(Note: this post also appears in Planet KDE and Planet openSUSE because I thought this might be interesting to others)

As I mentioned in some other posts, I have a small “server” which I use as a NAS to provide archiving for photos and other files of interest. As it runs in a remarkably small (and quiet) enclosure, I’ve managed to put it in an incospicuous part of the room it is in. For the most part, it runs without a hitch: but in some (rare) occasions it needs to be looked at, and sometimes either logging via SSH is not possible, or it is not enough to diagnose the problem. In other words, I need to check what’s on the display. And the position it is in means that attaching a monitor and a keyboard can be inconvenient at best. In other words, I needed out-of-band management.

KVM over IP

This machine does not run on server-grade hardware, and as such, it lacks a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) like the ones found in more expensive boards (like HP’s iLO, Dell’s iDRAC, or the ASPEED AST2400 found in Supermicro boards), which means it does not have an additional network interface to do out of band management. An alternative to do this kind of work is having an additional piece of hardware, connected to the network and the server, which captures the server’s video output along with keyboard / mouse input, so that it can be controlled remotely, a so called KVM over IP.

There are a number of manufacturers that offer such devices, like Lantronix or Aten. The problem is that they’re absurdly expensive, going in the 500-1000€ range, which frankly is too expensive for my hobby-level interest.

Here comes a new challenger

One day, doing a casual search I became aware of someone who apparently had the same problem, who decided to do something about it and created pikvm. This is, according to the page itself

A very simple and fully functional Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP that you can make with your own hands without any soldering!

This was certainly intriguing. Even more intriguing was that the project is entirely Free Software, which made it even more fit to my requirements. So after a few days of reading and researching, I decided to have a go at it.

Hardware and important notices

These are the materials and parts I used:

• One Raspberry Pi 4 2GB
• A 64GB micro SD card
• A USB-C power splitter (more on that later)
• A short USB C to USB C cable
• A Pi case with fan (this proved ultimately to be a mistake; see later on for why)
• A HDMI to CSI 2 module to feed the server’s video input to the Pi
• A USB C to USB A cable, to connect the Pi to the server for keyboard / mouse control
• A Raspberry Pi USB C power supply (at least 3A)

pikvm uses USB On-The-Go to be able to capture input from the server’s USB port and also optionally mount media (then made available to the server; think ISOs mounted as virtual CD-ROMS, for example). However, connecting directly the Pi to the USB ports of the server can be extremely problematic. The Pi’s USB C port delivers both data and power; the host machine USB ports also deliver power. In certain circumstances, this can cause a significant reverse current into the host’s USB ports, potentially frying hardware.

To prevent this “inconvenience”, one can either make a split Y cable (warning: video link), separating the power and the data lines, or use a ready-made splitter. As I frankly suck at anything which involves precision work at a reasonable level (I still can’t believe how I managed as a lab bench scientist in my early career days) I went for the splitter: one port would get only power, and the other only data, eliminating the problem.

Assembling the hardware

Unfortunately I took no photos while assembling the hardware, because I only thought about writing a blog post much later, therefore you’ll have to live with my $ADJECTIVE_OF_CHOICE prose for now. Setting the whole thing up was quite easy, easier than expected, in fact. It was only a matter of removing tape from the acrylic pieces of the case, set up spacers, and place the Pi inside.

The case I bought came with a daughterboard to provide more convenient access to the Pi’s USB ports. I attached it to the Pi itself without much thought, yet unaware of the mistake I was doing (yes, I’m building up the “suspense”).

Attaching the HDMI to CSI-2 module proved a little harder. You have to connect its ribbon cable to the Pi’s camera port (image by Ram.Sh, taken from the Raspberrpi Pi forums), but without bending it because it can easily snap if you’re not careful. I had to fiddle a bit to make sure that the tiny plastic piece acting as a stopper to the cable was actually firmly in place.

As the case could not house the splitter and the HDMI to CSI-2 module (I had originally planned to put them inside, but I based my plan on a different version of the case, and the one I have they wouldn’t fit properly) I mounted them on top of the case, using a couple of M2 standoffs and additional screws.

The original (let’s call it version 1) was something like this:

Then, I had to download the appropriate image for the Pi, flash it to the microSD card, then put the microSD card in the Pi. After that, it was just a matter of connecting the cables (USB to splitter and server; HDMI to module; network cable) and plugging in the USB C power supply.

