Search Results: "Norbert Preining"

3 July 2020

Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma Status Update 2020-07-04

Great timing for 4th of July, here is another status update of KDE/Plasma for Debian. Short summary: everything is now available for Debian sid and testing, for both i386 and am64 architectures! (Update 2020-07-07: Plasma 5.19.3 is included!) (Update 2020-07-15: Frameworks 5.72 and KDE Apps 20.04.3 are included!) With Qt 5.14 arriving in Debian/testing, and some tweaks here and there, we finally have all the packages (2 additional deps, 82 frameworks, 47 Plasma, 216 Apps, 3 other apps) built on both Debian unstable and Debian testing, for both amd64 and i386 architectures. Again, big thanks to OBS! Repositories:
For Unstable: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma519/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Unstable/ ./
For Testing: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma519/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Testing/ ./
As usual, don t forget that you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc. Enjoy.

30 June 2020

Norbert Preining: TeX Live Debian update 20200629

More than a month has passed since the last update of TeX Live packages in Debian, so here is a new checkout!
All arch all packages have been updated to the tlnet state as of 2020-06-29, see the detailed update list below. Enjoy. New packages akshar, beamertheme-pure-minimalistic, biblatex-unified, biblatex-vancouver, bookshelf, commutative-diagrams, conditext, courierten, ektype-tanka, hvarabic, kpfonts-otf, marathi, menucard, namedef, pgf-pie, pwebmac, qrbill, semantex, shtthesis, tikz-lake-fig, tile-graphic, utf8add. Updated packages abnt, achemso, algolrevived, amiri, amscls, animate, antanilipsum, apa7, babel, bangtex, baskervillef, beamerappendixnote, beamerswitch, beamertheme-focus, bengali, bib2gls, biblatex-apa, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-phys, biblatex-software, biblatex-swiss-legal, bibleref, bookshelf, bxjscls, caption, ccool, cellprops, changes, chemfig, circuitikz, cloze, cnltx, cochineal, commutative-diagrams, comprehensive, context, context-vim, cquthesis, crop, crossword, ctex, cweb, denisbdoc, dijkstra, doclicense, domitian, dps, draftwatermark, dvipdfmx, ebong, ellipsis, emoji, endofproofwd, eqexam, erewhon, erewhon-math, erw-l3, etbb, euflag, examplep, fancyvrb, fbb, fbox, fei, fira, fontools, fontsetup, fontsize, forest-quickstart, gbt7714, genealogytree, haranoaji, haranoaji-extra, hitszthesis, hvarabic, hyperxmp, icon-appr, kpfonts, kpfonts-otf, l3backend, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, latex-amsmath-dev, latexbangla, latex-base-dev, latexdemo, latexdiff, latex-graphics-dev, latexindent, latex-make, latexmp, latex-mr, latex-tools-dev, libertinus-fonts, libertinust1math, lion-msc, listings, logix, lshort-czech, lshort-german, lshort-polish, lshort-portuguese, lshort-russian, lshort-slovenian, lshort-thai, lshort-ukr, lshort-vietnamese, luamesh, lua-uca, luavlna, lwarp, marathi, memoir, mnras, moderntimeline, na-position, newcomputermodern, newpx, nicematrix, nodetree, ocgx2, oldstandard, optex, parskip, pdfcrop, pdfpc, pdftexcmds, pdfxup, pgf, pgfornament, pgf-pie, pgf-umlcd, pgf-umlsd, pict2e, plautopatch, poemscol, pst-circ, pst-eucl, pst-func, pstricks, pwebmac, pxjahyper, quran, rec-thy, reledmac, rest-api, sanskrit, sanskrit-t1, scholax, semantex, showexpl, shtthesis, suftesi, svg, tcolorbox, tex4ht, texinfo, thesis-ekf, thuthesis, tkz-doc, tlshell, toptesi, tuda-ci, tudscr, twemoji-colr, univie-ling, updmap-map, vancouver, velthuis, witharrows, wtref, xecjk, xepersian-hm, xetex-itrans, xfakebold, xindex, xindy, xltabular, yathesis, ydoc, yquant, zref.

29 June 2020

Norbert Preining: Cinnamon 4.6 for Debian

After a few rounds of testing in experimental, I have uploaded Cinnamon 4.6 packages to Debian/unstable. Nothing spectacular new besides the usual stream of fixes. Enjoy the new Cinnamon!

