Tue, 15 Sep 2015
Eternal Spring
This year we spent our holidays in the island of eternal spring. I have been to Madeira in 2010 at a conference, and I had only about two and half days to visit something outside the hotel. This time, we decided to spend two weeks there: one week in Funchal, and another one somewhere close to the Northern coast.
We tried to ask travel agencies whether two-weeks trip with them is possible, but the reply was that it would be difficult. So we ended up booking the flight and accomodation for both weeks separately. Surprisingly enough, the price was about the same as with the travel agency.
We enjoyed the sea, gardens in Funchal, mountains, and of course levada walks. The weather was nice: it was about 19 °C and foggy weather in the mountains, while the temperature attacked unbearable values of 35 °C in Brno. I can highly recommend Madeira, I would say there is still at least another week worth of interesting places for us to see there.
Have a look at a short description (about 25 photos, in Czech), or a larger photo gallery (about 200 photos).
Speaking of photo galleries: I used Photoswipe for the above gallery. It turned out to be customizable enough for my needs. The only drawback is that it does not work well in Fennec (a mobile version of Firefox on Android).
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Mon, 14 Sep 2015
Service Bloat
I have (finally) upgraded my home workstation/server/router to Fedora 22. Newer Fedora releases have an anti-feature called "product": one cannot simply install "Fedora", the "Fedora Product", such as Fedora Workstation, should be selected first. For a system with X session (two X sessions, in my case), "Fedora Workstation" seems to be a natural choice. It is not: "Fedora Workstation" can be translated from Fedora Newspeak to an ordinary English as "Fedora GNOME 3". So this is a no-go.
A time ago, I came across a suggestion that "Fedora Server" is probably
the closest thing to former "Fedora". So I upgraded my home box to
"Fedora Server". Today, after a routine inspection of open ports on my
home server, I discovered that something is listening on port 9090
on INADDR_ANY (and IN6ADDR_ANY as well). One fuser -n tcp,
and I discovered that the listening process is called cockpit-ws.
Digging further into it, it seems that this is a web-based administrative
interface (do you remember linuxconf, anyone?), probably another futile
attempt to encapsulate the strength of all the configuration files to some
useless web-based interface. Moreover, it cannot be uninstalled, as it
depends on the fedora-release-server package.
A side note: the cockpit-ws package contains font files,
which is probably against Fedora Font Packaging Guidelines.
I wonder what happened to the "no unnecessary services should be enabled by default" philosophy. It seems that Cockpit is a blatant example of an unnecessary service, which is not only installed by default, but also enabled by default in Fedora Server 22. I recommend to run the following commands:
# systemctl stop cockpit.socket # systemctl disable cockpit.socket
What other kinds of service-bloat did you find on your computers? Watch for newly opened ports after Fedora upgrades.
11 replies for this story:
Adelton wrote: Nonproduct
I assume you've used fedup to upgrade. In that case --product=nonproduct is probably what you wanted.
isimluk wrote: Fedora minimal
To remove unnecesary packages, I maintain fedora-minimal.rpm with various conflicts. https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/isimluk/fedora-minimal/
Yenya wrote: Re: Nonproduct
OK, how can I move an existing system to nonproduct? Is removing fedora-release-server package what I want? Thanks.
Yenya wrote: Re: Fedora minimal
Interesting. I have looked at fedora-minimal, and it looks like sudden outbreak of common sense to me. Thanks and keep up the good work!
Adelton wrote: Re: Nonproduct
That is my understanding -- it's just package dependency thing.
Adelton wrote: Re: Fedora minimal
Nice. I've installed all but four. fedora-minimal-conflicts-gnome conflicts with libxklavier but that is needed by lightdm, xfce4-settings, and xfce4-xkb-plugin -- all things I kinda like. And fedora-minimal-conflicts-anaconda wants to remove pykickstart which I have no problem with except it would take away dnf-plugins-core which sounds a bit hardcore.
Yenya wrote: Re: Nonproduct
Do you know whether a fresh install (as opposed to fedup upgrade) can also be done as "nonproduct"?
isimluk wrote: Re: Fedora minimal
Yenya, Yes. My understanding is that removing fedora-release-server is what you need. Adelton, I'll happily accept patches. pykickstart has been only recently required by dnf-plugins-core. libxklavier is not useful for me, but we could move it out of fedora-minimal-gnome pkg to some other.
Yenya wrote: Fedora No Bullshit?
Maybe we should attempt to create a Fedora spin without this bloat. Fedora Traditional? Fedora No Bullshit? Fedora JustWorks?
Yenya wrote: Re: Fedora No Bullshit?
(replying to myself :-) Fedora Nonproduct? Fedora Core? Fedora Versatile?
petr_p wrote: Re: Nonproduct
Uninstalling fedora-release* will break dependencies probably. Proper way is to have installed exactly on of the fedora-release* packages (e.g. "dnf --allowerasing install fedora-release). See [http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=637888]. By the way product introduction has already happened in Fedora 21. I recommend reading [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum#Version_specific_notes].