@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

AdrianVovk

@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org

Working on systemd-homed for GNOME STF

Used to work on carbonOS

tOSU graduate

He/Him

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AdrianVovk, to random
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

The GNOME Foundation Board election ends on the 11th at 23:59 UTC, which is less than 48 hours away!

If you're a Foundation member and haven't voted yet, please don't forget to vote!

Efforts like the STF grant (made possible by @sonny and @tbernard) show that, with active leadership and direct community involvement, the board can become a powerful vehicle for positive change throughout the whole project. So let's make sure we all vote!

kramo, to linux
@kramo@fosstodon.org avatar

I was sad to find a surprising lack of visual scripting apps for Linux. Apple's Shortcuts app is very powerful and can be incredibly useful. It's not like we don't have the technical ability to make something similar.

So I started working on one myself :blobfoxfloofcofe:

A screencast showing a visual scripting app called "Actions" sending a notification with an editable title and description.

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@kramo Ruh roh, looks like we had overlapping ideas

Here's my idea how to make this very very powerful, please feel free to implement: https://gitlab.gnome.org/bertob/app-ideas/-/issues/247. I haven't gotten very far and have been busy with STF work recently

pid_eins, to random
@pid_eins@mastodon.social avatar

5️⃣ Here's the 5th installment of my series of posts highlighting key new features of the upcoming v256 release of systemd.

I am pretty sure all of you are well aware of the venerable "sudo" tool that is a key component of most Linux distributions since a long time. At the surface it's a tool that allows an unprivileged user to acquire privileges temporarily, from within their existing login sessions, for just one command, or maybe for a subshell.

"sudo" is very very useful, as it…

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@pid_eins @swick Toolbox is just a nice UX wrapper around Podman.

Using sudo in the container doesn't let you escape the container, but gives you root access inside of the container. @swick is concerned that run0 won't be able to do that, because it would run the command on the host system instead

(Since Toolbox is a Podman container, it doesn't have PID 1 running in it. It proxies all DBus to the host system)

sonny, to random
@sonny@floss.social avatar

It keeps getting better 🛡️ 👍

#Flathub

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@ITwrx @sonny Huh?

How are you supposed to find out if your account is compromised and someone is logged in and impersonating you?

This seems doubly important for a platform that's used to distribute software. Especially given recent events...

Moreover, even if we accept your premise about data mining, the email has literally nothing to do with it. They can collect all the same data without sending you the email.

cassidy, to GNOME
@cassidy@blaede.family avatar

A conversation that keeps popping up in my mind since FOSDEM centers around open source projects and “AI,” and I still don’t know what I think. So let me share some thoughts here on the famously nuance-friendly Internet. 😜

During a chat w/folks from several open source organizations, someone suggested GNOME could attract funding by “sprinkling some AI on it.” Several folks laughed at the topical joke, but then realized it was in earnest. 🧵

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@cassidy I'm personally all for the tasteful uses of machine learning that you're describing 👍

And if adding these genuinely useful, thoughtful uses of "AI" gives us funding because it's what's hyped right now, that's great

amartinz, to random

We at SHIFT are trying to make our devices more developer friendly.

The step i personally consider most important is getting access to logs to make bringups easier.
There are not many worse things than trying to get something to boot up without any indication of what is happening.

With the upcoming SHIFTphone 8 this should be way easier, as we have added a switch to toggle UART via USB-C, which means no soldering required anymore!

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@amartinz Amazing and exciting!

Could there be any possibility to replace the Android firmware with something more standard?

Two approaches I'm picturing here: I know qcom's XBL is just a heavily-custom UEFI, so it could be feasible to sign & ship a secondary non-mangled impl (the one qcom ships with laptops)? Or is this not up to the OEM?

Second approach is being able to disable write protection on the FW via a physical screw or something, like on older Chromebooks.

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@amartinz @cas This is still about chainloading uboot from ABL, right? I was asking about replacing the whole ABL with a custom community build (maybe signed by you) of EDK2 or UBoot or whatever so that we can make the phone truly behave like it was supposed to boot Linux; so we could wipe out the entire storage medium and partition it like we would on a PC (of course with additional partitions to hold the bootloader if it's stored on the same UFS/eMMC/whatever).

