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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

Remap CapsLock key

Remapping key is not something we can do by default via the Settings panel: those hackers tweaks are accessible with a package called gnome-tweaks. When installed, run the command gnome-tweaks from a terminal or simply run the Tweaks application via the icon.

Then follow Keyboard > Additional Layout Options and in the section Ctrl position select Caps Lock as Ctrl.

Install `mu4e`

The package which provides mu4e is maildir-utils.

Tools

DNF

Listing Package Files

Sometimes, we may be interested in the files that a package will install on your system. This can be achieved with the following command:

% 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
[...]

Upgrades

Fedora 40

On 11th, August 2024, I upgraded to Fedora 40 which was released on March 2024. I had a few issues which are listed below with the fix or workaround.

WiFi not working
Update 25th August 2024: the problem is workaround in wl-kmod from version 6.30.223.271-53.fc40. The latest version of the wpa_supplicant provided by default in Fedora 40 now works.

After the reboot, the wife was not working anymore. On my Macbook Pro, the chipset is a Broadcom BCM4360.
```
% lspci | grep -i wireless
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4360 802.11ac Dual Band Wireless Network Adapter (rev 03)
```
The driver is unfortunately proprietary and has to be installed from the rpmfusion-nonfree repository.

The current issue is tracked in the Fedora bugtracker.

I followed the advice: downgrade the package wpa_supplicant which seems incompatible with broadcom-wl package:
```
% sudo dnf downgrade wpa_supplicant
```
I also pinned it to that version until the bug is fixed.
```
% sudo dnf install 'dnf-command(versionlock)'
% sudo dnf versionlock add
```
NVidia Kernel Module Error

When I boots, the NVidia drivers could not be loaded. That was not a big trouble because in that case, we use the free version of the driver called nouveau. I just removed anything related to the NVidia proprietary drivers.
mu4e Error

When I wanted to start mu4e (in Emacs), I got an error. I enabled the debug mode (with M-x mu4e-toggle-logging) and discovered it was related to a version of indexing schema. This is justified: the previous version of mu was 1.10 and the new one is 1.12. I just re-indexed my mails.