Planet Debian

I am still here. Sadly while I battle this insane infection from my broken arm I got back in July, the hackers got my blog. I am slowly building it back up. Further bad news is I have more surgeries, first one tomorrow. Furthering my current struggles I cannot start my job search due to hospitalization and recovery. Please consider a donation. https://gofund.me/6e99345d

On the open source work front, I am still working on stuff, mostly snaps ( Apps 24.08.3 released )

Thank you everyone that voted me into the Ubuntu Community Council!

I am trying to stay positive, but it seems I can’t catch a break. I will have my computer in the hospital and will work on what I can. Have a blessed day and see you soon.

Scarlett

Sometimes you've to look at the content of x509 certificate chains. Usually one finds them pem encoded and concatenated in a text file.

Since the openssl x509 subcommand only decodes the first certificate it will find in a file, I did something like this:

csplit -z -f 'cert' fullchain.pem '/-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----/' '{*}' for x in cert*; do openssl x509 -in $x -noout -text; done

Apparently that's the "wrong" way and the more appropriate way is using the openssl crl2pkcs7 subcommand albeit we do not try to parse a revocation list here.

openssl crl2pkcs7 -nocrl -certfile fullchain.pem | \ openssl pkcs7 -print_certs -noout

Learned that one in a webinar presented by Victor Dukhovni. If you're new to the topic worth watching.

I climbed on top of a mountain with a beautiful view, and when I started readying my new laptop for a work call (as one does on top of mountains), I realised that I couldn't right click and it kind of spoiled the mood.

Clicking on the bottom right corner of my touchpad left-clicked. Clicking with two fingers left-clicked. Alt-clicking, Super-clicking, Control-clicking, left clicked.

Here's there are two ways to simulate mouse buttons with touchpads in Wayland:

• clicking on different areas at the bottom of the touchpad
• double or triple-tapping, as long as the fingers are not too far apart

Skippable digression:

I'm not sure why Gnome insists in following Macs for defaults, which is what people with non-Mac hardware are less likely to be used to.

In my experience, Macs are as arbitrarily awkward to use as anything else, but they managed to build a community where if you don't understand how it works you get told you're stupid. All other systems (including Gnome) have communities where instead you get told (as is generally the case) that the system design is stupid, which at least gives you some amount of validation in your suffering.

Oh well.

How to configure right click

Surprisingly, this is not available in Gnome Shell settings. It can be found in gnome-tweaks: under "Keyboard & Mouse", "Mouse Click Emulation", one can choose between "Fingers" or "Area".

I tried both and went for "Area": I use right-drag a lot to resize windows, and I couldn't find a way, at least with this touchpad, to make it work consistently in "Fingers" mode.

The theme "Ceratopsian" by Elise Couper has been selected as the default theme for Debian 13 "trixie". The theme is inspired by Trixie's (the fictional character from Toy Story) frill and is also influenced by a previously used theme called "futurePrototype" by Alex Makas.

After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of six choices were submitted. The desktop artwork poll was open to the public, and we received 2817 responses ranking the different choices, of which Ceratopsian has been ranked as the winner among them.

We'd like to thank all the designers that have participated and have submitted their excellent work in the form of wallpapers and artwork for Debian 13.

Congratulations, Elise, and thank you very much for your contribution to Debian!

Review: Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, by Ashley Herring Blake

Series: Bright Falls #2 Publisher: Berkley Romance Copyright: November 2022 ISBN: 0-593-33644-5 Format: Kindle Pages: 365

Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail is a sapphic romance novel and a sequel to Delilah Green Doesn't Care. This is a romance style of sequel, which means that it spoils the previous book but involves a different set of protagonists, one of whom was a supporting character in the previous novel.

I suppose the title is a minor spoiler for Delilah Green Doesn't Care, but not one that really matters.

Astrid Parker's interior design business is in trouble. The small town of Bright Falls doesn't generate a lot of business, and there are limits to how many dentist office renovations that she's willing to do. The Everwood Inn is her big break: Pru Everwood has finally agreed to remodel and, even better, Innside America wants to feature the project. The show always works with local designers, and that means Astrid. National TV exposure is just what she needs to turn her business around and avoid an unpleasant confrontation with her domineering, perfectionist mother.

Jordan Everwood is an out-of-work carpenter and professional fuck-up. Ever since she lost her wife, nothing has gone right either inside or outside of her head. Now her grandmother is renovating the favorite place of her childhood, and her novelist brother had the bright idea of bringing her to Bright Falls to help with the carpentry work. The remodel and the HGTV show are the last chance for the inn to stay in business and stay in the family, and Jordan is terrified that she's going to fuck that up too. And then she dumps coffee all over the expensive dress of a furious woman in a designer dress because she wasn't watching where she was going, and that woman turns out to be the designer of the Everwood Inn renovation. A design that Jordan absolutely loathes.

The reader met Astrid in Delilah Green Doesn't Care (which you definitely want to read first). She's a bit better than she was there, but she's still uptight and unhappy and determined not to think too hard about why. When Jordan spills coffee down her favorite dress in their first encounter, shattering her fragile professional calm, it's not a meet-cute. Astrid is awful to her. Her subsequent regret, combined with immediately having to work with her and the degree to which she finds Jordan surprisingly attractive (surprising in part because Astrid thinks she's straight), slowly crack open Astrid's too-controlled life.

This book was, once again, just compulsively readable. I read most of it the same day that I started it, staying up much too late, and then finished it the next day. It also once again made me laugh in delight at multiple points. I am a sucker for stories about someone learning how to become a better person, particularly when it involves a release of anxiety, and oh my does Blake ever deliver on that. Jordan's arc is more straightforward than Astrid's — she just needs to get her confidence back — but her backstory is a lot more complex than it first appears, including a morally ambiguous character who I would hate in person but who I admired as a deft and tricky bit of characterization.

The characters from Delilah Green Doesn't Care of course play a significant role. Delilah in particular is just as much of a delight here as she was in the first book, and I enjoyed seeing the development of her relationship with her step-sister. But the new characters, both the HGTV film crew and the Everwoods, are also great. I think Blake has a real knack for memorable, distinct supporting characters that add a lot of depth to the main romance plot.

I thought this book was substantially more sex-forward than Delilah Green Doesn't Care, with some lust at first or second sight, a bit more physical description of bodies, and an extended section in the middle of the book that's mostly about sex. If this is or is not your thing in romance novels, you may have a different reaction to this book than the previous one.

There is, unfortunately, another third-act break-up, and this one annoyed me more than the one in Delilah Green Doesn't Care because it felt more unnecessary and openly self-destructive. The characters felt like they were headed towards a more sensible and less dramatic resolution, and then that plot twist caught me by surprise in an unpleasant way. After two books, I'm getting the sense that Blake has a preferred plot arc, at least in this series, and I wish she'd varied the story structure a bit more. Still, the third-act conflict was somewhat believable and the resolution was satisfying enough to salvage it.

If it weren't for some sour feelings about the shape of that plot climax, I would have said that I liked this book even better than Delilah Green Doesn't Care, and that's a high bar. This series is great, and I will definitely be reading the third one. I'm going to be curious how that goes since it's about Iris, who so far has worked better for me as a supporting character than a protagonist. But Blake has delivered compulsively readable and thoroughly enjoyable books twice now, so I'm definitely here for the duration.

If you like this sort of thing, I highly recommend this whole series.

Followed by Iris Kelly Doesn't Date in the romance series sense, but as before this book is a complete story with a satisfying ending.

Rating: 9 out of 10

This is bits from DPL for November.

MiniDebConf Toulouse

I had the pleasure of attending the MiniDebConf in Toulouse, which featured a range of engaging talks, complementing those from the recent MiniDebConf in Cambridge. Both events were preceded by a DebCamp, which provided a valuable opportunity for focused work and collaboration.

