Colors of Noise

agx@sigxcpu.org

Entries tagged "planetgnome".

On a road to Prizren with a Free Software Phone
12th August 2022

Since people are sometimes slightly surprised that you can go onto a multi week trip with a smartphone running free sofware so only I wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to Prizren/Kosovo to attend Debconf 22 using a Librem 5. It's a mix of things that happend and bits that got improved to hopefully make things more fun to use. And, yes, there won't be any big surprises like being stranded without the ability to do phone calls in this read because there weren't and there shouldn't be.

After two online versions Debconf 22 (the annual Debian Conference) took place in Prizren / Kosovo this year and I sure wanted to go. Looking for options I settled for a train trip to Vienna, to meet there with friends and continue the trip via bus to Zagreb, then switching to a final 11h direct bus to Prizren.

When preparing for the trip and making sure my Librem 5 phone has all the needed documents I noticed that there will be quite some PDFs to show until I arrive in Kosovo: train ticket, bus ticket, hotel reservation, and so on. While that works by tapping unlocking the phone, opening the file browser, navigating to the folder with the PDFs and showing it via evince this looked like a lot of steps to repeat. Can't we have that information on the Phone Shell's lockscreen?

This was a good opportunity to see if the upcoming plugin infrastructure for the lock screen (initially meant to allow for a plugin to show upcoming events) was flexible enough, so I used some leisure time on the train to poke at this and just before I reached Vienna I was able to use it for the first time. It was the very last check of that ticket, it also was a bit of cheating since I didn't present the ticket on the phone itself but from phosh (the phones graphical shell) running on my laptop but still.

PDF barcode on phosh's lockscreen List of tickets on phosh's lockscreen

This was possible since phosh is written in GTK and so I could just leverage evince's EvView. Unfortunately the hotel check in didn't want to see any documents ☹.

For the next day I moved the code over to the Librem 5 and (being a bit nervous as the queue to get on the bus was quite long) could happily check into the Flixbus by presenting the barcode to the barcode reader via the Librem 5's lockscreen.

When switching to the bus to Prizren I didn't get to use that feature again as we bought the tickets at a counter but we got a nice krem banana after entering the bus - they're not filled with jelly, but krem - a real Kosovo must eat!).

Although it was a rather long trip we had frequent breaks and I'd certainly take the same route again. Here's a photo of Prizren taken on the Librem 5 without any additional postprocessing:

Prizren

What about seeing the conference schedule on the phone? Confy(a conferences schedule viewer using GTK and libhandy) to the rescue:

Confy with Debconf's schedule

Since Debian's confy maintainer was around too, confy saw a bunch of improvements over the conference.

For getting around Puremaps(an application to display maps and show routing instructions) was very helpful, here geolocating me in Prizren via GPS:

Puremaps

Puremaps currently isn't packaged in Debian but there's work onging to fix that (I used the flatpak for the moment).

We got ourselves sim cards for the local phone network. For some reason mine wouldn't work (other sim cards from the same operator worked in my phone but this one just wouldn't). So we went to the sim card shop and the guy there was perfectly able to operate the Librem 5 without further explanation (including making calls, sending USSD codes to query balance, …). The sim card problem turned out to be a problem on the operator side and after a couple of days they got it working.

We had nice, sunny weather about all the time. That made me switch between high contrast mode (to read things in bright sunlight) and normal mode (e.g. in conference rooms) on the phone quite often. Thankfully we have a ambient light sensor in the phone so we can make that automatic.

Phosh in HighContrast

See here for a video.

Jathan kicked off a DebianOnMobile sprint during the conference where we were able to improve several aspects of mobile support in Debian and on Friday I had the chance to give a talk about the state of Debian on smartphones. pdf-presenter-console is a great tool for this as it can display the current slide together with additional notes. I needed some hacks to make it fit the phone screen but hopefully we figure out a way to have this by default.

Debconf talk Pdf presenter console on a phone

I had two great weeks in Prizren. Many thanks to the organizers of Debconf 22 - I really enjoyed the conference.

