desktop May 2015

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

71 participants
48 discussions

Anaconda wishlist
by Michael Catanzaro 04 Jun '15

04 Jun '15

Hi, I put together a desired installation experience wishlist. Let's discuss and consider forwarding this to the Anaconda developers as a request. * Remove the timezone selection spoke. This spoke is redundant with gnome-initial-setup. * Remove or simplify the network configuration spoke. In the live installer, this spoke allows setting only the system hostname, but it follows different rules for setting the hostname than GNOME/systemd. The spoke should either follow hostnamed's rules for pretty hostnames (i.e. allows capital letters, spaces, etc. without any complaint), or the spoke should be removed. If we keep it, it should allow the user to set a "computer name" (avoiding technical terminology like "hostname") and should not include the phrase "network configuration." * Remove root password configuration. It's confusing how this is different from the user's admin account password. Advanced users can set a root password after installation if desired. * Remove user account creation. This is redundant with gnome-initial -setup. * Remove hub and spokes: simply go straight to keyboard layout selection after language selection, then from there to disk layout, optionally from there to the hostname panel, and then to the installation progress panel. This last panel will need a bit of a redesign, since it will be pretty empty otherwise. Clearly this is mostly a list of things to remove, rather than things to add. The goal is to make installation as simple and easy as possible. Changes to gnome-initial-setup: Skip language and keyboard layout selection in user creation mode. These panels cannot reasonably be removed from Anaconda, so we should use them only in existing user mode (when a new user account is created after installation). They're redundant in user creation mode. This proposal leaves the disk layout spoke untouched, which is the most confusing portion of the installation experience, but it's more than enough changes for one release already. Thoughts?

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Significant drop in ABRT reports in F22
by Jiri Eischmann 02 Jun '15

02 Jun '15

Hi, I regularly go through most frequent problems reported to ABRT retrace server because it helps me prioritize bugs in Fedora that are assigned to my team. I've noticed a significant drop in number of reports in Fedora 22. It's just two weeks before the final release when many early adopters are already running F22, but the difference in number of reports from F21 and F22 is huge: 64373:904. 12 days before F21 was released, we collected 16081 reports from this version. That's almost 18x more. I don't think we're experiencing such a huge drop in adoption, so I investigated more. I found out several things which I think are a cause of this: 1) I upgraded my machine, and the new Problem Reporting in Privacy Settings is set not to do automatic reporting, completely ignoring my settings in ABRT from F21. 2) I checked settings in ABRT and automatic settings was enabled, so I thought something was broken because my crashes were not reported automatically. Then (with the help of Jakub Filak) I found out that this had been overridden by the new settings in Privacy. 3) Users are no longer asked if they want to enable automatic reporting when the first crash happens. So unless despite complete lack of any hints they find their way into Privacy settings their crashes are not reported. I can no longer even make ureports manually by clicking on Report in notifications. To report it, I need to do the full BZ report. With such a decrease in number of reports, ABRT is much less useful to developers and I think we should fix it: * privacy settings should reflect my settings from ABRT after upgrade. * settings in ABRT and Control Center should be in sync, I understand that the Privacy is master settings overriding app's settings, but there is only one app reporting and it's very confusing for users. * users should be asked if they want to enable automatic reporting after the first crash like in the last. Jiri

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root login via gdm
by Pete Travis 29 May '15

29 May '15

At one time, one could not log in to a GNOME session on Fedora as the root account. Now, you can, out of the box. For me, this seems like less of a "getting in the user's way" thing, and more of a common sense default security policy - especially given all the work done to make things work smoothly with polkit. Am I missing something? If not, what about going back to blocking root login to desktop environments? -- -- Pete

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Re: VSYNC problems on Fedora 21/22 and Intel HD graphics...
by drago01 29 May '15

