A word of caution about references

It was stated earlier that references allow data to be modified outside of their declared scope and, just as with global variables, this non-local manipulation of the data can be confusing to the programmer(s) and thereby lead to unintended bugs. This is an important point to emphasize and explain.

On line 35 of the win_move subroutine, you can see that I did not dereference the provided array reference (\@mark) but rather I chose to store the reference in a scalar named tkns. I did this because I do not need to access the individual elements of the provided array in the win_move subroutine. I only need to pass the reference on to the get_victor subroutine. Not making a local copy of the array is a short cut, but it is dangerous. Because $tkns is only a copy of the reference, not a copy of the original data being referred to, if I or a later program developer were to write something like$tkns->[0] = ‘Y’ in the win_move subroutine, it would actually modify the value of the mark array in the hal_move subroutine. By passing a reference to its mark array (\@mark) to the win_move subroutine, the hal_move subroutine has granted access to modify its local copy of @mark. In this case, it would probably be better to make a local copy of the mark array in the win_move subroutine using syntax similar to what is shown on line 56 rather than preserving the reference as I have done for the purpose of demonstration on line 35.

Aliases

In addition to references, there is another way that a local variable created with the my or state keyword can leak into the scope of a called subroutine. The list of parameters that you provide to a subroutine is directly accessible in the @_ array.

To demonstrate, the following example script prints b, not a, because the inc subroutine accesses the first element of @_ directly rather than first making a local copy of the parameter.

#!/usr/bin/perl sub inc { $_[0]++; } MAIN: { my$var = 'a'; inc $var; print "$var\n"; }

Aliases are different from references in that you don’t have to dereference them to get at their values. They really are just alternative names for the same variable. Be aware that aliases occur in a few other places as well. One such place is the list returned from the sort function – if you were to modify an element of the returned list directly, without first copying it to another variable, you would actually be modifying the element in the original list that was provided to the sort function. Other places where aliases occur include the code blocks of functions like grep and map. The grep and map functions are not covered in this series of articles. See the provided links if you want to know more about them.

Final notes

Many of Perl’s built-in functions will operate on the default scalar ($_) or default array (@_) if they are not explicitly provided a variable to read from or write to. Line 40 of the above Perl module provides an example. The numbers from the nums array are sequentially aliased to$_ by the for keyword. If you chose to use these variables, in most cases you will probably want to retrieve your data from $_ or @_ fairly quickly to prevent it being accidentally overwritten by a subsequent command. The substitution command (s/…/…/), for example, will manipulate the data stored in$_ if it is not explicitly bound to another variable by one of the =~ or !~ operators. Likewise, the shift function operates on @_ (or @ARGV if called in the global scope) if it is not explicitly provided an array to operate on. There is no obvious rule to which functions support this shortcut. You will have to consult the documentation for the command you are interested in to see if it will operate on a default variable when not provided one explicitly.

As demonstrated on lines 55 and 56, the same name can be reused for variables of different types. Reusing variable names generally makes the code harder to follow. It is probably better for the sake of readability to avoid variable name reuse.

Beware that making copies of arrays or hashes in Perl (as demonstrated on line 56) is shallow by default. If any of the elements of the array or hash are references, the corresponding elements in the duplicated array or hash will be references to the same original data. To make deep copies of data structures, use one of the Clone or Storable Perl modules. An alternative workaround that may work in the case of multi-dimensional arrays is to emulate them with a one-dimensional hash.

Similar in form to Perl’s syntax for creating lists – (1, 2, 3) – unnamed array references and unnamed hash references can be constructed on the fly by bounding a comma-separated set of elements in square brackets ([]) or curly brackets ({}) respectively. Line 07 of the game script demonstrates an unnamed (anonymous) array reference being constructed and assigned to the MARKS constant.

Notice that the import subroutine at the end of the above Perl module (chip2.pm) is assigning to some of the same names in the calling namespace as the previous module (chip1.pm). This is intentional. The hal_move and complain aliases created by chip1’s import subroutine will simply be overridden by the identically named aliases created by chip2’s import subroutine (assuming chip2.pm is loaded after chip1.pm in the calling namespace). Only the aliases are updated/overridden. The original subroutines from chip1 will still exist and can still be called with their full names – chip1::hal_move and chip1::complain.

### Customizing Bash

Wednesday 1st of July 2020 08:00:00 AM

The outermost layer of your operating system – the part you interact with – is called the shell. Fedora comes with several preinstalled shells. Shells can be either graphical or text-based. In documentation, you will often see the acronyms GUI (Graphical User Interface) and CLI (Command-Line Interface) used to distinguish between graphical and text-based shells/interfaces. Other GUI and CLI shells can be used, but GNOME is Fedora’s default GUI and Bash is its default CLI.

The remainder of this article will cover recommended dotfile practices for the Bash CLI.

Bash overview

From the Bash reference manual:

At its base, a shell is simply a macro processor that executes commands. The term macro processor means functionality where text and symbols are expanded to create larger expressions.

Reference Documentation for Bash
Edition 5.0, for Bash Version 5.0.
May 2019

In addition to helping the user start and interact with other programs, the Bash shell also includes several built-in commands and keywords. Bash’s built-in functionality is extensive enough that it is considered a high-level programming language in its own right. Several of Bash’s keywords and operators resemble those of the C programming language.

Bash can be invoked in either interactive or non-interactive mode. Bash’s interactive mode is the typical terminal/command-line interface that most people are familiar with. GNOME Terminal, by default, launches Bash in interactive mode. An example of when Bash runs in non-interactive mode is when commands and data are piped to it from a file or shell script. Other modes of operation that Bash can operate in include: login, non-login, remote, POSIX, unix sh, restricted, and with a different UID/GID than the user. Various combinations of these modes are possible. For example interactive+restricted+POSIX or non-interactive+non-login+remote. Which startup files Bash will process depends on the combination of modes that are requested when it is invoked. Understanding these modes of operation is necessary when modifying the startup files.

According to the Bash reference manual, Bash …

1. Reads its input from a file …, from a string supplied as an argument to the -c invocation option …, or from the user’s terminal.

2. Breaks the input into words and operators, obeying [its] quoting rules. … These tokens are separated by metacharacters. Alias expansion is performed by this step.

3. Parses the tokens into simple and compound commands.

4. Performs the various shell expansions …, breaking the expanded tokens into lists of filenames … and commands and arguments.

5. Performs any necessary redirections … and removes the redirection operators and their operands from the argument list.

6. Executes the command.

7. Optionally waits for the command to complete and collects its exit status.

Reference Documentation for Bash
Edition 5.0, for Bash Version 5.0.
May 2019

When a user starts a terminal emulator to access the command line, an interactive shell session is started. GNOME Terminal, by default, launches the user’s shell in non-login mode. Whether GNOME Terminal launches the shell in login or non-login mode can be configured under EditPreferencesProfilesCommand. Login mode can also be requested by passing the –login flag to Bash on startup. Also note that Bash’s login and non-interactive modes are not exclusive. It is possible to run Bash in both login and non-interactive mode at the same time.

Invoking Bash

Unless it is passed the noprofile flag, a Bash login shell will read and execute the commands found in certain initialization files. The first of those files is /etc/profile if it exists, followed by one of ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, or ~/.profile; searched in that order. When the user exits the login shell, or if the script calls the exit built-in in the case of a non-interactive login shell, Bash will read and execute the commands found in ~/.bash_logout followed by /etc/bash_logout if it exists. The file /etc/profile will normally source /etc/bashrc, reading and executing commands found there, then search through /etc/profile.d for any files with an sh extension to read and execute. As well, the file ~/.bash_profile will normally source the file ~/.bashrc. Both /etc/bashrc and ~/.bashrc have checks to prevent double sourcing.

An interactive shell that is not a login shell, will source the ~/.bashrc file when it is first invoked. This is the usual type of shell a user will enter when opening a terminal on Fedora. When Bash is started in non-interactive mode – as it is when running a shell script – it will look for the BASH_ENV variable in the environment. If it is found, will expand the value, and use the expanded value as the name of a file to read and execute. Bash behaves just as if the following command were executed:

if [ -n "$BASH_ENV" ]; then . "$BASH_ENV"; fi

It is important to note that the value of the PATH variable is not used to search for the filename.

Important user-specific dotfiles

Bash’s best-known user dotfile is ~/.bashrc. Most user customization is done by editing this file. Most user customization, may be a stretch since there are reasons to modify all of the mentioned files; as well as other files that have not been mentioned. Bash’s environment is designed to be highly customizable in order to suit the needs of many different users with many different tastes.

When a Bash login shell exits cleanly, ~/.bash_logout and then /etc/bash_logout will be called if they exist. The next diagram is a sequence diagram showing the process Bash follows when being invoked as an interactive shell. The below sequence is followed, for example, when the user opens a terminal emulator from their desktop environment.

Armed with the knowledge of how Bash behaves under different invocation methods, it becomes apparent that there are only a few typical invocation methods to be most concerned with. These are the non-interactive and interactive login shell, and the non-interactive and interactive non-login shell. If global environment customizations are needed, then the desired settings should be placed in a uniquely-named file with a .sh extension (custom.sh, for example) and that file should be placed in the /etc/profile.d directory.

The non-interactive, non-login invocation method needs special attention. This invocation method causes Bash to check the BASH_ENV variable. If this variable is defined, the file it references will be sourced. Note that the values stored in the PATH environment variable are not utilized when processing BASH_ENV. So it must contain the full path to the file to be sourced. For example, if someone wanted the settings from their ~/.bashrc file to be available to shell scripts they run non-interactively, they could place something like the following in a file named /etc/profile.d/custom.sh

# custom.sh . . . #If Fedora Workstation BASH_ENV="/home/username/.bashrc" . . . #If Fedora Silverblue Workstation BASH_ENV="/var/home/username/.bashrc" export BASH_ENV

The above profile drop-in script will cause the user’s ~/.bashrc file to be sourced just before every shell script is executed.