Tags: debian, gnome, librem5, phosh, planetdebian, planetfsfe, planetgnome.
phosh overview
28th December 2020

phosh is graphical shell for mobile, touch based devices like smart phones. It's the default graphical shell on Purism's Librem 5 (and that's where it came to life) but projects like postmarketOS, Mobian and Debian have picked it up putting it into use on other devices as well and contributing patches.

This post is meant as a short overview how things are tied together so further posts can provide more details.

A PHone SHell

As mobile shell phosh provides the interface components commonly found on mobile devices to

phosh's overview 2 phosh's lockscreen phosh's overview 1

It uses GObject object system and GTK to build up the user interface components. Mobile specific patterns are brought in via libhandy.

Since phosh is meant to blend into GNOME as seamlessly as possible it uses the common interfaces present there via D-Bus like org.gnome.Screensaver or org.gnome.keyring.SystemPrompter and retrieves user configuration like keybindings via GSettings from preexisting schema.

The components of a running graphical session roughly look like this:

phosh session

The blue boxes are the very same found on GNOME desktop sessions while the white ones are currently only found on phones.

feedbackd is explained quickly: It's used for providing haptic or visual user feedback and makes your phone rumble and blink when applications (or the shell) want to notify the user about certain events like incoming phone calls or new messages. What about phoc and squeekboard?

phoc and squeekboard

Although some stacks combine the graphical shell with the display server (the component responsible for drawing applications and handling user input) this isn't the case for phosh. phosh relies on a Wayland compositor to be present for that. Keeping shell and compositor apart has some advantages like being able to restart the shell without affecting other applications but also adds the need for some additional communication between compositor and shell. This additional communication is implemented via Wayland protocols. The Wayland compositor used with phosh is called phoc for PHone Compositor.

One of these additional protocols is wlr-layer-shell. It allows the shell to reserve space on the screen that is not used by other applications and allows it to draw things like the top and bottom bar or lock screen. Other protocols used by phosh (and hence implemented by phoc) are wlr-output-management to get information on and control properties of monitors or wlr-foreign-toplevel-management to get information about other windows on the display. The later is used to allow to switch between running applications.

However these (and other) Wayland protocols are not implemented in phoc from scratch. phoc leverages the wlroots library for that. The library also handles many other compositor parts like interacting with the video and input hardware.

The details on how phoc actually puts things up on the screen deserves a separate post. For the moment it's sufficient to note that phosh requires a Wayland compositor like phoc.

We've not talked about entering text without a physical keyboard yet - phosh itself does not handle that either. squeekboard is the on screen keyboard for text (and emoji) input. It again uses Wayland protocols to talk to the Wayland compositor and it's (like phosh) a component that wants exclusive access to some areas of the screen (where the keyboard is drawn) and hence leverages the layer-shell protocol. Very roughly speaking it turns touch input in that area into text and sends that back to the compositor that then passes it back to the application that currently gets the text input. squeekboard's main author dcz has some more details here.

The session

So how does the graphical session in the picture above come into existence? As this is meant to be close to a regular GNOME session it's done via gnome-session that is invoked somewhat like:

phoc -E 'gnome-session --session=phosh'

So the compositor phoc is started up, launches gnome-session which then looks at phosh.session for the session's components. These are phosh, squeekboard and gnome-settings-daemon. These then either connect to already running services via D-Bus (e.g. NetworkManager, ModemManager, ...) or spawn them via D-Bus activation when required (e.g. feedbackd).

Calling conventions

So when talking about phosh it's good to keep several things apart:

On top of that people sometimes refer to 'Phosh' as the software collection consisting of the above plus more components from GNOME (Settings, Contacs, Clocks, Weather, Evince, ...) and components that currently aren't part of GNOME but adapt to small screen sizes, use the same technologies and are needed to make a phone fun to use e.g. Geary for email, Calls for making phone calls and Chats for SMS handling.

Since just overloading the term Phosh is confusing GNOME/Phosh Mobile Environment or Phosh Mobile Environment have been used to describe the above collection of software and I've contacted GNOME on how to name this properly, to not infringe on the GNOME trademark but also give proper credit and hopefully being able to move things upstream that can live upstream.

