Fedora 22

Fedora 22 is out, go get it.
https://getfedora.org/

Complaints!

I use KDE so the I'm using the new Plasma UI. Some of my apps are getting confused about the system tray. Haven't dug in to deeply yet.

The worst thing though is the mouse input. I spent a good while troubleshooting my gaming mouse thinking a light drop from earlier in the day had broken it somehow. Small mouse movements were really slow or lost altogether. It's pretty terrible in a game when you're using it for aiming and the mouse doesn't move.
I found the KDE input setting and set acceleration and settings to what I thought should make it better but it was still dropping inputs, particularly when changing direction in small motions.

Turns out Reddit had the answer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/37lp20/f22_anyone_else_notice_the_strange_mouse/
That linked me to:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/37bup5/fedora_22_released_and_available_now/crle62j
Basically, uninstall the new input library.

Mouse scroll is pretty terrible with my work mouse barely moving at all for the "Add Activities" window when I was trying to add something to the new KDE desktop. Changing the scroll by 3 lines to 12 lines didn't help at all there. I'm going to remove that package on that computer too.

I should probably contribute a bug report.

Otherwise, Fedora 22 is looking nice so far.

One new systemd feature I'm really appreciating is the new control+alt+delete handling.
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=2e5c94b9aa

I had a graphics driver crash for unrelated reasons which caused something to hang. I mashed control+alt+delete in frustration and was pleasantly surprised when it said "Ctrl-Alt-Del was pressed more than 7 times within 2s, rebooting immediately." when I was expecting to have to hit the power button.

Braillenote and Bluetooth

I bought a BrailleNote recently.
It's a little broken and that's the condition it was advertised in. Turns out it's not too bad.

• The battery is shot (easy enough to build a new battery pack though).
• There's no charger (guess who has an adapter which matches perfectly*)
• Some keys are missing (not rocket science to fix if I cared to)
• And it's running KeySoft 7.2

Turning it on the first time was a little stressful. I could not find the voltage the AC charger is supposed to put out but I kind of felt like it used 12 volts dc and I hoped 1.5 amps was good enough and that it was center positive... because that's what I used. The smart thing to do would have been to ask someone but it was midnight, it was broken anyways as far as I knew and I didn't care about salvaging anything but the Braille display which I doubted would be damaged even if I fried the mainboard. So I just plugged it in and turned it on.

Darn it worked. What to do with it? I wanted to take it apart, stick a BeagleBone in it as a new brain and make it a Linux system.

It runs this now ancient version of Windows CE 4.2 and there was never an SDK for it. In theory it supports being a Braille display via bluetooth but I can't find a reference to getting that working with brltty or any other open source program. Therefore my current plan is to attempt to reverse engineer the bluetooth connection and hook it up to brltty (mostly because I don't have a null modem serial cable).

I'm convinced this thing talks rfcomm and that's mostly because Wireshark was decoding the bluetooth traffic for me and identified it as such. Also, the cursor keys were easy to decode as the BrailleNote sends it when in Braille Terminal mode even without a properly configured program on the computer. My main problem is I don't really know anything about writing a program to connect via bluetooth. I've used rfcomm on the command line to hook up bluetooth modules as serial ports but none of the channels and combinations worked for me. I was under the impression there were only 30 channels when I tried this last but now it's looking to me like I need to use a particular UUID which I hope is in the Wireshark or hcidump output. 

Todo List:

• Get brltty talking to this over bluetooth.
• Build new battery pack
• Replace the Interactive Fiction program with something I write (I've previously determined it is it's own .exe which talks over some named pipes for I/O.)
• Find my VM for Windows 2000 that had all the Windows CE development tools for 4.2. That really ought to be before writing a new program since that's what I'll need to do it.

Other Fun

• A process segfaults when I plug in the USB cable after installing SynCE. Actually it segfaults when I unplug it again too.
• I can't read the display. Probably should learn at some point but fortunately it has voice output enabled by default.
• I should screenshots and bluetooth data for the next post.

*No idea what the proper amperage is.

Mumble 1.2.5 on Fedora 20

 UPDATE:
A update has been pushed to the official updates-testing.
You should probably use that one and uninstall mine beforehand.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1062209
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/mumble-1.2.5-1.fc20
Test it and leave karma.


Old Post Follows:
Mumble 1.2.5 came out a few weeks ago but the version in Fedora is still stuck on 1.2.4. Since I don't know what the protocol is for prodding package maintainers to push updates and I recently stumbled across COPR I decided to try making an update myself.

What's COPR? Read yourself. https://fedorahosted.org/copr/wiki/UserDocs#FAQ

Short version is someone loads some source code into it and it compiles, packages and hosts a repository to install it from.

Here's my attempt.
http://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/chder/mumble/

The existing RPM SPEC file from 1.2.4 worked with only trivial changes for 1.2.5. Some day I should try packaging my own code and writing a SPEC from scratch.

Yubikey Neo

I bought myself a YubiKey Neo and it works great on my Linux systems but there's one little snag I hit tonight (and solved).


The problem:
I took my YubiKey to another computer and wanted to SSH to my server which is configured to let me log in using it as the key. Unfortunately I couldn't get the key to be recognized by gpg-agent.

Doing this: gpg-agent --enable-ssh-support --daemon ssh-add -l
didn't work. No keys were listed (except ones on the hard drive).

Turns out my problem was I needed to install gnupg2-smime.

After the fact I remembered I did that on the first computer I setup to use it.

This is probably your problem if gpg --card-status works but gpg2 --card-status doesn't.

Yay KDE

http://www.kde.org/
https://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options

Fedora 19 + KDE = My favorite Linux setup.
I'm using it at work on my primary workstation as the primary OS.
I've got my co-programmer using it too as his primary OS on his workstation.
I've got my awesome Laptop running it (along with Steam and games).
And if I'd known more about it when I first set up my Grandmother's laptop I would have installed that instead of the Gnome version of Fedora.

It's not perfect but it's good.

- Chris

Android keyboard update

Just testing out the keyboard update. It's pretty good at figuring out what I mean. I only had to make one correction and only because I changed my mind about what to write. No more tap tap sound. One tap per word is better than one tap per letter. 

Apple Time Capsule and IP Problems

Stupid Apple Time Capsule keeps disappearing.

Turns out the IP being advertised over Bonjour is wrong and I have not figured out how to fix it.

I used a Linux system with avahi-tools installed

]# avahi-browse -a -r -t

=  wlan0 IPv4 User's Time Capsule                          Apple File Sharing   local
   hostname = [Users-Time-Capsule.local]
   address = [169.254.65.2]
   port = [548]
   txt = []
=  wlan0 IPv4 User's Time Capsule                          Microsoft Windows Network local
   hostname = [Users-Time-Capsule.local]
   address = [169.254.65.2]
   port = [445]
   txt = ["netbios=H=n"]
=  wlan0 IPv4 User's Time Capsule                          Apple TimeMachine    local
   hostname = [Users-Time-Capsule.local]
   address = [169.254.65.2]
   port = [9]

Well that's not right when the subnet is a 192.168.10.X
Checking the DHCP client table of the cable modem shows the capsule was given a valid address and I can even ping it. Still, the wrong address. The AirPort Utility can't greys it out since it can find it. Oh and it's connected to the router via Ethernet to rule out wifi issues.