DebCamp

During these events, I participated in numerous technical discussions on topics such as maintaining long-neglected packages, team-based maintenance, FTP master policies, Debusine, and strategies for separating maintainer script dependencies from runtime dependencies, among others. I was also fortunate that members of the Publicity Team attended the MiniDebCamp, giving us the opportunity to meet in person and collaborate face-to-face.

Independent of the ongoing lengthy discussion on the Debian Devel mailing list, I encountered the perspective that unifying Git workflows might be more critical than ensuring all packages are managed in Git. While I'm uncertain whether these two questions--adopting Git as a universal development tool and agreeing on a common workflow for its use--can be fully separated, I believe it's worth raising this topic for further consideration.

Attracting newcomers

In my own talk, I regret not leaving enough time for questions--my apologies for this. However, I want to revisit the sole question raised, which essentially asked: Is the documentation for newcomers sufficient to attract new contributors? My immediate response was that this question is best directed to new contributors themselves, as they are in the best position to identify gaps and suggest improvements that could make the documentation more helpful.

That said, I'm personally convinced that our challenges extend beyond just documentation. I don't get the impression that newcomers are lining up to join Debian only to be deterred by inadequate documentation. The issue might be more about fostering interest and engagement in the first place.

My personal impression is that we sometimes fail to convey that Debian is not just a product to download for free but also a technical challenge that warmly invites participation. Everyone who respects our Code of Conduct will find that Debian is a highly diverse community, where joining the project offers not only opportunities for technical contributions but also meaningful social interactions that can make the effort and time truly rewarding.

In several of my previous talks (you can find them on my talks page –just search for "team," and don't be deterred if you see "Debian Med" in the title; it's simply an example), I emphasized that the interaction between a mentor and a mentee often plays a far more significant role than the documentation the mentee has to read. The key to success has always been finding a way to spark the mentee's interest in a specific topic that resonates with their own passions.

Bug of the Day

In my presentation, I provided a brief overview of the Bug of the Day initiative, which was launched with the aim of demonstrating how to fix bugs as an entry point for learning about packaging. While the current level of interest from newcomers seems limited, the initiative has brought several additional benefits.

I must admit that I'm learning quite a bit about Debian myself. I often compare it to exploring a house's cellar with a flashlight –you uncover everything from hidden marvels to things you might prefer to discard. I've also come across traces of incredibly diligent people who have invested their spare time polishing these hidden treasures (what we call NMUs). The janitor, a service in Salsa that automatically updates packages, fits perfectly into this cellar metaphor, symbolizing the ongoing care and maintenance that keep everything in order. I hadn't realized the immense amount of silent work being done behind the scenes--thank you all so much for your invaluable QA efforts.

Reproducible builds

It might be unfair to single out a specific talk from Toulouse, but I'd like to highlight the one on reproducible builds. Beyond its technical focus, the talk also addressed the recent loss of Lunar, whom we mourn deeply. It served as a tribute to Lunar's contributions and legacy. Personally, I've encountered packages maintained by Lunar and bugs he had filed. I believe that taking over his packages and addressing the bugs he reported is a meaningful way to honor his memory and acknowledge the value of his work.

Advent calendar bug squashing

I’d like to promote an idea originally introduced by Thorsten Alteholz, who in 2011 proposed a Bug Squashing Advent Calendar for the Debian Med team. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of an Advent Calendar, you can find an explanation on Wikipedia.) While the original version included a fun graphical element —which we’ve had to set aside due to time constraints (volunteers, anyone?)— we’ve kept the tradition alive by tackling one bug per day from December 1st to 24th each year. This initiative helps clean up issues that have accumulated over the year.

Regardless of whether you celebrate the concept of Advent, I warmly recommend this approach as a form of continuous bug-squashing party for every team. Not only does it contribute to the release readiness of your team’s packages, but it’s also an enjoyable and bonding activity for team members.

Best wishes for a cheerful and productive December

Andreas.

A new release of the anytime package arrived on CRAN today—the first is well over four years. The package is fairly feature-complete, and code and functionality remain mature and stable, of course.

anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … input format to either POSIXct (when called as anytime) or Date objects (when called as anydate) – and to do so without requiring a format string as well as accomodating different formats in one input vector. See the anytime page, or the GitHub repo for a few examples, and the beautiful documentation site for all documentation.

This release slowly matured over four years. It combines a number of strictly internal repository maintenance such as changes to continuous integration with small enhancements (adding for example some new formats, responding better to an error condition, dealing with logical input as an error) with a relaxation of the C++ compilation standard. While we once needed C++11, it is now a constraint as as R itself is quite proactive (the last two releases defaulted already to C++17, suitable compiler permitting) we can now relax this constraint. The documentation site is new, as some other small changes. See the full list of changes which follows.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.10 (2024-12-02)

• A new documentation site was added.

• Continuous Integration now uses run.sh from r-ci with bspm

• Logical input vectors are now recognised as an error (#121)

• Additional dot-separated format '%Y.%m.%d' is supported

• Other small updates were made throughout the package

• No longer set a C++ compilation standard as the default choices by R are sufficient for the package

• Switch Rcpp include file to Rcpp/Lightest

• We recommend ~/.R/Makevars compiler flag options -Wno-ignored-attributes -Wno-nonnull -Wno-parentheses

• The tinytest runner was simplified

• NA values from conversion now trigger a warning

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report of changes relative to the previous release. The issue tracker tracker off the GitHub repo can be use for questions and comments. More information about the package is at the package page, the GitHub repo and the documentation site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I thought it had been a full year since I last shared a playlist, but it's been two! I had a plan to produce more, but it seems I haven't. Instead here's a few tracks I've discovered recently which share a common theme.

In August I stumbled across a Sound on Sound video interviewing Pete Cannon, who creates authentically old-school Jungle music using tools and techniques from the time, including AKAI samplers and the Commodore Amiga computer.

Here's three tracks that I found since then. Some 8-bit Amiga-jungle,

by

some slower-paced acid house from someone ostensibly based on Whitley Bay,

by

and a darker piece I heard on the radio.

by

Graph for my furusato tax. Exceeding 150-man will inevitably exceed 50-man limit for Ichiji-shotoku. So added some rough calculation there. graph.

Review: Long Live Evil, by Sarah Rees Brennan

Series: Time of Iron #1 Publisher: Orbit Copyright: July 2024 ISBN: 0-316-56872-4 Format: Kindle Pages: 433

Long Live Evil is a portal fantasy (or, arguably more precisely, a western take on an isekai villainess fantasy) and the first book of a series. If the author's name sounds familiar, it's possibly because of In Other Lands, which got a bunch of award nominations in 2018, She has also written a lot of other YA fantasy, but this is her first adult epic fantasy novel.

Rae is in the hospital, dying of cancer. Everything about that experience, from the obvious to the collapse of her friendships, absolutely fucking sucks. One of the few bright points is her sister's favorite fantasy series, Time of Iron, which her sister started reading to her during chemo sessions. Rae mostly failed to pay attention until the end of the first book and the rise of the Emperor. She fell in love with the brooding, dangerous anti-hero and devoured the next two books. The first book was still a bit hazy, though, even with the help of a second dramatic reading after she was too sick to read on her own.

This will be important later.

After one of those reading sessions, Rae wakes up to a strange woman in her hospital room who offers her an option. Rather than die a miserable death that bankrupts her family, she can go through a door to Eyam, the world of Time of Iron, and become the character who suits her best. If she can steal the Flower of Life and Death from the imperial greenhouse on the one day a year that it blooms, she will wake up, cured. If not, she will die. Rae of course goes through, and wakes in the body of Lady Rahela, the Beauty Dipped in Blood, the evil stepsister. One of the villains, on the night before she is scheduled to be executed.