That's it for a start. phosh's development documentation can be browsed here but is also available in the source code.

Besides the projects mentioned above credits go to Purism for allowing me and others to work on the above and other parts related to moving Free Software on mobile Linux forward.

Tags: librem5, phosh, planetdebian, planetgnome.
Introducing gtherm
7th January 2020

Continuous temperature monitoring from the kernel's /sys/class/thermal/ in an application can be cumbersome. gtherm aims to make that simpler by providing a daemon (gthd) that exports thermal zones and cooling cells over DBus and providing a small library libgtherm (and GObject introspection bindings). gthcli is a simple command line client that displays the currently found values:

Thermal Zones
-------------
      dbus path: /org/sigxcpu/Thermal/ThermalZone/0
           type: cpu-thermal
    temperature: 53,00°C
cooling devices: /org/sigxcpu/Thermal/CoolingDevice/0

      dbus path: /org/sigxcpu/Thermal/ThermalZone/3
           type: max170xx_battery
    temperature: 36,60°C

      dbus path: /org/sigxcpu/Thermal/ThermalZone/2
           type: vpu-thermal
    temperature: 54,00°C

      dbus path: /org/sigxcpu/Thermal/ThermalZone/1
           type: gpu-thermal
    temperature: 54,00°C
cooling devices: /org/sigxcpu/Thermal/CoolingDevice/1

Cooling Devices
---------------
    dbus path: /org/sigxcpu/Thermal/CoolingDevice/0
         type: thermal-idle-0
    max state: 100
current state: 0

    dbus path: /org/sigxcpu/Thermal/CoolingDevice/1
         type: 38000000.gpu
    max state: 6
current state: 0

There's support for gnome-usage in the works:

gnome-usage thermal view

Next up is support for trip points (and maybe tuning cooling behaviour from userspace later on).

Tags: gnome, librem5, phosh, planetgnome.
GTK+ and the application id
28th August 2018

tl;dr: If you want to be sure your application will be displayed with the correct icon under different Wayland compositors make sure that your GApplication (or GtkApplication) uses

g_set_prgname(your_g_application_id);

on GTK+3. On GTK+4 this is handled for you.

Details: While working on touch based window switching for the Librem5 I noticed that lots of the GNOME application did not end up with a proper icon when using g_desktop_app_info_new (desktop_id). The desktop_id is determined from the Wayland xdg surface's app_id as specified by in Wayland's xdg-shell protocol.

The protocol says:

The compositor shell will try to group application surfaces together
by their app ID. As a best practice, it is suggested to select app
ID's that match the basename of the application's .desktop file.
For example, "org.freedesktop.FooViewer" where the .desktop file is
"org.freedesktop.FooViewer.desktop".

It's even more explicit about the relation of the app_id to the D-Bus service name:

For D-Bus activatable applications, the app ID is used as the D-Bus
service name.

So why does this currently fail? It's because GTK+3 historically uses g_get_prgname() to set the app_id and this defaults to application's basename. But what we rather want is

g_application_id == D-Bus service name == $(basename desktop_file_path .desktop) == xdg app_id

There were patches by Jonas Ådahl to fix this but those were partially reverted since it broke existing applications. Now with GTK+4 around the corner we can fix this. See the migration docs.

This will also allow us to get rid of all the rename-desktop-file in the flatpak manifests too.

(The reason why this currently works in gnome-shell is because there's a private protocoll between GTK+ and GNOME Shell that (among other things) works around this).

Update: to check what app_id Wayland is seeing use:

WAYLAND_DEBUG=1 your_program |& grep 'xdg_toplevel@[0-9]\+\.set_app_id'
Tags: librem5, phosh, planetdebian, planetgnome.
libhandy 0.0.2
24th July 2018

Last month we tagged the first release of libhandy, a GTK+ library to ease the development of GNOME applications for mobile devices and small screens. Two of the contained widgets, HdyLeaflet and HdyColumn, are containers to address the specific size constraints of phones (video by Adrien). The rest are special purpose widgets, needed more than once on mobile devices, e.g. a Keypad (video).

