what’s this? a tech post on this tech blog?

preface

why?

recently my laptop started running dangerously full on disk usage (who’d’ve thunk 150gb was not enough for a daily driven linux install ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), so i decided that rather than trudge through my drive and clean out junk id just back up my entire \ drive onto an external hard drive, clean reinstall and upgrade Fedora Workstation 40.

i also took this opportunity to finally completely ditch gnome for good, and complete my switch to KDE Plasma with an upgrade to Plasma 6! i don’t know why i chose to stick with gnome when i switched to fedora 2 years ago, i knew even back then how backwards the gnome devs were ¹.

after games like Factorio launched with just a plain, decoration-less window for the hundredth time, and the 20 extensions that i had to install just to get my workflow down broke after the most minor of gnome updates² i had enough, dnf groupinstalled KDE5 and customized to my hearts content without having to install a single extra utility. ³

so, this post’s basically a big note to self for me to follow while setting up my system again. some of the stuff’s obvious, like a big list of packages for me to install, and some’s the most obscure stuff i had to hunt through forum posts to find answers to in typical linux fashion. hopefully some of this is useful to someone else.

download

first, get Fedora KDE 40. i prefer to download the torrent, which is available here. the torrent should also come with a `CHECKSUM file, which you should 100% be using to ensure that your download is valid. (checksums are also available here too.)

first, download the fedora GPG keys.

$ curl -O https://fedoraproject.org/fedora.gpg

verify that the keys are correct by listing them

$ gpg --with-fingerprint --show-keys --keyid-format long fedora.gpg

and verify these against the keys given on the Fedora website.

then use the verified keys to verify the checksum

$ gpgv --keyring ./fedora.gpg Fedora-Spins-40-1.14-x86_64-CHECKSUM

then finally use the verified checksum to verify the iso

$ sha256sum -c Fedora-Spins-40-1.14-x86_64-CHECKSUM

install media

i use a 32gb usb drive and ventoy for this, which means writing the iso to the drive is as simple as copying it to the drive and selecting it in the list when ventoy boots up.

i don’t use a separate home partition, but i might this time because i no longer have storage issues given that i’m increasing my fedora install to 500 GB total.

the basics

setup

change the hostname, if i didn’t set it in the installer: hostnamectl set-hostname brahma

install prerequisites for the next couple steps

$ sudo dnf install git python3

also, enable rpm fusion repos

$ sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm \
 https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

and flathub

$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

displaylink

displaylink is still not fully supported in linux, and worse still, i’ve got a newer usb 3.0 dock where the drivers aren’t installed by default. this wouldn’t be a problem except synaptics happily only make the new displaylink driver available for ubuntu, and leave other distros to “the community” to unpack and repackage.

thankfully, there’s a group that packages the driver as an rpm, and they have a version for fedora 40! even better, someone’s made this available as a copr, so installing the drivers is as easy as:

$ sudo dnf copr enable crashdummy/Displaylink
$ sudo dnf install displaylink

when testing this with a live install, i did find that the evdi kernel module used by the driver would just not build itself, possibly because the live environment thought it was running on a different kernel version, so i ended up having to manually build and load the drivers myself:

$ git clone https://github.com/displaylink/evdi
$ cd evdi
$ cp module/* /usr/src/evdi-1.14.5/
$ sudo dnf install dkms kernel-devel-$(uname -r)
$ sudo dkms build -m evdi -v 1.14.5 --force
$ sudo dkms install -m evdi -v 1.14.5

that got my screens to wake up on the live session.

building the evdi drivers for a kernel update

normally dkms just works and rebuilds everything every kernel upgrade, but sometimes it needs to be jolted back to life.

$ # first, make sure that the requirements are installed:
$ sudo dnf install python3 python3-pybind11 libdrm libdrm-devel
$ # also install the kernel headers for the current version:
$ sudo dnf install kernel-devel-$(uname -r)
$ # then clone the kernel module
$ git clone https://github.com/displaylink/evdi
$ cd evdi
$ # and then you should be able to build and install the drivers again:
$ make
$ sudo make install

from then on, every kernel update, you can run make and sudo make install, and it should just work.⁴

nvidia drivers

fedora already comes installed with nouveau drivers, but some programs i use need cuda support, as well as games run better with proprietary drivers.

$ sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

wait a couple of minutes before rebooting, as the module is getting built in the background. check that it’s done with modinfo -F version nvidia or modprobe nvidia returning 0.

dotfiles

i use the style of dotfiles described in this atlassian article. it involves a bare git repo in a folder and git commands that are run against it to add config files. to setup:

$ git clone --bare https://github.com/appcreatorguy/dotfiles
$ # first, backup any existing dotfiles (.bashrc, etc.)
$ mkdir -p .config-backup
$ config checkout 2>&1 | egrep "\s+\." | awk {'print $1'} | xargs -I{} mv {} .config-backup/{}

then temporarily define a local bash function for the config command, which is just a wrapper around git with args to specify our dotfiles folder:

$ function config {
   /usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME $@
}

and checkout the repo with config checkout. to prevent an explosion when you run config status remember to set this flag in the repo’s config :config config status.showUntrackedFiles no.

tools

ssh

fedora should come with ssh by default. i copy my ssh key over from my backup so that i don’t have to re-enroll keys on all my devices.

shell

i use zsh as my shell, so install it and change the default shell.

$ sudo dnf install zsh
$ chsh -s $(which zsh)

python

install pip for python packages:

$ sudo dnf install python3-pip

deno

install deno (which powers this blog!):

$ curl -fsSL https://deno.land/install.sh | sh

tailscale

install tailscale so i can access my homelab from anywhere:

$ curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
$ tailscale up --operator=$USER # set the operator to the current user, will be helpful further on

syncthing

i use syncthing to synchronize files between all my devices (including my jailbroken kindle!) and it just works; it’s honestly epic.

$ sudo dnf install syncthing

i want it to carry over my settings from the previous install, so i’ll copy over the folder ~/.config/syncthing from my backup.

terminal

i use the kitty terminal

$ sudo dnf install kitty

ides

these days i’ve fallen back into using vscode

$ sudo dnf install code

settings sync is on, so signing in should pull my config for that i also use neovim, and a version manager for it called bob

$ sudo dnf install cargo
$ cargo install bob-nvim
$ bob use stable # should be v0.10.0 at time of writing

for my nvim config, i use astronvim, however i haven’t had the time to update my config to v4, so that’ll have to be done later.

other things

spotify

first install:

$ flatpak install flathub com.spotify.Client

then install spicetify for extensions and theming

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spicetify/cli/main/install.sh | sh
$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spicetify/marketplace/main/resources/install.sh | sh # to install spicetify marketplace as well

nearly all my extensions come from the spicetify marketplace, as well as some of my custom snippets, so i’ll be sure to import them from my backup.

whatsapp

there’s a good flatpak electron wrapper around whatsapp web that i use on linux:

$ flatpak install flathub io.github.mimbrero.WhatsAppDesktop

tailscale gui

KTailctl seems to work well with KDE on my other laptop

$ flatpak install flathub org.fkoehler.KTailctl

discord

discord’s available in the rpm fusion repos

$ sudo dnf install discord

i also like to use vencord to theme discord

$ sh -c "$(curl -sS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Vendicated/VencordInstaller/main/install.sh)"

and as screen sharing is terrible on wayland, i use vesktop specifically for that; it’s an electron wrapper around the web ui of discord.