Yesterday I picked up my new KDE Slimbook. It comes with KDE Neon pre-installed. Of course it also works well with openSUSE, and Manjaro, and Netrunner Linux (some things I’ve at least booted the Live CD for). But for me, “will it run FreeBSD” is actually the most important bit.

Yes. Yes it does, and it does so beautifully.

That is at least one advantage of choosing a Free Software friendly laptop, one designed for GNU/Linux: it is likely to be supported by many more operating systems that you might like. No, I have not tried OpenSolaris / Illumos on it .. there’s really no desktop distro in that corner anymore.

So, here’s how to breakupgrade your  Slimbook to FreeBSD (no warranty implied):

• Resize the installed partition to make space for FreeBSD. I chopped 40GB off the end of the main Linux partition. This may break various crypt-setup things, be careful. For resizing, I actually used the Manjaro installer, and told it to resize an existing partition, then cancelled the install during unsquash, and then deleted the partition it had made. You can probably use resize2fs and gparted with good effect, too.
• Install FreeBSD 12-CURRENT. I went for UFS on a single partition, no swap: that’s the easiest to get right, and avoids weirdness like zpools on a partition. It ended up in ada0p4, or sda4, or (hd0, gpt4) depending on what nomenclature you use for naming disks.
• Oh, yeah .. don’t install a boot manager for FreeBSD. We’ll let the existing GRUB deal with it.
• Reboot and let GRUB start Linux again. We’ll configure GRUB to (also) start FreeBSD. Add an OS entry for FreeBSD, by adding /etc/grub.d/40_custom:
  

  
menuentry "FreeBSD" --class freebsd --class bsd --class os {
insmod ufs2
insmod bsd
set root=(hd0,gpt4)
chainloader /boot/boot1.efi
}


  Also recommended: set timeouts so you can actually pick an OS, in /etc/grub.d/custom.cfg:

  
set timeout=5
set timeout_style=menu


• Reboot, hit escape at the right moment to get the GRUB menu, and choose FreeBSD. Boot into FreeBSD.
• Configure wireless networking on FreeBSD for the Slimbook. I have one with an Intel 7265 wireless card, so I needed to set that up. Since the firmware comes from the filesystem, I ended up following the quick-start guide and futzing with rc.local to load the driver. Here’s my rc.local:
  

  
#! /bin/sh
/sbin/kldload if_iwm
/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev iwm0
:


  and this is a bit of my rc.conf:

  
# Wireless
wlans_iwm0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA SYNCDHCP"


  Bear in mind that NetworkManager and other fancy bits are not available: configure wpa_supplicant.conf by hand and add SSIDs and PSKs there.

• Right now, Intel IGP after Broadwell (and the Slimbook is a Skylake) isn’t fully supported by the xf86-video-intel driver, so instead use scfb. This loses acceleration and some other features, but it gives you X11 right now, as opposed to sometime later when the newer drivers are merged.
  

  pkg install xf86-video-scfb

  Add some explicit, manual, X.org configuration:

  
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "scfb"
EndSection


• After that, follow my earlier Plasma 5 on FreeBSD HOWTO, including adding the Area51 repo. However, since this is 12-CURRENT, you need to use a different pkg repository URL.

This concludes my laptop-futzing-about at Akademy this year: I have a laptop that dual-boots Linux and FreeBSD, and gives me an up-to-date Plasma 5 Desktop and KDE Applications on both — but that leaves me free to hack on whatever my work requires in the OS best suited to it each day of the week.

Books, badges and new functionalities are coming!

Hey WikiToLearn-ers! It has been a while, but now “What’s going on?” is back.

This last period was really difficult for all of us but we never forgot of WikiToLearn. In spite of personal commitments and exams, the members of our community kept working day after day and now we see the results!

Electromagnetism is now ready!

In the first episode of “Meet the authors” we have come to know Dan, a long term contributor of ours. It is now a pleasure to announce that his book about electromagnetism is ready! Dan is one of the most active editors in our community and on our website he wrote several books on the italian portal: analysis, physics I, mechanics and electromagnetism! Kudos Daniele for your strong dedication to the project and for your contributions!

We have badges!