29 May '15

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:01 PM, Chris Wilson <chris(a)chris-wilson.co.uk> wrote: > On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 03:37:29PM -0400, Alex G.S. wrote: >> Hello, >> First of all I love the new GNOME 3.16 release. The notifications and >> system tray icons (in the left) are great and productivity boosters. >> However, I'm having some issues with Intel HD graphics on X11 that make >> things very difficult. Though these problems are solved by the Wayland >> session it's still too unstable for me to use in production as a >> day-to-day desktop. >> Hardware: >> Intel® Core™ i5-4200M CPU @ 2.50GHz × 4 >> Intel® Haswell Mobile (HD 4600, i965) >> GNOME: >> Version 3.16.2 >> Kernel: >> 4.0.4-301.fc22.x86_64 >> Problem: >> [1]https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=741376 >> At work I use two external monitors in addition to the laptop screen. >> VSYNC often breaks when using either SNA or UXA at random intervals. It >> also breaks also when I fullscreen any application in any monitor. Even >> when I force VSYNC in both xorg.conf and drirc it doesn't seem to help. >> These are configurations for reference: >> /etc/environment: >> CLUTTER_VBLANK=True >> /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf >> Section "Device" >> Identifier "Intel Graphics" >> Driver "intel" >> Option "AccelMethod" "sna" >> Option "TearFree" "true" >> Option "SwapbuffersWait" "true" > > Try Option "DRI" "2" in conjunction to the above. We no longer default to DRI3 in F22.

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Fedora runtimes and sandboxed desktop applications
by Alexander Larsson 29 May '15

