Fedora 42 released today, and I upgraded my installation. With a release number like 42, that called for a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy wallpaper.
I liked this wallpaper, based on the movie. You can find it here.
I really should have the Infocom Hitchhiker’s game running in the terminal — I have it here somewhere on a CD-ROM collection I bought early in my EB Games career — but Super Star Trek will have to do.
I don’t actually use Fedora. I keep it around for testing purposes. Specifically, to test my VPN connection to work.
So, two and a half years ago, after two and a half years of experimentation, I worked out how to connect my Linux Mint machine to Diamond’s VPN. It was something I wanted to do immediately after Diamond went work-from-home due to the COVID pandemic, and I now know enough to know that I probably would not have been able to get it to work at the time. I came close one weekend in the summer of 2022 — the two-factor app trilled on my phone — but then the connection crashed. Eventually, though, I worked it out, and once I did, I needed to be sure I could reproduce the steps and document them.
And so I downloaded Fedora, a complete different distro than what I used regularly, because I wanted to make sure that the process would work under different conditions. (I actually downloaded the Fedora ISO over Camden Yards’ in-stadium wifi the last time I went to a game there. Sorry not sorry, Orioles.)
I loaded Fedora onto a USB, fired up a live session, installed the plugins I needed, and had a working VPN connection and remote desktop to Diamond within ten minutes.
A new release of Fedora came out a few weeks after that. I downloaded that ISO and installed Fedora on an empty partition. (I have 8 terabytes of storage in my system. I’m not hurting on space.) And it’s come in handy as a cross-check point with the VPN and the remote desktop, like when FreeRDP 2 (the remote desktop program I use) was replaced with FreeRDP 3 and I had issues dealing with Kerberos, which Fedora handled differently than Debian and EndeavourOS. (I have an Arch-based distro for similar reasons.)
I do try to spend a work-from-home day in either Fedora or EOS every two weeks or so, just so I am using them. Sometimes, even, I just want a different look to the day. Fedora is on GNOME, EOS has both KDE Plasma and I3, and I don’t dislike any of these environments.
I did spent forty minutes this morning working from Fedora in the VPN on the week’s liquidation lists. It actually seemed more sprightly than it usually is in Linux Mint Debian Edition. I may have to investigate this further…
So, to wrap this up. Fedora 42 is out. Don’t forget your towel.