Category: Linux

i have forked neofetch

whbeebe1 Comment
neofetch report of my Linux Mint system

I have forked the original neofetch into my personal GitHub area: https://github.com/wbeebe/neofetch2

I’ve done this because I want to fix some issues I have with it and to add what I believe are a few necessary features. I also wanted to grab a copy before anything happened to the original. I know that putting a project into archive is supposed to protect it, and I also have read that there a currently a number of existing forks that are actively being developed. I decided to go this route because it helps to scratch that coding itch and because I believe I can contribute useful features to the tool, as well as keep it going for a few more years. At least I hope it won’t sit idle for three? four? years since it’s last original update.

This should be interesting.

a very, very brief encounter with fedora 40

whbeebe

Fedora Linux 40 was released yesterday, 23 April 2024. Rather than download a full ISO file and create a virtual machine from that, I took my existing Fedora 39 virtual machine (running with Virtual Machine Manager 4 and qemu 6.2 and hosted on Linux Mint) and updated it with the Fedora tools. Here’s how that went.

There is a well documented process to upgrade an older version of Fedora to a new release, which you can follow here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading-fedora-offline/

Once done with that, you’ll perform a sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot, which is when all the heavy upgrade work really begins. Note from the screen capture there are 2,000 packages to deal with.

Final Fedora 40 upgrade step

Once you kick off the system upgrade, you’re presented with this;

Fedora 40 upgrade

And while that’s happening inside the VM, the host system is getting pretty hammered;

Fedora 40 host system load

I have no idea how long the upgrade took, but it was well over an hour. While waiting for it to finish I did housework in preparation for going to bed.

Fedora 40 final

When I came back to check the VM, I noticed the wallpaper was changed yet again. Really, why can’t an upgrade keep the older release’s wallpaper? It sounds like a trivial complaint, but it’s not. As neofetch shows, the VM is now officially running Fedora 40.

One big immediate observation is that Fedora 40 is rather sluggish, especially when you move a window around. It’s stutters and there’s a lot of screen tearing. I strongly suspect that the reason is that the now-very-old version of QEMU/KVM isn’t optimized for the kernel running in Fedora 40. The current version of QEMU is 6.2, but general release is version 8, and the QEMU developers just announced the release of version 9. This is why I don’t like running on distributions with very long support timelines. Sounds great for certain types of work, but as a home developer, I don’t need that. I’m going to have to find a repo that will allow me to install directly onto my system, as there is no flatpack version of QEMU.