29 May '15

I'm working on an application sandboxing system called xdg-app, and the surrounding echo-system. I won't go into details, but there are some links to technical details at the end of the mail[1]. The basic idea is that we have two sources (both ostree trees), one called the runtime (/usr), and one called the app (/app), which get combined in a container-like environment at launch time by xdg-app, with configurable degrees of sandboxing. There is also some interaction with the host system so that installed desktop files show up in the shell and dbus session services from apps work. xdg-app has two major goals, the first is to allow applications to run in a sandboxed environment with minimal access to the host. The second is to allow third parties to create and distribute applications that run on all distributions (and the sandboxing helps making this less risky). To facilitate and test this I've also created an upstream gnome runtime[2] that gnome applications can chose to use. I'm also working on various Portal APIs[3] that allow sandboxed applications to safely interact with the system. But, third party applications are a long way off in the future, and so are sandboxed applications (which need not only a fleshed out set of sandbox APIs, but also modifications to individual apps). In the meantime it is still interesting to run bundled applications. For instance in the context of an Atomic-based Fedora Workstation (with readonly /usr), or if you want to run older or newer versions of applications than your distribution is shipping. It would make a lot of sense to use the existing packages in Fedora for this. And in order to kickstart discussions about this I've created an initial sample of a possible Fedora runtime using rpm-ostree and the Fedora 22 repositories: https://github.com/alexlarsson/fedora-runtime Building this produces a repo with the main runtime (org.fedoraproject.Platform) and a sdk runtime (org.fedoraproject.Sdk) which has some additional tools for app creation and debugging. It also builds .Var subruntimes that contain /var with the rpm db for use when building apps. The current package set is mostly based on what is in the gnome one, so don't consider this official in any way. These runtimes are made to work with xdg-app 0.3.0 which are now in updates-testing for F21 and F22. You also need rpm-ostree from git master for the container support to build the fedra runtime. In order to test the runtime I've also created a firefox application bundle. Unfortunately it requires some hacks in order to be relocated to /app, and to work as a bundle. However, it works pretty well, running somewhat contained with only access to the Downloads xdg directory and with ~/.mozilla being redirected to the per-app persistant data directory (~/.var/app/org.fedoraproject.firefox). Note however, that I would not consider this properly sandboxed, as it uses X11 for rendering, which is not very secure. The scripts to build the firefox bundle is here: https://github.com/alexlarsson/fedora-apps I've also put up a xdg-app repository so that you can easily test this: (Run these commands as non-root, due to the --user args) xdg-app add-remote --user --no-gpg-verify fedora http://people.redhat.com/~alexl/repo xdg-app install-runtime --user fedora org.fedoraproject.Platform 22 xdg-app install-app --user fedora org.fedoraproject.firefox xdg-app run org.fedoraproject.firefox Once installed the desktop file will be exported to the session, so you should also be able to launch it from the shell. In theory this should work on any distro, but I've only tried it on F21. The question is, would the Fedora project be interested in supplying and maintaining a Fedora runtime like this, which allows us (and others) to create applications using the fedora base. And if we do, exactly what should be considered part of the basic platform. Defining a platform requires a lot of care. It is a balance between wanting as much as possible in it to share more maintainance and updates and make it easier to write apps and on the other hand trying to keep the basic platfrom small, maintained and of high quality. The ABI requirements for a platform is a bit different than a regular distro. The goal is to allow apps built against a particular platform to run for years to come, so it should only do security and very important bugfix updates, and *never* break ABI. On the other hand, its easy to break ABI in a later version of the runtime, because they are parallel installed. This is somewhat different than our current updates which revs libraries during the distro lifetime as long as it also updates all users of it. An added complexity is that anything in the runtime that relies on some kind of IPC to the host (say the pulseaudio client libraries, or something that uses a dbus interface on the host) requires the host side of that IPC to remain available and backwards compatible in future versions of the distro, so we should err on exposing a minimal set of IPC. There is also some changes that may be required in the distro to keep unnecessary dependencies out of the runtime. For instance anything related to hardware or system initialization is completely unnecessary. Luckily much of this is being fixed by similar needs from docker already. One thing that is different from docker however, is that we generally want translations/locales in the runtime. But these are pretty large, so we want to handle them in a smart way. xdg-app has a feature that allows splitting a runtime into a base and a set of optional extensions that are mounted in the sandbox only when they are installed. I use this in the gnome runtime to split out each locale. Unfortunately Fedora uses a single large locale-archive file for its locales, so its hard to do that. This needs some research to figure out how to do properly. There are also some custom configuration that a runtime needs. For instance, the build script for the fedora runtime above drops in a new fontconfig file that adds a /app/share/fonts fontdir for app-bundled fonts and configuration to include the host fonts (which xdg-app exposes in /run/host/fonts). This would be nicer if this was just a fontconfig subpackage we could pull in, and I'm sure there are more similar configuration options that would be needed. Creating applications from fedora packages is a bit more complicated. The primary reason is that they need to be relocated to /app. In the hacky script above I just extract the rpm contents to /app and then rewrite some rpaths and shell scripts. A less hacky approach is to rebuild the rpms with a different rpm %_prefix macro, or to use relocatable rpms. It is not really significantly different from creating rpms to use in software collections though, so we have some experience with this. Packaging an application also requires some changes other than the relocatability itself. First of all, all "exported" files from an application (such as icons, desktop files, dbus service files, or other files that are read from outside the app itself) must have the application id (which is a dbus/java-style reverse dns name) as a filename prefix. This is both for avoiding conflicts, and for security reasons, see [4]. However, it wouldn't necessarily be a problem if we just did such changes on the regular fedora packages too, as a regular fedora packaging policy. One issue is that as third party packagers of applications we should not use the "official" app ids for our builds, as they would conflict with upstream doing their own release. So, our package of org.gnome.gedit should probably be called org.fedoraproject.gedit, which may require some minor tweaks to the build (for instance, this affects the dbus name the app uses for dbus activated desktop files, as well as the name of the desktop file itself). There are clearly a lot of details here, but I'll stop here and throw this out as the start of a discussion. I'll gladly reply to any questions people may have. [1] More information: My devconf talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-2a_XYJPEY gnome wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps xdg-app code: https://github.com/alexlarsson/xdg-app [2] Announcement of gnome runtime: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2015/03/31/official-gnome-sdk-runtime-builds-… [3] https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps/DocumentPortal https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps/Sandbox [4] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-os-list/2015-February/msg00009.html -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Alexander Larsson Red Hat, Inc alexl(a)redhat.com alexander.larsson(a)gmail.com He's a war-weary Republican vampire hunter on a search for his missing sister. She's a ditzy winged queen of the dead with the power to see death. They fight crime!