Initial test run

First of all… it turned on, which was already a good result in itself. After a longer than expected boot (because it was generating certificates and SSH keys), the machine was finally reachable on the network (actual domain name redacted):

$ ping pikvm.example.com -c 3
PING pikvm.example.com (192.168.10.83) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.10.83 (192.168.10.83): icmp_seq=1 ttl=62 time=3.96 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.83 (192.168.10.83): icmp_seq=2 ttl=62 time=4.09 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.10.83 (192.168.10.83): icmp_seq=3 ttl=62 time=3.86 ms

The first step was to change the default password for root (which is, unsurprisingly root, although I would have preferred “hunter2”). pivkm runs Arch Linux as base (with some additional repositories set up by pikvm’s author) and keeps the whole filesystem read-only. So after connecting via SSH, the first thing to do is to switch it to read-write and then change the password. There are two convenience aliases provided to make things simple.

[root@pikvm ~]# rw
[root@pikvm ~]# passwd
New password:
[...]
[root@pikvm ~]# ro

After that, it was time to access the web interface provided by pikvm. It is password protected by default, and also in this case the login / password combination is predefined (admin and admin). Thus first I accessed the terminal again and set a different password:

[root@pikvm ~]# rw
[root@pikvm ~]# kvmd-htpasswd set admin
[...]
[root@pikvm ~]# ro

Then I could finally log in and be presented by this interface:

As you can see, there’s also a web terminal for those who don’t want to use SSH. You can also use VNC in place of the web interface should you want it. As I wanted to see if everything was working, I went for the KVM option. After a small embarrassing moment where I got no signal because the HDMI cable was not plugged in properly in the module (ahem), I was presented with the login screen from the server (any reference to Preem Palver, the First Speaker is not coincidental).

I was working! But then, I tried using the keyboard… and no input arrived to the server.

Diagnosing the problem

I then tried to troubleshoot the problem. pikvm’s diagnostic said that the stream from USB was “paused” so I suspected the cabling, or the USB splitter. I then tried:

• Replacing the USB C to USB A cable (three different cables): no dice;
• Replacing the USB C to USB C cable to the splitter (three different cables): no dice;
• Using a USB C hub in place of a splitter; no dice.

I was at my wits’ end, so I just posted a question on the subreddit dedicated to the project. It was then a suggestion was made, to actually test and remove the daughterboard I had attached to the Pi. I was vaguely aware that it needed specific boot options to be used, but they were incompatible with the ones used by pikvm, so I had left them alone.

I proceeded to do so, and after removing one side of the case (or the USB C cable wouldn’t fit), I came up with the following solution:

And after I attached it back to the server, lo and behold, keyboard input was working!

That is why I said it was a mistake to use that case, or at least the daughterboard. It was not suitable for the purpose and it took a while just to realize it was not forwarding data properly. In retrospect, I would’ve used a different case.

Conclusion

So that’s how I was able to prepare an affordable KVM-over-IP solution and be happy (?). The project’s maintainer, aside sponsorships, is actually working on a proper HAT (warning: video link) which is about to go on sale: a possibly better option for those who don’t want to fiddle too much like I did, which also offers additional options which require more manual work and that I did not do (like ATX power control to control the server’s power remotely).

“How was your day?” “Ugh, I spent all day in meetings, didn’t get any work done!” 

How often have you heard this exchange?

It makes me sad because someone’s day has not been joyful; work can be fun. 

I love a whinge as much as the next Brit; maybe if we said what we mean rather than using the catch-all “meetings” we could make work joyful.

Meetings are work

Meetings are work. It’s a rare job where you can get something done alone without collaborating with anyone else. There are some organisations that thrive with purely async communication. Regardless, if you’re having meetings let’s recognise that they are work. 

What was it about your meeting-full day that made you sad? It doesn’t have to be that way.

Working together can be fun

I’ve seen teams after a day of ensemble (mob) programming. Exhausted, yet elated at the amount they’ve been able to achieve together; at the breakthroughs they’ve made. Yet a group of people, working together, on the same thing, sounds an awful lot like a meeting. Aren’t those bad‽

Teams who make time together for a full day of planning, who embrace the opportunity to envision the future together, can sometimes come away filled with hope. Hope that better things are within their grasp than they previously believed possible.

Yet the more common experience of meetings seems synonymous with “waste of time” or “distraction from real work”. Why is this? Why weren’t they useful?

One team’s standup can be an energising way to kick off the day. Hearing interesting things we collectively learned since yesterday Deciding together what that means for today’s plan; who will work with whom on what? 

