Fedora 25 released

fox · November 22, 2016, 01:01:48 PM

Fedora 25 was released today. This version uses the latest version of Gnome (ver. 22), and also, for the first time, the Wayland display server is the default. Other improvements, and a download link, can be found here. If you already have version 24 installed, you can apparently upgrade painlessly, following the instructions in the link. I have Fedora 24 on my Acer, so I'm going to try the upgrade. I'm also curious whether Wayland works well on my iMac, where I am still getting occasional freeze-ups on my dual monitor setup.

Jason · November 22, 2016, 05:30:24 PM

Thanks for letting us know, Mike.

fox · November 23, 2016, 07:04:37 AM

First upgrade try was unsuccessful. It started OK, but didn't have enough space to accommodate the upgrade. Next, I tried expanding the partition with gparted, booting from Ubuntu on a usb stick. Looked to have worked, but it didn't. When I tried a dnf-install (command line), I ran into the same problem, not enough space. Apparently this is because the original install used LVM. There are LVM formatting tools, but I'll have to read up on these, and they will have to be implemented from an external Fedora disk. Depending on difficulty, I may not bother, and will just wipe the partition and install Fedora 25 on it. I have to do something now. While the Fedora 24 partition still boots up, some things don't work on it anymore because the partition it thinks it has is full.

It would be a shame if I can't try the upgrade path again. Being able to upgrade a distro is important to me when the distro doesn't have an LTS version. So I won't know how reliable Fedora is for upgrading until I try the next version. I suppose I could reinstall Fedora 24 on an ext 4 partition and then try upgrading, but that isn't a good test either. I think it's the stuff you add and the constant updating over time that makes an upgrade more likely to fail.

ssfc72 · November 23, 2016, 09:52:27 AM

Sounds like it may be a good idea to stick with an ext 4 partition, when installing a Distro, unless the lvm formatting tools do the job, for you.

fox · November 23, 2016, 03:41:03 PM

I totally agree. The LVM partitioning in Fedora is a default, and I didn't catch that until my installation of Fedora 24 was completed. It causes other complications as well, as gparted run from a distro like Ubuntu doesn't seem to have all the functionality on an LVM partition that it does on an ext2/3/4 partition. At any rate, I found instructions on how to deal with expansion or contraction of an LVM partition. I'm going to try this from a Fedora 25 installation disk. If that doesn't work, I'll wipe 24 and install 25, and I'll have to wait under 26 is out to test the updater mechanism.

Meanwhile, I successfully booted a Fedora 25 live usb on my MacBook Air that was made from Windows. This was using Wayland. I didn't play around with it a lot, but it seems to be functional. Certainly more functional than Mir is at present in Ubuntu 16.10.

Jason · November 23, 2016, 07:03:48 PM

How much space left did you have in your root partition? That is, how full was it?

fox · November 23, 2016, 10:55:21 PM

I had zero space left, nada. However, I managed to solve my problem. I was able to execute some LVM commands that expanded the LVM partition. I did this by booting the computer with a Ubuntu 16.10 live usb. It was tricky and I spent a lot of time searching the internet and reading about LVM partitions. I don't fully understand what I did, but it turns out that just expanding an LVM partition doesn't incorporate the new space. I had to issue a terminal command to do so, and also learn some lvm naming syntax. Nothing an intermediate Linux user couldn't do, but I was pretty happy I was able to solve this problem. What is strange is that gparted reports the extra space as mostly filled, but it isn't. Nautilus tells me I have over 18 gb free.

Once I had the extra space I reissued the dnf upgrade command. Most of the Fedora 25 packages had already been downloaded, and thankfully it didn't download them a second time. The upgrade took 30-45 minutes, and following a reboot command, I had Fedora 25!

Fedora 25 Wayland display server works, for the most part. At least one app, gparted, crashes on Wayland but not X, but the 5 or 6 other programs I tried work fine on Wayland. There is one other problem I don't recall having in Fedora 24: Google online accounts don't work. When you try to sign in, you get a signature expired message. This is on both server version, and the bug has been reported.

Jason · November 24, 2016, 07:05:08 AM

Quote from: fox on November 23, 2016, 10:55:21 PM
I had zero space left, nada.

