Wear A Fedora

To enable file sharing through WebDAV, go to Settings -> Sharing and Enable File Sharing. An unintuitive part here is the "File Sharing Address" provided is dav://fedora, which isn't quite helpful. The real address is http://local_ip:port, where local_ip could be found through ifconfig, and port could be found through lsof | grep http.

In order to create a Samba share, follow detailed steps of the how-to guide³, which could be summarized as:

1. Install package samba
2. Enable and start the smb service
3. Allow Samba acccess from other computers
4. Add a Samba user, or create a dedicated group for Samba share
5. Create a dedicated directory to be shared by Samba
6. Update SELinux context for the shared directory
7. Modify /etc/samba/smb.conf for sharing configurations
8. Restart the smb service for the config changes to take effect

A lot of steps are involved, but the concepts should be straightforward.

For Boxes, an interesting behavior is that if the default "Firmware" option is chosen, i.e. BIOS, then the boxed OS will have IP address from 192.168.0.0/16, with broadcast address mapped to virbr0 in local machine. In this case, we can ssh into the boxed OS through its IP address. On the other hand, If the "Firmware" is set to UEFI, then the boxed OS will have IP address from 10.0.0.0/8.⁸

Configuration for Boxes could be found in ~/.config/libvirt/qemu/ for VM, and in ~/.config/libvirt/storage/ for storage settings. If GNOME Boxes doesn't suit your need, consider virt-manager, which is another GUI application that offers more customizations, albeit requiring admin privilege. Fedora also provides the option to manage virtual machines through the cockpit web console⁹.

For using CLI to manage virtual machines, there is detailed online documentation on this topic¹⁰. Aside from packages qemu-kvm and libvirt, we might also need:

• virt-install to create virtual machines
• virsh to manage virtual machines, and
• virt-viewer to connect and display the graphical console for a virtual machine

An interesting usage of virt-viewer is to connect to a VM after it has already been started in Boxes, e.g. virt-viewer --attach "Rocky Linux".

VCMI¹² is the GPL licensed re-implementation of HOMM 3, yet it is only available in software center through flatpak by default. In order to install the RMP package, add the RMP Fusion¹³ repository first¹⁴, then install vcmi¹⁵.

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install vcmi

After VCMI is installed, put game data into $HOME/.local/share/vcmi and have fun.

In order to play Windows games on Linux, we typically need Wine¹⁶, along with a games launcher, e.g Bottles, Heroic, Lutris, etc.

• Bottles¹⁷: Wine prefix manager that could provide a clean Wine environment for different aplications
• Heroic Games Launcher¹⁸: A modern game launcher with user-friendly interface. For now Flatpak package is available but not RPM
• Lutris¹⁹: All-in-one tool that handles games from Steam, Epic, GOG, itch.io, Humble Bundle, and emulators like MAME, Dolphine, RetroArch, ScummVM, etc.
• PlayOnLinux²⁰: An older tool that manages Wine prefixes, not in active development anymore
• Others²¹: Faugus Launcher, UMU Launcher, etc.

Take Bottles as an example, follow these steps to play HoMM 5:

1. Install Wine: sudo dnf install wine
2. Install Bottles: sudo dnf install bottles
3. Download HoMM 5 installation files from GOG.com, i.e. the setup-*.bin file along with setup-*.exe file
4. Open Bottles, create a new bottle with Environment of Gaming. Wait for the initialization process to complete, which might take a while
5. Open the bottle, run the executable downloaded earlier, e.g. setup-*.exe, follow the installation wizard to complete the process
6. Back to Bottles, where the game should be enlisted in the Programs section. Add it to library for easy access, or run the prgram to play.

Among all the GNOME applications pre-installed, Passwords and Keys is missing and requires manual installation, which is a bit confusing, since Chromium will complain if the user password has been changed through passwd without going throug the GNOME settings. And when this error happens, install Passwords and Keys and cleanse Log In data with old password.

In order to enable static IP of current machine, go to Network config and conifigure IPv4 manually by setting both IP address, Subnet mask (which is typically 255.255.255.0), and Gateway (e.g. 192.168.1.1). Also, consider to go to router config and bind the IP with machine MAC address.

Current Fedora has /sbin, /bin and /usr/sbin/ all pointing to /usr/bin. To get a glossary of all programs available, we could generate a one-line report for each one on the fly.

ls /bin | while read CMD_NAME; do whatis $CMD_NAME; done

In order to write GNOME application, follow the tutorial in GNOME Developer Documentation²²: first install GNOME Builder²³, then install dependency libs & tools:

• cmake
• gtk4-devel
• libadwaita-devel

Which could be achieved with

sudo dnf install cmake gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel

Note that when a new project is created, the "Active Configuration" for building is the json file for Flatpak. Switch to Default to go with native build.

The command timedatectl is used to manage time and date info²⁴. When the system time becomes wrong after suspension, check current settings through timedatectl status, e.g.

$ timedatectl status
               Local time: Mon 2025-08-11 03:26:22 CST
           Universal time: Sun 2025-08-10 19:26:22 UTC
                 RTC time: Sun 2025-08-10 19:26:39
                Time zone: Asia/Shanghai (CST, +0800)
System clock synchronized: no
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

According to the example output, the "System clock synchronized" serivce is turned off, which could be the culprit. Now check manual timedatectl(1), it says that systemd-timesyncd.service(8) provides the service we need here, so:

# systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service
systemctl start systemd-timesyncd.service
# systemctl enable systemd-timesyncd.service
timedatectl timesync-status

The problem should have been resolved now based on the latest output of timedatectl status:

timedatectl status
               Local time: Sun 2025-08-10 19:51:18 CST
           Universal time: Sun 2025-08-10 11:51:18 UTC
                 RTC time: Sun 2025-08-10 19:51:18
                Time zone: Asia/Shanghai (CST, +0800)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

Note that systemd-timesyncd(8) might conflict with chronyd(8), so only one of them should be enabled.

A file with name *Minibuf-3* was generated the other day, and I found it interesting that the macOS terminal could list this file but unable to remove it by name – not sure whether it's a bug or not. Anyway, if quoting file name with '' or "" doesn't work, then try one of these two methods:

• remove file by inode number instead of file name

  ls -i
  find . -inum <inode_number> -delete
  

• interactive deletion with globbing

  # Note that * here will be interpreted by shell for globbing
  rm -i *
  

A simple echo TCP server could be started with the Netcat(nc) tool, e.g.

# for TCP
nc -lk 1999
# for UDP
# nc -luk 1999

A TCP client could also be started with Netcat(nc), e.g.

nc localhost 1999

With tcp connection established, type anything from client, and the content will be printed out in the server output.

To schedule periodical tasks for current user, we could use crontab(1), specifically, use crontab -e to edit crontab content with text editor denoted by EDITOR, and use crontab -l to list the content of crontab.

Note that unlike system-wise crontab in /etc/crontab, the entry in user-level crontab does not have the user-name field, i.e. the following entry

* * * * * user-name command-to-be-executed

becomes

* * * * * command-to-be-executed

For instance, to schedule a job that prints some log every hour, we could add the following entry:

0 */1 * * * echo "====User cron job heartbeat at $(date)====" >> ~/Logs/crontab.log 2>&1