Users typically customizie their system environment so that it will better fit their work habits and preferences. An example of the sort of customization that a user can make is an alias. Commands frequently run with the same set of starting parameters are good candidates for aliases. Some example aliases are provided in the ~/.bashrc file shown below.

# .bashrc # Source global definitions if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then . /etc/bashrc fi . . . # User specific aliases and functions alias ls='ls -hF --color=auto' alias la='ls -ahF --color=auto' # make the dir command work kinda like in windows (long format) alias dir='ls --color=auto --format=long' # make grep highlight results using color alias grep='grep --color=auto'

Aliases are a way to customize various commands on your system. They can make commands more convenient to use and reduce your keystrokes. Per-user aliases are often configured in the user’s ~/.bashrc file.

If you find you are looking back through your command line history a lot, you may want to configure your history settings. Per-user history options can also be configured in ~/.bashrc. For example, if you have a habit of using multiple terminals at once, you might want to enable the histappend option. Bash-specific shell options that are boolean in nature (take either on or off as a value) are typically enabled or disabled using the shopt built-in command. Bash settings that take a more complex value (for example, HISTTIMEFORMAT) tend to be configured by assigning the value to an environment variable. Customizing Bash with both shell options and environment variable is demonstrated below.

# Configure Bash History # Expand dir env vars on tab and set histappend shopt -s direxpand histappend # - ignoreboth = ignorespace and ignoredup HISTCONTROL='ignoreboth' # Controls the format of the time in output of history HISTTIMEFORMAT="[%F %T] " # Infinite history # NB: on newer bash, anything < 0 is the supported way, but on CentOS/RHEL # at least, only this works HISTSIZE= HISTFILESIZE= # or for those of us on newer Bash HISTSIZE=-1 HISTFILESIZE=-1

The direxpand option shown in the example above will cause Bash to replace directory names with the results of word expansion when performing filename completion. This will change the contents of the readline editing buffer, so what you typed is masked by what the completion expands it to.

The HISTCONTROL variable is used to enable or disable some filtering options for the command history. Duplicate lines, lines with leading blank spaces, or both can be filtered from the command history by configuring this setting. To quote Dusty Mabe, the engineer I got the tip from:

ignoredup makes history not log duplicate entries (if you are running a command over and over). ignorespace ignores entries with a space in the front, which is useful if you are setting an environment variable with a secret or running a command with a secret that you don’t want logged to disk. ignoreboth does both.

Dusty Mabe – Redhat Principle Software Engineer, June 19, 2020

For users who do a lot of work on the command line, Bash has the CDPATH environment variable. If CDPATH is configured with a list of directories to search, the cd command, when provided a relative path as its first argument, will check all the listed directories in order for a matching subdirectory and change to the first one found.

# .bash_profile # set CDPATH CDPATH="/var/home/username/favdir1:/var/home/username/favdir2:/var/home/username/favdir3" # or could look like this CDPATH="/:~:/var:~/favdir1:~/favdir2:~/favdir3"

CDPATH should be updated the same way PATH is typically updated – by referencing itself on the right hand side of the assignment to preserve the previous values.

# .bash_profile # set CDPATH CDPATH="/var/home/username/favdir1:/var/home/username/favdir2:/var/home/username/favdir3" # or could look like this CDPATH="/:~:/var:~/favdir1:~/favdir2:~/favdir3" CDPATH="$CDPATH:~/favdir4:~/favdir5" PATH is another very important variable. It is the search path for commands on the system. Be aware that some applications require that their own directories be included in the PATH variable to function properly. As with CDPATH, appending new values to PATH can be done by referencing the old values on the right hand side of the assignment. If you want to prepend the new values instead, simply place the old values ($PATH) at the end of the list. Note that on Fedora, the list values are separated with the colon character (:).

# .bash_profile # Add PATH values to the PATH Environment Variable PATH="$PATH:~/bin:~:/usr/bin:/bin:~/jdk-13.0.2:~/apache-maven-3.6.3" export PATH The command prompt is another popular candidate for customization. The command prompt has seven customizable parameters: PROMPT_COMMAND If set, the value is executed as a command prior to issuing each primary prompt ($PS1).

PROMPT_DIRTRIM If set to a number greater than zero, the value is used as the number of trailing directory components to retain when expanding the \w and \W prompt string escapes. Characters removed are replaced with an ellipsis.

PS0 The value of this parameter is expanded like PS1 and displayed by interactive shells after reading a command and before the command is executed.

PS1 The primary prompt string. The default value is ‘\s-\v\$‘. … PS2 The secondary prompt string. The default is ‘> ‘. PS2 is expanded in the same way as PS1 before being displayed. PS3 The value of this parameter is used as the prompt for the select command. If this variable is not set, the select command prompts with ‘#? PS4 The value of this parameter is expanded like PS1 and the expanded value is the prompt printed before the command line is echoed when the -x option is set. The first character of the expanded value is replicated multiple times, as necessary, to indicate multiple levels of indirection. The default is ‘+ ‘. Reference Documentation for Bash Edition 5.0, for Bash Version 5.0. May 2019 An entire article could be devoted to this one aspect of Bash. There are copious quantities of information and examples available. Some example dotfiles, including prompt reconfiguration, are provided in a repository linked at the end of this article. Feel free to use and experiment with the examples provided in the repository. Conclusion Now that you are armed with a little knowledge about how Bash works, feel free to modify your Bash dotfiles to suit your own needs and preferences. Pretty up your prompt. Go nuts making aliases. Or otherwise make your computer truly yours. Examine the content of /etc/profile, /etc/bashrc, and /etc/profile.d/ for inspiration. Some comments about terminal emulators are fitting here. There are ways to setup your favorite terminal to behave exactly as you want. You may have already realized this, but often this modification is done with a … wait for it … dotfile in the users home directory. The terminal emulator can also be started as a login session, and some people always use login sessions. How you use your terminal, and your computer, will have a bearing on how you modify (or not) your dotfiles. If you’re curious about what type session you are in at the command line the following script can help you determine that. #!/bin/bash case "$-" in (*i*) echo This shell is interactive ;; (*) echo This shell is not interactive ;; esac

Place the above in a file, mark it executable, and run it to see what type of shell you are in. $- is a variable in Bash that contains the letter i when the shell is interactive. Alternatively, you could just echo the$- variable and inspect the output for the presence of the i flag:

$echo$- Reference information

The below references can be consulted for more information and examples. The Bash man page is also a great source of information. Note that your local man page is guaranteed to document the features of the version of Bash you are running whereas information found online can sometimes be either too old (outdated) or too new (not yet available on your system).

https://opensource.com/tags/command-line

You will have to enter a valid email address at the above site, or sign up, to download from it.

https://opensource.com/article/19/12/bash-script-template

Community members who provided contributions to this article in the form of example dotfiles, tips, and other script files:

• Micah Abbott – Principal Quality Engineer
• John Lebon – Principal Software Engineer
• Dusty Mabe – Principal Software Engineer
• Colin Walters – Senior Principal Software Engineer

A repository of example dotfiles and scripts can be found here:

https://github.com/TheOneandOnlyJakfrost/bash-article-repo

Please carefully review the information provided in the above repository. Some of it may be outdated. There are many examples of not only dotfiles for Bash, but also custom scripts and pet container setups for development. I recommend starting with John Lebon’s dotfiles. They are some of the most detailed I have seen and contain very good descriptions throughout. Enjoy!

### LaTeX typesetting part 2 (tables)

Monday 29th of June 2020 08:00:00 AM

LaTeX offers a number of tools to create and customise tables, in this series we will be using the tabular and tabularx environment to create and customise tables.

Basic table

To create a table you simply specify the environment \begin{tabular}{columns}

\begin{tabular}{c|c} Release &Codename \\ \hline Fedora Core 1 &Yarrow \\ Fedora Core 2 &Tettnang \\ Fedora Core 3 &Heidelberg \\ Fedora Core 4 &Stentz \\ \end{tabular}

In the above example “{c|c}” in the curly bracket refers to the position of the text in the column. The below table summarises the positional argument together with the description.

Position Argument c Position text in the centre l Position text left-justified r Position text right-justified p{width} Align the text at the top of the cell m{width} Align the text in the middle of the cell b{width} Align the text at the bottom of the cell

Both m{width} and b{width} requires the array package to be specified in the preamble.

Using the example above, let us breakdown the important points used and describe a few more options that you will see in this series

Option Description & Defines each cell, the ampersand is only used from the second column \\ This terminates the row and start a new row | Specifies the vertical line in the table (optional) \hline Specifies the horizontal line (optional) *{num}{form} This is handy when you have many columns and is an efficient way of limiting the repetition || Specifies the double vertical line Customizing a table

Now that some of the options available are known, let us create a table using the options described in the previous section.

\begin{tabular}{*{3}{|l|}} \hline \textbf{Version} &\textbf{Code name} &\textbf{Year released} \\ \hline Fedora 6 &Zod &2006 \\ \hline Fedora 7 &Moonshine &2007 \\ \hline Fedora 8 &Werewolf &2007 \\ \hline \end{tabular} Managing long text

With LaTeX, if there are many texts in a column it will not be formatted well and does not look presentable.

The below example shows how long text is formatted, we will use “blindtext” in the preamble so that we can produce sample text.