Rae's initial panic slowly turns to a desperate glee. She knows all of these characters. She knows how the story will turn out. And she has a healthy body that's not racked with pain. Maybe she's not the heroine, but who cares, the villains are always more interesting anyway. If she's going to be cast as the villain, she's going to play it to the hilt. It's not like any of these characters are real.

Stories in which the protagonists are the villains are not new (Nimona and Hench come to mind just among books I've reviewed), but they are having a moment. Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer came out last year, and this book and Django Wexler's How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying both came out this year. This batch of villain books all take different angles on the idea, but they lean heavily on humor. In Long Live Evil, that takes the form of Rae's giddy embrace of villainous scheming, flouncing, and blatant plot manipulation, along with her running commentary on the various characters and their in-story fates.

The setup here is great. Rae is not only aware that she's in a story, she knows it's full of cliches and tropes. Some of them she loves, some of them she thinks are ridiculous, and she isn't shy about expressing both of those opinions. Rae is a naturally dramatic person, and it doesn't take her long to lean into the opportunities for making dramatic monologues and villainous quips, most of which involve modern language and pop culture references that the story characters find baffling and disconcerting.

Unfortunately, the base Time of Iron story is, well, bad. It's absurd grimdark epic fantasy with paper-thin characters and angst as a central character trait. This is clearly intentional for both in-story and structural reasons. Rae enjoys it precisely because it's full of blood and battles and over-the-top brooding, malevolent anti-heroes, and Rae's sister likes the impossibly pure heroes who suffer horrible fates while refusing to compromise their ideals. Rae is also about to turn the story on its head and start smashing its structure to try to get herself into position to steal the Flower of Life and Death, and the story has to have a simple enough structure that it doesn't get horribly confusing once smashed. But the original story is such a grimdark parody, and so not my style of fantasy, that I struggled with it at the start of the book.

This does get better eventually, as Rae introduces more and more complications and discovers some surprising things about the other characters. There are several delightful twists concerning the impossibly pure heroine of the original story that I will not spoil but that I thought retroactively made the story far more interesting. But that leads to the other problem: Rae is both not very good at scheming, and is flippant and dismissive of the characters around her. These are both realistic; Rae is a young woman with cancer, not some sort of genius mastermind, and her whole frame for interacting with the story is fandom discussions and arguments with her sister. Early in the book, it's rather funny. But as the characters around her start becoming more fleshed out and complex, Rae's inability to take them seriously starts to grate. The grand revelation to Rae that these people have their own independent existence comes so late in the book that it's arguably a spoiler, but it was painfully obvious to everyone except Rae for hundreds of pages before it got through Rae's skull.

Those are my main complaints, but there was a lot about this book that I liked. The Cobra, who starts off as a minor villain in the story, is by far the best character of the book. He's not only more interesting than Rae, he makes everyone else in the book, including Rae, more interesting characters through their interactions. The twists around the putative heroine, Lady Rahela's stepsister, are a bit too long in coming but are an absolute delight. And Key, the palace guard that Rae befriends at the start of the story, is the one place where Rae's character dynamic unquestionably works. Key anchors a lot of Rae's scenes, giving them a sense of emotional heft that Rae herself would otherwise undermine.

The narrator in this book does not stick with Rae. We also get viewpoint chapters from the Cobra, the Last Hope, and Emer, Lady Rahela's maid. The viewpoints from the Time of Iron characters can be a bit eye-roll-inducing at the start because of how deeply they follow the grimdark aesthetic of the original story, but by the middle of the book I was really enjoying the viewpoint shifts. This story benefited immensely from being seen from more angles than Rae's chaotic manipulation. By the end of the book, I was fully invested in the plot line following Cobra and the Last Hope, to the extent that I was a bit disappointed when the story would switch back to Rae.

I'm not sure this was a great book, but it was fun. It's funny in places, but I ended up preferring the heartfelt parts to the funny parts. It is a fascinating merger of gleeful fandom chaos and rather heavy emotional portrayals of both inequality and the experience of terminal illness. Rees Brennan is a stage four cancer survivor and that really shows; there's a depth, nuance, and internal complexity to Rae's reactions to illness, health, and hope that feels very real. It is the kind of book that can give you emotional whiplash; sometimes it doesn't work, but sometimes it does.

One major warning: this book ends on a ridiculous cliffhanger and does not in any sense resolve its main plot arc. I found this annoying, not so much because of the wait for the second volume, but because I thought this book was about the right length for the amount of time I wanted to spend in this world and wish Rees Brennan had found a way to wrap up the story in one book. Instead, it looks like there will be three books. I'm in for at least one more, since the story was steadily getting better towards the end of Long Live Evil, but I hope the narrative arc survives being stretched out across that many words.

This one's hard to classify, since it's humorous fantasy on the cover and in the marketing, and that element is definitely present, but I thought the best parts of the book were when it finally started taking itself seriously. It's metafictional, trope-subverting portal fantasy full of intentional anachronisms that sometimes fall flat and sometimes work brilliantly. I thought the main appeal of it would be watching Rae embrace being a proper villain, but then the apparent side characters stole the show. Recommended, but you may have to be in just the right mood.

Content notes: Cancer, terminal illness, resurrected corpses, wasting disease, lots of fantasy violence and gore, and a general grimdark aesthetic.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Or how it took more than a year for me to set up this website -

As the computer science tradition demands, we must start with a Hello World.

Though I have to say this hello world took quite a long time to reach the internet. I’ve been thinking about setting up this website for way over a year, but there are always too many things to decide - what Static Site Generator will I use? Where should I get a domain from? Which registrar would be better now? What if I want to set up a mail server, is it good enough? Oh, and what about the theme, which one to choose? Can I get one simple enough to not fetch javascript or css from external sources?

This was taking so long that even my friends were saying “Please, just share your screen and let’s do it now!”. Well, rejoice friends, now it’s done!

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. The larger blocks are the Phosh 0.43 release, the initial file chooser portal, phosh-osk-stub now handling digit, number, phone and PIN input purpose via special layouts as well as Phoc mostly catching up with wlroots 0.18 and the current development version targeting 0.19.

phosh

• When taking a screenshot via keybinding or power button long press save screenshots to clipboard and disk (MR)
• Robustify Screenshot CI job (MR)
• Update CI pipeline (MR)
• Fix notifications banners that aren't tall enough not being shown (MR). Another 4y old bug hopefully out of the way.
• Add rfkill mock and docs (MR). Useful for HKS testing.
• Release 0.43~rc1 and 0.43
• Drop libsoup workaround (MR)
• Ensure notification only takes its actual height (MR)

phoc

• Move wlroots 0.18 update forward (MR). Needs a bit more work before we can make it default.
• Catch up with wlroots development branch (MR) allowing us to test current wlroots again.
• Some of the above already applies to main so schedule it for 0.44 (MR)

phosh-mobile-settings

• Don't mark release notes as translatable to save some i18n effort (MR)
• Release 0.43~rc1 and 0.43.0

libphosh-rs

• Adjust to API change (MR)
• Release 0.0.4 on crates.io

phosh-osk-stub

• Add layouts for PIN, number and phone input purpose (MR)
• Release 0.43~rc1
• Ensure translation get picked up, various cleanups and release 0.43.0 (MR)
• Make desktop file match app-id (MR)

phosh-tour

• Fix typo and reduce number of strings to translate (MR)
• Add translator comments (MR). This, the above and additional fixes in p-m-s were prompted by i18n feedback from Alexandre Franke, thanks a lot!
• Release 0.43.0

pfs

• Initial version of the adaptive file chooser dialog using gtk-rs. See demo.
• Allow to activate via double click (for non-touch use) (MR)

xdg-desktop-portal-phosh

• Use pfs to provide a file chooser portal (MR)

meta-phosh

• Slightly improve point release handling (MR)
• Improve string freeze announcements and add phosh-tour (MR)

