Two Fedora Beginner Questions

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1

Hello, I have been using Fedora Workstation 41 with Gnome for a week now but have a few basic questions I hope you won’t mind me asking:

  1. rpmfusion.org - what is the best way of using this? Should I follow the How To’s and download all the relevant software to me, or instead, should I just use stock Fedora and only download things from rpmfusion if I have specific problems?

  2. SMART Notifications - coming from Debian I would normally install smart-notifier which issues a warning on my desktop if I have any SMART data of concern. Is there an equivalent here in Fedora?

Or is one expected to make there own script similar to those outlined in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/S.M.A.R.T. I have played around with these ideas but am yet to get anywhere with them. I’m new to script writing. Do things work differently with Wayland vs X11? I seemingly can’t get things to work that apparently work for others: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/721309/smartd-output-to-screen-not-email?answertab=createdasc#tab-top

2

Welcome to Fedora, and Welcome to the Forums!

I can answer 1. for you, though others may have different ideas, this being Linux :wink:

  1. You should download the minimum that you need to perform your requirements. There is no problem with RPM Fusion, but the more your download the more you have to update and the more potential security holes there will be.
3

RPM fusion provides packages what Fedora’s policies prevent them packaging.

For example the NVIDIA drivers, Steam game client, and various CODECs that are patent encumbered. If you need these packages then RPMfusion is the place to get them from.

I use the smartmontools package to monitor disk.
It includes the smartctl tool and the smartd service.
Once you have smartmontools installed you can enable the smartd service

sudo systemctl enable --now smartd.service

See man smartd for what smartd does.

4

To send a notification to your desk top from a service you need to use this:

systemd-run --machine=barry@.host --user notify-send 'Hello world!' 'This is an example notification.'

I found that information in this Arch Linux documentation Desktop notifications - ArchWiki

5

Thank you both for your replies. I’ll confess that the 2nd question about smart notifications is what I have been battling with recently, the 1st question was an after thought following my installation a week ago.

Looking back I should have reacquainted myself with what I had downloaded following the rpmfusion how-to’s. I agree with MatH about installing the minimum required. Really I was wondering whether I should have downloaded the AMD (mesa) Hardware Codecs right away, or perhaps I should have waited to see if I needed them or not.

Thank you Barry for your systemd-run suggestion. I’ve had a quick go with it but again I’m yet to have any success. Have you got this to work on your machine? And have you any idea why those suggestions I had already linked may not work? I may well have a go on another machine to see if I have any luck there.

To be honest I didn’t want to spend too much time on getting a notification system to work if there was a Fedora equivalent to the Debian smart-notifier I mentioned earlier. Moreover it isn’t hard to check one’s smart data manually once a week to see if all is ok. As I’m new to Fedora I’m sure there will be software I just don’t know the names of yet.

6

I tested the system-run from as ssh into root and it worked.
Kde shown the notification.

I do not have notifications wired up in smartd.