The tech team never stops, the platform is always at his best and our sysadmins work hard to provide you great services. When we had problems we were able to solve them very quickly and to get back on our feet! In this period

our devs worked on a long-term requested feature for our website: badges! Yeah, now WikiToLearn has badges! Since our project was born we were asked a way to certify an imported or reviewed book and to give its author/reviewer the proper merit. We are very happy to announce that this feature is now ready! When you donate a book to be imported, a proper tag will be associated to it on the website.

Professors always asked us a tag to certify their books authority. To accommodate this request now we have the “Reviewed” tag. Are you the author of a specific book and you would like it to be certified? Now with WikiToLearn you can! One step further to guarantee high-quality content and to monitor revisions on our dynamical textbooks!

Let’s celebrate!

We never forget where we belong: that’s why we remind you that during this week Akademy2017 is taking place in Almeria! Akademy is the annual conference of the KDE community. WikiToLearn was born under the KDE umbrella and still today we fell part of the KDE family. This year WikiToLearn is represented at Akademy by Vasudha, a GSoC student of ours working on Ruqola. Today we remember Akademy with extreme pleasure: two years ago, during Akademy2015 our project was officially born!

Since the first official announcement to the public, so much happened. We can consider ourselves satisfied for the hard work we did and for the initial outreach we had. People feedbacks pushed us to work better and better to improve functionalities and to satisfy users’ needs. In this period we had the occasion to spread the word about WikiToLearn and we could obtain substantial involvement in our projects. We are extremely grateful to all the members of our community for events organized, books donated for importation, reviews and creation of new material on the platform.

For us now it’s time to work even harder. During these two years we came up to realize what we were doing properly and what has to be modified. In the next few months we are working on communication and style improvements to enlarge our community.

Content creation and usability are the two main issues we are facing right now.  Any kind of user should be aware of what the platform offers and should be encouraged to write on it. WikiToLearn collects dynamical textbooks and in the incoming future this innovative feature of our product has to become our strength point!

We are working for you, WikiToLearn-ers! Stay tuned, spread the word, join.wikitolearn.org and start sharing your knowledge in a completely innovative way!

L'articolo Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 24-Badges and books) sembra essere il primo su Blogs from WikiToLearn.

Hello, this is the report for the second phase of the GSOC. The last month was not easy. Some things had to be re-written because they were not very well written. For example, I wrote a system of “sensors”, the logic of which was laid in the destructors of objects....

It has been more than a month since I last blogged. This is not really a good situation. Nevertheless, for the remaining period of GSOC I will try to be more regular.

In this post I intend to report the whereabouts of my project. First of all me not posting any updates about my project was due to two problems that showed up when I was two weeks into the coding period. One, which I had anticipated, was to decide from where to show a warning dialog during the brief period of time when privileges are elevated. The problem was that showing the prompt from KIO::Slave resulted in repetition and to show it from KIO::JobUiDelegate permissions of destination folder was needed beforehand which required additional computation. So for this I decided to add a signal in KIO::Slave and all the necessary code for additional prompts in KIO::Job. This way the KIO slave emits the signal whenever it encounters ACCESS DENIED error and then job decides whether or not to show the prompt. The other problem was to figure out how to modify files created by a privileged process by an underprivileged one. By the way the latter was completely uncalled-for and it took me around two weeks to decide on a solution. To send data between processes I tried every possible IPC mechanism involving shared memory, pipes and sockets. At last I decided on sharing file descriptor between the privileged and under-privileged process and to accomplish that I used Unix local domain sockets.

Now fast-forward to today, I have found solutions to my problems and I can say I have finally made some real progress. To be precise with my current state of project dolphin’s context menu is very much usable inside a read-only folder. Most of the action in dolphin’s context menu, which includes copy/cut/paste, rename, creating new file, creating new folder, creating links, trash and delete, are working without any issues whatsoever. The actions that are not working are Creating desktop files, Creating Link to Application (technically both involves creating desktop files but have two separate menu options), Compressing files, Drag and Drop, Undoing and Renaming multiple files in one go. The first two need changes in KIO::KPropertiesDialog in order to work. For compressing to work changes have to be done from ark’s side. DnD requires changes in KIO::DropJob. Undoing and renaming many files kind of challenge my current solution but I have explained their case and the possible workaround in the end of post.

I have created a phabricator task in which I have listed all the related revisions and also tried to explain how everything is going to work. If anyone has a kde build environment set up and is interested to try out the changes then apply the patches listed in this repo. Unlike my previous patches which required separate branch for every file operation, all of my current patches can be applied at once and changes can be tested without having to checkout to a new branch.