Debian

• Upload Phosh 0.43.0~rc1 and 0.43.0 (MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR, MR)
• meta-phosh: Add Recommend: for xdg-desktop-portal-phosh (MR)
• phosh-osk-data got accepted, create repo, brush up packaging and upload to unstable (MR
• phosh-osk-stub: Recommend data packager (MR
• Phosh: drop reverts (MR)
• varnam-schemes: Fix autopkgtest (MR)
• varnam-schemes: Improve packaging (MR)
• Prepare govarnam 1.9.1 (MR)

Calls

• ussd: Set input purpose and switch to AdwDialog (MR, Screenshot)

libcall-ui

• Drop libhandy leftover (MR)

git-buildpackage

• Improve docs and cleanup markdown (MR)
• Mention gbp push in intro (MR)
• Use application instead of productname entities to improve reading flow (MR)

wlroots

• Drop mention of wlr_renderer_begin_with_buffer (MR)

python-dbusmock

• Add mock for gsd-rfkill (MR)

xdg-spec

• Sync notification categories with the portal spec (MR)
• Add categories for SMS (MR)
• Add a pubdate so it's clear the specs aren't stale (MR) (got fixed in a different and better way, thanks Matthias!)

ashpd

• Allow to set filters in file chooser portal demo (MR)

govarnam

• Robustify file generation (MR)

varnam-schemes

• Unbreak tests on non intel/amd architectures (e.g. arm64) (MR)

Reviews

This is not code by me but reviews I did on other peoples code. The list is incomplete, but I hope to improve on this in the upcoming months. Thanks for the contributions!

• flathub: livi runtime and gst update (MR)
• phosh: Split linters into their own test suite (MR)
• phosh; QuickSettings follow-up (MR)
• phosh: Accent color fixes (MR)
• phosh: Notification animation (MR)
• phosh: end-session dialog timeout fix (MR)
• phosh: search daemon (MR)
• phosh-ev: Migrate to newer gtk-rs and async_channel (MR)
• phosh-mobile-settings: Update gmobile (MR)
• phosh-mobile-settings: Make panel-switcher scrollable (MR)
• phosh-mobile-settings: i18n comments (MR)
• gbp doc updates (MR)
• gbp handle suite names with number prefix (MR)
• Debian libvirt dependency changes (MR
• Chatty: misc improvements (MR
• iio-sensor-proxy: buffer driver without trigger (MR)
• gbp doc improvements (MR)
• gbp: More doc improvements (MR)
• gbp: Clean on failure (MR)
• gbp: DEP naming consistency (MR)

Help Development

If you want to support my work see donations. This includes a list of hardware we want to improve support for. Thanks a lot to all current and past donors.

Comments?

Join the Fediverse thread

Most of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian.

You can also support my work directly via Liberapay.

Conferences

I attended MiniDebConf Toulouse 2024, and the MiniDebCamp before it. Most of my time was spent with the Freexian folks working on debusine; Stefano gave a talk about its current status with a live demo (frantically fixed up over the previous couple of days, as is traditional) and with me and others helping to answer questions at the end. I also caught up with some people I haven’t seen in ages, ate a variety of delicious cheeses, and generally had a good time. Many thanks to the organizers and sponsors!

After the conference, Freexian collaborators spent a day and a half doing some planning for next year, and then went for an afternoon visiting the Cité de l’espace.

Rust team

I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions, as part of upgrading pydantic and rpds-py:

• rust-archery
• rust-jiter (noticing an upstream test bug in the process)
• rust-pyo3 (fixing CVE-2024-9979)
• rust-pyo3-build-config
• rust-pyo3-ffi
• rust-pyo3-macros
• rust-pyo3-macros-backend
• rust-regex
• rust-regex-automata
• rust-regex
• rust-serde
• rust-serde-derive
• rust-serde-json
• rust-speedate
• rust-triomphe

Python team

Last month, I mentioned that we still need to work out what to do about the multipart vs. python-multipart name conflict in Debian (#1085728). We eventually managed to come up with an agreed plan; Sandro has uploaded a renamed binary package to experimental, and I’ve begun work on converting reverse-dependencies (asgi-csrf, fastapi, python-curies, and starlette done so far). There’s a bit more still to do, but I expect we can finish it soon.

I fixed problems related to adding Python 3.13 support in:

• coreapi
• git-repo-updater
• offlineimap3
• ptyprocess
• pytest-testinfra
• python-formencode
• python-iniparse
• python-line-profiler
• python-parameterized
• python-sdjson (contributed upstream)
• python-testfixtures (contributed upstream)
• python-venusian
• sphinx-a4doc (contributed upstream, and I also made a small antlr4 improvement)
• webpy

I fixed some packaging problems that resulted in failures any time we add a new Python version to Debian:

• python-btrees
• python-nox

I fixed other build/autopkgtest failures in:

• psycopg3 (contributed upstream)
• python-aiohttp
• python-cotengrust
• python-distutils-extra
• python-formencode
• python-openapi-schema-validator
• python-openapi-spec-validator
• sphinxcontrib-towncrier

I packaged python-quart-trio, needed for a new upstream version of python-urllib3, and contributed a small packaging tweak upstream.

I backported a twisted fix that caused problems in other packages, including breaking debusine‘s tests.

I disentangled some upstream version confusion in python-catalogue, and upgraded to the current upstream version.

I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions:

• aioftp (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• ansible-core
• ansible
• debugpy
• jsonpickle
• manuel
• psycopg2
• pydantic-core
• pydantic
• pydantic-settings
• pymssql (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• pyodbc (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-argh (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-boltons (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-channels-redis
• python-colorlog (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-django-pgtrigger
• python-line-profiler
• python-pathvalidate (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-plac (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-precis-i18n
• python-pure-eval (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-pythonjsonlogger (contributing a small packaging fix upstream, as well as a test fix to jupyter-events)
• python-rdata (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-semantic-release
• python-telethon (fixing a Python 3.13 failure, and contributing some test fixes upstream)
• python-tornado (fixing CVE-2024-52804)
• python-trio (fixing a Python 3.13 failure)
• python-trustme
• python-typeguard
• python-urllib3 (fixing CVE-2024-37891 and a Python 3.13 failure, and requiring some shenanigans with its hypercorn test-dependency)
• python-zipp
• quart (fixing CVE-2024-49767)
• rpds-py (fixing a build failure)
• sen
• sqlparse
• stravalib
• transaction
• waitress
• zope.interface

Other small fixes

I contributed Incus support to needrestart upstream.

In response to Helmut’s Cross building talk at MiniDebConf Toulouse, I fixed libfilter-perl to support cross-building (5b4c2e10, f9788c27).

I applied a patch to move aliased files from / to /usr in iprutils (#1087733).

I adjusted debconf to use the new /usr/lib/apt/apt-extracttemplates path (#1087523).

I upgraded putty to 0.82.

Lots of travel and back to Tokyo. Then I got sick. Trying to work on my bass piece, but it's really hard and I am having hard time getting to a reasonable shape. Discussions on Debconf 2026 bid. Hoping it will materialize soon.

Review: Unexploded Remnants, by Elaine Gallagher

Publisher: Tordotcom Copyright: 2024 ISBN: 1-250-32522-6 Format: Kindle Pages: 111

Unexploded Remnants is a science fiction adventure novella. The protagonist and world background would support an episodic series, but as of this writing it stands alone. It is Elaine Gallagher's first professional publication.

Alice is the last survivor of Earth: an explorer, information trader, and occasional associate of the Archive. She scouts interesting places, looks for inconsistencies in the stories the galactic civilizations tell themselves, and pokes around ruins for treasure. As this story opens, she finds a supposedly broken computer core in the Alta Sidoie bazaar that is definitely not what the trader thinks it is. Very shortly thereafter, she's being hunted by a clan of dangerous Delosi while trying to decide what to do with a possibly malevolent AI with frightening intrusion abilities.