26 June 2020

Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma 5.19.2 for Debian

After the long wait (or should I say The Long Dark) finally Qt 5.14 has arrived in Debian/unstable, and thus the doors for KDE/Plasma 5.19 are finally open.
I have been preparing this release for quite some time, but due to Qt 5.12 I could only test it in a virtual machine using Debian/experimental. But now, finally, a full upgrade to Plasma 5.19(.2) has arrived. Unfortunately, it turned out that the OBS build servers are either overloaded, incapable, or broken, but they do not properly build the necessary packages. Thus, I make the Plasma 5.19.2 (and framework) packages available via my server, for amd64. Please use the following apt line: 
deb https://www.preining.info/debian/ unstable kde
(The source packages are also there, just in case you want to rebuild them for i386). Not that this requires my GPG key to be imported, best is to put it into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/preining-norbert.asc. For KDE Applications please still use 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps/Debian_Unstable/ ./
but I might sooner or later move that to my server, too. OBS servers are too broken with respect to considerable big rebuild groups it seems. So, enjoy your shiny new KDE/Plasma desktop on Debian, too!

13 June 2020

Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma Status Update

Some time has passed since the last updated of my KDE/Plasma packages. In the meantime KDE/frameworks 0.70 was uploaded to Debian/unstable, and everyone should have smoothly transitioned to the official packages by now.
In the same vein, some packages from the Plasma stack have been updated to 5.18.5 via the official channels, but some aren t here my repos still might be helpful. Finally, KDE/Apps are also in the process of finally being updated to 20.04.0/1 in Debian/unstable, but 20.04.2 was already released the other day, as well as Plasma 5.19 some days ago. So here is the current status in the repositories I maintain on OBS: Concerning Plasma 5.19: I have already written about this, and since then the packages have been updated to Plasma 5.19 as released, but since Debian/unstable still ships Qt 5.12, Plasma 5.19 cannot be installed on it. Also, the repo has changed on OBS, see below. Repositories:
For Unstable: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Unstable/ ./
For Testing: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Testing/ ./
For Plasma 5.19 (only for amd64): 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma519/Debian_Unstable/ ./
As usual, don t forget that you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc. As mentioned in the previous post, collaboration with the Debian Qt/KDE Team unfortunately turned out to be impossible, but I will keep updating the packages here, and try to keep compatibility with the Debian official packages, so that if finally there are updates they will take precedence over the packages from my repositories. Enjoy.

26 May 2020

Norbert Preining: Multi-device and RAID1 with btrfs

I have been using btrfs, a modern modern copy on write filesystem for Linux, since many years now. But only recently I realized how amateurish my usage has been. Over the last day I switched to multiple devices and threw in a RAID1 level at the same time.
For the last years, I have been using btrfs in a completely naive way, simply creating new filesystems, mounting them, moving data over, linking the directories into my home dir, etc etc. It all became a huge mess over time. I have heard of multi-device support , but always thought that this is for the big players in the data centers not realizing that it works trivially on your home system, too. Thanks to an article by Mark McBride I learned how to better use it! Btrfs has an impressive list of features, and is often compared to (Open)ZFS (btw, they domain openzfs.org has a botched SSL certificate .. umpf, my trust disappears even more) due to the high level of data security. I have been playing around with the idea to use ZFS for quite some time, but first of all it requires compiling extra modules all the time, because ZFS cannot be included in the kernel source. And much more, I realized that ZFS is simply too inflexible with respect to disks of different sizes in a storage pool. Btrfs on the other hand allows adding and removing devices to the filesystem on a running system. I just added a 2TB disk to my rig, and called: 
btrfs device add /dev/sdh1 /
and with that alone, my root filesystem grew immediately. At the end I have consolidated data from 4 extra SSDs into this new filesystem spanning multiple disks, and got rid of all the links and loops. For good measure, and since I had enough space left, I also switched to RAID1 for this filesystem. This again, surprisingly, works on a running system! 
btrfs balance start -dconvert=raid1 -mconvert=raid1 /
Here, both data and metadata are mirrored on the devices. With 6TB of total disk space, the balancing operation took quite some time, about 6h in my case, but finished without a hiccup. After all that, the filesystem now looks like this: 
$ sudo btrfs fi show /
Label: none  uuid: XXXXXX
	Total devices 5 FS bytes used 2.19TiB
	devid    1 size 899.01GiB used 490.03GiB path /dev/sdb3
	devid    2 size 489.05GiB used 207.00GiB path /dev/sdd1
	devid    3 size 1.82TiB used 1.54TiB path /dev/sde1
	devid    4 size 931.51GiB used 649.00GiB path /dev/sdf1
	devid    5 size 1.82TiB used 1.54TiB path /dev/sdc1
and using btrfs fi usage / I can get detailed information about the device usage and status. Stumbling blocks You wouldn t expect such a deep rebuilding of the intestines of a system to go without a few bumps, and indeed, there are a few: First of all, update-grub is broken when device names are used. If you have GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true, so that actual device nodes are used in grub.cfg, the generated entries are broken because they list all the devices. This comes from the fact that grub-mkconfig uses grub-probe --target=device / to determine the root device, and this returns in our case: 
# grub-probe --target=device /
/dev/sdb3
/dev/sdd1
/dev/sde1
/dev/sdf1
/dev/sdc1
and thus the grub config file contains entries like: 
...
menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux ...' ...  
  ...
  linux	/boot/vmlinuz-5.7.0-rc7 root=/dev/sdb3
/dev/sdd1
/dev/sde1
/dev/sdf1
/dev/sdc1 ro <other options>
This is of course an invalid entry, but fortunately grub still boots, but ignores the rest of the command line options. So I decided to turn back to using UUID for the root entry, which should be better supported. But alas, what happened, I couldn t even boot anymore. Grub gave me very cryptic messages like cannot find UUID device and dropping you into the grub rescue shell, then having the grub rescue shell being unable to read any filesystem at all (not even FAT or ext2!). The most cryptic one was grub header bytenr is not equal node addr, where even Google gave up on it. At the end I booted into a rescue image (you always have something like SystemRescueCD on an USB stick next to you during these operations, right?), mounted the filesystem manually, and reinstalled grub, which fixed the problem, and now the grub config file contains only the UUID for root. I don t blame btrfs for that, this is more like we are, after sooo many years, we still don t have a good boot system All in all, a very smooth transition, and at least for some time I don t have to worry about which partition has still some space left. Thanks btrfs and Open Source!

