Rasmus Thomsen Cogitri

This year I attended my first in-person GNOME conference (the GUADEC) in Rīga, Latvia. It was great to meet all the other GNOME folks, and there were loads of interesting talks, so if you haven’t had the chance to attend the GUADEC yet, I’d strongly encourage you to do so next year. The GUADEC 2024 will take place in Denver, Colorado, but there will also be a Mini-GUADEC in Berlin again.

Recently I’ve been using Fedora Toolbox a lot for development to have a reproducible development enviroment across my different systems. To make it easier to have the same container on multiple machines I’ve created my own Dockerfile:

Article by editor Leo thinkabit.ukim@gmail.com

As readers know I’m a developer for Alpine Linux, it is a very nice simple distribution for running containers.

Unforunately it is not very nice when using GNOME, it has less developers than other distros and its integration isn’t as good as it is in the more popular distros like Debian and Fedora.

With that in mind I have decided to test Fedora Silverblue, a flavour of Fedora with GNOME that uses OSTree to provide reliable upgrades and rollbacks of the operating system, allowing the user to overlay their own packages on top and using container technologies (like podman and toolbox) to provide an alternative to installing packages onto the system itself.

In this article I’ll describe the process of creating an Alpine Linux image to be used in podman and accessed via SSH or podman exec, while taking into account the peculirarities of working from inside toolbox.

Article by Leo thinkabit.ukim@gmail.com

This is an update on APKBUILD.vim: filetype, plugins, syntax and linters for APKBUILDs on vim, as of now APKBUILD.vim is under very active constant development, and it will remain this way until all features have been implemented and there is nothing else to remove.

In fact the development is so fast that the article was outdated the moment it arrived. So lets catch up on everything that happened until 247b647ba47cb9a091020e4e5c4df7894cc05b1d.

If you wish to follow along then here are the commits.

Article by editor Leo thinkabit.ukim@gmail.com

Pantalaimon is a End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) aware proxy daemon that connects to a Matrix server and handles sending and receiving messages. It also handles verifying sessions, verifying or blacklisting devices, and exporting/importing session keys.

Its main use-case is to provide clients that have not yet fully implemented some of the most important Matrix’s features, namely verifying devices and End-to-End encryption, a good man-in-the-middle that does it transparently for you.

Today we will set up a local pantalaimon daemon and log in with Fractal, the GNOME client for Matrix. We will also learn how to use the panctl program from Pantalaimon to verify the session we started with Fractal.

Article by editor Leo thinkabit.ukim@gmail.com

The Linux distro I contribute to, Alpine Linux, uses build recipes called APKBUILDs. They are shell scripts but with context-aware variables that can affect the final result of package. APKBUILDs are subject to policies that only apply to Alpine Linux and its packaging system abuild.

Vim is a text editor used by many of our developers and users use for editing APKBUILDs. But while vim has a filetype for shellscripts, it is insufficient to provide syntax, plugins, indentation and other nice to have features that are specific to the context of an APKBUILD.

In light of that I took upon myself to write a complete implementation of a vim filetype for APKBUILDs.

Meet APKBUILD.vim.

Article by editor Leo thinkabit.ukim@gmail.com

The Machine Learning terminology here is simplified and will have a loss quality, but not pertinent to the point.

Nibbler is a Graphical User Interface to analyse chess games using mainly the Leela Chess Zero chess engine (software that plays chess and provides an evaluation of positions). It is written specifically for using Leela.

Nibbler is written specifically to make use of Leela’s output. While traditional engines ouptut centipawns to indicate how much hundredths of a pawn either side is ahead. Leela outputs what it believes what is the Win, Draw and Loss chance for the current side, along with how certain it is of its evaluation and other information like how many moves left until the games reaches its conclusion.

Unfortunately for us it is written in Electron which makes it very hard to package for musl systems like Alpine Linux which I use and am a developer of. Fortunately there is flatpak which is a godsend for packaging heavyweight apps, so lets go package it.

Article by editor Leo thinkabit.ukim@gmail.com

The Linux distribution I contribute to, Alpine Linux, has recently switched fully to using GitLab (self-hosted instance) and has started gradually phasing out support for sending patches via the Mailing List.

To help smooth the transition for Mailing List contributors and also make contributing to Alpine Linux in general more efficient, I decided to step up and help by making it easier to create, edit and merge Merge Requests.

I’ve recently started using VSCode as my main editor, mainly due to its extensibility, meaning I can use it in almost all scenarios (at work, for personal projects, …) and it’s easy to customize to my needs (although the defaults are pretty nice already). However, since it uses Electron (which currently still needs glibc, although that might change soon) I currently need to run it in a Flatpak, which needed some setup in order to be suitable for development

I’ve recently wanted to debug gnome-shell, that was crashing at seemingly random times for me (especially after hibernating), but attaching a debugger to gnome-shell isn’t as easy as it appears. I’ve noticed that it tended to dump a core.$pid file in my $HOME, which is a coredump file one can load into a debugger to print the backtrace among other things to after the fact. It annoyed me a little that it cluttered my $HOME and I figured it’d be nice having a manager for these coredumps so one can see what programs crashed, why and how and to easily rotate them. I’ve remembered using systemd-coredumpd at some point and kind of liked that, but since I’m using Alpine Linux that wasn’t an option, so I wrote corecollector.