\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}\hline Summary &Description \\ \hline Test &\blindtext \\ \end{tabular}

As you can see the text exceeds the page width; however, there are a couple of options to overcome this challenge.

• Specify the column width, for example, m{5cm}
• Utilise the tabularx environment, this requires tabularx package in the preamble.
Managing long text with column width

By specifying the column width the text will be wrapped into the width as shown in the example below.

\begin{tabular}{|l|m{14cm}|} \hline Summary &Description \\ \hline Test &\blindtext \\ \hline \end{tabular}\vspace{3mm} Managing long text with tabularx

Before we can leverage tabularx we need to add it in the preamble. Tabularx takes the following example

**\begin{tabularx}{width}{columns}** \begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|l|X|} \hline Summary & Tabularx Description\\ \hline Text &\blindtext \\ \hline \end{tabularx}

Notice that the column that we want the long text to be wrapped has a capital “X” specified.

Multi-row and multi-column

There are times when you will need to merge rows and/or column. This section describes how it is accomplished. To use multi-row and multi-column add multi-row to the preamble.

Multirow

Multirow takes the following argument \multirow{number_of_rows}{width}{text}, let us look at the below example.

\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}\hline Release &Codename \\ \hline Fedora Core 4 &Stentz \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{MultiRow} &Fedora 8 \\ &Werewolf \\ \hline \end{tabular}

In the above example, two rows were specified, the ‘*’ tells LaTeX to automatically manage the size of the cell.

Multicolumn

Multicolumn argument is \multicolumn{number_of_columns}{cell_position}{text}, below example demonstrates multicolumn.

\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|}\hline Release &Codename &Date \\ \hline Fedora Core 4 &Stentz &2005 \\ \hline \multicolumn{3}{|c|}{Mulit-Column} \\ \hline \end{tabular} Working with colours

Colours can be assigned to the text, an individual cell or the entire row. Additionally, we can configure alternating colours for each row.

Before we can add colour to our tables we need to include \usepackage[table]{xcolor} into the preamble. We can also define colours using the following colour reference LaTeX Colour or by adding an exclamation after the colour prefixed by the shade from 0 to 100. For example, gray!30

\definecolor{darkblue}{rgb}{0.0, 0.0, 0.55} \definecolor{darkgray}{rgb}{0.66, 0.66, 0.66}

Below example demonstrate this a table with alternate colours, \rowcolors take the following options \rowcolors{row_start_colour}{even_row_colour}{odd_row_colour}.

\rowcolors{2}{darkgray}{gray!20} \begin{tabular}{c|c} Release &Codename \\ \hline Fedora Core 1 &Yarrow \\ Fedora Core 2 &Tettnang \\ Fedora Core 3 &Heidelberg \\ Fedora Core 4 &Stentz \\ \end{tabular}

In addition to the above example, \rowcolor can be used to specify the colour of each row, this method works best when there are multi-rows. The following examples show the impact of using the \rowcolours with multi-row and how to work around it.

As you can see the multi-row is visible in the first row, to fix this we have to do the following.

\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}\hline \rowcolor{darkblue}\textsc{\color{white}Release} &\textsc{\color{white}Codename} \\ \hline \rowcolor{gray!10}Fedora Core 4 &Stentz \\ \hline \rowcolor{gray!40}&Fedora 8 \\ \rowcolor{gray!40}\multirow{-2}{*}{Multi-Row} &Werewolf \\ \hline \end{tabular}

Let us discuss the changes that were implemented to resolve the multi-row with the alternate colour issue.

• The first row started above the multi-row
• The number of rows was changed from 2 to -2, which means to read from the line above
• \rowcolor was specified for each row, more importantly, the multi-rows must have the same colour so that you can have the desired results.

One last note on colour, to change the colour of a column you need to create a new column type and define the colour. The example below illustrates how to define the new column colour.

\newcolumntype{g}{>{\columncolor{darkblue}}l}

Let’s break it down:

• \newcolumntype{g}: defines the letter g as the new column
• {>{\columncolor{darkblue}}l}: here we select our desired colour, and l tells the column to be left-justified, this can be subsitued with c or r
\begin{tabular}{g|l} \textsc{Release} &\textsc{Codename} \\ \hline Fedora Core 4 &Stentz \\ &Fedora 8 \\ \multirow{-2}{*}{Multi-Row} &Werewolf \\ \end{tabular}\ Landscape table

There may be times when your table has many columns and will not fit elegantly in portrait. With the rotating package in preamble you will be able to create a sideways table. The below example demonstrates this.

For the landscape table, we will use the sidewaystable environment and add the tabular environment within it, we also specified additional options.

• \centering to position the table in the centre of the page
• \caption{} to give our table a name
• \label{} this enables us to reference the table in our document
\begin{sidewaystable} \centering \caption{Sideways Table} \label{sidetable} \begin{tabular}{ll} \rowcolor{darkblue}\textsc{\color{white}Release} &\textsc{\color{white}Codename} \\ \rowcolor{gray!10}Fedora Core 4 &Stentz \\ \rowcolor{gray!40} &Fedora 8 \\ \rowcolor{gray!40}\multirow{-2}{*}{Multi-Row} &Werewolf \\ \end{tabular}\vspace{3mm} \end{sidewaystable} Lists in tables

To include a list into a table you can use tabularx and include the list in the column where the X is specified. Another option will be to use tabular but you must specify the column width.

List in tabularx \begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|l|X|} \hline Fedora Version &Editions \\ \hline Fedora 32 &\begin{itemize}[noitemsep] \item CoreOS \item Silverblue \item IoT \end{itemize} \\ \hline \end{tabularx}\vspace{3mm} List in tabular \begin{tabular}{|l|m{6cm}|}\hline Fedora Version &Editions \\ \hline Fedora 32 &\begin{itemize}[noitemsep] \item CoreOS \item Silverblue \item IoT \end{itemize} \\ \hline \end{tabular} Conclusion

LaTeX offers many ways to customise your table with tabular and tabularx, you can also add both tabular and tabularx within the table environment (\begin\table) to add the table name and to position the table.

The packages used in this series are:

\usepackage{fullpage} \usepackage{blindtext} % add demo text \usepackage{array} % used for column positions \usepackage{tabularx} % adds tabularx which is used for text wrapping \usepackage{multirow} % multi-row and multi-colour support \usepackage[table]{xcolor} % add colour to the columns \usepackage{rotating} % for landscape/sideways tables Additional Reading

This was an intermediate lesson on tables. For more advanced information about tables and LaTex in general, you can go to the LaTeX Wiki.

### Docker and Fedora 32

Friday 26th of June 2020 07:00:00 AM

With the release of Fedora 32, regular users of Docker have been confronted by a small challenge. At the time of writing, Docker is not supported on Fedora 32. There are alternatives, like Podman and Buildah, but for many existing users, switching now might not be the best time. As such, this article can help you set up your Docker environment on Fedora 32.

Step 0: Removing conflicts

This step is for any user upgrading from Fedora 30 or 31. If this is a fresh installation of Fedora 32, you can move on to step 1.

To remove docker and all its related components:

sudo dnf remove docker-* sudo dnf config-manager --disable docker-* Step 1: System preparation

With the last two versions of Fedora, the operating system has moved to two new technologies: CGroups and NFTables for the Firewall. While the details of these new technologies is behind the scope of this tutorial, it’s a sad fact that docker doesn’t support them yet. As such, you’ll have to make some changes to facilitate Docker on Fedora.

Enable old CGroups

The previous implementation of CGroups is still supported and it can be enabled using the following command.

sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0" Whitelist docker in firewall

To allow Docker to have network access, two commands are needed.

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=trusted --add-interface=docker0 sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=FedoraWorkstation --add-masquerade

The first command will add the Docker-interface to the trusted environment which allows Docker to make remote connections. The second command will allow docker to make local connections. This is particularly useful when multiple Docker containers are in as a development environment.

Step 2: installing Moby

Moby is the open-source, white label version of Docker. It’s based on the same code but it does not carry the trademark. It’s included in the main Fedora repository, which makes it easy to install.

sudo dnf install moby-engine docker-compose

This installs moby-engine, docker-compose, containerd and some other related libraries. Once installed, you’ll have to enable the system-wide daemon to run docker.

sudo systemctl enable docker Step 3: Restart and test

To ensure that all systems and settings are properly processed, you’ll now have to reboot your machine.

sudo systemctl reboot

After that, you can validate your installation using the Docker hello-world package.

sudo docker run hello-world

You are then greeted by the Hello from Docker! unless something went wrong.

Optionally, you can now also add your user to the group account of Docker, so that you can start docker images without typing sudo.

sudo groupadd docker sudo usermod -aG docker $USER Logout and login for the change to take effect. If the thought of running containers with administrator privileges concerns you, then you should look into Podman. In summary From this point on, Docker will work how you’re used to, including docker-compose and all docker-related tools. Don’t forget to check out the official documentation which can help you in many cases where something isn’t quite right. The current state of Docker on Fedora 32 is not ideal. The lack of an official package might bother some, and there is an issue upstream where this is discussed. The missing support for both CGroups and NFTables is more technical, but you can check their progress in their public issues. These instruction should allow you to continue working like nothing has happened. If this has not satisfied your needs, don’t forget to address your technical issues at the Moby or Docker Github pages, or take a look at Podman which might prove more robust in the long-term future. ### Getting Started with Haskell on Fedora Wednesday 24th of June 2020 08:00:00 AM Haskell is a functional programming language. To create a program, the user applies and composes functions, in comparison to imperative languages, which use procedural statements. Haskell features state-of-the-art programming paradigms that can be used for general purpose programs, research, and industrial applications. Most notably, it is purely functional using an advanced type system, which means that every computation, even the ones that produce side-effecting IO operations, are defined using pure functions in the mathematical sense. Some of the main reasons for Haskell’s increasing popularity are ease of maintenance, extensive packages, multi-core performance, and language safety against some bugs, such as null pointers or deadlock. So let’s see how to get started with Haskell on Fedora. Install Haskell in Fedora Fedora provides an easy way to install the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) via the official repository:$ sudo dnf install -y ghc $ghc --version The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 8.6.5 Now that GHC is installed, let’s write a simple program, compile it, and execute it. First program in Haskell Let’s write the traditional “Hello, World!” program in Haskell. First, create a main.hs file, and then type or copy the following. main = putStrLn ("Hello, World!") Running this program is quite simple.$ runhaskell main.hs Hello, World!

