Upgrading Fedora 38 to Fedora 39

 Even though Fedora 40 is coming out in a few days (or because of it), it was time to upgrade from 38 to 39.  

No immediately noticeable problem.  It downloaded the packages, installed and rebooted with no problems. 

One reason is that my Fedora 38 ran into problems with NUT being able to load the driver to the UPS.  This seemed to be because Fedora 38 had upgraded the NUT packages and there's an issue.  I noticed that Fedora 39 actually uses the previous package version and when the system came up after the upgrade, NUT was working again.

Remembering Multi-Monitor Layout on Linux

Problem

I currently have the three monitors daisy-chained so the PC is connect to one monitor through USB-C DisplayPort and then daisy-chained to the other through standard DisplayPort cables.  This set up has a problem when the PC suspends or restarts.  Sometimes the first display gets no signals from the PC (thus none of the others does either) or just the last display gets no signals.  In either case, turning off-and-on will bring up all the displays (which I'm guessing allows the PC and monitor to do their handshake properly), but the layout of the displays are forgotten.  

Diagnoses

There seems to be two problems:  

1. One is that that when the system comes up that the monitor is not able communicate with it causing it to not wake up.  This could be some kind of race condition, but I'm not certain.
2. The display output names gets changed where Monitor A is sometimes referred to as DisplayPort-4 and another time it can be named DisplayPort-1.  The info I've found seems to point to this being caused by the video drivers who is responsible for setting the output names (e.g. DisplayPort-1, DP-1, etc.).

Solution(s)

I don't have a solution for #1, but the solution/workaround for #2 can mitigates it.

Linux uses the RandR (Resize and Rotate X Windows Extension) and the xrandr tool can be used but the parameters becomes long when there's multiple monitors, different rotations and positions that are relative to each other.  Another tool that helps is arandr which is a GUI front-end to xrandr that has a feature to save layout into a script that can be run.  Once you have your layout setup, it can export it to a script that you can re-run, but I ran into two problems:

1. It doesn't capture the order of the displays (which is on the right, middle and left) so while all three might be in the right rotation, they are not in the right order.
2. The name of the display sometimes changes (e.g. a display might once be called DisplayPort-1 get tuned into DisplayPort-4) and then the script also doesn't work.

Finally, I found a tool called autorandr which will finger print the display so that even though the name changes, it still knows which monitor is which.  It can also save different profiles such as a laptop with no external monitor and another one with one external monitor which it will then recognize and load the appropriate profile automatically.  On Fedora, installing the autorandr package will install /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/40-monitor-hotplug.rules which tells it to run autorandr. 

Since the issue I'm having is that the output names change, I needed to tell autorandr to use the fingerprint signature which is done with the '--match-edid' flag.   One option is to modify the udev rule with this flag (remember to use systemd-delta to check future differences with the distribution package version) or manually run autorandr with the flag.   I did the latter since I'm still testing to see if it does what I hope it'll do.