Fedora, KDE, Games, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 15, 2024

• SparkFun Electronics ☛ Low-Power Draw with the NORA-W306 Thing+

  Rob is back at work with the new SparkFun Thing Plus - NORA-W306, and this time he's showing off the low-power consumption capabilities of the board. This Feather form-factor development board is capable of a lot including an integrated single-chip low-power dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) Wireless LAN (WLAN) and Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE 5.3) communication microcontroller. It also consists of a dual processor core: Arm Cortex-M33 and Cortex-M23!

• Fedora

  • Hans de Goede: Fedora plymouth boot splash not showing on systems with AMD GPUs

    Recently there have been a number of reports (bug 2183743, bug 2276698, bug 2283839, bug 2312355) about the plymouth boot splash not showing properly on PCs using AMD GPUs.The problem without plymouth and AMD GPUs is that the amdgpu driver is a really really big driver, which easily takes up to 10 seconds to load on older PCs. The delay caused by this may cause plymouth to timeout while waiting for the GPU to be initialized, causing it to fallback to the 3 dot text-mode boot splash.There are 2 workaround for this depending on the PCs configuration: [...]

  • Kevin Fenzi: Infrastructure happenings, second half of aug – first half of sept 2024

    So, I was going to try and do these posts more regularly, but of course thats hard to do. After flock there was a bunch of things I wanted to post, then a bunch of fires and so things got behind. Such is life, so here’s a few things I wanted to talk about in more detail from the last month or so. As always, I do still post on mastodon daily, happy to answer questions or comments there as things happen and expand on things in posts like this.

    Fedora 41 branched off rawhide! This I think went much more smoothly than the last cycle. I like to hope it’s because we documented all the things that were not right last time and did them this time. There were a few more things to adjust, it wasn’t perfect, but it was much better!

• KDE/Qt

  • Adriaan de Groot ☛ KDE Plasma Wayland keyboard layouts

    Calamares is a GNU/Linux system installer used by dozens of distro’s to get the bits from an ISO image onto a target computer. Development is nowadays purely on a volunteer basis, which makes it hard to keep up with all the changes in the GNU/Linux world. But steps are made, and code submissions are very welcome, and here’s a note on something relatively new and useful: Wayland keyboard layouts.

    Some History

    In an X11-based system, the X server is the one thing that knows how to interpret keystrokes (pressing the button on a bit of hardware, e.g. the button to the right of the one labeled CapsLock is labeled A and makes the letter “a” when pressed). The X server can be told how to interpret the buttons: one command is setxkbmap which can manipulate the keymap: [...]

• Games

  • Notebook Check ☛ Microsoft paves the way for Linux gaming success with plan that would kill kernel-level anti-cheat [Ed: Bizarre spin]

    Microsoft has officially announced its intent to move security measures out of the kernel, following the Crowdstrike disaster a few short months ago. The removal of kernel access for security solutions would likely revolutionise running Windows games on the Steam Deck and other Linux systems.

    Back in July, after the massive Crowdstrike outage that ended up grounding flights and bringing businesses around the world to their knees, there was talk from Microsoft about locking down the Windows kernel in order to prevent similar issues from arising in the future. Now, according to a Microsoft blog post about the recent Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit, the company is committing to providing “more security capabilities to solution providers outside of kernel mode.”

    According to the blog post, Microsoft and many of its security partners and vendors discussed several aspects of the future of security in Windows, but moving security features out of the kernel has some interesting implications for the future of gaming on Linux. Removing kernel-level security software would mean that anti-cheat software would all have to be implemented with user access, making it much less intrusive and far easier to emulate with translation layers, like WINE or Valve's Proton.