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New Member of List
by William Best 28 May '15

28 May '15

Hello, My name is William Best. I am not sure if this is the right group to join for how I would like to contribute. My passion/career involves helping people with developmental disabilities get better access to technology. Over the past year or so, I have been experimenting with different Linux distributions to come up with a low-cost, stable, and robust solution for the disabled people I work with. I really like Fedora the best out of the bunch for a variety of reasons. My goal is to help get features/apps that would help disabled people access technology in a better way. Let me know if I am in the right group for this. Thanks! ~William Best

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wired networking should work by default, even if not connected at install time
by Chris Murphy 28 May '15

28 May '15

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=963952 The gist of this bug is, if the user installs Fedora and doesn't have (wired) ethernet connected at the time of installation, onboot=no and therefore on any subsequent boot, the network does not come up. A separate GNOME bug is that even if the user manually turns on that wired connection, it isn't a sticky setting. So networking is off again the next reboot. The trick is to find the totally obscure and buried option for the wired device to connect automatically. This bug doesn't piss me off the way it did back in 2013 when I filed it, because I know the work around. But this is still a Top 10 Most Asinine Bug. Amusingly, wireless connections don't have this behavior, even though they're in the realm of 8000% more risky even when making a manual+conscious connection. Whereas when I take a physical plug and stick it into the jack, it's a considerable WTF moment when that connection doesn't work until I intervene further, and doesn't work yet again on a reboot until I intervene yet again. I can kinda sorta almost understand server folks differing on this (even though I find it specious for various reasons) but Workstation really shouldn't behave this way. It is not an easy work around, at all, when the user doesn't don't know about it. And in no sane world should they need to know about it. And even when they do know about it, it's always a *sigh* "oh yes, that" moment. So from every perspective I see it as a negative and no benefit. Thanks, -- Chris Murphy

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Re: VSYNC problems on Fedora 21/22 and Intel HD graphics...
by Alex G.S. 27 May '15

27 May '15

> > Let's actually look at what debug information is available then rather > than just flailing in the dark here. The journal since booting should > help see where the lookups are coming from, at least let me know how the > system is configured. What's the best way to capture a log and where should I upload it to? On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 4:43 PM, Chris Wilson <chris(a)chris-wilson.co.uk> wrote: > On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 04:28:33PM -0400, Alex G.S. wrote: > > > Try Option "DRI" "2" in conjunction to the above. > > It worked momentarily but GNOME Shell locked up and crashed when I > had an > > application (Remmina) fullscreen in of the monitors. This happens > very > > frequently in my experience. GNOME just seems unstable on Intel HD > 4600. > > I even tried adding the following to my boot parameters but it didn't > > change anything: > > i915.semaphores=1 > > Let's actually look at what debug information is available then rather > than just flailing in the dark here. The journal since booting should > help see where the lookups are coming from, at least let me know how the > system is configured. > -Chris > > -- > Chris Wilson, Intel Open Source Technology Centre >

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VSYNC problems on Fedora 21/22 and Intel HD graphics...
by Alex G.S. 27 May '15

27 May '15

Hello, First of all I love the new GNOME 3.16 release. The notifications and system tray icons (in the left) are great and productivity boosters. However, I'm having some issues with Intel HD graphics on X11 that make things very difficult. Though these problems are solved by the Wayland session it's still too unstable for me to use in production as a day-to-day desktop. Hardware: Intel® Core™ i5-4200M CPU @ 2.50GHz × 4 Intel® Haswell Mobile (HD 4600, i965) GNOME: Version 3.16.2 Kernel: 4.0.4-301.fc22.x86_64 Problem: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=741376 At work I use two external monitors in addition to the laptop screen. VSYNC often breaks when using either SNA or UXA at random intervals. It also breaks also when I fullscreen any application in any monitor. Even when I force VSYNC in both xorg.conf and drirc it doesn't seem to help. These are configurations for reference: /etc/environment: CLUTTER_VBLANK=True /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf Section "Device" Identifier "Intel Graphics" Driver "intel" Option "AccelMethod" "sna" Option "TearFree" "true" Option "SwapbuffersWait" "true" EndSection /etc/drirc <device screen="0" driver="i965"> <application name="Default"> <option name="force_s3tc_enable" value="true" /> <option name="no_rast" value="false" /> <option name="always_flush_batch" value="false" /> <option name="always_flush_cache" value="false" /> <option name="shader_precompile" value="true" /> <option name="hiz" value="true" /> <option name="clamp_max_samples" value="-1" /> <option name="bo_reuse" value="1" /> <option name="allow_glsl_extension_directive_midshader" value="false" /> <option name="force_glsl_extensions_warn" value="false" /> <option name="disable_throttling" value="false" /> <option name="disable_glsl_line_continuations" value="false" /> <option name="disable_blend_func_extended" value="false" /> <option name="vblank_mode" value="3" /> </application> I even have a GNOME extension I created that autoloads the following GNOME JS function: Meta.disable_unredirect_for_screen(global.screen) This still doesn't help at all. There is a bug report for this item and has been confirmed but I haven't heard anything and status is still NEW and not yet confirmed. Please, any help on this would be appreciated. Things like this should just work out of the box especially on Intel HD graphics. This is a bewildering problem as this is my work machine and I may end up switching to a Mac or Ubuntu Unity if this cannot be fixed. Thank you! Best, Alex

