Another successful and very fun BalCCon is behind us! Huge props to the organizers, speakers, volunteers and everyone else who made it happen.

BalCCon is a very important event for the Serbian (and even wider) Fedora community simply because it is the largest local event that gathers hackers, tinkerers and of course many Linux users.

This year we had a large booth like the years before with swag to give away and some interesting devices running Fedora on them.

I also gave a short talk (maybe a bit too short) about how we use Fedora in Education at my University.

The main thing for us, as always, was to talk to people about Fedora and how it can work for them and introduce them to different projects within Fedora.

All in all, a great event, met many cool people and hopefully we see each other at the next BalCCon. Till then! :)

Another awesome Fedora Release Party in Novi Sad! Thank you all who came to hang out and hear what is new in Fedora 26.

We had several interesting talks about what is new in Fedora 26, how to package RPMs, how to use Fedora Server edition, how to become a Fedora contributor and the ever-so-important talk about privacy, encryption and security in mobile IM applications.

Gallery: https://nmilosev.github.io/f26rpns-gallery/

Slides: https://github.com/nmilosev/f26rpns-gallery/tree/gh-pages/talks

See you in 6 months!

The days of hacking Intel drivers to run X server on Chromebooks are behind us. :)

As of version 50, Chrome OS includes a Wayland server. Even though this is mostly for running Android applications, even my old Toshiba Chromebook which doesn’t have Android support, has Wayland in it. Therefore Crouton Fedora can now fully utilize it and run GUI applications on it, mixed with Chrome OS windows!

https://github.com/nmilosev/crouton-fedora-wayland

There are some problems but nothing major so far. Let me know how it works for you!

This year we managed to get a booth on a very popular student job fair called Konteh. (Thanks to Boban Poznanovic, one of the event managers)

Konteh is an annual event where local companies send their recruiters to find young, educated students who would be good candidates for open positions at their companies. As it is primarily a job fair, at first I wasn’t sure if this is a place where Fedora would benefit from a booth, but the number of people asking about what is it, what do we do and how to join certainly changed my mind.

This year Konteh took place on Wednesday 23 and Thursday 24 March at the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad, Serbia.

Our booth was on the second floor of the main venue. I had some leftover Fedora goodies (DVD’s were a hit!) from previous release parties, so this was a good opportunity to share it with a great number of CS students.

We had a...

Almost two years after writing my post about running Fedora on a BayTrail tablet, I decided to provide a small update.

Even though a lot of support landed in kernels 4.8 and 4.9 there are still a few things needed fixing. The good news is that out-of-the-box experience is much, much better now, with almost everything working.

So let’s get to it!

 Fedora version, and deskop environment

I recommend starting with a i686 Fedora Workstation image. If GNOME is slow on your tablet you can later install another DE (I installed XFCE).

Remember that you will most certainly need GDM because it is the only Login Manager which supports touch screens.

 Getting it to boot

When you download the i686 ISO, you will need to extract it to a blank FAT32 formatted USB drive. You will still need the bootia32 trick to get GRUB loaded.

 Fixing black screen on boot

One of the biggest issues with BayTrail...

Another awesome Fedora release, and another awesome Fedora Release Party in Novi Sad! :)

This is my short event report from the Fedora 25 Release Party in Novi Sad.

This time the organization went really really smooth (we were infinitely more experienced than the last time - it was our first event), and I met a lot of new Fedora people and had a chance to talk about Fedora with everyone!

The party took place, like last time, on the Faculty of Science, University of Novi Sad in the biggest amphitheater of the Department of Mathematics and Informatics. To be even more precise it’s about 3 minutes away from our Fedora-powered computer lab!

About 40 people (among who was a Fedora ambassador from Uruguay!) attended and we had four talks about different topics, regarding Fedora, Security and Hackerspaces.

 Talk #1

After a short introduction from the head of the Chair of Information...

A small update. I wrote a small shell script which can set up a Fedora chroot anywhere (get the name now?) where a compatible kernel is. This means you can use minimal Fedora shell on almost any other Linux distribution.

Here is the project homepage and source code:

https://github.com/nmilosev/anyfed

You use it like this:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nmilosev/anyfed/master/anyfed && bash anyfed

The only prerequisites are that you have tar and wget in your $PATH, you don’t even have to be superuser. It should work on any recent ARM or x86_64 kernel. I’ve tested it on my Android phone, my Raspberry Pi (with LibreELEC) and a couple of virtual machines and it is working really good.

The use cases are very broad. For example for running software which isn’t available on your installed distribution, or to try out dnf and other Fedora-specific tools. Also, this could be very...

Termux is an awesome new open source app for Android which provides you with a basic Linux shell. It also has a tiny repository with some packages and one of those packages is proot which you may remember from my GNURoot tutorial.

GNURoot way of getting Fedora on your unrooted Android phone still works, but this way is much cleaner and we have more control over what’s going on. I’ve been using this for a couple of days and it has been really stable and fast.

Anyway to install Fedora on your unrooted (or rooted) Android phone you have to:

• install Termux from the Play Store or the F-Droid store
• open it and paste this little snippet:

apt update && apt install wget -y && /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nmilosev/termux-fedora/master/termux-fedora.sh && sh termux-fedora.sh

and wait. If everything goes well, you can enter Fedora chroot with a...

This is a quick guide on how to quickly make a Fedora Minimal chroot environment without any special tools. The only prerequisite is that you have root access on the machine you are using, and chroot binary (or busybox even). I am also using wget and tar but you probably have that. :)

We are going to use a Docker image as it contains a very well packaged Fedora Minimal rootfs.

Docker images are available for x86_64 and ARM architectures here:

https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/24/Docker/

I am setting up my Raspberry Pi 2 in this example so I used the ARM image. The “host” operating system is LibreELEC media center, but this will work on any Linux distribution.

# make sure you are root
sudo su

# create a directory for Fedora
mkdir -p /fedora 
cd /fedora

# get the Docker image
wget