20 May 2020

Norbert Preining: Plasma 5.19 coming to Debian

The KDE Plasma desktop is soon getting an update to 5.19, and beta versions are out for testing.
In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience.
There are lots of new features mentioned in the release announcement, I like in particular the much more usable settings application as well as the new info center.



I have been providing builds of KDE related packages since quite some time now, see everything posted under the KDE tag. In the last days I have prepared Debian packages for Plasma 5.18.90 on OBS, for now only targeting Debian/sid and amd64 architecture. These packages require Qt 5.14, which is only available in the experimental suite, and there is no way to simply update to Qt 5.14 since all Qt related packages need to be recompiled. So as long as Qt 5.14 doesn t hit unstable, I cannot really run these packages on my main machine, but I tried a clean Debian virtual machine installing only Plasma 5.18.90 and depending packages, plus some more for a pleasant desktop experience. This worked out quite well, the VM runs Plasma 5.18.90. I don t have 3D running on the VM, so I cannot really check all the nice new effects, but I am sure on my main system they would work. Well, bottom line, as soon as we have Qt 5.14 in Debian/unstable, we are also ready for Plasma 5.19!

16 May 2020

Norbert Preining: Upgrading AMD Radeon 5700 to 5700 XT via BIOS

Having recently switched from NVIDIA to AMD graphic cards, in particular a RX 5700, I found out that I can get myself a free upgrade to the RX 5700 XT variant without paying one Yen, by simply flashing a compatible 5700 XT BIOS onto the 5700 card. Not that this is something new, a detailed explanation can be found here.
The same article also gives a detailed technical explanation on the difference between the two cards. The 5700 variant has less stream processors (2304 against 2560 in the XT variant), and lower power limits and clock speeds. Other than this they are based on the exact same chip layout (Navi 10), and with the same amount and type of memory 8 GB GDDR6. Flashing the XT BIOS onto the plain 5700 will not changes the number of stream processors, but power limits and clock speeds are raised to the same level of the 5700 XT, providing approximately a 7% gain without any over-clocking and over-powering, and potentially more by raising voltage etc. Detailed numbers can be found in the linked article above. The first step in this free upgrade is to identify ones own card correctly, best with device id and subsystem id, and then find the correct BIOS. Lots of BIOS dumps are provided in the BIOS database (link already restricting to 5700 XT BIOS). I used CPU-Z (Windows program) to determine this items, see image on the right (click to enlarge). In my case I got 1002 731F - 1462 3811 for the complete device id. The card is a MSI RX 5700 8 GB Mech OC, so I found the following alternative BIOS for MSI RX 5700 XT 8 GB Mech OC. Unfortunately, it seems that MSI is distinguishing 5700 and 5700 XT by their device id, because the XT variant gives 1002 731F - 1462 3810 for the complete device id, meaning that the last digit is 1 off compared to mine (3811 versus 3810). And indeed, trying to flash this video BIOS the normal way (using the Windows version ended in a warning that the subsystem id is different. A bit of search led to a thread in the TechPowerup Fora and this post explaining how to force the flashing in this case. Disclaimer: The following might brick your graphic card, you are doing this on your own risk! Necessary software: I did all the flashing and checking under Windows, but only because I realized too late that there is a fully uptodate flashing program for Linux that exhibits the same functionality. Also, I didn t know how to get the device id since the current AMD ROCm tools seem not to provide this data. If you are lucky and the device ids for your card are the same for both 5700 and 5700 XT variants, then you can use the graphical client (amdvbflashWin.exe), but if there is a difference, the command line is necessary. After unpacking the AMD Flash program and getting the correct BIOS rom file, the steps taken on Windows are (the very same steps can be taken on Linux): This should succeed in both cases. After that shutdown and restart your computer and you should be greeted with a RT 5700 XT card, without twisting a single screw. Starting Windows for the first time gave some flickering, because the driver for the new card was installed. On Linux the system auto-detects the card and everything works out of the box. Very smooth. Finally, a word of warning: Don t do these kind of things if you are not ready to pay the prize of a bricked GPU card in case something goes wrong! Everything is on your own risk! Let me close with a before/after image, most of the fields are identical, but the default/gpu clocks both at normal as well as boost levels see a considerable improvement

