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A Patchy System – Applying Patches with Portage to Fix Upstream Bugs

12 minutes to read

For many free software projects, there is usually some delay between the initial annoucement of a bug fix or an enhancement and the moment when you finally get the software update that ships it. As a user, you need to wait for the patch to get reviewed and accepted by the project, wait for the change to be tested and integrated, wait for the new version containing the change to be released by the upstream, and finally, wait for your distribution to ship the new release. Suppose there is a bug fix that will be included in the upcoming GNOME 40 release, which will probably be available in March 2021. If you are using Fedora Workstation, you must wait until the end of April to get that bug fix with Fedora 34. For Gentoo users, I would not expect the arrival of that bug fix until the second half of this year, because all recent GNOME updates took about half a year to land in Gentoo. …

Create a CPU Frequency and Temperature Monitoring Bash Script for Linux-based Systems

4 minutes to read

This post will show you a way to monitor CPU frequency and temperature on Linux-based systems without aid of any programs or packages that are not commonly preinstalled on major GNU/Linux distributions. No extra hardware drivers are required: the magic is done merely by a short Bash script in just a few lines that only relies on mechanisms provided by the Linux kernel itself and some most essential Unix commands. …

MC Forge Mod Dev Blog: Migrating to Minecraft 1.16

Updated: 13 minutes to read

It is no longer news that Minecraft Forge has stable Minecraft 1.16 support, as the first recommended build for 1.16.x, which is Forge 34.1.0, was released in September 2020, very soon after I published the previous blog post for this serires about an update to my mod project. Development of Forge for Minecraft 1.16.x already had significant progress when the update for my mod was worked on, and I contemplated adding support for 1.16 along with that update. However, after a hard attempt to port my mod to Minecraft 1.16, I decided that because many method names in the Minecraft API source code decompiled by MCP were still not fully deobfuscated, Forge on 1.16 was still immature, and my mod’s update would not ship with 1.16 support. …

My Gentoo Hands-on Experience

Updated: 14 minutes to read

It has been six weeks since I published the last post on this site. Myriad new topics and ideas to write about have accumulated in my drafts for new articles, but I was too busy to find enough time for converting them into high-quality articles I have been endeavored to deliver. Now, as I finally have got some free time, I want to talk about one of the things I did during the past period: trying out Gentoo, a source-based GNU/Linux distribution famous for letting its users compile almost every component of the operating system, including the Linux kernel. …

Use Btrfs on Fedora Installed from a Raw Image

8 minutes to read

Fedora is moving to Btrfs for its default file system on its “desktop variants” in Fedora 33. This change is welcomed by some users because of some benefits Btrfs is offering. Other Fedora variants still default to ext4, although users may elect to use Btrfs during system installation with the Anaconda installer. But for non-desktop-variant raw image distributions like the Minimal aarch64 image, you do not have the chance to choose a file system other than ext4, because you are applying the image directly instead of using Anaconda. This post will show you how to use Btrfs on a Fedora installation derived from such image by converting the file system after the image is applied. …

USB Issue on Raspberry Pi 4 Running Fedora - Complex Solution

Updated: 7 minutes to read

In the previous post we looked at a very simple solution to fix the USB ports on Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB/8GB RAM models running Fedora, which involves a trade-off between the USB ports' functionality and the amount of RAM available to the operating system. This post will give you another solution that takes more steps but no longer limits available memory to 3 GiB. As said in the previous post, no action is required for the 2GB model. The symptoms of this issue are available there as well. …

USB Issue on Raspberry Pi 4 Running Fedora - Simple Solution

3 minutes to read

When Fedora runs on Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB/8GB RAM models, the USB ports might not be working out-of-box as of Fedora 32 and Linux kernel 5.8. In this post, I will introduce a very simple solution to this problem that only requires you to add one line to a configuration file. Notes and Caveats If you are using the 2GB model, then rest assured - the USB ports should work out-of-box, and you do not need to do anything. This issue exists only on the 4GB and 8GB models. …

MC Forge Mod Dev Blog: Adding a Configuration GUI

Updated: 19 minutes to read

Minecraft Forge had been shipping a configuration GUI framework which mods could use to provide customization options, but the framework has been gone since Minecraft 1.13. This post describes how I created a mod configuration GUI without using that framework by directly using APIs of Minecraft. The procedure shown in this post is applicable to Minecraft 1.14.4 and 1.15.x. I did not check its correctness on Minecraft 1.13.x and old 1.14.x releases since those Minecraft versions do not have stable Minecraft Forge builds, but chances are the majority of the steps are also applicable to those versions. Nevertheless, I would recommend developing mods using only stable Minecraft Forge releases. …

Perform Manual dnf history undo

8 minutes to read

My choices of GNU/Linux distributions are Fedora for desktop computers and CentOS for servers. Both of them feature DNF - Red Hat’s package manager front-end for RPM, which is the primary reason I use these distributions. Although one might argue that it is slow, DNF is very clear on not only what it will do for an action but also what it has done: it maintains a history of package installation and removal operations, which are called “transactions”. You can undo a transaction with dnf history undo or roll back to a previous state with dnf history rollback. Other common package managers, like APT and Pacman, also save operation logs, but they generally do not offer a similar operation reverting functionality. …

Install Raspberry Pi’s vcgencmd on Fedora

Updated: 5 minutes to read

This post is a continuation of my previous one about setting up a cluster of Raspberry Pis running Fedora. After I got the cluster to compute something, @ColsonXu, the cluster’s owner, asked me if I could monitor the CPU temperature of each Raspberry Pi by running this command: $ /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp The vcgencmd program is included in Raspberry Pi OS (formerly called Raspbian) as a utility for retrieving information about Raspberry Pi’s hardware. However, it is not included in Fedora’s software repositories. Luckily though, the source code of vcgencmd, along with the entire userland package that contains the program, is available, so we can compile it on our own. …