This is one of those stories where all the individual pieces sounded great, but the way they were assembled didn't click for me. Unusually, I'm not entirely sure why. Often it's the characters, but I liked Alice well enough. The Lewis Carroll allusions were there but not overdone, her computer agent Bugs is a little too much of a Warner Brothers cartoon but still interesting, and the world building has plenty of interesting hooks. I certainly can't complain about the pacing: the plot moves briskly along to a somewhat predictable but still adequate conclusion. The writing is smooth and competent, and the world is memorable enough that I'm still thinking about it.

And yet, I never connected with this story. I think it may be because both Alice and the tight third-person narrator tend towards breezy confidence and matter-of-fact descriptions. Alice does, at times, get scared or angry, but I never felt those emotions. They were just events that were described to me. There wasn't an emotional hook, a place where the character grabbed me, and so it felt like everything was happening at an odd remove. The advantage of this approach is that there are no overwrought emotional meltdowns or brooding angstful protagonists, just an adventure story about a competent and thoughtful character, but I think I wanted a bit more emotional involvement than I got.

The world background is the best part and feels like it could be part of a larger series. The Milky Way is connected by an old, vast, and only partly understood network of teleportation portals, which had cut off Earth for unknown reasons and then just as mysteriously reactivated when Alice, then Andrew, drunkenly poked at a standing stone while muttering an old prayer in Gaelic. The Archive spent a year sorting out her intellectual diseases (capitalism was particularly alarming) and giving her a fresh start with a new body. Humanity subsequently destroyed itself in a paroxysm of reactionary violence, leaving Alice a free agent, one of a kind in a galaxy of dizzying variety and forgotten history.

Gallagher makes great use of the weirdness of the portal network to create a Star Wars style of universe: the focus is more on the diversity of the planets and alien species than on a coherent unifying structure. The settings of this book are not prone to Planet of the Hats problems. They instead have the contrasts that one would get if one dropped portals near current or former Earth population centers and then took a random walk through them (or, in other words, what playing GeoGuessr on a world map feels like). I liked this effect, but I have to admit that it also added to that sense of sliding off the surface of the story. The place descriptions were great bits of atmosphere, but I never cared about them. There isn't enough emotional coherence to make them memorable.

One of the more notable quirks of this story is the description of ideologies and prejudices as viral memes that can be cataloged, cured, and deployed like weapons. This is a theme of the world-building as well: this society, or at least the Archive-affiliated parts of it, classifies some patterns of thought as potentially dangerous but treatable contagious diseases. I'm not going to object too much to this as a bit of background and characterization in a fairly short novella stuffed with a lot of other world-building and plot, but there's was something about treating ethical systems like diseases that bugged me in much the same way that medicalization of neurodiversity bugs me. I think some people will find that sense of moral clarity relaxing and others will find it vaguely irritating, and I seem to have ended up in the second group.

Overall, I would classify this as an interesting not-quite-success. It felt like a side story in a larger universe, like a story that would work better if I already knew Alice from other novels and had an established emotional connection with her. As is, I would not really recommend it, but there are enough good pieces here that I would be interested to see what Gallagher does next.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Tracking library dependencies work in Debian to resolve from symbols usage to a library and add this to the list of dependencies. That is working for years now. The KDE community nowadays create more and more QML based applications. Unfortunately QML is a interpreted language, this means missing QML dependencies will only be an issue at runtime.

To fix this I created dh_qmldeps, that searches for QML dependencies at build time and will fail if it can't resolve the QML dependency.

Me didn't create an own QML interpreter, just using qmlimportscanner behind the scenes and process the output further to resolve the QML modules to Debian packages.

The workflow is like follows:

The package compiles normally and split to the binary packages. Than dh_qmldeps scans through the package content to find QML content ( .qml files, or qmldirfor QML modules). All founded files will be scanned by qmlimportscanner, the output is a list of depended QML modules. As QML modules have a standardized file path, we can ask the Debian system, which packages ship this file path. We end up with a list of Debian packages in the variable ${qml6:Depends}. This variable can be attached to the list of dependencies of the scanned package. A maintainer can also lower some dependencies to Recommends or Suggest, if needed.

You can find the source code on salsa and usage documentation you can find on https://qt-kde-team.pages.debian.net/dh_qmldeps.html.

The last weeks I now enabled dh_qmldeps for newly every package, that creates a QML6 module package. So the first bugs are solved and it should be usable for more packages.

By scanning with qmlimportscanner trough all code, I found several non-existing QML modules:

• import QtQuick3DPrivate qt6-multimedia - no Private QML module QTBUG-131753.
• import QtQuickPrivate qt6-graphs - no Private QML module QTBUG-131754.
• import QtQuickTimeline qt6-quicktimeline - the correct QML name is QtQuick.Timeline QTBUG-131755.
• import QtQuickControls2 qt6-webengine - looks like a porting bug as the QML6 modules name is QtQuick.Controls QTBUG-131756.
• import QtGraphicalEffects kquickimageeditor - the correct name is for QML6 is qt5compat.graphicaleffects, properly as it is an example nobody checks it kquickimageeditor!7.

YEAH - the first milestone is reached. We are able to simply handle QML modules.

But QML applications there is still room for improvement. In apps the QML files are inside the executable. Additionally applications create internal QML modules, that are shipped directly in the same executable. I still search for a good way to analyse an executable to get a list of internal QML modules and a list of included QML files. Any ideas are welcomed :)

As workaround dh_qmldeps scans currently all QML files inside the application source code.

After years of seeing people's strava tracks, I became convinced that they insufficiently filter the data, resulting in over-estimating the effort. Today I did a bit of lazy analysis, and half-confirmed this: in the one case I looked at, strava reported reasonable elevation gain numbers, but greatly overestimated the distance traveled.

I looked at a single gps track of a long bike ride. This was uploaded to strava manually, as a .gpx file. I can imagine that different things happen if you use the strava app or some device that integrates with the service (the filtering might happen before the data hits the server, and the server could decide to not apply any more filtering).

I processed the data with a simple hysteretic filter, ignoring small changes in position and elevation, trying out different thresholds in the process. I completely ignore the timestamps, and only look at the differences between successive points. This handles the usual GPS noise; it does not handle GPS jumps, which I completely ignore in this analysis. Ignoring these would produce inflated elevation/gain numbers, but I'm working with a looong track, so hopefully this is a small effect.

Clearly this is not scientific, but it's something.