Building an executable of the program is as simple as running it.

$ghc main.hs [1 of 1] Compiling Main ( main.hs, main.o ) Linking main ...$ ./main Hello, World!

GHC provides a Read Eval Print Loop (REPL) command to interactively evaluate Haskell expressions.

$ghci Prelude> :load main.hs [1 of 1] Compiling Main ( main.hs, interpreted ) Ok, one module loaded. *Main> main Hello, World! *Main> :type putStrLn putStrLn :: String -> IO () *Main> :info String type String = [Char] -- Defined in ‘GHC.Base’ *Main> :help ... The most common REPL commands are: • :load loads a file. • :reload reloads loaded files. • :type shows the type of an expression. • :info displays information about a name. • :browse lists the loaded functions. Using Haskell packages Haskell features a package system to share functions. To show how to use packages, let’s write a new one. First, create a MyPackage.hs file, and then, type or copy the following. module MyPackage where greet name = putStrLn ("Hello, " ++ name ++ "!") Next, modify the main.hs file as follow: import MyPackage main = greet ("Fedora") In the modified main.hs, instead of using the standard putStrLn function to print the “Hello, World!” the application now uses the greet function from the newly created package:$ runhaskell main.hs Hello, Fedora!

GHC automatically looks for packages in the current working directory, and it can also looks for packages installed globally on the system. To use a Fedora package in your Haskell project, you need to install the development files. For example, let’s use the ansi-wl-pprint library to add color:

$sudo dnf install -y ghc-ansi-wl-pprint-devel Next, modify the MyPackage.hs file: module MyPackage where import Text.PrettyPrint.ANSI.Leijen greet name = putDoc (green (text ("Hello, " ++ name ++ "!\n"))) Then you can build a small executable using dynamic links:$ ghc -dynamic main.hs -o greet && strip greet [1 of 2] Compiling MyPackage ( MyPackage.hs, MyPackage.o ) [2 of 2] Compiling Main ( main.hs, main.o ) Linking greet ... $du --si greet 17k greet$ ./greet Hello, Fedora!

This concludes how to get started with Haskell on Fedora. You can find the Haskell SIG (Special Interests Groups) on Freenode IRC in #fedora-haskell, or in the mailing list

Learning resources

Haskell may be daunting because it supports many advanced concepts such as GADTs or type-level programing. However, the basics are quite accessible and they are more than enough to reap the majority of benefits and reliably deliver quality software.

To learn more about the language, here are some further resources:

### Protect your system with fail2ban and firewalld blacklists

Monday 22nd of June 2020 08:00:00 AM

If you run a server with a public-facing SSH access, you might have experienced malicious login attempts. This article shows how to use two utilities to keep the intruder out of our systems.

To protect against repeated ssh login attempts, we’ll look at fail2ban. And if you don’t travel much, and perhaps stay in one or two countries, you can configure firewalld to only allow access from the countries you choose.

First let’s work through a little terminology for those not familiar with the various applications we’ll need to make this work:

fail2ban: Daemon to ban hosts that cause multiple authentication errors.

fail2ban will monitor the SystemD journal to look for failed authentication attempts for whichever jails have been enabled. After the number of failed attempts specified it will add a firewall rule to block that specific IP address for an amount of time configured.

firewalld: A firewall daemon with D-Bus interface providing a dynamic firewall.

Unless you’ve manually decided to use traditional iptables, you’re already using firewalld on all supported releases of Fedora and CentOS.

Assumptions
• The host system has an internet connection and is either fully exposed directly, through a DMZ (both REALLY bad ideas unless you know what you’re doing), or has a port being forwarded to it from a router.
• While most of this might apply to other systems, this article assumes a current version of Fedora (31 and up) or RHEL/CentOS 8. On CentOS you must enable the Fedora EPEL repo with sudo dnf install epel-release
Install & Configuration Fail2Ban

More than likely whichever FirewallD zone is set already allows SSH access but the sshd service itself is not enabled by default. To start it manually and without permanently enabling on boot:

$sudo systemctl start sshd Or to start and enable on boot:$ sudo systemctl enable --now sshd

The next step is to install, configure, and enable fail2ban. As usual the install can be done from the command line:

$sudo dnf install fail2ban Once installed the next step is to configure a jail (a service you want to monitor and ban at whatever thresholds you’ve set). By default IPs are banned for 1 hour (which is not near long enough). The best practice is to override the system defaults using *.local files instead of directly modifying the *.config files. If we look at my jail.local we see: # cat /etc/fail2ban/jail.local [DEFAULT] # "bantime" is the number of seconds that a host is banned. bantime = 1d # A host is banned if it has generated "maxretry" during the last "findtime" findtime = 1h # "maxretry" is the number of failures before a host get banned. maxretry = 5 Turning this into plain language, after 5 attempts within the last hour the IP will be blocked for 1 day. There’s also options for increasing the ban time for IPs that get banned multiple times, but that’s the subject for another article. The next step is to configure a jail. In this tutorial sshd is shown but the steps are more or less the same for other services. Create a configuration file inside /etc/fail2ban/jail.d. Here’s mine: # cat /etc/fail2ban/jail.d/sshd.local [sshd] enabled = true It’s that simple! A lot of the configuration is already handled within the package built for Fedora (Hint: I’m the current maintainer). Next enable and start the fail2ban service.$ sudo systemctl enable --now fail2ban

Hopefully there were not any immediate errors, if not, check the status of fail2ban using the following command:

$sudo systemctl status fail2ban If it started without errors it should look something like this:$ systemctl status fail2ban ● fail2ban.service - Fail2Ban Service Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/fail2ban.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled) Active: active (running) since Tue 2020-06-16 07:57:40 CDT; 5s ago Docs: man:fail2ban(1) Process: 11230 ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p /run/fail2ban (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Main PID: 11235 (f2b/server) Tasks: 5 (limit: 4630) Memory: 12.7M CPU: 109ms CGroup: /system.slice/fail2ban.service └─11235 /usr/bin/python3 -s /usr/bin/fail2ban-server -xf start Jun 16 07:57:40 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: Starting Fail2Ban Service… Jun 16 07:57:40 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: Started Fail2Ban Service. Jun 16 07:57:41 localhost.localdomain fail2ban-server[11235]: Server ready

If recently started, fail2ban is unlikely to show anything interesting going on just yet but to check the status of fail2ban and make sure the jail is enabled enter:

$sudo fail2ban-client status Status |- Number of jail: 1 - Jail list: sshd And the high level status of the sshd jail is shown. If multiple jails were enabled they would show up here. To check the detailed status a jail, just add the jail to the previous command. Here’s the output from my system which has been running for a while. I have removed the banned IPs from the output:$ sudo fail2ban-client status sshd Status for the jail: sshd |- Filter | |- Currently failed: 8 | |- Total failed: 4399 | - Journal matches: _SYSTEMD_UNIT=sshd.service + _COMM=sshd - Actions |- Currently banned: 101 |- Total banned: 684 - Banned IP list: ...

Monitoring the fail2ban log file for intrusion attempts can be achieved by “tailing” the log:

$sudo tail -f /var/log/fail2ban.log Tail is a nice little command line utility which by default shows the last 10 lines of a file. Adding the “-f” tells it to follow the file which is a great way to watch a file that’s still being written to. Since the output has real IPs in it, a sample won’t be provided but it’s pretty human readable. The INFO lines will usually be attempts at a login. If enough attempts are made from a specific IP address you will see a NOTICE line showing an IP address was banned. After the ban time has been reached you will see an NOTICE unban line. Lookout for several WARNING lines. Most often this happens when a ban is added but fail2ban finds the IP address already in its ban database, which means banning may not be working correctly. If recently installed the fail2ban package it should be setup for FirewallD rich rules. The package was only switched from “ipset” to “rich rules” as of fail2ban-0.11.1-6 so if you have an older install of fail2ban it may still be trying to use the ipset method which utilizes legacy iptables and is not very reliable. FirewallD Configuration Reactive or Proactive? There are two strategies that can be used either separately or together. Reactive or proactive permanent blacklisting of individual IP address or subnets based on country of origin. For the reactive approach once fail2ban has been running for a while it’s a good idea to take a look at how “bad is bad” by running sudo fail2ban-client status sshd again. There most likely will be many banned IP addresses. Just pick one and try running whois on it. There can be quite a bit of interesting information in the output but for this method, only the country of origin is of importance. To keep things simple, let’s filter out everything but the country. For this example a few well known domain names will be used:$ whois google.com | grep -i country
Registrant Country: US
Tech Country: US $whois rpmfusion.org | grep -i country Registrant Country: FR$ whois aliexpress.com | grep -i country
Registrant Country: CN

The reason for the grep -i is to make grep non-case sensitive while most entries use “Country”, some are in all lower case so this method matches regardless.

Now that the country of origin of an intrusion attempt is known the question is, “Does anyone from that country have a legitimate reason to connect to this computer?” If the answer is NO, then it should be acceptable to block the entire country.