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@amartinz @cas Custom proper UEFI like this would give the community big benefits:

  • Ability to re-lock the bootloader, implement UEFI secure boot, etc to have a proper security story for our Linux phones

  • Flexibility with partitioning, so we're not stuck shoehorning ourselves into Android's partition layout

  • Impl TPM on these devices, which we can do via OP-TEE but it's useless if FW isn't aware of it

Please forgive any errors; I'm just a distro dev w/ opinions and not a FW expert :)

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@amartinz @cas 🤩 Amazing to hear!

sonny, to linux
@sonny@floss.social avatar

What's the best modern guide for hacking on the kernel?

I don't want to learn everything about the internals, I want to iterate on a module quickly.

I feel like I'm missing on a lot of optimizations to shorten the feedback loop.

#Linux #kernel #hardwareEnablement #postmarketOS

AdrianVovk, (edited )
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@sonny Not a kernel hacker so I don't know if it's the best, but this seems like a really nice tool to quickly iterate on the kernel coming out of systemd: https://github.com/DaanDeMeyer/mkosi-kernel

FOSSDEM talk announcing it & showing how it works: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2209-streamlining-kernel-hacking-with-mkosi-kernel/

@daandemeyer

aral, to accessibility
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

Q. “I am blind, and I have been since 2021. I have grown very accustomed to using NVDA on Windows, which is a free open source screen reader. It's great… my question is, does Linux have good support for screen reading software?”

A. “As someone that deals with this on a daily basis: The short answer is 'no' … The best advice I can give you is to not bother investing too much in Linux and keep with Windows, or move to macOS.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/13rym2j/linux_and_scren_readers_for_the_blind/

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@aral This really stings, but we do have some good news coming in this front. Through a grant provided by the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME has been investing money into accessibility development and making progress on it.

CC @sonny

samueldr, to random
@samueldr@ap.samueldr.com avatar

I sure would want some time (and energy) to actually plan out a not-awful tool to deal with partitions (and maybe even filesystems as a treat)...

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@samueldr Deal with them in what way?

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@samueldr Ah I see. So something like udisks, gnome-disk-utility, parted/fdisk (both as cli and library), and systemd-repart glued together into one big thing?

What do you feel is missing from the existing tools? Maybe they can just be extended to be better, likely for a lot less work on everyone's parts? I ask because I'm certain systemd upstream would be interested in ideas for what to do better in repart - there's a push to make it more generally useful to everyone (esp disk image builders)

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@samueldr Well repart's mission does extend to producing disk images nowadays. And the people working on it are really interested in making repart (and mkosi, which uses repart) a generic enough OS image builder that all the distros use it. They've been happy to add what's missing. Perhaps it's worth a look. I probably won't be doing CLI/TUI/GUI stuff any time soon, if ever, though

I was also going to plug genimage but it looks like you already have it starred on GH

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@samueldr And I definitely relate to "things are broken enough that it should all just be redone, and it'll be easier than dealing with all the cruft"... Seems like I'm fighting the urge to rework something on the regular, anyway 🙃

If days became 48 hours, I don't know if that would be a blessing or a curse

wjt, to random
@wjt@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Do native English speakers who did not study Latin at school know what “et al.” means?

Specifically, is listing an app's developer as “Jane Bloggs, et al.” fine or pretentious/incomprehensible nonsense?

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@wjt I definitely learned it in school when they taught us about the citations. The various citation standards tend to have rules like "if there's > 2 authors only cite the first one and say 'et al' for the rest". I remember coming across et al for the first time in this context of citations back in grade school. So yeah I think it should be known, at least for my generation 🤷‍♂️ IDK if teaching people to cite sources so thoroughly is a post-internet thing (since it's now very easy to plagiarize)

lebout2canap, to random
@lebout2canap@mastodon.tedomum.net avatar

Mousam

Beautiful and lightweight weather app build using Gtk4, Libadwaita and Python.

https://flathub.org/fr/apps/io.github.amit9838.mousam

#Flatpak

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@lebout2canap What's the data source? This looks like it has lots more data it shows compared to, say, GNOME Weather... Would be cool if it was something GNOME could natively show too!

cassidy, (edited ) to apple
@cassidy@blaede.family avatar

Do you believe that Apple protects user privacy, especially more meaningfully than other companies or tech products?