The code

Parsing .gpx is slow (this is a big file), so I cache that into a .vnl:

import sys import gpxpy filename_in = 'INPUT.gpx' filename_out = 'OUTPUT.gpx' with open(filename_in, 'r') as f: gpx = gpxpy.parse(f) f_out = open(filename_out, 'w') tracks = gpx.tracks if len(tracks) != 1: print("I want just one track", file=sys.stderr) sys.exit(1) track = tracks[0] segments = track.segments if len(segments) != 1: print("I want just one segment", file=sys.stderr) sys.exit(1) segment = segments[0] time0 = segment.points[0].time print("# time lat lon ele_m") for p in segment.points: print(f"{(p.time - time0).seconds} {p.latitude} {p.longitude} {p.elevation}", file = f_out)

And I process this data with the different filters (this is a silly Python loop, and is slow):

#!/usr/bin/python3 import sys import numpy as np import numpysane as nps import gnuplotlib as gp import vnlog import pyproj geod = None def dist_ft(lat0,lon0, lat1,lon1): global geod if geod is None: geod = pyproj.Geod(ellps='WGS84') return \ geod.inv(lon0,lat0, lon1,lat1)[2] * 100./2.54/12. f = 'OUTPUT.gpx' track,list_keys,dict_key_index = \ vnlog.slurp(f) t = track[:,dict_key_index['time' ]] lat = track[:,dict_key_index['lat' ]] lon = track[:,dict_key_index['lon' ]] ele_ft = track[:,dict_key_index['ele_m']] * 100./2.54/12. @nps.broadcast_define( ( (), ()), (2,)) def filter_track(ele_hysteresis_ft, dxy_hysteresis_ft): dist = 0.0 ele_gain_ft = 0.0 lon_accepted = None lat_accepted = None ele_accepted = None for i in range(len(lat)): if ele_accepted is not None: dxy_here = dist_ft(lat_accepted,lon_accepted, lat[i],lon[i]) dele_here = np.abs( ele_ft[i] - ele_accepted ) if dxy_here < dxy_hysteresis_ft and dele_here < ele_hysteresis_ft: continue if ele_ft[i] > ele_accepted: ele_gain_ft += dele_here; dist += np.sqrt(dele_here * dele_here + dxy_here * dxy_here) lon_accepted = lon[i] lat_accepted = lat[i] ele_accepted = ele_ft[i] # lose the last point. It simply doesn't matter dist_mi = dist / 5280. return np.array((ele_gain_ft, dist_mi)) Nele_hysteresis_ft = 20 ele_hysteresis0_ft = 5 ele_hysteresis1_ft = 100 ele_hysteresis_ft_all = np.linspace(ele_hysteresis0_ft, ele_hysteresis1_ft, Nele_hysteresis_ft) Ndxy_hysteresis_ft = 20 dxy_hysteresis0_ft = 5 dxy_hysteresis1_ft = 1000 dxy_hysteresis_ft = np.linspace(dxy_hysteresis0_ft, dxy_hysteresis1_ft, Ndxy_hysteresis_ft) # shape (Nele,Ndxy,2) gain,distance = \ nps.mv( filter_track( nps.dummy(ele_hysteresis_ft_all,-1), dxy_hysteresis_ft), -1,0 ) # Stolen from mrcal def options_heatmap_with_contours( plotoptions, # we update this on output *, contour_min = 0, contour_max, contour_increment = None, do_contours = True, contour_labels_styles = 'boxed', contour_labels_font = None): r'''Update plotoptions, return curveoptions for a contoured heat map''' gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'set', ('view equal xy', 'view map')) if do_contours: if contour_increment is None: # Compute a "nice" contour increment. I pick a round number that gives # me a reasonable number of contours Nwant = 10 increment = (contour_max - contour_min)/Nwant # I find the nearest 1eX or 2eX or 5eX base10_floor = np.power(10., np.floor(np.log10(increment))) # Look through the options, and pick the best one m = np.array((1., 2., 5., 10.)) err = np.abs(m * base10_floor - increment) contour_increment = -m[ np.argmin(err) ] * base10_floor gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'set', ('key box opaque', 'style textbox opaque', 'contour base', f'cntrparam levels incremental {contour_max},{contour_increment},{contour_min}')) if contour_labels_font is not None: gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'set', f'cntrlabel format "%d" font "{contour_labels_font}"' ) else: gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'set', f'cntrlabel format "%.0f"' ) plotoptions['cbrange'] = [contour_min, contour_max] # I plot 3 times: # - to make the heat map # - to make the contours # - to make the contour labels _with = np.array(('image', 'lines nosurface', f'labels {contour_labels_styles} nosurface')) else: gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'unset', 'key') _with = 'image' using = \ f'({dxy_hysteresis0_ft}+$1*{float(dxy_hysteresis1_ft-dxy_hysteresis0_ft)/(Ndxy_hysteresis_ft-1)}):' + \ f'({ele_hysteresis0_ft}+$2*{float(ele_hysteresis1_ft-ele_hysteresis0_ft)/(Nele_hysteresis_ft-1)}):3' plotoptions['_3d'] = True plotoptions['_xrange'] = [dxy_hysteresis0_ft,dxy_hysteresis1_ft] plotoptions['_yrange'] = [ele_hysteresis0_ft,ele_hysteresis1_ft] plotoptions['ascii'] = True # needed for using to work gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'unset', 'grid') return \ dict( tuplesize=3, legend = "", # needed to force contour labels using = using, _with=_with) contour_granularity = 1000 plotoptions = dict() curveoptions = \ options_heatmap_with_contours( plotoptions, # we update this on output # round down to the nearest contour_granularity contour_min = (np.min(gain) // contour_granularity)*contour_granularity, # round up to the nearest contour_granularity contour_max = ((np.max(gain) + (contour_granularity-1)) // contour_granularity) * contour_granularity, do_contours = True) gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'unset', 'key') gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'set', 'size square') gp.plot(gain, xlabel = "Distance hysteresis (ft)", ylabel = "Elevation hysteresis (ft)", cblabel = "Elevation gain (ft)", wait = True, **curveoptions, **plotoptions, title = 'Computed gain vs filtering parameters') contour_granularity = 10 plotoptions = dict() curveoptions = \ options_heatmap_with_contours( plotoptions, # we update this on output # round down to the nearest contour_granularity contour_min = (np.min(distance) // contour_granularity)*contour_granularity, # round up to the nearest contour_granularity contour_max = ((np.max(distance) + (contour_granularity-1)) // contour_granularity) * contour_granularity, do_contours = True) gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'unset', 'key') gp.add_plot_option(plotoptions, 'set', 'size square') gp.plot(distance, xlabel = "Distance hysteresis (ft)", ylabel = "Elevation hysteresis (ft)", cblabel = "Distance (miles)", wait = True, **curveoptions, **plotoptions, title = 'Computed distance vs filtering parameters') Results: gain

Strava says the gain was 46307ft. The analysis says:

These show the filtered gain for different values of the distance and gain hysteresis thresholds. The same data is shown at diffent zoom levels. There's no sweet spot, but we get 46307ft with a reasonable amount of filtering. Maybe 46307ft is a bit low even.

Results: distance

Strava says the distance covered was 322 miles. The analysis says:

Once again, there's no sweet spot, but we get 322 miles only if we apply no filtering at all. That's clearly too high, and is not reasonable. From the map (and from other people's strava routes) the true distance is closer to 305 miles. Why those people's strava numbers are more believable is anybody's guess.

My new laptop Framework (Framework Laptop 13 DIY Edition (AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series)) arrived, all the hardware works out of the box on Debian Stable, and I'm very happy indeed.

This post has the notes of all the provisioning steps, so that I can replicate them again if needed.

Installing Debian 12

Debian 12's installer just worked, with Secure Boot enabled no less, which was nice.

The only glitch is an argument with the guided partitioner, which was uncooperative: I have been hit before by a /boot partition too small, and I wanted 1G of EFI and 1G of boot, while the partitioner decided that 512Mb were good enough. Frustratingly, there was no way of changing that, nor I found how to get more than 1G of swap, as I wanted enough swap to fit RAM for hybernation.

I let it install the way it pleased, then I booted into grml for a round of gparted.

The tricky part of that was resizing the root btrfs filesystem, which is in an LV, which is in a VG, which is in a PV, which is in LUKS. Here's a cheatsheet.

Shrink partitions:

• mount the root filesystem in /mnt
• btrfs filesystem resize 6G /mnt
• umount the root filesystem
• lvresize -L 7G vgname/lvname
• pvresize --setphysicalvolumesize /dev/mapper/pvname 8G
• cryptsetup resize --device-size 9G name

note that I used an increasing size because I don't trust that each tool has a way of representing sizes that aligns to the byte. I'd be happy to find out that they do, but didn't want to find out the hard way that they didn't.

