Fedora Notes

As my MacBook Pro edition 2013 fell out of support from Apple and I did not want to use a computer without security updates, I decided to replace the proprietary OS by a GNU/Linux one. And as I wanted to give a try to the Fedora distribution, I did not install my beloved Debian.

This page gathers some notes I took about the configuration and the tools provided by that distribution.

I must say that I had no problem installing the version 38 of Fedora: I prepared a USB stick with the recommended tool I installed on my MacOS MacBook Pro and followed the steps.

Post Installation Setup

Keyboard Layout

Apple keyboard is handled by the kernel module called hid_apple. This ones accepts a bunch of parameters amongst which two are interesting to me:

• fnmode which controls how the fn key should behave (0=disabled, 1=press fn to access the F1, F2… keys, 2=the converse of 1, press fn to access the alternative functions of the F1, F2… keys). My preference is the option 2.
• iso_layout to have the key ~ next to the upcase key (instead of below the Esc key).

So I created the file /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf and added the following:

options hid_apple fnmode=2
options hid_apple iso_layout=0

Next, to make this persistent, I regenerated the initramfs using dracut:

% sudo dracut --force

Fix NVidia Blurry Display on Wake Up

Sometimes, some parts of the gnome desktop display blurry. This is linked to a but to the proprietary NVidia drivers. To work around this, we can restart the display manager by pressing Alt+f2 and entering the r command.

Otherwise, something to test if the issue is too boring is to disable some power management options in the NVidia drivers configuration /usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia-power-management.conf:

options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=0

Fix Wrong Battery Percentage

Sometimes, when I wake my computer up, the battery level is wrong showing me a few percents when my battery is actually fully charged.

This is a tiny glitch in upower service. Rebooting it fixes the bug:

% sudo systemctl restart upower

Fix Trackpad

I still do not found out why some times, the trackpad does not respond anymore. Looking at the system logs, I can only see the following error repeating each time I touch the trackpad:

If this happen, simply reloading the kernel module fix the problem:

% sudo rmmod bcm5974
% sudo modprobe bcm5974

Tools

DNF

What files a package will install?

% dnf repoquery -l postgresql
Last metadata expiration check: 0:15:20 ago on Sat 21 Oct 2023 06:14:05 AM CEST.
/usr/bin/clusterdb
/usr/bin/createdb
/usr/bin/createuser
/usr/bin/dropdb
[...]