This time around for the v0.0.2 release we mostly have bugfixes. From the Debian package's changelog:

[ Adrien Plazas ]
* dialer: Make the grid visible and forbid show all.
* example: Drop usage of show_all()
* dialer: Add column-spacing and row-spacing props.
* example: Change the grid's spacing and minimum size request.
* flatpak: Allow access to the dconf config dir.
* Replace phone-dial-symbolic by call-start-symbolic.
* column: Fix height for width request.

[ Guido Günther ]
* Use source.puri.sm instead of code.puri.sm.
* Add AUTHORS file
* gitlab-ci: Build on Debian buster using provided build-deps.
* arrows: test object construction
* Multiple gtk-doc fixes
* docs: Abort on warnings.
* DialerButton: free letters

The Debian package was uploaded to Debian's NEW queue.

Tags: librem5, planetdebian, planetgnome.
whatmaps 0.0.9
18th January 2015

I have released whatmaps 0.0.9 a tool to check which processes map shared objects of a certain package. It can integrate into apt to automatically restart services after a security upgrade.

This release fixes the integration with recent systemd (as in Debian Jessie), makes logging more consistent and eases integration into downstream distributions. It's available in Debian Sid and Jessie and will show up in Wheezy-backports soon.

This blog is flattr enabled.

Tags: debian, planetdebian, planetfsfe, planetgnome, whatmaps.
krb5-auth-dialog 3.15.4
17th January 2015

To keep up with GNOMEs schedule I've released krb5-auth-dialog 3.15.4. The changes of 3.15.1 and 3.15.4 include among updated translations, the replacement of deprecated GTK+ widgets, minor UI cleanups and bug fixes a header bar fix that makes us only use header bar buttons iff the desktop environment has them enabled:

krb5-auth-dialog with header bar krb5-auth-dialog without header bar

This makes krb5-auth-dialog better ingtegrated into other desktops again thanks to mclasen's awesome work.

This blog is flattr enabled.

Tags: gnome, planetdebian, planetfsfe, planetgnome.
Testing a NetworkManager VPN plugin password dialog
12th October 2014

Testing the password dialog of a NetworkManager VPN plugin is as simple as:

echo -e 'DATA_KEY=foo\nDATA_VAL=bar\nDONE\nQUIT\n' | ./auth-dialog/nm-iodine-auth-dialog -n test -u $(uuid) -i

The above is for the iodine plugin when run from the built source tree. This allows one to test these dialogs although one didn't see them since ages since GNOME shell uses the external UI mode to query for the password.

This blog is flattr enabled.

Tags: gnome, planetdebian, planetfsfe, planetgnome.
CrystalHD progress
30th November 2013

Following up on my port of the crystalhd plugin to the gstreamer 1.0 api I realized that the CrystalHD repo is pretty dormant. After reading slomo's nice article about GStreamer and hardware integration and a short off list mail exchange I decided to split the GStreamer part out of the CrystalHD repo and to try to get the plugin into gst-plugins-bad.

Since the kernel part is already in linux kernel's staging area there would not be much left in the repo except for the libcrystalhd library itself and the firmware blobs. So I split them out as well and started to clean them up a bit by moving it to autoconf/automake, dropping the need for a C++ compiler and adding symbol versioning among other things.

So up to know video is still smooth with:

gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=sample.mp4 ! decodebin ! xvimagesink

after jhbuilding up to gst-plugins-bad.

There are #ifdefs for macosx and windows but I doubt they're functional but in case anybody is building libcrystalhd on these these platforms it'd be great to know if it still works.

Should these efforts lead to the crystalhd plugin being merged into GStreamer getting the kernel driver out of staging would be a great next step.

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Tags: gnome, planetdebian, planetfsfe, planetgnome, wetab.
gst0.10-crystalhd ported to gstreamer 1.0
22nd March 2013

Following up on using Debian on the WeTab with GNOME Shell I figured accelerated video using the built in CrystalHD to save battery power and CPU cycles would be nice to have. There's even a Debian package available but not for gstreamer 1.0 (which is used by GNOME 3.6) so I had a look at gstreamer's plugin writers guide and porting guide and updated the driver. Packages are here until there's a new upstream version or Debian package release.