Resize with gparted:

Move and resize partitions at will. Shrinking first means it all takes a reasonable time, and you won't have to wait almost an hour for a terabyte-sized empty partition to be carefully moved around. Don't ask me why I know.

Regrow partitions:

• cryptsetup resize name
• pvresize /dev/mapper/pvname
• lvresize -L 100% vgname/lvname
• mount the root filesystem in /mnt
• btrfs filesystem resize max /mnt
• umount the root filesystem

Setup gnome

When I get a new laptop I have a tradition of trying to make it work with Gnome and Wayland, which normally ended up in frustration and a swift move to X11 and Xfce: I have a lot of long-time muscle memory involved in how I use a computer, and it needs to fit like prosthetics. I can learn to do a thing or two in a different way, but any papercut that makes me break flow and I cannot fix will soon become a dealbreaker.

This applies to Gnome as present in Debian Stable.

General Gnome settings tips

I can list all available settings with:

gsettings list-recursively

which is handy for grepping things like hotkeys.

I can manually set a value with:

gsettings set <schema> <key> <value>

and I can reset it to its default with:

gsettings reset <schema> <key>

Some applications like Gnome Terminal use "relocatable schemas", and in those cases you also need to specify a path, which can be discovered using dconf-editor:

gsettings set <schema>:<path> <key> <value> Install appindicators

First thing first: app install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator, log out and in again: the Gnome Extension manager won't see the extension as available until you restart the whole session.

I have no idea why that is so, and I have no idea why a notification area is not present in Gnome by default, but at least now I can get one.

Fix font sizes across monitors

My laptop screen and monitor have significantly different DPIs, so:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"

And in Settings/Displays, set a reasonable scaling factor for each display.

Disable Alt/Super as hotkey for the Overlay

Seeing all my screen reorganize and reshuffle every time I accidentally press Alt leaves me disoriented and seasick:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter overlay-key '' Focus-follows-mouse and Raise-or-lower

My desktop is like my desktop: messy and cluttered. I have lots of overlapping window and I switch between them by moving the focus with the mouse, and when the visible part is not enough I have a handy hotkey mapped to raise-or-lower to bring forward what I need and send back what I don't need anymore.

Thankfully Gnome can be configured that way, with some work:

• In gnome-shell settings, keyboard, shortcuts, windows, set "Raise window if covered, otherwise lower it" to "Super+Escape"
• In gnome-tweak-tool, Windows, set "Focus on Hover"

This almost worked, but sometimes it didn't do what I wanted, like I expected to find a window to the front but another window disappeared instead. I eventually figured that by default Gnome delays focus changes by a perceivable amount, which is evidently too slow for the way I move around windows.

The amount cannot be shortened, but it can be removed with:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides focus-change-on-pointer-rest false Mouse and keyboard shortcuts

Gnome has lots of preconfigured sounds, shortcuts, animations and other distractions that I do not need. They also either interfere with key combinations I want to use in terminals, or cause accidental window moves or resizes that make me break flow, or otherwise provide sensory overstimulation that really does not work for me.

It was a lot of work, and these are the steps I used to get rid of most of them.

Disable Super+N combinations that accidentally launch a questionable choice of programs:

for i in `seq 1 9`; do gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-$i '[]'; done

Gnome-Shell settings:

• Multitasking:
  • disable hot corner
  • disable active edges
  • set a fixed number of workspaces
  • workspaces on all displays
  • switching includes apps from current workspace only
• Sound:
  • disable system sounds
• Keyboard
  • Compose Key set to Caps Lock
  • View and Customize Shortcuts:
    • Launchers
      • launch help browser: remove
    • Navigation
      • move to workspace on the left: Super+Left
      • move to workspace on the right: Super+Right
      • move window one monitor …: remove
      • move window one workspace to the left: Shift+Super+Left
      • move window one workspace to the right: Shift+Super+Right
      • move window to …: remove
      • switch system …: remove
      • switch to …: remove
      • switch windows …: disabled
    • Screenshots
      • Record a screenshot interactively: Super+Print
      • Take a screenshot interactively: Print
      • Disable everything else
    • System
      • Focus the active notification: remove
      • Open the applcation menu: remove
      • Restore the keyboard shortctus: remove
      • Show all applications: remove
      • Show the notification list: remove
      • Show the overvire: remove
      • Show the run command prompt: remove (the default Gnome launcher is not for me) Super+F2 (or remove to leave it to the terminal)
    • Windows
      • Close window: remove
      • Hide window: remove
      • Maximize window: remove
      • Move window: remove
      • Raise window if covered, otherwise lower it: Super+Escape
      • Resize window: remove
      • Restore window: remove
      • Toggle maximization state: remove
  • Custom shortcuts
    • xfrun4, launching xfrun4, bound to Super+F2
• Accessibility:
  • disable "Enable animations"

gnome-tweak-tool settings:

• Keyboard & Mouse
  • Overview shortcut: Right Super. This cannot be disabled, but since my keyboard doesn't have a Right Super button, that's good enough for me. Oddly, I cannot find this in gsettings.
• Window titlebars
  • Double-Click: Toggle-Maximize
  • Middle-Click: Lower
  • Secondary-Click: Menu
• Windows
  • Resize with secondary click

Gnome Terminal settings:

Thankfully 10 years ago I took notes on how to customize Gnome Terminal, and they're still mostly valid:

• Shortcuts

  • New tab: Super+T
  • New window: Super+N
  • Close tab: disabled
  • Close window: disabled
  • Copy: Super+C
  • Paste: Super+V
  • Search: all disabled
  • Previous tab: Super+Page Up
  • Next tab: Super+Page Down
  • Move tab…: Disabled
  • Switch to tab N: Super+Fn (only available after disabling overview)

  • Switch to tab N with Alt+Fn cannot be configured in the UI: Alt+Fn is detected as simply Fn. It can however be set with gsettings:

    sh for i in `seq 1 12`; do gsettings set org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Keybindings:/org/gnome/terminal/legacy/keybindings/ switch-to-tab-$i "<Alt>F$i"; done

• Profile

  • Text
    • Sound: disable terminal bell

Other hotkeys that got in my way and had to disable the hard way:

for n in `seq 1 12`; do gsettings set org.gnome.mutter.wayland.keybindings switch-to-session-$n '[]'; done gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-down '[]' gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-up '[]' gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings panel-main-menu '[]' gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface menubar-accel '[]'

Note that even after removing F10 from being bound to menubar-accel, and after having to gsetting binding to F10 as is:

$ gsettings list-recursively|grep F10 org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Keybindings switch-to-tab-10 '<Alt>F10'

I still cannot quit Midnight Commander using F10 in a terminal, as that moves the focus in the window title bar. This looks like a Gnome bug, and a very frustrating one for me.

Appearance

Gnome-Shell settings:

• Appearance:
  • dark mode

gnome-tweak-tool settings:

• Fonts
  • Antialiasing: Subpixel
• Top Bar
  • Clock/Weekday: enable (why is this not a default?)

Gnome Terminal settings:

• General
  • Theme variant: Dark (somehow it wasn't picked by up from the system settings)
• Profile
  • Colors
    • Background: #000

Other decluttering and tweaks

Gnome Shell Settings:

• Search
  • disable application search
• Removable media
  • set everything to "ask what to do"
• Default applications
  • Web: Chromium
  • Mail: mutt
  • Calendar: khal is not sadly an option
  • Video: mpv
  • Photos: Geequie

Set a delay between screen blank and lock: when the screen goes blank, it is important for me to be able to say "nope, don't blank yet!", and maybe switch on caffeine mode during a presentation without needing to type my password in front of cameras. No UI for this, but at least gsettings has it:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver lock-delay 30 Extensions

I enabled the Applications Menu extension, since it's impossible to find less famous applications in the Overview without knowing in advance how they're named in the desktop. This stole a precious hotkey, which I had to disable in gsettings:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.apps-menu apps-menu-toggle-menu '[]'

I also enabled:

• Removable Drive Menu: why is this not on by default?
• Workspace Indicator
• Ubuntu Appindicators (apt install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator and restart Gnome)

I didn't go and look for Gnome Shell extentions outside what is packaged in Debian, as I'm very wary about running JavaScript code randomly downloaded from the internet with full access over my data and desktop interaction.