Functionally the proactive approach it not very different from the reactive approach, however, there are countries from which intrusion attempts are very common. If the system neither resides in one of those countries, nor has any customers originating from them, then why not add them to the blacklist now rather than waiting?

Blacklisting Script and Configuration

So how do you do that? With FirewallD ipsets. I developed the following script to automate the process as much as possible:

#!/bin/bash # Based on the below article # https://www.linode.com/community/questions/11143/top-tip-firewalld-and-ipset-country-blacklist # Source the blacklisted countries from the configuration file . /etc/blacklist-by-country # Create a temporary working directory ipdeny_tmp_dir=$(mktemp -d -t blacklist-XXXXXXXXXX) pushd$ipdeny_tmp_dir # Download the latest network addresses by country file curl -LO http://www.ipdeny.com/ipblocks/data/countries/all-zones.tar.gz tar xf all-zones.tar.gz # For updates, remove the ipset blacklist and recreate if firewall-cmd -q --zone=drop --query-source=ipset:blacklist; then firewall-cmd -q --permanent --delete-ipset=blacklist fi # Create the ipset blacklist which accepts both IP addresses and networks firewall-cmd -q --permanent --new-ipset=blacklist --type=hash:net \ --option=family=inet --option=hashsize=4096 --option=maxelem=200000 \ --set-description="An ipset list of networks or ips to be dropped." # Add the address ranges by country per ipdeny.com to the blacklist for country in $countries; do firewall-cmd -q --permanent --ipset=blacklist \ --add-entries-from-file=./$country.zone && \ echo "Added $country to blacklist ipset." done # Block individual IPs if the configuration file exists and is not empty if [ -s "/etc/blacklist-by-ip" ]; then echo "Adding IPs blacklists." firewall-cmd -q --permanent --ipset=blacklist \ --add-entries-from-file=/etc/blacklist-by-ip && \ echo "Added IPs to blacklist ipset." fi # Add the blacklist ipset to the drop zone if not already setup if firewall-cmd -q --zone=drop --query-source=ipset:blacklist; then echo "Blacklist already in firewalld drop zone." else echo "Adding ipset blacklist to firewalld drop zone." firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=drop --add-source=ipset:blacklist fi firewall-cmd -q --reload popd rm -rf$ipdeny_tmp_dir

This should be installed to /usr/local/sbin and don’t forget to make it executable!

$sudo chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/firewalld-blacklist Then create a configure file: /etc/blacklist-by-country: # Which countries should be blocked? # Use the two letter designation separated by a space. countries="" And another configuration file /etc/blacklist-by-ip, which is just one IP per line without any additional formatting. For this example 10 random countries were selected from the ipdeny zones: # ls | shuf -n 10 | sed "s/\.zone//g" | tr '\n' ' ' nl ee ie pk is sv na om gp bn Now as long as at least one country has been added to the config file it’s ready to run!$ sudo firewalld-blacklist % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 142 100 142 0 0 1014 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1014 100 662k 100 662k 0 0 989k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 989k Added nl to blacklist ipset. Added ee to blacklist ipset. Added ie to blacklist ipset. Added pk to blacklist ipset. Added is to blacklist ipset. Added sv to blacklist ipset. Added na to blacklist ipset. Added om to blacklist ipset. Added gp to blacklist ipset. Added bn to blacklist ipset. Adding ipset blacklist to firewalld drop zone. success

To verify that the firewalld blacklist was successful, check the drop zone and blacklist ipset:

$sudo firewall-cmd --info-zone=drop drop (active) target: DROP icmp-block-inversion: no interfaces: sources: ipset:blacklist services: ports: protocols: masquerade: no forward-ports: source-ports: icmp-blocks: rich rules:$ sudo firewall-cmd --info-ipset=blacklist | less blacklist type: hash:net options: family=inet hashsize=4096 maxelem=200000 entries:

The second command will output all of the subnets that were added based on the countries blocked and can be quite lengthy.

So now what do I do?

While it will be a good idea to monitor things more frequently at the beginning, over time the number of intrusion attempts should decline as the blacklist grows. Then the goal should be maintenance rather than active monitoring.

To this end I created a SystemD service file and timer so that on a monthly basis the by country subnets maintained by ipdeny are refreshed. In fact everything discussed here can be downloaded from my pagure.io project:

https://pagure.io/firewalld-blacklist

Aren’t you glad you read the whole article? Now just download the service file and timer to /etc/systemd/system/ and enable the timer:

$sudo systemctl daemon-reload$ sudo systemctl enable --now firewalld-blacklist.timer

### Contribute at the Fedora Test Week for Kernel 5.7

Friday 19th of June 2020 05:50:36 PM

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.

### Internet connection sharing with NetworkManager

Wednesday 17th of June 2020 07:00:00 AM

NetworkManager is the network configuration daemon used on Fedora and many other distributions. It provides a consistent way to configure network interfaces and other network-related aspects on a Linux machine. Among many other features, it provides a Internet connection sharing functionality that can be very useful in different situations.

For example, suppose you are in a place without Wi-Fi and want to share your laptop’s mobile data connection with friends. Or maybe you have a laptop with broken Wi-Fi and want to connect it via Ethernet cable to another laptop; in this way the first laptop become able to reach the Internet and maybe download new Wi-Fi drivers.

In cases like these it is useful to share Internet connectivity with other devices. On smartphones this feature is called “Tethering” and allows sharing a cellular connection via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or a USB cable.

This article shows how the connection sharing mode offered by NetworkManager can be set up easily; it addition, it explains how to configure some more advanced features for power users.

How connection sharing works

The basic idea behind connection sharing is that there is an upstream interface with Internet access and a downstream interface that needs connectivity. These interfaces can be of a different type—for example, Wi-Fi and Ethernet.

If the upstream interface is connected to a LAN, it is possible to configure our computer to act as a bridge; a bridge is the software version of an Ethernet switch. In this way, you “extend” the LAN to the downstream network. However this solution doesn’t always play well with all interface types; moreover, it works only if the upstream network uses private addresses.

A more general approach consists in assigning a private IPv4 subnet to the downstream network and turning on routing between the two interfaces. In this case, NAT (Network Address Translation) is also necessary. The purpose of NAT is to modify the source of packets coming from the downstream network so that they look as if they originate from your computer.

It would be inconvenient to configure manually all the devices in the downstream network. Therefore, you need a DHCP server to assign addresses automatically and configure hosts to route all traffic through your computer. In addition, in case the sharing happens through Wi-Fi, the wireless network adapter must be configured as an access point.

There are many tutorials out there explaining how to achieve this, with different degrees of difficulty. NetworkManager hides all this complexity and provides a shared mode that makes this configuration quick and convenient.

Configuring connection sharing

The configuration paradigm of NetworkManager is based on the concept of connection (or connection profile). A connection is a group of settings to apply on a network interface.

This article shows how to create and modify such connections using nmcli, the NetworkManager command line utility, and the GTK connection editor. If you prefer, other tools are available such as nmtui (a text-based user interface), GNOME control center or the KDE network applet.

A reasonable prerequisite to share Internet access is to have it available in the first place; this implies that there is already a NetworkManager connection active. If you are reading this, you probably already have a working Internet connection. If not, see this article for a more comprehensive introduction to NetworkManager.

The rest of this article assumes you already have a Wi-Fi connection profile configured and that connectivity must be shared over an Ethernet interface enp1s0.

To enable sharing, create a connection for interface enp1s0 and set the ipv4.method property to shared instead of the usual auto:

$nmcli connection add type ethernet ifname enp1s0 ipv4.method shared con-name local The shared IPv4 method does multiple things: • enables IP forwarding for the interface; • adds firewall rules and enables masquerading; • starts dnsmasq as a DHCP and DNS server. NetworkManager connection profiles, unless configured otherwise, are activated automatically. The new connection you have added should be already active in the device status:$ nmcli device DEVICE         TYPE      STATE         CONNECTION enp1s0         ethernet  connected     local wlp4s0         wifi      connected     home-wifi

If that is not the case, activate the profile manually with nmcli connection up local.

Changing the shared IP range

Now look at how NetworkManager configured the downstream interface enp1s0:

$ip -o addr show enp1s0 8: enp1s0 inet 10.42.0.1/24 brd 10.42.0.255 ... 10.42.0.1/24 is the default address set by NetworkManager for a device in shared mode. Addresses in this range are also distributed via DHCP to other computers. If the range conflicts with other private networks in your environment, change it by modifying the ipv4.addresses property:$ nmcli connection modify local ipv4.addresses 192.168.42.1/24

Remember to activate again the connection profile after any change to apply the new values:

$nmcli connection up local$ ip -o addr show enp1s0 8: enp1s0 inet 192.168.42.1/24 brd 192.168.42.255 ...

If you prefer using a graphical tool to edit connections, install the nm-connection-editor package. Launch the program and open the connection to edit; then select the Shared to other computers method in the IPv4 Settings tab. Finally, if you want to use a specific IP subnet, click Add and insert an address and a netmask.

Adding custom dnsmasq options

In case you want to further extend the dnsmasq configuration, you can add new configuration snippets in /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq-shared.d/. For example, the following configuration:

dhcp-option=option:ntp-server,192.168.42.1 dhcp-host=52:54:00:a4:65:c8,192.168.42.170

tells dnsmasq to advertise a NTP server via DHCP. In addition, it assigns a static IP to a client with a certain MAC.

There are many other useful options in the dnsmasq manual page. However, remember that some of them may conflict with the rest of the configuration; so please use custom options only if you know what you are doing.