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Tags: gnome, planetdebian, planetgnome, wetab.
Iodine plugin for network-manager
24th February 2012

During FOSDEM I finally got around to hack on a iodine plugin for network manager. Given a suitably prepared server on the other end this allows you to tunnel connections over DNS when all other traffic is firewalled. The basic configuration only needs the domain name set:

Network Manager Iodine Configuration

You can grab the sources from git.gnome.org, a Debian package is also available.

This blog is flattr enabled.

Tags: gnome, planetdebian, planetgnome.
GNOME Prepaid Manager 0.0.3
28th December 2011

A recent trip to Switzerland made me dig out my prepaid card for UMTS usage again. This resulted in some minor enhancements for Prepaid Manager. The new release handles disabled and missing modems more reliably. It also has some visual feedback if we know the length of the top up code:

GNOME Prepaid Manager screenshot

This blog is flattr enabled.

Tags: gnome, planetdebian, planetgnome.
GNOME Prepaid Manager 0.0.2
14th August 2011

The new release switches to GDBus and adds an application icon. Together with the recently released Modem Manager 0.5 it's now able to fetch the balance information via USSD on Huawei and ZTE modems as well.

GNOME Prepaid Manager Icon

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Tags: gnome, planetdebian, planetgnome.
GNOME Prepaid Manager, ModemManager and Huawei modems
31st May 2011

I've made a first release of GNOME Prepaid Manager a couple of days ago after switching to GTK+3, GSettings and PyGObject's GObject introspection but it still wasn't that useful since the very common Huawei chipsets (present in many UMTS USB sticks) weren't working due to some missing code in ModemManager.

GNOME Prepaid Manager screenshot

Thanks to Dan's great description I just got around to add that which should make ppm useful to more people.

This blog is flattr enabled.

Tags: gnome, planetdebian, planetgnome.
GNOME 3.0 release party in Bonn
7th April 2011

Living in the Bonn/Cologne area? Join the great GNOME 3.0 release party currently going on in the Netzladen now!

I am GNOME

Tags: planetgnome.
GNOME Prepaid-manager-applet status
22nd March 2011

Thanks to Dan merging my changes into mobile-broadband-provider-info and ModemManager the prepaid-manager applet now doesn't need any external dependencies patched which is great news. However I still didn't get around to make it work on the very common Huawei 3G chipsets though. Once this is done the ui needs a lift up badly.

This blog is flattr enabled.

Tags: gnome, planetgnome.
krb5-auth-dialog GNOME3 status
16th March 2011

Hello Planet GNOME! As of 2.91.91 krb5-auth-dialog should be fairly usable in GNOME3. The status icon is gone if the notification service supports persistence, we migrated to GDBus and to the new Control Panel.

notification with gnome-shell

The move to DConf is still missing though.

Tags: gnome, planetgnome.
git-buildpackage tip #4: creating remote repositories
11th March 2011

In order to ease creation of remote repositories to publish your Debian packaging work git-buildpackage ships gbp-create-remote-repo: If you run

gbp-create-remote-repo --remote-url-pattern='ssh://git.debian.org/home/users/agx/public_git/%(pkg)s.git'

from inside a git repository it will create a remote repository on git.debian.org in the given directory, push your debian, upstream and pristine-tar branches into it and set up branch tracking so you can easily use gbp-pull or git pull to update your local repository from there. '%(pkg)s' will be replaced by the source packages name. If you want to be more explicit you can use:

gbp-create-remote-repo --remote-url-pattern='ssh://git.debian.org/home/users/agx/public_git/foo.git'

so no substitution will take place. In case you only want to push to that repository but not pull from there you can use the --no-track option so gbp-create-repo won't set up any branch tracking.

If you specify the remote-url-pattern via gbp.conf calling:

gbp-create-remote-repo

is enough to create a repo on your favorite git server. The default is to create new repositories in the collab-maint repository on alioth.debian.org.

This feature is available in your $PATH since 0.5.16 (it was shipped in examples/ before) and was inspired by the Debian OCaml Maintainers dom-new-git-repo work.

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Tags: debian, git, planetgnome.

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