For another team it may be a depressing round of status updates that shames people who feel bad that they’ve not achieved as much as they’d hoped.

How do we make meetings better?

A first step is talking about what did or didn’t work, rather than accepting they have to be this way. Because there’s no “one weird trick” that will make your meetings magical. You’ll need to find what works for your team.

Why should you care? You probably prefer fun work. If you could make your meetings a little more fun you might enjoy your work a lot more.

Meetings beget meetings. Running out of time. Follow-ups. Clarifying things that were confusing from the first meeting… Ineffective meetings breed. Tolerating bad leads to more misery.

Saying what we mean

Here’s some things we could say that are more specific

We didn’t need a meeting for that. 

Was it purely a broadcast of information with no interactivity? Could we have handled it asynchronously via email/irc/slack etc?

I didn’t need to be there

No new information to you? Nothing you could contribute? If you’re not adding value how about applying the law of mobility and leave / opt out in future. Or feed back to the organiser. Maybe they’re seeing value you’re adding that you’re oblivious to.

I don’t know what that meeting was for

How about we clarify the goal for next time. Make it a ground rule for future meetings. If it’s worth everyone making time for it’s worth stating the purpose clearly so people can prepare & participate.

It wasn’t productive

Was the meeting to make a decision and we came out without either deciding anything or learning anything? 

Was the meeting to make progress towards a shared goal and it feels like we talked for an hour and achieved nothing.

Perhaps we’d benefit from a facilitator next time.

It was boring

Can we try mixing up the format? Could you rotate the facilitator to get different styles? How can you engage everyone? Or does the boredom indicate that the topic is not worth a meeting?

If it is important but still boring how do we make it engaging? It’s telling that “workshop” “retrospective” “hackathon” and other more specific names don’t have the same connotation as the catch-all “meetings”. Just giving the activity a name shows that someone has thought about an appropriate activity that will engage the participants to achieve a goal.

I needed more time to think

Could we share proposals for consideration beforehand? Suggest background reading to enable people to come prepared? Allocate time for reading and thinking in the meeting?

It was too long

We could have achieved the same outcome in 5 minutes but ended up talking in circles for an hour. 

I didn’t hear from ____

Did we exclude certain people from the conversation, intentionally or unintentionally? What efforts can you make to create a space for everyone to participate?

Not enough focus time

Do you need to defragment your calendar? Cramming in activities that need deep focus in gaps between meetings is not a recipe for success. Do you need to ask your manager for help rescheduling meetings that you can’t control? Should you be going to them all or can you trust someone else to represent you?

Too many context switches

Even if you don’t need focus time, context switching from one meeting to another can be exhausting. Are you or your team actively involved in too many different things? Can you say no to more? Can you work with others and reschedule meetings to give each day a focus?

It wasn’t as important as other work

Maybe you’re wasting lots of time planning things you might never get to and would be better off focusing on what’s important right now? Is your whole team attending something that you could send a representative to? Perhaps reading the minutes will be enough. 

Highlight the value

We decided on a database for the next feature 

We learned how the production incident occurred

We heard the difficulty the customer is having with…

We made a plan for the day 

We shared how we halved our production lead time

We realised that our solution won’t work

We agreed some coding principles

Tackling your meetings

What’s your least valuable meeting? Which brings you the least joy? 

What’s your most valuable meeting? Which brings you the most joy? 

What’s the difference between these? What made them good or bad. 

Turn up the good; vote with your feet on the bad.

The post Meetings, ugh! Let’s change our language appeared first on Benji's Blog.

Sometimes you have to sit on two chairs at the same time. No, I don't mean to give you east-European political advice. I mean developing things in two concurrent branches can be a pain with the constant switching.

In my case I need to develop a stylesheet for both gtk3 and gtk4 at the same time, usually having to compare the two running concurrently. Matthias recently introduced me to the secret cabal of people knowing about git worktree. Thanks to it you can have two branches of the same project checked out at the same time, not only saving you the (cheap) drive space, but keeping a single history so cherry picking and diffing between the two doesn't need to involve refreshing remotes or jumping through other hoops.

So let's take a look at my scenario. I have gtk checked out in Builder, by default going to ~/Projects/gtk. The master branch equates to the new goodness of gtk4. Pushing the run button will build me gtk4-widget-factory ready to test the stylesheet. But to have the gtk3 equivalent run side by side, I don't use a duplicate of the repo, but instead created a worktree copy:

cd ~/Projects/gtk
git checkout -tb gtk-3-24 origin/gtk-3-24 
git checkout master 
git worktree add ../gtk3 gtk-3-24

At this point you can open the gtk3 project in Builder and works as if those were not closely interconnected. But every commit is 'visible' in the other project.

