4 cool new projects to try in COPR

4 packages to try from the Copr repos

COPR is a collection of personal repositories for software that isn’t carried in Fedora. Some software doesn’t conform to standards that allow easy packaging. Or it may not meet other Fedora standards, despite being free and open source. COPR can offer these projects outside the Fedora set of packages. Software in COPR isn’t supported by Fedora infrastructure or signed by the project. However, it can be a neat way to try new or experimental software.

Here’s a set of new and interesting projects in COPR.

exa

Exa is an alternative for the ls command. By default it uses colors to distinguish between different file types and access permissions. It also can show status of source code managed by git, and show directories with a tree view. Exa is written in the Rust programming language.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides exa for Fedora 25, 26, and Rawhide. To install exa, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable eclipseo/exa
sudo dnf install exa

Bazel

Bazel is a tool that automatically builds and tests software. It can produce packages for deployment on Android and iOS. It uses the Bazel query language to declare dependencies. Bazel can also produce dependency graphs of the entire source code. Thanks to these graphs, it rebuilds only what is necessary. Bazel supports Python, Java, C++, C and Objective C natively. It also works with any other language using its extension language, Skylark.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides Bazel for EPEL 7 and Fedora 24, 25, 26, and Rawhide. To install bazel, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable vbatts/bazel
sudo dnf install bazel

Riot

Riot is a client for the decentralized messaging and data-transfer protocol Matrix. It supports voice and video conferencing, and customizable and keyword specific notifications. It allows file-sharing as well, including file archiving. Riot also can connect to other communicating systems like IRC, Slack and Gitter.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides Riot for EPEL 7 and Fedora 25 and 26. To install the Riot package, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable ansiwen/Riot
sudo dnf install riot

Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection

This package collects several simple one-player puzzle games. It includes favorites like minesweeper, sudoku, n15-puzzle, and many others. It uses its own framework to enable the games to run on multiple platforms. The games are written in C.

Installation instructions

The repo currently supports Fedora 24, 25, 26, and Rawhide. To install the puzzles, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable ribenakid/puzzles
sudo dnf install puzzles
New in Fedora Using Software

13 Comments

  1. antikythera

    also, check out nonamedotc/xfce-414

    Fedora has an Xfce spin and currently the packages in the repository are from Xfce 4.12 version. As many of you may be aware, Xfce project is working on porting to GTK-3 with 4.14 version likely to be all GTK-3.

    Version 4.13 packages are development versions leading to an eventual Xfce-4.14 release. nonamedotc has created a COPR repo for 4.13 packages for use in Fedora 25+ and is looking for users to help with bug hunting

  2. Toms T

    Firefox Nightly is another great program that I use COPR for.

    • Brian

      Can you provide instructions? Does it conflict with the normal default Firefox? Can you call it from the Gnome menu?

      • Toms T

        It conflicts at a very light level and, as far as I know, it doesn’t cause real issues. You cannot use both Nightly and Stable Firefox at the same time, but can separately. Yes, you can call it from the Gnome menu (dash), it has an icon (however, it will show up as a normal Firefox icon after launching it in the Gnome dash).

        As for instructions: just go to COPR, search for “firefox-nightly”, and use a repository that gets regular updates . I currently use a repo created by “sramanujam”, but that by no means is be all and end all firefox-nightly repo. Here is and instructions for the repo I use:
        sudo dnf copr enable sramanujam/firefox-nightly
        sudo dnf install firefox-nightly

        to remove
        sudo dnf remove firefox-nightly
        sudo dnf copr disable sramanujam/firefox-nightly

  3. KJBenson

    This is an easy way to install the Riot chat app. But it’s outdated on Copr/Fedora, hasn’t been updated for 5 months.

    Really a shame considering that Riot is a great chat app and that I can use all the newest features on my Debian machine, but Fedora is lacking behind.

    Note that this is of course not a dealbreaker as http://www.riot.im has a great Web App.

  4. Houder

    Re: Simon Tatham’s puzzles collection …
    Pkg (puzzles) is already available in distro (Fedora); however the one in the copr repo is definitely more uptodate (June 2017 vs February 2016 (f24)). Nice!

  5. Steve

    I’m definately new to COPR and dnf. I installed the puzzle package as per the directions given here. How do I determine the command to run them? The documentation is nice except for this important detail.

    • Houder

      … uhm, the pkg is installed is the same location, and in the same way, by the version from COPR as is done by the version from the distro …
      If neccessarry, a game can be executed as follows: /usr/bin/puzzle-. As an example, to run the game named “guess”, execute /usr/bin/puzzle-guess …
      However, in my case (using the KDE spin of f24), “guess” can be invoked from the start menu, as follows: start > (All) applications > games > logic games > guess (puzzle game) …

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