14 May 2020

Norbert Preining: Switching from NVIDIA to AMD (including tensorflow)

I have been using my Geforce 1060 extensively for deep learning, both with Python and R. But the always painful play with the closed source drivers and kernel updates, paired with the collapse of my computer s PSU and/or GPU, I decided to finally do the switch to AMD graphic card and open source stack. And you know what, within half a day I had everything, including Tensorflow running. Yeah to Open Source!
Preliminaries So what is the starting point: I am running Debian/unstable with a AMD Radeon 5700. First of all I purged all NVIDIA related packages, and that are a lot I have to say. Be sure to search for nv and nvidia and get rid of all packages. For safety I did reboot and checked again that no kernel modules related to NVIDIA are loaded. Firmware Debian ships the package amd-gpu-firmware but this is not enough for the current kernel and current hardware. Better is to clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git and copy everything from the amdgpu directory to /lib/firmware/amdgpu. I didn t do that at first, and then booting the kernel did hang during the switch to AMD framebuffer. If you see this behaviour, your firmwares are too old. Kernel The advantage of having open source driver that is in the kernel is that you don t have to worry about incompatibilities (like every time a new kernel comes out the NVIDIA driver needs patching). For recent AMD GPUs you need a rather new kernel, I have 5.6.0 and 5.7.0-rc5 running. Make sure that you have all the necessary kernel config options turned on if you compile your own kernels. In my case this is 
CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU=m
CONFIG_DRM_AMDGPU_USERPTR=y
CONFIG_DRM_AMD_ACP=y
CONFIG_DRM_AMD_DC=y
CONFIG_DRM_AMD_DC_DCN=y
CONFIG_HSA_AMD=y
When installing the kernel, be sure that the firmware is already updated so that the correct firmware is copied into the initrd. Support programs and libraries All the following is more or less an excerpt from the ROCm Installation Guide! AMD provides a Debian/Ubuntu APT repository for software as well as kernel sources. Put the following into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list: 
deb [arch=amd64] http://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/debian/ xenial main
and also put the public key of the rocm repository into /etc/apt/trusted.d/rocm.asc. After that apt-get update should work. I did install rocm-dev-3.3.0, rocm-libs-3.3.0, hipcub-3.3.0, miopen-hip-3.3.0 (and of course the dependencies), but not rocm-dkms which is the kernel module. If you have a sufficiently recent kernel (see above), the source in the kernel itself is newer. The libraries and programs are installed under /opt/rocm-3.3.0, and to make the libraries available to Tensorflow (see below) and other programs, I added /etc/ld.so.conf.d/rocm.conf with the following content: 
/opt/rocm-3.3.0/lib/
and run ldconfig as root. Last but not least, add a udev rule that is normally installed by rocm-dkms, put the following into /etc/udev/rules.d/70-kfd.rules: 
SUBSYSTEM=="kfd", KERNEL=="kfd", TAG+="uaccess", GROUP="video"
This allows users from the video group to access the GPU.
Up to here you should be able to boot into the system and have X running on top of AMD GPU, including OpenGL acceleration and direct rendering: 
$ glxinfo
ame of display: :0
display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
...
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
...
Tensorflow Thinking about how hard it was to get the correct libraries to get Tensorflow running on GPUs (see here and here), it is a pleasure to see that with open source all this pain is relieved. There is already work done to make Tensorflow run on ROCm, the tensorflow-rocm project. The provide up to date PyPi packages, so a simple 
pip3 install tensorflow-rocm
is enough to get Tensorflow running with Python: 
>> import tensorflow as tf
>> tf.add(1, 2).numpy()
2020-05-14 12:07:19.590169: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:44] Successfully opened dynamic library libhip_hcc.so
...
2020-05-14 12:07:19.711478: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:1247] Created TensorFlow device (/job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/device:GPU:0 with 7444 MB memory) -> physical GPU (device: 0, name: Navi 10 [Radeon RX 5600 OEM/5600 XT / 5700/5700 XT], pci bus id: 0000:03:00.0)
3
>>
Tensorflow for R Installation is trivial again since there is a tensorflow for R package, just run (as a user that is in the group staff, which normally own /usr/local/lib/R) 
$ R
...
> install.packages("tensorflow")
..
Do not call the R function install_tensorflow() since Tensorflow is already installed and functional! With that done, R can use the AMD GPU for computations: 
