System Utilities

Since release 2.0, the Wireshark network protocol analyzer came with two graphical user interfaces - a legacy one in GTK+ and a new one using Qt. In this release, the legacy GTK+ interface has been removed and the developers are focusing on the actively maintained Qt-based interface, which allows them to bring in new updates.

Users will not be particularly affected by the removal of the legacy GUI as both interfaces look and behave the same even though the frameworks are different.

See the upstream release notes for additional information.

Starting with Fedora 29, the tzdata package, which contains rules for world time zones, is using the vanguard data format by default. This format was introduced in tzdata version 2018d and became default in version 2018e which is the default version in Fedora 29. This format includes POSIX-compliant implementations of negative DST offsets, which have previously been a problem for both Java and ICU parsers.

If you have any programs which parse tzdata files, make sure they are updated to be able to parse the new format. If you dump time zone data with zdump, you will now see negative DST offsets where applicable.

Additionally, tzdata-2018e changes the North Korea time zone from UTC+8:30 to UTC+9 as of May 5, 2018.

The GRUB boot loader is now configured to hide the boot menu by default if Fedora is the only operating system installed and if the previous boot succeeded. This results in a smoother boot experience on such systems.

To display the boot menu in order to boot an older or rescue kernel, you can now do one of the following:

The auto-hide functionality is automatically enabled on all new Fedora Workstation installations. Older installations will keep their original settings. To disable this function, use run the sudo grub2-editenv - unset menu_auto_hide command in a terminal.

For additional information, see the announcement post.

Fedora 29 provides version 1.0 of Stratis Storage, a local storage management solution. This will allow further testing and user feedback that will guide the development and stabilization of Stratis, and let us consider future integration into Anaconda and other more critical aspects of Fedora.

Stratis is a local storage system akin to Btrfs, ZFS, and LVM. Its goal is to enable easier setup and management of disks and SSDs, as well as enabling the use of advanced storage features such as thin provisioning, snapshots, integrity, and a cache tier without requiring expert-level storage administration knowledge. Furthermore, Stratis includes monitoring and repair capabilities, and a programmatic API, for better integration with higher levels of system management software.

See the project website for documentation and full release notes.

Fedora now prioritizes commands from $HOME/.local/bin and $HOME/bin over system-wide paths to allow to easily mask system binaries with newer versions. For example, pip install --user virtualenv will now work even when virtualenv from the package repositories is installed. The new behavior is only available for newly created user accounts.

If you have existing user accounts and you want to benefit from this change, edit file ~/.bash_profile and adjust the PATH definition to PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$HOME/bin:$PATH (see /etc/skel/.bash_profile).