Other useful tricks

If you want to set up sharing via Wi-Fi, you could create a connection in Access Point mode, manually configure the security, and then enable connection sharing. Actually, there is a quicker way, the hotspot mode:

$nmcli device wifi hotspot [ifname$dev] [password $pw] This does everything needed to create a functional access point with connection sharing. The interface and password options are optional; if they are not specified, nmcli chooses the first Wi-Fi device available and generates a random password. Use the ‘nmcli device wifi show-password‘ command to display information for the active hotspot; the output includes the password and a text-based QR code that you can scan with a phone: What about IPv6? Until now this article discussed sharing IPv4 connectivity. NetworkManager also supports sharing IPv6 connectivity through DHCP prefix delegation. Using prefix delegation, a computer can request additional IPv6 prefixes from the DHCP server. Those public routable addresses are assigned to local networks via Router Advertisements. Again, NetworkManager makes all this easier through the shared IPv6 mode:$ nmcli connection modify local ipv6.method shared

Note that IPv6 sharing requires support from the Internet Service Provider, which should give out prefix delegations through DHCP. If the ISP doesn’t provides delegations, IPv6 sharing will not work; in such case NM will report in the journal that no prefixes are available:

policy: ipv6-pd: none of 0 prefixes of wlp1s0 can be shared on enp1s0

Also, note that the Wi-Fi hotspot command described above only enables IPv4 sharing; if you want to also use IPv6 sharing you must edit the connection manually.

Conclusion

Remember, the next time you need to share your Internet connection, NetworkManager will make it easy for you.

If you have suggestions on how to improve this feature or any other feedback, please reach out to the NM community using the mailing list, the issue tracker or joining the #nm IRC channel on freenode.

### LaTeX Typesetting – Part 1 (Lists)

Monday 15th of June 2020 07:00:00 AM

This series builds on the previous articles: Typeset your docs with LaTex and TeXstudio on Fedora and LaTeX 101 for beginners. This first part of the series is about LaTeX lists.

Types of lists

LaTeX lists are enclosed environments, and each item in the list can take a line of text to a full paragraph. There are three types of lists available in LaTeX. They are:

• Itemized: unordered or bullet
• Enumerated: ordered
• Description: descriptive
Creating lists

To create a list, prefix each list item with the \item command. Precede and follow the list of items with the \begin{<type>} and \end{<type>} commands respectively where <type> is substituted with the type of the list as illustrated in the following examples.

Itemized list \begin{itemize} \item Fedora \item Fedora Spin \item Fedora Silverblue \end{itemize} Enumerated list \begin{enumerate} \item Fedora CoreOS \item Fedora Silverblue \item Fedora Spin \end{enumerate} Descriptive list \begin{description} \item[Fedora 6] Code name Zod \item[Fedora 8] Code name Werewolf \end{description} Spacing list items

The default spacing can be customized by adding \usepackage{enumitem} to the preamble. The enumitem package enables the noitemsep option and the \itemsep command which you can use on your lists as illustrated below.

Using the noitemsep option

Enclose the noitemsep option in square brackets and place it on the \begin command as shown below. This option removes the default spacing.

\begin{itemize}[noitemsep] \item Fedora \item Fedora Spin \item Fedora Silverblue \end{itemize} Using the \itemsep command

The \itemsep command must be suffixed with a number to indicate how much space there should be between the list items.

\begin{itemize} \itemsep0.75pt \item Fedora Silverblue \item Fedora CoreOS \end{itemize} Nesting lists

LaTeX supports nested lists up to four levels deep as illustrated below.

Nested itemized lists \begin{itemize}[noitemsep] \item Fedora Versions \begin{itemize} \item Fedora 8 \item Fedora 9 \begin{itemize} \item Werewolf \item Sulphur \begin{itemize} \item 2007-05-31 \item 2008-05-13 \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \item Fedora Spin \item Fedora Silverblue \end{itemize} Nested enumerated lists \begin{enumerate}[noitemsep] \item Fedora Versions \begin{enumerate} \item Fedora 8 \item Fedora 9 \begin{enumerate} \item Werewolf \item Sulphur \begin{enumerate} \item 2007-05-31 \item 2008-05-13 \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate} \item Fedora Spin \item Fedora Silverblue \end{enumerate} List style names for each list type EnumeratedItemized\alph*$\bullet$\Alph*$\cdot$\arabic*$\diamond$\roman*$\ast$\Roman*$\circ$$-$ Default style by list depth LevelEnumerated Itemized 1NumberBullet2Lowercase alphabetDash3Roman numeralsAsterisk4Uppercase alphabetPeriod Setting list styles

The below example illustrates each of the different itemiszed list styles.

% Itemize style \begin{itemize} \item[$\ast$] Asterisk \item[$\diamond$] Diamond \item[$\circ$] Circle \item[$\cdot$] Period \item[$\bullet$] Bullet (default) \item[--] Dash \item[$-$] Another dash \end{itemize}

There are three methods of setting list styles. They are illustrated below. These methods are listed by priority; highest priority first. A higher priority will override a lower priority if more than one is defined for a list item.

List styling method 1 – per item

Enclose the name of the desired style in square brackets and place it on the \item command as demonstrated below.

% First method \begin{itemize} \item[$\ast$] Asterisk \item[$\diamond$] Diamond \item[$\circ$] Circle \item[$\cdot$] period \item[$\bullet$] Bullet (default) \item[--] Dash \item[$-$] Another dash \end{itemize} List styling method 2 – on the list

Prefix the name of the desired style with label=. Place the parameter, including the label= prefix, in square brackets on the \begin command as demonstrated below.

% Second method \begin{enumerate}[label=\Alph*.] \item Fedora 32 \item Fedora 31 \item Fedora 30 \end{enumerate} List styling method 3 – on the document

This method changes the default style for the entire document. Use the \renewcommand to set the values for the labelitems. There is a different labelitem for each of the four label depths as demonstrated below.


LaTeX supports three types of lists. The style and spacing of each of the list types can be customized. More LaTeX elements will be explained in future posts.

Additional reading about LaTeX lists can be found here: LaTeX List Structures

### Fedora 32: Simple Local File-Sharing with Samba

Friday 12th of June 2020 02:19:02 PM

Sharing files with Fedora 32 using Samba is cross-platform, convenient, reliable, and performant.

What is ‘Samba’?

Samba is a high-quality implementation of Server Message Block protocol (SMB). Originally developed by Microsoft for connecting windows computers together via local-area-networks, it is now extensively used for internal network communications.

Apple used to maintain it’s own independent file sharing called “Apple Filing Protocol (AFP)“, however in recent times, it also has also switched to SMB.

In this guide we provide the minimal instructions to enable:

• Public Folder Sharing (Both Read Only and Read Write)
• User Home Folder Access
Note about this guide: The convention '~]$' for a local user command prompt, and '~]#' for a super user prompt will be used. Public Sharing Folder Having a shared public place where authenticated users on an internal network can access files, or even modify and change files if they are given permission, can be very convenient. This part of the guide walks through the process of setting up a shared folder, ready for sharing with Samba. Please Note: This guide assumes the public sharing folder is on a Modern Linux Filesystem; other filesystems such as NTFS or FAT32 will not work. Samba uses POSIX Access Control Lists (ACLs). For those who wish to learn more about Access Control Lists, please consider reading the documentation: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7: System Administrator's Guide: Chapter 5. Access Control Lists", as it likewise applies to Fedora 32. In General, this is only an issue for anyone who wishes to share a drive or filesystem that was created outside of the normal Fedora Installation process. (such as a external hard drive). It is possible for Samba to share filesystem paths that do not support POSIX ACLs, however this is out of the scope of this guide. Create Folder For this guide the /srv/public/ folder for sharing will be used. The /srv/ directory contains site-specific data served by a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system. This directory gives users the location of data files for a particular service, such as FTP, WWW, or CVS. Data that only pertains to a specific user should go in the /home/ directory. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Storage Administration Guide: Chapter 2. File System Structure and Maintenance: 2.1.1.8. The /srv/ Directory Make the Folder (will provide an error if the folder already exists). ~]# mkdir --verbose /srv/public Verify folder exists: ~]$ ls --directory /srv/public Expected Output: /srv/public Set Filesystem Security Context

To have read and write access to the public folder the public_content_rw_t security context will be used for this guide. Those wanting read only may use: public_content_t.

Label files and directories that have been created with the public_content_rw_t type to share them with read and write permissions through vsftpd. Other services, such as Apache HTTP Server, Samba, and NFS, also have access to files labeled with this type. Remember that booleans for each service must be enabled before they can write to files labeled with this type.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, SELinux User’s and Administrator’s Guide: Chapter 16. File Transfer Protocol: 16.1. Types: public_content_rw_t

Add /srv/public as “public_content_rw_t” in the system’s local filesystem security context customization registry:

Add new security filesystem security context: ~]# semanage fcontext --add --type public_content_rw_t "/srv/public(/.*)?" Verifiy new security filesystem security context: ~]# semanage fcontext --locallist --list Expected Output: (should include) /srv/public(/.*)? all files system_u:object_r:public_content_rw_t:s0

Now that the folder has been added to the local system’s filesystem security context registry; The restorecon command can be used to ‘restore’ the context to the folder:

Restore security context to the /srv/public folder: $~]# restorecon -Rv /srv/public Verify security context was correctly applied: ~]$ ls --directory --context /srv/public/ Expected Output: unconfined_u:object_r:public_content_rw_t:s0 /srv/public/ User Permissions Creating the Sharing Groups

To allow a user to either have read only, or read and write accesses to the public share folder create two new groups that govern these privileges: public_readonly and public_readwrite.