Now coming back to the issue with undoing and renaming files. My design assumes one top-level parent job and many sub-jobs. However while undoing changes and renaming files, jobs are created in a loop. This means creation of many top-level jobs (like KIO::CopyJob) and that many sub jobs (like KIO::SimpleJob). So a possible workaround is to introduce a new KIO::Job that can be placed outside the loop body and would serve as a parent job for all the jobs created inside the loop. But I will consider this only after my current changes are reviewed by KIO developers.

Till then cheers.

I started to implement multiple cursor and selection support in KDE’s famous text editor kate a while ago, but eventually didn’t quite have the time to finalize it. I am currently at Akademy in Spain, KDE’s annual developer conference, and decided that would be a good time to pick it up again and make it actually work. Here it is in action:

Multiple cursors in kate

What does it do?

It allows you to have an arbitrary amount of cursors and selections in KTextEditor. They all mirror what you do with the primary one — text input, text removal, navigation, text selection, …

Features include:

• Place any amount of cursors with mouse and keyboard shortcuts.
• Have any amount of (disconnected, i.e. non-continuous) selections. Each selection has exactly one cursor at either its start or its end, but the selection for a cursor is allowed to be empty. Selections do not need to have the same size.
• Freeze and unfreeze your secondary cursors, allowing you to move only the primary cursor, or all of them simultaneously.
• Perform most editing, text selection and text navigation features on all cursors simultaneously.

What is it good for?

You decide.

Multiple selections of different sizes

How do I use it?

Usage is relatively simple; the shortcut for controlling multicursors is currently Ctrl+Meta (Meta is the key with the Windows icon on it). Press Ctrl+Meta and click in your document to place a secondary cursor. Then, just do whatever you would normally do with the keyboard. Press Esc to clear all secondary cursors.

You can place cursors with just the keyboard by pressing Ctrl+Meta+D (“toggle secondary cursor at current position”). Doing that will freeze all secondary cursors, and the keyboard now only moves the primary cursor until you unfreeze them again with Ctrl+Meta+F.

You can also create multiple and additional selections by pressing Ctrl+Meta, and then just using the mouse to select text.

Multiple cursors in a Kate document

What’s the state?

Most things work, there will be some issues I’m not aware of. What is at the moment completely broken is persistent selection, and the block selection mode. Both just do random things. I will need to fix that — or do you want to help? Assistance is very welcome.

If you want to test things, I’m sure you can find issues around static and dynamic word wrap, and folding.

How do I try it?

Check out the “multicursor” branch in the ktexteditor repo and build it, then start kate or any other application using the katepart editor component. Or, get a kate AppImage with multicursor support from here: http://files.svenbrauch.de/kate-linux/multicursor/

Please leave feedback in the comments if you try it out!

Yesterday I picked up my new KDE Slimbook from the Slimbook.es stand at Akademy.

First thing I did, of course, was boot it with my FreeBSD 11.0 SD card, to see if it works with my favorite operating system (with Plasma 5 desktop, of course). Nope: 11.0 hangs after finding acpi_ec0, so I will write about that later this week.

Second thing I did was boot KDE Neon (pre-installed) on it, to see how it works out-of-the-box. I collected a bunch of tiny-little-irritations, papercuts if you will, from the basic installation — which have disappeared after an update and reboot.

It’s a really nice and slick machine. I wanted a machine that would still fit in the train or plane, for work, but a little larger than my Thinkpad x121e. I bought that machine in 2012(?) from Hettes, a Dutch shop specializing in hardware with Linux preinstalled (now gone, since they could no longer source hardware without a Windows license). So I’m really happy to buy a new machine from a Free Software supporting shop in 2017.

There’s a bit of a weird-ass dongle in the box for wired ethernet, SD card slot, HDMI and two USB ports on the sides, and a DC in — I don’t think I will miss USB-C at all, although that would be neat for a refresh. I have not tried the webcam, which is in the bezel at the top of the screen (no nostril shots like some Dell machines). Speaking of bezels, they’re pretty wide compared to current “design” laptops, Not any wider than the x121e, so relatively more narrow.