$ R
...
> library(tensorflow)
> tf$constant("Hellow Tensorflow")
2020-05-14 12:14:24.185609: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:44] Successfully opened dynamic library libhip_hcc.so
...
2020-05-14 12:14:24.277736: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:1247] Created TensorFlow device (/job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/device:GPU:0 with 7444 MB memory) -> physical GPU (device: 0, name: Navi 10 [Radeon RX 5600 OEM/5600 XT / 5700/5700 XT], pci bus id: 0000:03:00.0)
tf.Tensor(b'Hellow Tensorflow', shape=(), dtype=string)
>
AMD Vulkan From the Vulkan home page:
Vulkan is a new generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms.
Several games are using the Vulkan API if available and it is said to be more efficient. There are Vulkan libraries for Radeon shipped in with mesa, in the Debian package mesa-vulkan-drivers, but they look a bit outdated is my guess. The AMDVLK project provides the latest version, and to my surprise was rather easy to install, again by following the advice in their README. The steps are basically (always follow what is written for Ubuntu): All as described in the linked README. Just to make sure, I removed the JSON files /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon* shipped by Debians mesa-vulkan-drivers package. Finally I deviated a bit by not editing the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf, but instead copying to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf and adding there the section: 
Section "Device"
        Identifier "AMDgpu"
        Option  "DRI" "3"
EndSection
. To be honest, I did not follow the Copy driver and JSON files literally, since I don t want to copy self-made files into system directories under /usr/lib. So what I did is: With this in place, I don t pollute the system directories, and still the new Vulkan driver is available. But honestly, I don t really know whether it is used and is working, because I don t know how to check.
With all that in place, I can run my usual set of Steam games (The Long Dark, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Talos Principle, Supraland, ) and I don t see any visual problem till now. As a bonus, KDE/Plasma is now running much better, since NVIDIA and KDE has traditionally some incompatibilities. The above might sound like a lot of stuff to do, but considering that most of the parts are not really packaged within Debian, and all this is rather new open source stack, I was surprised that in half a day I got all working smoothly. Thanks to all the developers who have worked hard to make this all possible.

10 May 2020

Norbert Preining: Updating Dovecot for Debian

A tweet of a friend pointed me at the removal of dovecot from Debian/testing, which surprised me a bit. Investigating the situation it seems that Dovecot in Debian is lagging a bit behind in releases, and hasn t seen responses to some RC bugs. This sounds critical to me as dovecot is a core part of many mail setups, so I prepared updated packages.
Based on the latest released version of Dovecot, 2.3.10, I have made a package starting from the current Debian packaging and adjusted to the newer upstream. The package builds on Debian Buster (10), Testing, and Unstable on i386 and x64 archs. The packages are available on OBS, as usual: For Unstable: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-dovecot/Debian_Unstable/ ./
For Testing: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-dovecot/Debian_Testing/ ./
For Debian 10 Buster: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-dovecot/Debian_10/ ./
To make these repositories work, don t forget that you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc. These packages are provided without any warranty. Enjoy.

7 May 2020

Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma 5.18.5 for Debian

After the KDE Apps update 20.04, now the recently released Plasma 5.18.5 is ready for Debian.
Furthermore, since the most recent version of the KDE frameworks have been uploaded to Debian/experimental, I have adapted the packages to make upgrades to the versions in experimental and hopefully soon in unstable smooth. I am also working with the Debian KDE Qt Team to update KDE Apps and Plasma in Debian proper. Stay tuned. For now, here is what you need: Use the following APT sources in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/obs-npreining-kde.list: For Unstable: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Unstable/ ./
For Testing: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Testing/ ./
And don t forget that you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc. Enjoy.