#Apple #privacy #iPhone #iOS

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@cassidy I think they do more, just by sheer technology. They do a really strong job with the actual hardware level security

Software wise... meh. I don't have a strong opinion because I'm not too sure, but afaik they have a "rules for you but not for me" model about privacy restrictions on their OSs. FOSS is much better

Overall, I suspect they, as a company, don't actually value privacy as much as they claim. It's a tool for them, not a goal. (ie look at them use "privacy" to be anti repair)

alatiera, to random
@alatiera@mastodon.social avatar

Days since I put something magnetic on top of the laptop and made it suspend: 0

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@alatiera this is the worst. My uni gave us iPads to take notes, and they had magnetic keyboards attached. God forbid I put that thing anywhere near my laptop

osandov, to random
@osandov@fosstodon.org avatar

I just wrote up a case study of using drgn to get a dm-crypt encryption key out of kernel memory: https://drgn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/case_studies/dm_crypt_key.html

This was a fun, practical example!

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@osandov If you can control the flow of execution, there's probably a much easier way to do this. dm-crypt stores the key in the kernel keyring. Some keys can be returned to userspace, and others can't. You can probably use the debugger to skip the check and make the kernel return a key it shouldn't.

Even if you're just reading you can probably traverse the keyring structures a bit easier than the crypto structures.

(I'm not a kernel dev btw, just someone who's had to deal w/ dm-crypt)

cassidy, (edited ) to GNOME
@cassidy@blaede.family avatar

If you use GNOME Web, do you use pinned tabs? If so (lots of caveats…), does the pinned tab closing behavior make sense to you?

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@cassidy I daily drive GNOME Web and have pinned tabs. I just never close them (that's why they're pinned), so I couldn't tell you what the closing behavior is and if it's weird.

IIRC from the one time I've gotten rid of a pinned tab, I unpinned it first to make it a normal tab and then closed it.

alatiera, to random
@alatiera@mastodon.social avatar

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself making another distro

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@joojmachine @alatiera It's uncanny how exactly you described the end-goal state of carbonOS ;)

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

I hope that the Grub developers will someday fix grub-install so that the "unknown filesystem" error is replaced with a better one, like "Grub doesn't have the driver(s) necessary to use your / (or /boot) filesystem" or even "Grub doesn't currently support some filesystem features that are enabled on your / (or /boot) filesystem". Ideally with the right filesystem name.

This has certainly been coming up and getting forum/etc answers for long enough. But alas.

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@cks @reto I can confirm that sd-boot supports serial consoles, at least as long as your UEFI firmware does. I use this support fairly regularly

And it should be quite stable. It's just a menu that lets you pick what binary to run. Your firmware does the rest

tbernard, to random
@tbernard@mastodon.social avatar

What if there was an alternative fast/low-energy Rust compiler that doesn't do any of the static analysis?

I build a lot of random branches on Rust projects to do QA (almost always from scratch because dependencies have changed), but I don't usually change the code. It's a huge waste of time and energy to do all this extra work when I just want to try a branch as-is :/

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@tbernard I don't think anything like that is ready quite yet

You may want to look into the mold linker; it's multi-threaded so it should go a bit faster. Disable LTO. Don't build in release mode. Disable optimizations. This all is probably pretty difficult to do with the "press play in Builder" workflow I'm assuming you're used to.

Also keep in mind many of these things will make the program you're testing slower. Sometimes noticeably.

Or just wait... Rust's comp times are improving recently

rmader, to GNOME
@rmader@floss.social avatar

For #GNOME app folks: IMHO we need to think about what to do with Totem / Gnome Videos. It has not yet been ported to #gtk4, which is increasingly becoming an issue.

Apart from not fitting nicely UI wise, it prevents us from using the newly introduced #wayland hardware offloading (zero-copy playback) and, crucially, from (properly) supporting HDR content going forward.

I.e. we either need a port - or should consider making an alternative a core app to focus on.

Short 🧵

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@rmader To the people that care about MPV: I mean no harm! If I got something wrong I'm just misremembering what happened and you should correct me. I've never really been involved with the MPV community and am going off my limited view as an outsider.

I have zero idea the shape MPV is in nowadays after removing that maintainer. But from what I recall, MPV wasn't the most GNOME-friendly project. Maybe this has changed. I am still skeptical...

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