The touchpad is a big change for me personally, since I am — or shortly will have been — an IBM TrackPoint™ fan. On the other hand, the touchpad is solid and clicky. The keyboard is nice, with perhaps a little too much flex in the right-hand alt and delete keys. The arrow keys are arrowy, not the fat-left-and-right that (I think) HP uses.

So!

Having discovered that the machine is shiny and nice and fast and works well .. my next step is to try to break it. With the blessing of Alejandro and César — it’s good to have the best possible tech support right at hand.

(Oh, I forgot to mention: I’m pleased as punch with the ordering process, too, for instance the special “deliver to Akademy” shipping option, and the fact that I got email informing me of progress as the laptop was assembled and installed.)

Hey people,

The second phase of Google summer of code evaluation is near!!. And I have started to work on the second part of my project. That is, I have completed the first part of my project. Yeayy!

What’s on hand right now?

Started working on the Bundle Manager, creating the UI which was decided to be done. Creating addition features like deleting the bundles created and creating a search functionality too at the moment.

Deleting the bundles

In Krita, we cannot delete the bundle created just like that. The Bundles created are saved as the KisResource in a QList. We have to remove it from that list, then obviously, we have to remove it from the list widget where this bundle is shown. Then we have to BlackList the file. Then from there, we can remove the blacklisted bundles as we empty a recycle bin ;).

Searching the bundles.

I was reading the code of tag management most of the time, So I haven’t gone deep, this week coding. Other than these two functionalities. But I have a mere idea how to do this, Since this is a QList, I would think of implementing some search algorithms based on the bundle’s name. Or else, I will be tracing a way out using Hashing method.

I was reading the code for the tagging management and have to look out for things which need fixes. After understanding the codebase I will start implementing features and fixing bugs.

Planned works for next week.

• Get Second phase review done.
• Implement features/fix bugs of Tag management.
• Fix bugs/Implement features of Resource Manager.
• Document/test if necessary.
• Get more inputs on the tag management from the community.

Hope to hack in again in better ways.

Cheers.

Docker can help you to quickly set up a development environment for working on a software project. This is great for getting new contributors up to speed quickly. I've recently discovered how nice this is and want to share how I use Docker.

KDE projects often have desktop services, mimetypes and plugins. Ideally, these are installed system-wide. During development it is not convenient to change your main environment just to test your software. This is where Docker comes in. Docker is the most popular Linux container system. It gives you a system that is separate from your main system and which you can rewind when you break it.

Dolphin in KDE neon

The simplest way to get going is to run a fresh Plasma system. KDE neon provides Docker images.

After installing Docker, you can get a system going like this;

# give the docker application access to X
xhost +si:localuser:$USER
# run a throwaway session with dolphin
docker run --rm \
    -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    -ti \
    kdeneon/plasma:dev-stable dolphin

--rm

cleans up the container after use.

-ti

makes the session interactive.

-e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix

gives the container access to your X session.

Dolphin running in a throwaway Docker container. No home directory was set up.

Dolphin in openSUSE

Instead of kdeneon/plasma:dev-stable you might want to use a different distribution. You can build you own images by creating your own Dockerfile. Here is a simple Dockerfile for a Docker image for dolphin based on openSUSE.

FROM opensuse

# opensuse image is minimal, so add plasma and dolphin
RUN zypper --non-interactive install plasma5-desktop dolphin \
  && zypper clean

# set up an environment for a user
RUN useradd --create-home user
USER user
ENV KDE_FULL_SESSION=true
ENV XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user
WORKDIR /home/user

CMD ["bash", "-l"]

To create a docker image, write this text into a file name Dockerfile and run

xhost +si:localuser:$USER
docker build -t opensuse-dolphin .
docker run --rm \
    -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    -ti \
    opensuse-dolphin dolphin

Now a docker image called opensuse-dolphin was created and run. At each uppercased commands like RUN a snapshot is created. The last step is to tag the final snapshot with the name opensuse-dolphin. That name can be used to run a throwaway container with dolphin.

Dolphin running in a throwaway Docker container based on openSUSE.

Adding a home

To do any coding, you'd like to provide files to your container and have the ability to store files. This is possible. You can give a container access to a local folder with the -v flag, for example -v $HOME/calligra-dev/home:/home/user which mounts your folder $HOME/calligra-dev/home to the folder /home/user in the container.