27 April 2020

Norbert Preining: KDE Apps 20.04 (and Plasma) for Debian

A few days ago KDE Apps 20.04 were released, and I am happy that thanks to the openSUSE Build Service (and a lot of scripting and some hand-work), packages for Debian Unstable and Testing are available in by repositories!
The previous location (debian-plasma at OBS) should be replaced by the following entries in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/obs-npreining-kde.list: For Unstable: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps/Debian_Unstable/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Unstable/ ./
For Testing: 
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Testing/ ./
The different repositories provide different package groups: To make these repositories work out of the box, you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc. I don t provide an apt-gettable source archive anymore, in particular since one of the Debian KDE maintainers has rejected my help and told me Go away . So it seems that this convenience is not appreciated, and necessary. The source packages are available from the OBS web sites of the respective repositories. Well, if they are not doing the work, I cannot more than offer my help. Thanks Debian! Currently there are two packages missing: kio-extras and kdeconnect, both of which need new (hitherto unavailable) packages which I will hopefully package in the next days. Two other, juk and okular, are already at version 20.04 in Debian and co-installable. Enjoy!

24 April 2020

Norbert Preining: (Working) Unison Sync between for Debian/Buster and Sid

Since many years I am a big big fan of Unison. It is a two-way synchronization tool, meaning that changes on both sides are carried over as long as there is no conflict. Unison is the bread and butter for keeping my computers (main desktop, laptop, server) in sync. There is only one problem with Unison it is extremely picky about with what kind of Unison on the other side it speaks: Even the very same version, compiled with a slightly different OCaml compiler version, already produces incompatibilities. And with me having to sync between Debian/Buster (my server) and Debian/sid (my other machines), this always ended in tears. But heyhoh! the pain is over! My solution up to now was to keep a Unison binary from Buster on my Sid system, and used that binary when syncing to Buster server, but the normal Unison binary when syncing between two sid computers. This created lots of pain, because, when using a incompatible Unison binary, already a simple connect without a sync trial messed up the state files and required a complete resync. And so it happened often that I used the wrong binary, and had to resync a few gigabyte, what a pain. The Debian maintainer is working with upstream to improve this rather unfortunate situation, so maybe this will change in the future, but I need a solution now. BTW, thanks a lot to the excellent work of the current maintainers, setting up the new package was a blaze and only needed a bit of adjustments for the changed layout of recent sources. Big kudos to the maintainers of unison!!! So I have ventured out to create my own Unison package for Debian. And what I mean for Debian/Buster and Debian/sid, so that they are compatible, by using the very same compiler and the very same source and the very same dependencies to build the binaries. Fortunately, the lessons learned from my KDE/Plasma updates for Debian helped, and with a bit of magic and the nice service from the openSUSE build service, I now have packages for Unison ready for Debian/Buster and Debian/sid that are compatible, and in addition also the latest version, not the 5 year old package that is currently Debian. So here it is, the Debian Unison repository, binaries of (currently) Unison 2.51.2 are available for both i386 and amd64: For Debian/Buster 
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-unison/Debian_10  ./
For Debian/sid: 
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-unison/Debian_Unstable  ./
To use this repository, you need to import my OBS key obs-npreining.asc, best put it as is into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc. The sources are available at the OBS project debian-unison. For those interested, I had to backport a few package to Buster to ensure that the builds agree: debhelper (because dh_dwz is buggy in Buster), dh-ocaml, findlib, lablgl, lablgtk2, labltk, and ocaml. These packages are available in the OBS debian-ocaml-backports repository, and are also apt accessible if necessary. I guess you can conjure up the correct line ;-). That s it. I can now forget about all the differences between versions and happily sync between Buster and sid. Enjoy.