A total of five openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released so far this week.

Among some of the more known packages to update this week in Tumbleweed were firewalld, Flatpak, Wayland, LibreOffice, PulseAudio and both Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

Two out the five snapshots updated more than three packages like the most recent snapshot; snapshot 20210203 updated gthumb 3.10.2. The image viewer and browser utility for the GNOME environment fixed a jump to the bottom when selecting thumbnails with mouse and fixed a possible crash to the app after cancelling a search. KDE’s hex editor for viewing and editing raw data of a file, okteta 0.26.5, improved the cursor flash time setting and improved a new menu entry for selecting a custom UI color scheme. The xfce4-cpufreq-plugin 1.2.4 package now creates a label widget if it does not already exist. This panel plugin shows information about the CPU governor and frequencies supported and used by a system.

PulseAudio disabled Link Time Optimisation on armv7 in the updated 14.2 version in Snapshot 20210202. The snapshot updated the Linux Kernel to version 5.10.12 and ImageMagick to version 7.0.10.59, which now generates histograms by comparing pixel components rather than color. LibreOffice fixed some text that wrongly aligned in its 7.0.4 update. Wayland 1.19.0 had a minor update with bug fixes and protocol updates. Several Python Packages were updated in the snapshot including python-packaging 20.8, which reverted back to setuptools for compatibility purposes for some Linux distros, and python-Pillow 8.1.0, which fixed Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures that a Read Overflow in PCX Decoding. A patch was removed in firewalld 0.9.3 and fixes were made for iptables when an ipset is used as a zone source. The general-purpose parser generator bison 3.7.5 fixed the Table Generation that was generating incorrect parsers when there are many useless tokens. Other packages updated in the snapshot were xterm 363, yast2 4.3.51, iproute2 5.10.0 and zeromq 4.3.4.

Snapshot 20210131 updated the theorem prover from Microsoft Research; this z3 package was updated to version 4.8.10, which rewrote the arithmetic solver thereby replacing the legacy arithmetic solver.

Both Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird were updated in snapshot 20210130. The new 85.0 major version of Firefox eliminated 13 CVEs. A new feature in the browser protects from supercookies, which is a type of tracker that can stay hidden in the browser and track even after clearing cookies. Thunderbird 78.7.0 fixed a half dozen CVEs. One of the CVEs was related to an IMAP response injection when using the Opportunistic Transport Security Layer. Flatpak 1.10.1 switched to an upstream release tarball, updated translations and had a fix for some compiler warnings. Documentation typos were fixed and a fix to a minor extensions problem was made in the update of sqlite3 3.34.1. Other packages to update in the snapshot were bind 9.16.11, icewm 2.1.1, soundtouch 2.2 and yast2-bootloader 4.3.20, which ensures the proposal is re-calculated when the partitioning plan has changed,

Another snapshot with three packages updated was 20210128. This snapshot updated perl-Mojolicious to version 8.72, which deprecated quite a few connection methods, but did add support for trusted reverse proxies. Other packages to update in the snapshot were perl-IO-Tty 1.16, which switched to a github for tracking issues, and kvm_stat 5.10.9, which installs the systemd unit file in the proper place, so that the service can be started right away.

We've struggled with bringing subtle animation to GNOME in the past. There is interest in bringing it in some shape or form to gtk4. The bad news is the tools are still lacking on the production side. There's not much past Glaxanimate to do even simple transforms.

While we iterated on the GNOME 40 onboarding, it became clear a subtle animation for the touch gestures would really help. And because the CSS machinery in gtk is fairly capable, I experimented implementing such a thing with good'ol @keyframes.

While anything more complex would be a nightmare, animating the hand going back and forth is well served by a simple CSS rule:

@keyframes left-and-right {
    from { background-position: 40% 30%, center 30%, center; }
    to { background-position: 60% 30%, center 30%, center; }
}

.page:nth-child(6) {   /* left right */
  background: url('/org/gnome/Tour/hand-fg.svg'),
              url('/org/gnome/Tour/leftright-bg.svg');
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-position: center 30%;
  animation: left-and-right 2s ease-in-out infinite alternate;
}

It's a bit fragile, but a first shy step for animations in the UI. Hopefully first of many.