I like to manage this container home with git, so I can start with a clean folder by running git clean -fd.

mkdir -p $HOME/calligra-dev/home
cd $HOME/calligra-dev/home
git init
echo 'git clean -fd' > .bash_profile
echo -e 'src\nbuild\ninstall' > .gitignore
git add .bash_profile .gitignore
git commit -a -m 'Initial commit'

So the development environment is managed by Docker on the system level and by git on the level of work directory.

Developing Calligra in Docker

After this introduction, I'm showing the Dockerfile that I'm using for Calligra with QtCreator or KDevelop and the clazy quality checker. Clazy has not been packaged so the Dockerfile needs to have a build step for it.

FROM kdeneon/plasma:dev-stable

USER root

RUN apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -y

RUN apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
  cmake extra-cmake-modules g++ gettext git kdoctools-dev kross-dev \
  libboost-all-dev libeigen3-dev libetonyek-dev libfontconfig1-dev \
  libfreetype6-dev libgit2-dev libgsl-dev libkf5activities-dev \
  libkf5archive-dev libkf5kcmutils-dev libkf5kdelibs4support-dev \
  libkf5notifications-dev libkf5notifyconfig-dev libkf5parts-dev \
  libkf5wallet-dev libkf5xmlgui-dev libodfgen-dev libpoppler-qt5-dev \
  libqca-qt5-2-dev libqt5opengl5-dev libqt5svg5-dev libqt5x11extras5-dev \
  librevenge-dev libwpd-dev libwpg-dev libwps-dev ninja-build pkg-config \
  sudo

# requirements for clazy
RUN apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
  clang llvm-dev libclang-3.8-dev

# build and install clazy
RUN git clone git://anongit.kde.org/clazy \
  && cd clazy \
  && cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -GNinja \
  && ninja install

# dependencies for development
RUN apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
  cmake-curses-gui \
  less vim strace qtcreator kdevelop valgrind gdb

USER neon
CMD ["/bin/bash", "-l"]

docker run -v $HOME/calligra-dev/home:/home/neon \
  -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
  -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
  -e XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP \
  --network none \
  -ti calligra-clazy

Parallel development environments

Docker is easy to set up and lets you have tight control over your development and testing environment. You can have many environments present on your system and reset and start and stop them quickly. Finally, here is a screenshot of my desktop running development environments for Calligra 2 and Calligra 3 in parallel. Both are running in QtCreator. This is a screenshot from my Akademy presentation on Calligra.

Two versions of Calligra running in Docker containers.

Helping contributors to get started

Getting started in KDE can be challenging. Docker images or Dockerfiles for complete development environments can get new contributors started more quickly. In KDE, neon already uses Docker images. Jonathan Riddell is giving a presentation about that this Akademy. Because this is so easy, I predict that we'll see more Dockerfiles being published by KDE projects.

I've used ngrx/store and ngrx/effects for a while, and like the pattern. The new version has been released, and here are some of the changes I had to make in my code.

Pre v4 you built your reducers as follows, passing an object with

stateslice: reducerfunction.

const productionReducer = combineReducers(reducers);
export function reducers(state: any, action: any) {
    return productionReducer(state, action);}

StoreModule.forRoot(reducer),

export interface Action {
  type: string;
}

import {Action} from "@ngrx/store";

import {PrintItem} from "../../../models/print.model";


export const ADD_TO_QUEUE = '[Printing] Add to queue';

export const REMOVE_FROM_QUEUE = '[Printing] Remove from queue';

export const MARK_STATUS = '[Printing] mark status';

export class Print implements Action {
    type = ADD_TO_QUEUE;    

constructor(public payload: PrintItem) {}
}

export class PrintDone implements Action {
    type = REMOVE_FROM_QUEUE;    

constructor(public payload: PrintItem) {}
}

export class PrintStatus implements Action {
    type = MARK_STATUS;    

constructor(public payload: PrintItem) {}
}

export type Actions
    = Print
    | PrintStatus
    | PrintDone;

import {PrintState} from "../../../models/print.model";import {ActionReducer} from "@ngrx/store";import * as printingActionTypes from "../actions/printing.actions";

export type Action = printingActionTypes.Actions;
const initialState: PrintState = {
    queue: []
};
export const reducer: ActionReducer = (

    state = initialState, action: Action) => {
    switch (action.type) {

....