Tales of the KDE Network Kerala

Kerala is a fertile ground for Free/Libre Software. If you want to know a more detailed history, please see the article by Sasi Kumar. Though KDE couldn’t get the momentum it deserves there. Yet, various KDE products are well integrated into the curriculum of public schools, such as GCompris, Kpaint, Kstars etc. Apart from those, Kdenlive is used as a tool in the creative works of school children, Krita is getting famous in universities and Plasma desktop is used by a daily newspaper. Our strategy to reach out to more users and spread the community is through the already famous applications. But we felt that we are not equipped enough to reach out to more people. So in the first half of the year 2021, we decided to fix that. We are making Plasma workspace localization as good and complete as we can. And we decided to do GCompris and Krita tutorials in Malayalam. But our work is not restricted to it. We didn’t miss any occasion where we can talk and spread the news about KDE and its products.

Dialog on Raspberry Pi and CM4

• Beautiful Terminal User Interface with Dialog and Raspberry PI

  Writing terminal scripts for Linux on shell can need at some point getting user inputs from a graphic box. A common and elegant solution uses Dialog (also available on Raspberry PI) to create terminal user interfaces, able to interact with user mouse In this tutorial I’m going to show how to install and use Dialog on Raspberry PI, as in many debian-based linux distributions. Dialog is an application allowing to create text user interface widgets from a shell script, without the need for a desktop environment. An appreciated feature from dialog is that it provides users with the ability to interact with your boxe from a mouse.

• MirkoPC -> CM4 carrier board

  Carrier board for Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

Author on Vim and Jobs Outside Tech

• F(r)iction: Or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Start Loving Vim

  It is Dec 2009, and I am ready to quit my job. I wanted to focus on writing my first book; neither my commitments at work nor the state of technology was helping. Writing is hard work. Few tasks in the modern world can be as singular – or as daunting – a pursuit as sitting down in front of a blank piece of paper, and asking your brain to vomit out words that communicate an idea to readers. I am not suggesting that writing can’t be collaborative of course, but merely illustrating how daunting it can be for writers to set off on a new piece by themselves. This is true for fiction and non-fiction writing, but since I am a novelist I’d like to focus primarily on fiction in this article.

• What job did you do before tech?

  Who doesn't love a trip down memory lane? When recounting our career paths, they're often crooked and veer in unexpected directions. Many of us take pride in that. We trusted our intuition or a friend's advice and it led to experiences we'll never forget that shaped who we are today. And where we are today. I asked our community of writers to share a little bit about what kind of jobs they had before they got into tech. Here are 13 of them you're sure to enjoy.

Debian: IMA/EVM Certificates and EasyOS Updates

• Russell Coker: IMA/EVM Certificates

  I’ve been experimenting with IMA/EVM. Here is the Sourceforge page for the upstream project [1]. The aim of that project is to check hashes and maybe public key signatures on files before performing read/exec type operations on them. It can be used as the next logical step from booting a signed kernel with TPM. I am a long way from getting that sort of thing going, just getting the kernel to boot and load keys is my current challenge and isn’t helped due to the lack of documentation on error messages. This blog post started as a way of documenting the error messages so future people who google errors can get a useful result. I am not trying to document everything, just help people get through some of the first problems. I am using Debian for my work, but some of this will apply to other distributions (particularly the kernel error messages). The Debian distribution has the ima-evm-utils but no other support for IMA/EVM. To get this going in Debian you need to compile your own kernel with IMA support and then boot it with kernel command-line options to enable IMA, in recent kernels that includes “lsm=integrity” as a mandatory requirement to prevent a kernel Oops after mounting the initrd (there is already a patch to fix this).

• Flsynclient compiled in OE for next Easy

  Psynclient is a good idea, it is a shell script that uses gtkdialog. But we have had trouble with it. We used to use 'flsynclient', which is a compiled binary that uses the FLTK GUI library. Back in the Pyro-series, I compiled it in OpenEmbedded, but failed in the Dunfell OE. FLTK is a C++ library, and a change in the GNU compiler broke the build in the OE cross-compile environment.

• Foomatic PPDs now in EasyOS

  ...his post has a link to another post, reporting "filter failure". I don't know about that, however a first step will be to put all the PPDs into EasyOS. I previously thought that I had to install 'foomatic-db-engine' and 'foomatic-db' to get the PPDs, however, Debian has a DEB with them already extracted, named 'foomatic-db-compressed-ppds' -- which does not require the previous two DEBs. There is a package 'foomatic-filters', which provides an executable 'foomatic-rip', however, 'cups-filters' provides that executable. So also, 'foomatic-filters' is not required.