These are from Fedora Magazine:4 cool new projects to try in COPR for February
By Dominik Turecek

COPR is a collection of personal repositories for software that isn’t carried in Fedora. Some software doesn’t conform to standards that allow easy packaging. Or it may not meet other Fedora standards, despite being free and open source. COPR can offer these projects outside the Fedora set of packages. Software in COPR isn’t supported by Fedora infrastructure or signed by the project. However, it can be a neat way to try new or experimental software.

Here’s a set of new and interesting projects in COPR.

SWFTools

SWFTools is a set of command-line tools to manipulate and generate SWF files. It also contains programs to read or combine SWF files, or create them from other content such as image, video, audio, or source code files. In addition, SWFTools can extract content from existing SWF files.

SolveSpace

SolveSpace is a lightweight parametric 2D and 3D CAD modeling program. It includes an advanced geometric constraint solver. SolveSpace makes use of the model assembly easy, and it can manipulate the model dynamically. It also exports models to STL, DXF, PDF and SVG files, among many other functions. In addition, there are many tutorials for SolveSpace available.

 

Restic

Restic is a backup program that aims to be fast, efficient, and secure. It stores data as deduplicated snapshots, which allows you to restore to a state from a specific time. Restic also supports multiple local and remote storage back ends. In addition, it assumes the backup storage location is shared, so it always uses encryption.
Installation instructions

 

<Not Installed>

Polo

Polo is a file manager that supports multiple panes, each with multiple tabs and an embedded terminal. Polo offers many features such as:

Session support
A device manager that works with LUKS encrypted devices
Ability to create archives using multiple formats
Browser for archives as though they were normal folders
Full set of configuration options.

     O1 is one of our dial-up network providers.  They have to move fiber in the Sacramento area and this will involve a service interruption.

Dear O1 Customer,

One of our upstream providers needs to move fiber that will affect our dialup traffic in Lata 726. The maintenance window is scheduled for 03/03/2018 07:00 AM (PT) to 03/04/2018 05:00 PM (PT)

Dialup users may experience busy signals, or trouble connecting while maintenance is being performed.

We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience in this matter.

As with all technical contacts, if you experience any issues that you believe may be related to the above message, or have any questions concerning this email, please contact our 24/7 Network Operations Center at (888-444-1111),OPT #2 or via email at support@o1.com.

Thank you,

     We use nightly builds rather than stable on most of our servers because stable has an old version of xrandr that does not work with our servers but nightly builds has the correct version.

     Night before last a bad build got pushed and x2go has broken on most of our servers as a result.  I am installing the stable release to provide some functionality until they get the nightly builds working again.

     When you login you will have an initial screen size of 800×600.  To change this, open a terminal and type:

        xrandr -s (width)x(height)

     For example, I have a 1920×1080 screen so I would type:

        xrandr -s 1920×1080

     We will restore full functionality as soon as a working build becomes available again in Nightly Builds.  Thank you for your patience.

     Mint is now fixed in regards to Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.  All of the Debian derived servers are now fixed.  Redhat derived servers remain vulnerable to Spectre Variant 2.

     On Scientific (Scientific Linux 6), kde, gnome, lxde, xfce, icewm are all functional.  LXDE is rather minimal as no distribution for this OS exists but I was able to piece together enough of the required packages to get it minimally operational, the others are pretty much fully operational.  As with Zorin, KDE’s default configuration does not include a logout widget, so first thing you should do if you use it is add a logout widget to a panel.

     There is a new shell server available for your use, zorin.eskimo.com.  Zorin is a relatively new Linux distribution that has some of the eye candy of Mint or Debian but brings with it the security and updatedness of Ubuntu.

     The following desktop environments work on it with x2go, KDE, Mate, XFCE, and LDXE.  LDXQ does not work with x2go, please don’t ask.  The problem is it uses Qt5 and Qt5 applications are not presently compatible with x2go.  This is the first OS with KDE5 that works reasonably well with X2go.  It does not have the long start up time KDE5 sessions have on some other operating systems.

     There are two problems with KDE, First, the default configuration has no logout so first thing you should do when you login is add an logout widget to a panel so you can logout when finished.

     Then there is another issue, xrandr requires version 1.3, the stable x2go only has version 1.2 and Nightly Builds does not yet work on this platform.  The work around is to use xrandr in a terminal to set your screen dimensions manually, for example, my screen is 1920×1080 so I would type in a terminal, “xrandr -s 1920×1080“.

     The web server is now on 4.13.0-36, the most recent Ubuntu.  Spectre and Meltdown have been fixed since 4.13.0-33.  I suspect these subsequent releases are fixing things they broke in the process of fixing these two exploits.  I know 4.13.0-33 was unstable at least on some systems (my old Mac Pro 1,1 for example).

     There will be an outage of approximately 3 minutes Feb 17th close to noon in order to load a new kernel.

     Last night’s reboots did not go entirely cleanly.

     It took three reboots of Isumataq, which hosts home directories and a number of virtual machines, for it to come up cleanly.  The first two times it did not properly start networking and manually attempting to start it did not work.  This is not a new problem but one that has been ongoing since 16.04 LTS which introduced systemd which unfortunately while it sped up booting considerably, introduced quite a few bugs, all of which have not been entirely squashed yet.

     Debian NFS did not sync properly when the mail server returned to service and so to restore proper functionality I had to reboot that tonight.

     Ubuntu stopped talking to the network even though the kernel was still up and operational and I could get into the machine through the virtual machine manager.  I rebooted it to fix.

     The current state of meltdown and spectre vulnerability fixes on our network is that meltdown is fixed on all of our hosts both physical and virtual, spectre both variant 1 and variant 2 is fixed on all of our physical hosts and ALL ubuntu based hosts.  Spectre variant 1 is fixed on almost all of our virtual hosts but spectre variant 2 is fixed only on ubuntu based hosts.

     People ask me why I have moved and am continuing to move our services off of CentOS and to Ubuntu, this is an excellent example of why.  To the best of my knowledge, ubuntu is the ONLY Linux distribution that has fixed meltdown and BOTH variants of spectre.  They are usually first out of the gate with exploit fixes.