#1

Hi folks!

In then next month, I’ve signed up for two opportunities to present Fedora Silverblue to a public audience.

The first event will be a talk/lab at DevConf.cz titled “Day 1 with Fedora Silverblue” - https://devconfcz2019.sched.com/event/Jcnb/day-1-with-fedora-silverblue

The second event will be a Fedora Classroom session about Fedora Silverblue to be held on Feb 7, 2019 @ 1600 UTC.

The DevConf.cz event is intended to be a bit more hands on, whereas the classroom session will likely be more instructive or demonstrative.

I’m going to assume that the audience for both events is familiar with Linux and Fedora, but might not have any experience with immutable hosts, containers, Flatpaks, etc. The two events will give a general overview of these topics and demonstrate how easy it can be to use Fedora Silverblue.

A rough outline for the content looks like:

  • what is an immutable host?
  • what are the differences/similarities between Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Workstation?
  • what is ostree and rpm-ostree?
  • performing upgrades, rollbacks, rebases
  • package layering with rpm-ostree
  • using containers and container tools (podman, buildah)
  • using Flatpaks for GUI applications

Knowing the intended audience, the goals of the events, and this rough outline, I wanted to poll the community to see if there are topics or specifics in the existing topics that I may have missed or should include. I can’t promise to cover everything, but it would be helpful to hear what others think would be good information to present to folks who may be unfamiliar with Fedora Silverblue.

Thanks in advance for your input!

1 Like
#2

For the hands-on session, you might want to use Fedora Toolbox as the podman / buildah “experimental animal”. I think it exercises a lot of the underlying infrastructure. At the very least you probably should spend some time on the toolbox.

Also the filesystem layout and how to work around things that crash because they’re now in/var. :wink:

2 Likes
#3

And the fedora-toolbox creator/developer, Debarshi Ray, is going to be at DevConf.cz too, you could ask for his help.

#4

Don’t forget skopeo. I have been finding it very useful with the buildah/podman setup in Silverblue.
I had some issues with the fedora-toolbox which required me to override podman and buildah to an earlier version in order for it to run. You may want to ask @rishi if that is taken care of in his latest release.
As for the rest of Silverblue, there are still caveats to run into during use. For instance, today when I noticed the new fedora-toolbox release was available, I wanted to reset my downgraded packages (podman and buildah) before updating the toolbox. Using the rpm-ostree override reset command wouldn’t work for me, and if I used --allow-inactive for buildah, when I reboot I get the first login screen prompted to setup a new user! The same happens when I try to do it for the latest podman, nothing to reset on the override and --allow-inactive will cause a reboot into a fresh login screen where you cannot login as your current user.