I meant how much space did you have left before the attempted upgrade? I'm trying Chapeau on the Toshiba ultrabook. Haven't played with it much yet but noticed it seems to take a long time to boot but then again, so did Fedora. Seems it loads (or tries to load) a lot of services. Seems slower than Ubuntu-based distros in this regard even with the SSD.

fox · November 24, 2016, 07:36:49 AM

As I recall, I had a partition of about 15 gb with Fedora on it, with about 2 gb free. Fedora tends to fill up quickly because there are always lots of updates, and installed packages are cached. Even now I have about 4 gb of cached packages; some listed under Fedora 24 and most under Fedora 25. I think I can delete at least the Fedora 24 cached packages, but I'm not sure.

Regarding boot time, I agree that Fedora takes longer than Ubuntu on the same laptop, and certainly more time than Bunsen Labs. But I wouldn't say it's excessive - 30-40 seconds on a core 2 duo laptop with an internal SSD.

Now that I have demonstrated a successful upgrade in Fedora, I'm thinking about getting rid of LVM. I don't like the way it reports used capacity in gparted, and I don't like that it requires special command line tools to modify its partitions. Unfortunately, one cannot just change the format from LVM to something else (ext4 in my case). The two alternatives are (1) clone the partition it is on, erase the original and format to ext4, and then clone back, or (2) just nuke it and reinstall Fedora 25. Since I didn't add a lot of stuff to my Fedora partition, I suspect that either would take about the same amount of time.

Jason · November 24, 2016, 07:53:43 AM

LVM has its uses but for typical desktop systems, it's usually overkill. For servers or computers that constantly have new storage added, LVM makes sense. The concept is that you can have a volume that can be on one disk or one partition or across several disks and/or several partitions. Instead of worrying about where data is physically you think of logical volumes. It makes sense for system admins but just overly complicates the situation for home computer users and even typical workstations, IMO. Snapshotting can be really useful in any environment, though.

The first part of this article explains what LVM is. The recent gparted doesn't see LVM volumes properly is because they're not partitions. They add an extra layer between physical volumes (partitions) and the filesystems.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/lvm-made-easy

Jason · November 24, 2016, 08:00:46 AM

Btw, I find it's a good rule of thumb to allocate twice the space needed for the root partition (/). If you're really tight for space, then at least have 50% more than needed. That way you should always have enough room to do upgrades to next distro release.

fox · November 24, 2016, 12:49:30 PM

Thanks for the link, Jason. Makes for interesting reading, and does increase my knowledge of what LVM is good for and how it works. The way I operate, the advantage of LVM for snapshots is offset by the disadvantage of not being able to use gparted (the tool I know well) to manage them. Having said that, I don't see any imperative reason to nuke my Fedora 25 LVM partition since I know how to find out how much of it is being used, and how to expand or shrink it (though not by memory). Still, if I were to install Fedora again from scratch, I would not choose to do it in an LVM.

LVM would make a good topic for our monthly meetings. Jason, if you know enough about it, maybe you could present this to the club.

fox · November 24, 2016, 12:57:23 PM

One of the reasons I was keen to try Fedora is to see whether the Wayland display server is more freeze-proof on my iMac with dual monitor setup than is Ubuntu with the X server. The Fedora live usb I created boots up fine on my iMac, and both displays were activated by default. Unfortunately, like Ubuntu running X, the default is to place the second monitor on the right rather than the left where I have it. This cannot be changed running the live usb, attempting to do so gave me a black screen, perhaps because changes cannot be written, or perhaps because Wayland can't handle it. So I guess the only way to find out is to install Fedora on my drive. I haven't yet decided whether this is worth the effort.

Jason · November 24, 2016, 10:58:34 PM

You can access Wayland in 16.10 from what I understand. I haven't tried it myself.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-GNOME-16.10-Wayland

Sounds like it's still experimental, though. And I saw on a wiki that you can install it for older versions of Ubuntu, too. It's a package. No idea how well this works.

I have this feeling that maybe you've already tried this and I've just forgotten. Sorry if that's the case!

fox · November 25, 2016, 12:22:55 AM

Actually, I haven't tried it, but based on the article you linked me to, Wayland works much better in Fedora 25 than it does in Ubuntu Gnome 16.10. I'm using Fedora 25 Wayland now on my Acer, and other than gparted not working, I haven't run into any problems with it. Of course my dual monitor iMac setup could be a completely different thing and I still want to find this out.