User accounts can be granted access to read only, or read and write by adding their account to the respective group (and allow login via Samba creating a smb password). This process is demonstrated in the section: “Test Public Sharing (localhost)”.

Create the public_readonly and public_readwrite groups: ~]# groupadd public_readonly ~]# groupadd public_readwrite Verify successful creation of groups: ~]$getent group public_readonly public_readwrite Expected Output: (Note: x:1...: number will probability differ on your System) public_readonly:x:1009: public_readwrite:x:1010: Set Permissions Now set the appropriate user permissions to the public shared folder: Set User and Group Permissions for Folder: ~]# chmod --verbose 2700 /srv/public ~]# setfacl -m group:public_readonly:r-x /srv/public ~]# setfacl -m default:group:public_readonly:r-x /srv/public ~]# setfacl -m group:public_readwrite:rwx /srv/public ~]# setfacl -m default:group:public_readwrite:rwx /srv/public Verify user permissions have been correctly applied: ~]$ getfacl --absolute-names /srv/public Expected Output: file: /srv/public owner: root group: root flags: -s- user::rwx group::--- group:public_readonly:r-x group:public_readwrite:rwx mask::rwx other::--- default:user::rwx default:group::--- default:group:public_readonly:r-x default:group:public_readwrite:rwx default:mask::rwx default:other::--- Samba Installation ~]# dnf install samba Hostname (systemwide)

Samba will use the name of the computer when sharing files; it is good to set a hostname so that the computer can be found easily on the local network.

View Your Current Hostname: ~]$hostnamectl status If you wish to change your hostname to something more descriptive, use the command: Modify your system's hostname (example): ~]# hostnamectl set-hostname "simple-samba-server" For a more complete overview of the hostnamectl command, please read the previous Fedora Magazine Article: "How to set the hostname on Fedora". Firewall Configuring your firewall is a complex and involved task. This guide will just have the most minimal manipulation of the firewall to enable Samba to pass through. For those who are interested in learning more about configuring firewalls; please consider reading the documentation: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: Securing networks: Chapter 5. Using and configuring firewall", as it generally applies to Fedora 32 as well. Allow Samba access through the firewall: ~]# firewall-cmd --add-service=samba --permanent ~]# firewall-cmd --reload Verify Samba is included in your active firewall: ~]$ firewall-cmd --list-services Output (should include): samba Configuration Remove Default Configuration

The stock configuration that is included with Fedora 32 is not required for this simple guide. In particular it includes support for sharing printers with Samba.

For this guide make a backup of the default configuration and create a new configuration file from scratch.

Create a backup copy of the existing Samba Configuration: ~]# cp --verbose --no-clobber /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.fedora0 Empty the configuration file: ~]# > /etc/samba/smb.conf Samba Configuration Please Note: This configuration file does not contain any global definitions; the defaults provided by Samba are good for purposes of this guide. Edit the Samba Configuration File with Vim: ~]# vim /etc/samba/smb.conf

Add the following to /etc/samba/smb.conf file:

# smb.conf - Samba Configuration File # The name of the share is in square brackets [], # this will be shared as //hostname/sharename # There are a three exceptions: # the [global] section; # the [homes] section, that is dynamically set to the username; # the [printers] section, same as [homes], but for printers. # path: the physical filesystem path (or device) # comment: a label on the share, seen on the network. # read only: disable writing, defaults to true. # For a full list of configuration options, # please read the manual: "man smb.conf". [global] [public] path = /srv/public comment = Public Folder read only = No Write Permission

By default Samba is not granted permission to modify any file of the system. Modify system’s security configuration to allow Samba to modify any filesystem path that has the security context of public_content_rw_t.

For convenience, Fedora has a built-in SELinux Boolean for this purpose called: smbd_anon_write, setting this to true will enable Samba to write in any filesystem path that has been set to the security context of public_content_rw_t.

For those who are wishing Samba only have a read-only access to their public sharing folder, they may choose skip this step and not set this boolean.

There are many more SELinux boolean that are available for Samba. For those who are interested, please read the documentation: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7: SELinux User's and Administrator's Guide: 15.3. Samba Booleans", it also apply to Fedora 32 without any adaptation. Set SELinux Boolean allowing Samba to write to filesystem paths set with the security context public_content_rw_t: ~]# setsebool -P smbd_anon_write=1 Verify bool has been correctly set: $getsebool smbd_anon_write Expected Output: smbd_anon_write --> on Samba Services The Samba service is divided into two parts that we need to start. Samba ‘smb’ Service The Samba “Server Message Block” (SMB) services is for sharing files and printers over the local network. Enable and Start Services For those who are interested in learning more about configuring, enabling, disabling, and managing services, please consider studying the documentation: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7: System Administrator's Guide: 10.2. Managing System Services". Enable and start smb and nmb services: ~]# systemctl enable smb.service ~]# systemctl start smb.service Verify smb service: ~]# systemctl status smb.service Test Public Sharing (localhost) To demonstrate allowing and removing access to the public shared folder, create a new user called samba_test_user, this user will be granted permissions first to read the public folder, and then access to read and write the public folder. The same process demonstrated here can be used to grant access to your public shared folder to other users of your computer. The samba_test_user will be created as a locked user account, disallowing normal login to the computer. Create 'samba_test_user', and lock the account. ~]# useradd samba_test_user ~]# passwd --lock samba_test_user Set a Samba Password for this Test User (such as 'test'): ~]# smbpasswd -a samba_test_user Test Read Only access to the Public Share: Add samba_test_user to the public_readonly group: ~]# gpasswd --add samba_test_user public_readonly Login to the local Samba Service (public folder): ~]$ smbclient --user=samba_test_user //localhost/public First, the ls command should succeed, Second, the mkdir command should not work, and finally, exit: smb: \> ls smb: \> mkdir error smb: \> exit Remove samba_test_user from the public_readonly group: gpasswd --delete samba_test_user public_readonly Test Read and Write access to the Public Share: Add samba_test_user to the public_readwrite group: ~]# gpasswd --add samba_test_user public_readwrite Login to the local Samba Service (public folder): ~]$smbclient --user=samba_test_user //localhost/public First, the ls command should succeed, Second, the mkdir command should work, Third, the rmdir command should work, and finally, exit: smb: \> ls smb: \> mkdir success smb: \> rmdir success smb: \> exit Remove samba_test_user from the public_readwrite group: ~]# gpasswd --delete samba_test_user public_readwrite After testing is completed, for security, disable the samba_test_user‘s ability to login in via samba. Disable samba_test_user login via samba: ~]# smbpasswd -d samba_test_user Home Folder Sharing In this last section of the guide; Samba will be configured to share a user home folder. For example: If the user bob has been registered with smbpasswd, bob’s home directory /home/bob, would become the share //server-name/bob. This share will only be available for bob, and no other users. This is a very convenient way of accessing your own local files; however naturally it carries at a security risk. Setup Home Folder Sharing Give Samba Permission for Public Folder Sharing Set SELinux Boolean allowing Samba to read and write to home folders: ~]# setsebool -P samba_enable_home_dirs=1 Verify bool has been correctly set:$ getsebool samba_enable_home_dirs Expected Output: samba_enable_home_dirs --> on Add Home Sharing to the Samba Configuration

Append the following to the systems smb.conf file:

# The home folder dynamically links to the user home. # If 'bob' user uses Samba: # The homes section is used as the template for a new virtual share: # [homes] # ... (various options) # A virtual section for 'bob' is made: # Share is modified: [homes] -> [bob] # Path is added: path = /home/bob # Any option within the [homes] section is appended. # [bob] # path = /home/bob # ... (copy of various options) # here is our share, # same as is included in the Fedora default configuration. [homes] comment = Home Directories valid users = %S, %D%w%S browseable = No read only = No inherit acls = Yes Reload Samba Configuration Tell Samba to reload it's configuration: ~]# smbcontrol all reload-config Test Home Directory Sharing Switch to samba_test_user and create a folder in it's home directory: ~]# su samba_test_user samba_test_user:~]$cd ~ samba_test_user:~]$ mkdir --verbose test_folder samba_test_user:~]$exit Enable samba_test_user to login via Samba: ~]# smbpasswd -e samba_test_user Login to the local Samba Service (samba_test_user home folder):$ smbclient --user=samba_test_user //localhost/samba_test_user Test (all commands should complete without error): smb: \> ls smb: \> ls test_folder smb: \> rmdir test_folder smb: \> mkdir home_success smb: \> rmdir home_success smb: \> exit Disable samba_test_user from login in via Samba: ~]# smbpasswd -d samba_test_user

### Freeplane: the Swiss Army knife for your brain

Monday 8th of June 2020 07:00:00 AM

A previous Fedora Magazine article covered tracking your time and tasks. Another introduced some mind mapping tools. There you learned that mind mapping is a visual technique for structuring and organizing thoughts and ideas. This article covers another mind mapping app you can use in Fedora: Freeplane.

Freeplane is a free and open source software application that supports thinking, sharing information and getting things done. Freeplane runs on any operating system that has a current version of Java installed.

Installing Freeplane

Freeplane is not currently packaged in the Fedora repositories, so you will need to install it from the project’s website.

1. Go to the project’s Sourceforge site and click Download to download the file
2. Open a terminal and extract the file (note that the version you download may be different): unzip freeplane_bin-1.8.5.zip
3. Move the extracted contents to the /opt directory: sudo mv freeplane-1.8.5 /opt/freeplane

The configuration file is located in: ~/.config/freeplane. You can launch Freeplane by running /opt/freeplane/freeplane.sh from a terminal, but if you want to launch it from the desktop environment you can create a desktop file.