20 April 2020

Norbert Preining: Gaming: What Remains of Edith Finch

I never thought I could finish a game which is completely linear, has hardly any interaction necessary, hardly any riddles, no fighting. What Remains of Edith Finch taught be differently. And it is amazing.
A friend recently pointed me at a blog about casual games, and surprisingly I found two games I have played on the list: Firewatch and The Witness. One of the other games on the list was What Remains of Edith Finch. This games was lurking in my Steam library for quite some time, and I realized I actually started playing it long ago, but only for a few minutes, before having given up, back then. What a failure I realized! The games plays completely in the now deserted house of the family Finch. The youngest member of the family returns with a key to the house and uncovers the stories of her family. This is about all that is happening in the game. And it is so well done that I couldn t stop playing (wouldn t it be for my daughter interrupting me), and leaves you with the feeling to replay as soon as possible. The graphics are very well done, beautiful scenery, lots of love to details. The story progresses by walking (completely linearly) through the house, and text fragments appearing around you, telling part of the story, small hints, little secrets, everything that makes up a tangible set of family memories.
Exploring the house filled with locked rooms sealed as shrines for the deceased members of the family, Edith uncovers one by one the final moments of her family members, a family seemingly cursed. In these stories the player dives into the world and playing the role of the family members, re-living events of the past.
As I wrote in the beginning don t expect fights, don t expect riddles, but be prepared for an emotional roller coaster, for a deep dive into a well written family history with lots of weird twists. An absolute great game with a playing time of around 2h.

13 April 2020

Norbert Preining: TeX Live 2020 in Debian

A few days ago we have released upstream TeX Live 2020, and Debian packages are already available in the sid/unstable suite, and will (hopefully) migrate to testing rather soon.
All the changes listed in the upstream release blog apply also to the Debian packages: The currently available versions in unstable are There are also updates to texworks and asymptote available. Enjoy.

10 April 2020

Norbert Preining: TeX Live 2020 released

Get the Champagne ready, we have released the final images of TeX Live 2020.
Due to COVID-19, DVD production will be delayed, but we have decided to release the current image and update the net installer. The .iso image is available on CTAN, and the net installer will pull all the newest stuff. Currently we are working on getting those packages updated during the freeze to the newest level in TeX Live. Before providing the full list of changes, here a few things I would like to pick out: Most of the above features have been available already either via tlpretest or via regular updates, but are now fully released on the DVD version. Thanks goes to all the developers, builders, the great CTAN team, and everyone who has contributed to this release! Finally, here are the changes as listed in the master TeX Live documentation: General: epTeX, eupTeX: New primitives \Uchar, \Ucharcat, \current(x)spacingmode, \ifincsname; revise \fontchar?? and \iffontchar. For eupTeX only: \currentcjktoken. LuaTeX: Integration with HarfBuzz library, available as new engines luahbtex (used for lualatex) and luajithbtex. New primitives: \eTeXgluestretchorder, \eTeXglueshrinkorder. pdfTeX: New primitive \pdfmajorversion; this merely changes the version number in the PDF output; it has no e ect on any PDF content. \pdfximage and similar now search for image les in the same way as \openin. pTeX: New primitives \ifjfont, \iftfont. Also in epTeX, upTeX, eupTeX. XeTeX: Fixes for \Umathchardef, \XeTeXinterchartoks, \pdfsavepos. Dvips: Output encodings for bitmap fonts, for better copy/paste capabilities (https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-2/tb125rokicki-type3search.pdf). MacTeX: MacTeX and x86_64-darwin now require 10.13 or higher (High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina); x86_64-darwinlegacy supports 10.6 and newer. MacTeX is notarized and command line programs have hardened runtimes, as now required by Apple for install packages. BibDesk and TeX Live Utility are not in MacTeX because they are not notarized, but a README le lists urls where they can be obtained. tlmgr and infrastructure:

7 April 2020

Norbert Preining: QOwnNotes for Debian (update)

Update 2020-04-18: I have removed my QOwnNotes repository, since there is a OBS build by upstream that includes builds for Debian/unstable, testing, Buster. So no need for me. Please see https://www.qownnotes.org/installation for details!! Some time ago I posted about QOwnNotes for Debian. My recent experience with the openSUSE Build System has convinced me to move also the QOwnNotes packages there, which allows me to provide builds for Debian/Buster, Debian/testing, and Debian/sid, all for both i386 and amd64 architectures. To repeat a bit about QOwnNotes, it is a cross-platform plain text and markdown note taking application. By itself, it wouldn t be something to talk about, we have vim and emacs and everything in between. But QOwnNotes integrates nicely with the Notes application from NextCloud and OwnCloud, as well as providing useful integration with NextCloud like old version of notes, access to deleted files, watching changes, etc. The new locations for binary packages for both amd64 and i386 architectures are as follows below. To make these repositories work out of the box, you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc. Debian/buster: 
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-qownnotes/Debian_10  ./
Debian/testing: 
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-qownnotes/Debian_Testing  ./
Debian/unstable: 
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-qownnotes/Debian_Unstable  ./
The source can be obtained from either the git repository or the OBS project debian-qownnotes. Enjoy.