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Workstation WG Recap 2015-May-27
by Paul W. Frields 27 May '15

27 May '15

Minutes: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-05-27/workstation.2015… Minutes (text): http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-05-27/workstation.2015… Log: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-05-27/workstation.2015… * * * ================================================== #fedora-meeting: Workstation WG (special timeslot) ================================================== Meeting started by stickster at 15:00:01 UTC. The full logs are available at http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-05-27/workstation.2015… . Meeting summary --------------- * Roll call (stickster, 15:00:08) * Special time slot (stickster, 15:03:18) * This slot will not be repeated; next meeting is Monday 2015-Jun-08 at 1300 UTC (stickster, 15:03:38) * F23/24 plans (stickster, 15:04:02) * LINK: https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/27 (stickster, 15:04:43) * IDEA: Can we work toward a better upgrade story in F23/24 (stickster, 15:26:58) * ACTION: mcatanzaro to propose update to PRD to clarify that developer focus does not compromise the goal to be a "polished and user friendly system that can appeal to a wide general audience" (mcatanzaro, 15:31:10) * LINK: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2015-May/012065.html (mcatanzaro, 15:33:13) * LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Tasklist (stickster, 15:55:27) * LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Tasklist (stickster, 15:55:47) * many people who could work on F23 improvements are bound up on immediate RHEL work (stickster, 15:56:34) * ACTION: mclasen will also review foregoing task list to see what's already up that could be completed for F23 (stickster, 15:56:42) * LINK: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/so… (mclasen, 15:58:45) * ACTION: stickster pull together tasks from mclasen + update + anaconda requests into Council report for F23/24 (stickster, 15:59:29) * ACTION: stickster Set up whenisgood for WG + anaconda folks to discuss requests (stickster, 16:09:46) * stickster will carry over agenda items from mcatanzaro list so we can pick up at next meeting (stickster, 16:11:59) * Next meeting: 2015-Jun-08 UTC 1300 (stickster, 16:12:11) Meeting ended at 16:12:17 UTC. Action Items ------------ * mcatanzaro to propose update to PRD to clarify that developer focus does not compromise the goal to be a "polished and user friendly system that can appeal to a wide general audience" * mclasen will also review foregoing task list to see what's already up that could be completed for F23 * stickster pull together tasks from mclasen + update + anaconda requests into Council report for F23/24 * stickster Set up whenisgood for WG + anaconda folks to discuss requests Action Items, by person ----------------------- * mcatanzaro * mcatanzaro to propose update to PRD to clarify that developer focus does not compromise the goal to be a "polished and user friendly system that can appeal to a wide general audience" * mclasen * mclasen will also review foregoing task list to see what's already up that could be completed for F23 * stickster pull together tasks from mclasen + update + anaconda requests into Council report for F23/24 * stickster * stickster pull together tasks from mclasen + update + anaconda requests into Council report for F23/24 * stickster Set up whenisgood for WG + anaconda folks to discuss requests * **UNASSIGNED** * (none) People Present (lines said) --------------------------- * stickster (99) * mclasen (33) * mcatanzaro (31) * cschalle (15) * otaylor (14) * dcantrell (13) * kalev (9) * zodbot (8) * jwb (8) * nirik (2) * rdieter (1) * pingou (1) * Kellin (1) * juhp (0) Generated by `MeetBot`_ 0.1.4 .. _`MeetBot`: http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com

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desktop May 2015