[Guide] Fix Fedora updates failing in Russia and Ukraine

Original forum link

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/35724

Original poster

unknownghost

Created at

2025-08-23 08:28:14

Last wiki edit

2025-08-28 07:24:59

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1 revision

Posts count

3

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4

OpenH264 and Cisco

The updates fail because of the OpenH264 library. It was made by Cisco and for some weird licensing reason Fedora can't include it in their repos, so they download the binary from Cisco's servers (explained in more detail by [this reddit post | reddit.com])

Recently Cisco, it their infinite wisdom, decided to block all downloads from Russia (which, based on [this github issue | github.com], mostly affects Ukranians).

Disabling OpenH264

This part is based on [this github comment | github.com]

This has to be done in every Fedora-based template and standalone

1. Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-cisco-openh264.repo
   • Under the first header ([fedora-cisco-openh264]) find enabled=1 and replace it with enabled=0
2. Run dnf swap openh264 noopenh264 --allowerasing
3. Update using the Qubes Update Tool

(Optional) enabling H264 proper

This part was not tested 1. Run the following:

dnf install ffmpeg ffmpeg-libs
echo 'export MOZ_FFMPEG_AUDIO=1' | sudo tee -a /etc/environment
echo 'export MOZ_FFMPEG=1' | sudo tee -a /etc/environment`