3 April 2020

Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma updates for Debian sid/testing

I have written before about getting updated packages for KDE/Plasma on Debian. In the meantime I have moved all package building to the openSUSE Build Service, thus I am able to provide builds for Debian/testing, both i386 and amd64 architectures.
For those in hurry: new binary packages that can be used on both Debian/testing and Debian/sid can be obtained for both i386 and amd64 archs here: Debian/testing: 
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-plasma/Debian_Testing  ./
Debian/unstable: 
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-plasma/Debian_Unstable  ./
To make these repositories work out of the box, you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc. The sources for the above binaries are available at the OBS site for the debian-plasma sub-project, but I will also try to keep them apt-get-able on my server as before: 
deb-src https://www.preining.info/debian unstable kde
I have choosen the openSUSE build service because of its ease to push new packages, and automatic resolution of package dependencies within the same repository. No need to compile the packages myself, nor search for the correct order. I have also added a few new packages and updates (dolphin, umbrello, kwalletmanager, kompare, ), at the moment we are at 131 packages that got updated. If you have requests for update, drop me an email! Enjoy Norbert

31 March 2020

Norbert Preining: Fixing the Breeze Dark theme for gtk3 apps

It has been now about two weeks that I switched to KDE/Plasma on all my desktops, and to my big surprise, that went much more smooth than I thought. There are only a few glitches with respect to the gtk3 part of the Breeze Dark theme I am using, which needed fixup.
Tab distinction As I wrote already in a previous blog, the active tab in all kinds of terminal emulators, but in fact everything that uses the gtk3 notebook widget, is not distinguishable from other tabs. It turned out that this fix is a bit convoluted, but still possible, see the linked blog. Just for completeness, here is the CSS code I use in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css: 
notebook tab  
    /* background-color: #222; */
    padding: 0.4em;
    border: 0;
    border-color: #444;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 1px;
 
 
notebook tab:checked  
    /* background-color: #000; */
    background-image: none;
    border-color: #76C802;
 
 
notebook tab:checked label  
    color: #76C802;
    font-weight: 500;
 
 
notebook tab button  
    padding: 0;
    background-color: transparent;
    color: #ccc;
 
 
notebook tab button:hover  
  border: 0;
  background-image: none;
  border-color: #444;
  border-style: solid;
  border-width: 1px;
Scroll bars Another of the disturbing properties of the Breeze theme is the width-changing scroll bar. While not hovered upon, it is rather small, but when the mouse moves over it it expands its width. Now that might sound like a flashy cool idea, but in fact it is nothing but a PITA: When used with a terminal emulator, the result is that the line length changes when the mouse moves over the vertical scroll bar, and thus suddenly the layout (line break) changes for instant, which is really really disturbing. I can t imagine why developers ever come up with such a stupid idea. Anyway, the fix is not that difficult again, simply put the following into your ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (adjusting the width to your liking) and all will be fine: 
.scrollbar.vertical slider, scrollbar.vertical slider  
        min-width: 10px;
Not that bad, right? Other than this I haven t found any disturbing issue with using the Breeze theme with gtk3 (and gtk2) apps! Hope that helps

24 March 2020

Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma 5.18 for Debian

Update 2020-04-03: Please see this post for updated location of the packages!!! Now for i586 and amd64 architectures! I have been trying out the Plasma Desktop for one week now, and I am very positively surprised. Compared to the clumsy history of KDE3, the current desktop is extremely small-footprint and smooth, surprisingly. Integration is as expected great, and mixing programs from the other world (Gtk/Gnome) works also extremely smooth.
If there are a few things I would change, then mostly the chaos about kwallet and Gnome keyring. I would love to have one secret storage, and it seems that Gnome Keyring is preferrable, but this is in flux at the moment. Also, it is not that pressing, because I have moved all my passwords into pass and thus don t need the secret storage that much anymore. So, after a bit of working with Plasma, I realized that Debian still ships an old version, the most recent being 5.18.3 LTS. Thus, I embarked onto a journey of updating all the necessary packages, and there are a lot: in total 106 packages I did update (and one new one!) until I finally had a new plasma-desktop package available. If you are interested, there are binaries for amd64 and sources in my Debian repository (WARNING: These packages are for Debian/sid and maybe testing, and cannot be used with Buster!): 
deb https://www.preining.info/debian unstable kde
deb-src https://www.preining.info/debian unstable kde
As usual, don t forget to import my GPG key, and all packages are without warranty :-; There are two packages that I didn t manage to update: kde-gtk-config which has changed a lot and contains far less files, and breeze-icons which fails on its own symlink tests. If anyone has an idea, please let me know. If other packages are missing, please also drop me a line and I ll try to update them. Enjoy.

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