Open your favorite text editor and save the contents below to ~/.local/share/applications/freeplane.desktop.

[Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Name=Freeplane Icon=/opt/freeplane/freeplane.svg Exec=/opt/freeplane/freeplane.sh Terminal=false Icon=freeplane Type=Application MimeType=text/x-troff-mm; Categories=Office; GenericName=Freeplane Comment=A free tool to organise your information Keywords=Mindmaps; Knowledge management; Brainstorming;

Next, update the desktop file database with update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications

Now you can launch Freeplane from your desktop environment.

Using Freeplane

At its first startup, Freeplane’s main window includes an example mind map with links to documentation about all the different things you can do with Freeplane.

Start your First Mind Mapping

You have a choice of templates when you create a new mind map. The standard template works for most cases. Start typing the idea and your text will replace the center text.

Press the Insert key to add a branch (or node) off the center with a blank field where you can fill in something associated with the idea. Press Insert again to add another node connected to the first one.

Press Enter on a node to add a node parallel to that one.

All keyboard shortcuts are in the Freeplane documentation.

Freeplane Plug-ins

Plug-ins can be used to extend and customize the use of the app. Two important ones are:

1. Freeplane GTD+: A generic task management add-on, with a special focus in supporting the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology
2. Study Planner: helps organize learning

To install a new add-on to Freeplane, find the add-on you want on the Freemind add-ons directory.

• In Freeplane, select Tools > Add-ons
• Click the Search button
• Find and select the file you just downloaded
• Click Install
• Depending on the add-on, you may have additional questions to answer
• Restart Freeplane to use the new add-on
Integrating mind mapping in your everyday life

Mind mapping is a very powerful method that can be of great assistance in many aspects of life.

• Learning Linux or any certification
• Learning a computer language
• Learning a human language
• Even earning a degree

Whatever the objective this will always help to keep the ideas together and organized.

Personally I’m earning a few Linux Professional Institute certifications. The image below shows a mind map I am creating as I go through the systemd materials.

Conclusion

Now you have a start on how you can use Freeplane. Freeplane gives you all the tools you’ll need to create great, vibrant, and useful mind maps. Share how you use it in the comments.

### Contribute at the Fedora CoreOS Test Day

Friday 5th of June 2020 04:00:00 PM

The Fedora CoreOS team released the first Fedora CoreOS testing release based on Fedora 32. They expect that this release will promote to the stable channel in two weeks, on the usual schedule. As a result, the Fedora CoreOS and QA teams have organized a test day on Monday, June 08, 2020. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test cases and materials you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.

How does a test day 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 do the following things:

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

The wiki page for the 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.

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

### How to generate an EPUB file on Fedora

Thursday 4th of June 2020 08:00:00 AM

It is becoming more popular to read content on smartphones. Every phone comes with its own ebook reader. Believe or not, it is very easy to create your own ebook files on Fedora.

This article shows two different methods to create an EPUB. The epub format is one of the most popular formats and is supported by many open-source applications.

Most people will ask “Why bother creating an EPUB file when PDFs are so easy to create?” The answer is: “Have you ever tried reading a sheet of paper when you can only see a small section at a time?” In order to read a PDF you have to keep zooming and moving around the document or scale it down to a small size to fit the screen. An EPUB file, on the other hand, is designed to fit many different screen types.

Method 1: ghostwriter and pandoc

This first method creates a quick ebook file. It uses a Markdown editor named ghostwriter and a command-line document conversion tool named pandoc.

You can either search for them and install them from the Software Center or you can install them from the terminal. If you are going to use the terminal to install them, run this command: sudo dnf install pandoc ghostwriter.

For those who are not aware of what Markdown is, here is a quick explanation. It is a simple markup language created a little over 15 years ago. It uses simple syntax to format plain text. Markdown files can then be converted to a whole slew of other document formats.

ghostwriter

Now for the tools. ghostwriter is a cross-platform Markdown editor that is easy to use and does not get in the way. pandoc is a very handy document converting tool that can handle hundreds of different formats.

Once your document is complete, click File -> Export (or press Ctrl + E). In the dialog box, select between several options for the Markdown converter. If this is the first time you have used ghostwriter, the Sundown converter will be picked by default. From the dialog box, select pandoc. Next click Export. Your EPUB file is now created.

ghostwriter export dialog box

Note: If you get an error saying that there was an issue with pandoc, turn off Smart Typography and try again.

Method 2: calibre

If you want a more polished ebook, this is the method that you are looking for. It takes a few more steps, but it’s worth it.

First, install an application named calibre. calibre is not just an ebook reader, it is an ebook management system. You can either install it from the Software Center or from the terminal via sudo dnf install calibre.

In this method, you can either write your document in LibreOffice, ghostwriter, or another editor of your choice. Make sure that the title of the book is formatted as Heading 1, chapters as Heading 2, and sub-sections as Heading 3.

Next, export your document as an HTML file.

Now add the file to calibre. Open calibre and click “Add books“. It will take calibre a couple of seconds to add the file.

Once the file is imported, edit the file’s metadata by clicking on the “Edit metadata” button. Here you can fill out the title of the book and the author’s name. You can also upload a cover image (if you have one) or calibre will generate one for you.

Next, click the “Convert books” button. In the new dialog box, select the “Look & Feel” section and the “Layout” tab. Check the “Remove spacing between paragraphs” option. This will tighten up the contents as indent each paragraph.

Now, set up the table of contents. Select the “Table of Contents” section. There are three options to focus on: Level 1 TOC, Level 2 TOC, and Level 3 TOC. For each, click the wand at the end. In this new dialog box, select the HTML tag that applies to the table of contents entry. For example, select h1 for Level 1 TOC and so on.

Next, tell calibre to include the table of contents. Select the “EPUB output” section and check the “Insert Inline Table of Contents“. To create the epub file, click “OK“.

Now you have a professional-looking ebook file.

## More in Tux Machines

### Librem 14 Shipping in December

The Librem 14 is going to be a powerhouse with a six core, twelve thread, 4.70Ghz i7-10710U tenth generation Intel CPU. When we first announced the Librem 14 pre-order, we estimated shipping would begin in early Q4 2020 but unfortunately Intel has industry-wide supply issues with the i7-10th gen CPUs which has moved the ship date for the Librem 14 to December 2020. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the current \$100 pre-order sale will continue for a bit longer. We also hope to finish some fresh Librem 14 prototypes in about a week, so we can share new pictures of the design.

### Linux Journal is Back

As of today, Linux Journal is back, and operating under the ownership of Slashdot Media. As Linux enthusiasts and long-time fans of Linux Journal, we were disappointed to hear about Linux Journal closing it's doors last year. It took some time, but fortunately we were able to get a deal done that allows us to keep Linux Journal alive now and indefinitely. It's important that amazing resources like Linux Journal never disappear. We will begin publishing digital content again as soon as we can. If you're a former Linux Journal contributor or a Linux enthusiast that would like to get involved, please contact us and let us know the capacity in which you'd like to contribute. We're looking for people to cover Linux news, create Linux guides, and moderate the community and comments. We'd also appreciate any other ideas or feedback you might have. Right now, we don't have any immediate plans to resurrect the subscription/issue model, and will be publishing exclusively on LinuxJournal.com free of charge. Our immediate goal is to familiarize ourself with the Linux Journal website and ensure it doesn't ever get shut down again.

### Mozilla: More on Firefox 81, Security and UX

• ##### Firefox 81 Arrives with New Theme, Media Controls, PDF Viewer + More

Mozilla Firefox 81 has been released and it features some genuinely useful improvements. I know I probably say the same thing ever release, but last month’s Firefox 80 was a very low-key release for such a high-key milestone. Thankfully Mozilla has delivered plenty to talk about in the latest update. For instance, the famed open source web browser now lets you to pause/play audio and video in Firefox using keyboard shortcuts (physical ones), via MPRIS (e.g., sound menu), or using a connected headset (assuming it has player controls).

• ##### Mozilla VR Blog: Your Security and Mozilla Hubs

Mozilla and the Hubs team takes internet security seriously. We do our best to follow best practices for web security and securing data. This post will provide an overview of how we secure access to your rooms and your data. [...] When you deploy your own Hubs Cloud instance, you have full control over the instance and its data via AWS or DigitalOcean infrastructure--Mozilla simply provides the template and automatic updates. Therefore, you can integrate your own security measures and technology as you like. Everyone’s use case is different. Hubs cloud is an as-is product, and we’re unable to predict the performance as you make changes to the template. Server access is limited by SSH and sometimes two-factor authentication. For additional security, you can set stack template rules to restrict which IP addresses can SSH into the server.

• ##### Firefox UX: From a Feature to a Habit: Why are People Watching Videos in Picture-in-Picture?

At the end of 2019, if you were using Firefox to watch a video, you saw a new blue control with a simple label: “Picture-in-Picture.” Even after observing and carefully crafting the feature with feedback from in-progress versions of Firefox (Nightly and Beta), our Firefox team wasn’t really sure how people would react to it. So we were thrilled when we saw signals that the response was positive.

### Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 Released with Support for Sony Xperia X and OnePlus 3/3T

The biggest news in this release is, of course, the support for new devices. You can now install the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on the Sony Xperia X, Sony Xperia X Compact, Sony Xperia X Performance, Sony Xperia XZ, OnePlus 3, and OnePlus 3T smartphones using the official UBports Installer. This update also incorporates the QtWebEngine 5.14 components, which updates the built-in Morph Browser to the latest Chromium version, making it up to 25% faster across all devices and enabling support for selecting only the text you want from web pages using the touch handles, as well as to open downloaded PDF, TXT, IMG or MP3 files directly in the browser.