I also took care of checking that the Gnome Shell Extensions web page complains about the lacking "GNOME Shell integration" browser extension, because the web browser shouldn't be allowed to download random JavaScript from the internet and run it with full local access.

Yuck.

Run program dialog

The default run program dialog is almost, but not quite, totally useless to me, as it does not provide completion, not even just for executable names in path, and so it ends up being faster to open a new terminal window and type in there.

It's possible, in Gnome Shell settings, to bind a custom command to a key. The resulting keybinding will now show up in gsettings, though it can be located in a more circuitous way by grepping first, and then looking up the resulting path in dconf-editor:

gsettings list-recursively|grep custom-key org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybindings ['/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/']

I tried out several run dialogs present in Debian, with sad results, possibly due to most of them not being tested on wayland:

• fuzzel does not start
• gmrun is gtk2, last updated in 2016, but works fine
• kupfer segfaults as I type
• rofi shows, but can't get keboard input
• shellex shows a white bar at top of the screen and lots of errors on stderr
• superkb wants to grab the screen for hotkeys
• synapse searched news on the internet as I typed, which is a big no for me
• trabucco crashes on startup
• wofi works but looks like very much an acquired taste, though it has some completion that makes it more useful than Gnome's run dialog
• xfrun4 (package xfce4-appfinder) struggles on wayland, being unable to center its window and with the pulldown appearing elsewhere in the screen, but it otherwise works

Both gmrun and xfrun4 seem like workable options, with xfrun4 being customizable with convenient shortcut prefixes, so xfrun4 it is.

TODO

• Figure out what is still binding F10 to menu, and what I can do about it
• Figure out how to reduce the size of window titlebars, which to my taste should be unobtrusive and not take 2.7% of vertical screen size each. There's a minwaita theme which isn't packaged in Debian. There's a User Theme extension, and then the whole theming can of worms to open. For another day.
• Figure out if Gnome can be convinced to resize popup windows? Take the Gnome Terminal shortcut preferences for example: it takes ⅓ of the vertical screen and can only display ¼ of all available shortcuts, and I cannot find a valid reason why I shouldn't be allowed to enlarge it vertically.
• Figure out if I can place shortcut launcher icons in the top panel, and how

I'll try to update these notes as I investigate.

Conclusion so far

I now have something that seems to work for me. A few papercuts to figure out still, but they seem manageable.

It all feels a lot harder than it should be: for something intended to be minimal, Gnome defaults feel horribly cluttered and noisy to me, continuosly getting in the way of getting things done until tamed into being out of the way unless called for. It felt like a device that boots into flashy demo mode, which needs to be switched off before actual use.

Thankfully it can be switched off, and now I have notes to do it again if needed.

gsettings oddly feels to me like a better UI than the interactive settings managers: it's more comprehensive, more discoverable, more scriptable, and more stable across releases. Most of the Q&A I found on the internet with guidance given on the UI was obsolete, while when given with gsettings command lines it kept being relevant. I also have the feeling that these notes would be easier to understand and follow if given as gsettings invocations instead of descriptions of UI navigation paths.

At some point I'll upgrade to Trixie and reevaluate things, and these notes will be a useful checklist for that.

Fingers crossed that this time I'll manage to stay on Wayland. If not, I know that Xfce is still there for me, and I can trust it to be both helpful and good at not getting in the way of my work.

On the riscv64 port, the default boot method is UEFI, with U-Boot typically used as the firmware. This approach aligns more closely with other architectures, which avoid developping riscv64 specific code. For advanced users, booting using U-Boot and extlinux is possible, thanks to the kernel being built with CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y.

The same applies to the Debian Installer, which is provided as ISO images in various sizes and formats like on other architectures. These images can be put on a USB drive or an SD-card and booted directly from U-Boot in UEFI mode. Some users prefer to use the netboot "image", which in practice consists of a Linux kernel, an initrd, plus a set of Device Tree Blob (DTB) files.

However, booting this in UEFI mode is not straightforward, unless you use a TFTP server, which is also not trivial. Less known to users, there is also a corresponding mini.iso image, which contains all the above plus a bootloader. This offers a simpler alternative for installation, but depending on your (vendor) U-Boot version this still requires to go through a media.

Systemd version 257-rc2 comes with a great new feature, the ability to include multiple DTB files in a single UKI (Unified Kernel Image) file, with systemd-stub automatically loading the appropriate one for the current hardware. A UKI file combines a UEFI boot stub program, a Linux kernel image, an optional initrd, and further resources in a single UEFI PE file. This finally solves the DTB problem in the UEFI world for distributions, as a single image can work on multiple boards.

Building upon this, debian-installer on riscv64 now also creates a UEFI UKI mini.efi image, which contains systemd-stub, a Linux kernel, an initrd, plus a set of Device Tree Blob (DTB) files. Using this image also ensures that the system is booted in UEFI mode. Booting it with debian-installer is as simple as:

load mmc 0:1 mini.efo $kernel_addr_r # (can also be done using tftpboot, wget, etc.) bootefi $kernel_addr_r

Additional parameters can be passed to the image using the U-Boot bootargs environment variable. For instance, to boot in rescue mode:

setenv bootargs "rescue/enable=true"

Interesting news about NVidia using RISC-V CPUs in all their GPUs [1]. Hopefully they will develop some fast RISC-V cores.

Interesting blog post about using an 8K TV as a monitor, I’m very tempted to do this [2].

Interesting post about how the Windows kernel development work can’t compete with Linux kernel development [3].

Paul T wrote an insightful article about the ideal of reducing complexity of computer systems and the question of from who’s perspective complexity will be reduced [4].

Interesting lecture at the seL4 symposium about the PANCAKE language for verified systems programming [5]. The idea that “if you are verifying your code types don’t help much” is interesting.

Interesting lecture from the seL4 summit about real world security, starts with the big picture and ends with seL4 specifics [6].

Interesting lecture from the seL4 summit about Cog’s work building a commercial virtualised phome [7]. He talks about not building a “brick of a smartphone that’s obsolete 6 months after release”, is he referring to the Librem5?

Informative document about how Qualcom prevents OSs from accessing EL2 on Snapdragon devices with a link to a work-around for devices shipped with Windows (not Android), this means that only Windows can use the hypervisor features of those CPUs [8].

Linus tech tips did a walk through of an Intel fab, I learned a few things about CPU manufacture [9].

Interesting information on the amount of engineering that can go into a single component. There’s lots of parts that are grossly overpriced (Dell and HP have plenty of examples in their catalogues) but generally aerospace doesn’t have much overpricing [10].

Interesting lecture about TEE on RISC-V with the seL4 kernel [11].

Ian Jackson wrote an informative blog post about the repeating issue of software licenses that aren’t free enough with Rust being the current iteration of this issue [12].

The quackery of Master Bates to allegedly remove the need for glasses is still going around [13].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2396vhdt
• [2] https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/y2023m12d15/
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/25d3n66c
• [4] https://notes.pault.ag/complex-for-whom/
• [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAHVV0Lzopw
• [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyWB3jLj_P8
• [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI_Rn-riJ-Y
• [8] https://github.com/TravMurav/Qcom-Secure-Launch
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ehSCWoaOqQ
• [10] https://x.com/gak_pdx/status/1860448570446610562
• [11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRgLIb4eO8U
• [12] https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/19151.html
• [13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvUB-tORITk

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