SUSE, Fedora and GNOME News/Developments

While some folks are enjoying/celebrating Halloween, Tumbleweed stayed away from being scary. Even though there have been 5 snapshots (1024, 1025, 1027, 1028 & 1030) released this week, nothing there should scare you – at all: simply upgrade to the latest snapshot, as you always do.

Flatpak is a software utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. It is advertised as offering a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system. see Wikipedia .
Flatpak builds available in i386, x86-64, ARM and AArch64.

Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora Program Management this week. Fedora 31 was released on Tuesday. Fedora 29 will reach end of life on 26 November.

I have weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.

Fedora 31 ships with cgroups v2 by default. The major blocker for cgroups v2 adoption so far was the lack of support in the various container and virtualization tools, including the Podman stack. Since Toolbox containers are just OCI containers managed with Podman, we saw some action too.

After updating the host operating system to Fedora 31, Toolbox will try to migrate your existing containers to work with cgroups v2. Sadly, this is a somewhat complicated move, and in theory it’s possible that the migration might break some containers depending on how they were configured. So far, as per our testing, it seems that containers created by Toolbox do get smoothly migrated, so hopefully you won’t notice.

However, if things go wrong, barring a delicate surgery on the container requiring some pretty arcane knowledge, your only option might be to do a factory reset of your local Podman installation. As factory resets go, you will lose all your existing OCI containers and images on your local system. This is a sad outcome for those unfortunate enough to encounter it. However, if you do find yourself in this quagmire then take a look at the toolbox reset command.

Note that you need to have podman-1.6.2 and toolbox-0.0.16 for the above to work.

Thanks to Red Hat's Hans de Goede there is another optimization to GNOME's Mutter around XWayland full-screen gaming. 

The work by the prolific Red Hat desktop developer is for X11 games that rely upon XRandR to change the resolution while also using the NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN window manager hint when going into full-screen mode. 

[...]

The Mutter change can be found here while the xorg-server/XWayland side change was merged in October and will be present in whenever the next X.Org Server release finally materializes.