As was pointed out to us stable kernel maintainers last week, the overflow of the .y release number was going to happen soon, and our proposed solution for it (use 16 bits instead of 8), turns out to be breaking a userspace-visable api.

As we can’t really break this, I did a release of the 4.4.256 and 4.9.256 releases today that contain nothing but a new version number. See the links for the full technical details if curious.

This post describes the caveats and correct handling of the bash background operator within openQA.

In a previous article I shown how to rollback a package installation, just in case we get a buggy application after an update and want to go back to the previous version. This time I want to show how two or more versions of the same application can be installed without conflicts, and with the help of the small CLI application update-alternatives, how easy it is to switch from a version to another.

While the app got some spotlight on GNOME Circle, I found it super handy to my own use that I decided to write about it here as well.

ImageMagick

Even though I keep forgetting syntax for everything, one of the few bash constructs I remember is the for in loop. Mainly because that's how I repeadly convert and modify images on the command line with ImageMagick's convert or mogrify (same but dangerously operating on the same file):

for image in *jpeg; 
	do 
	out=`basename $image .jpeg`-thumb.jpeg
	convert -geometry 400 $image $out
done

Well usually on one line as:

for image in *jpeg; do out=`basename $image .jpeg`-thumb.jpeg; convert -geometry 400 $image $out; done

Curtail

Curtail's main weapon is convention. Convention trumps configurability in my book (even if there are some preferences). Rather than making you configure a behavior, before you can do anything, it provides one. You either dig it and can immediately be productive, or you don't and flame it on reddit and the orange site. Sorry I meant move on.

So what's the convention? The main workflow is you drop images onto it with drag and drop and it automatically compresses the images. The only decision you have to make upfront is whether you allow it to compress it more by going lossy or not. That's it. No selecting of output directory, scaling, formats. Nothing. Just drop images and get them processed. They will end up in the same directory as the source, with a -min suffix. Everything happens immediately and you will see a summary of the conversion in the window. It is very rare to run into such an app in the FOSS world. Thank you, Hugo.

Singing praise to the most locked down device you can get is pretty dangerous for someone operating in the FOSS world. But I have to do it, as the risk of somebody angrily throwing his Purism Librem 5 at me is pretty low.

Like most people I don't use my phone to do calls. Apart from failing to avoid all the addictions it throws at me, I love it for what it really is. An amazing video and photo camera.

I've owned (and still do) a decent number of cameras. Some of them I have really fond memories of, such as the Panasonic GF1. Mostly for its 20mm pancake lens I didn't sell along with the body when the time came, but kept it until a worthy body came along. That was the beast of a video camera I use until today, the GH5. Most of my drone video b-roll is shot with it and its amazing slow motion. On my drone trips I've always been making a decision whether to take the best camera I have (gh5) or a compact one (Sony rx100m4). The latter wasn't even close to the big guy, but it was easy to fit into the bag and for the few establishing shots was good enough. Surprisingly the iphone 6 plus I had back then had better stabilisation than the RX100. But preferred the Sony for the colors and not having such oversharpened phone look.

One thing that really peaked my interest when Apple unrolled the iPhone 11 was the wide angle. Very unsharp on the corners and quite poor wrt capturing light, I was really hooked on the superwides being bombarded by gopro footage (and doing a lot of that bombardment myself). Even though the primary lens on the 12 is way better, the ultrawide shots have something that really appeals to me.

Battery

Phones have gotten ridiculously big over the years. The iPhone 12 mini doesn't feel particularly small. It's after you hold any other current phone the size becomes apparent. I still wish it was a little smaller. I really miss the original Palm Pre form factor (and the most stylish OS ever).

People have reported poor battery performance even when the device is relatively new. We'll see how that's going to bite me when we will able to finally travel again, but so far the battery limitation hasn't been a constraint for me.

Lightning Port

Even though Apple is probably the corporation most trustworthy of keeping my photos, I'm still reluctant to have everything synchronized to someone elses computers. Thus the lighting cable and syncing over to a computer is a must. I really wish Apple bit the bullet and discontinued the dinosaur lightning connector in favor of a faster option. But sadly it looks like the successor won't be USB3, but no connector at all.

I assume the days of connecting the iphone to my Linux workstation and having access to app storage as well as translated media (HEVC images are provided as JPEGs by the virtual camera), but it would be nice to have some sort of local workflow even if locked to the Apple walled garden.