For quite some time, I have been noodling around an idea about adding a “new” Linux machine to my home with a specific purpose and requirements in mind. The primary purpose of this machine would be to enhance my organization and reduce wasted time. I also had a very specific form factor requirement for my … Continue reading openSUSE Tumbleweed on Dell Inspiron 20 3048 All-In-One Desktop →

In participating in with a virtual LUG, BDLL, I decided to give Enso OS a try, on Virtual Machine, of course. In recognizing that there can be Virtual Machine-isms, I am going to ignore any issues I had with that and just relay the overall usability of this distribution. I am evaluating Enso OS from … Continue reading Enso OS | Review from an openSUSE User →

Kmail, the mail program of the KDE project, does not come alone. Also included is an address book, an appointment manager, a notification service and much more. The whole thing is kept running by Akonadi, the backend of the whole KDE PIM Suite.

By default Akonadi runs with MySQL as database system, but this has caused quite some fuss again and again. So I looked around for alternatives and ended up at PostgreSQL next to SQLite. Unfortunately there were some negative reports about SQLite and the implementation in Akonadi, so I sorted it out directly.
I had no experience with PostgreSQL, but was able to set it up quite quickly. Connecting Akonadi and Kmail to PostgreSQL was also easy.

All steps under openSUSE

First we install all necessary packages for PostgreSQL and the Akonadi connection:

# zypper in postgresql-server libQt5Sql5-postgresql

Activate and start PostgreSQL Server:

# systemctl enable --now postgresql

Create Postgres user and database:

# su - postgres
$ createuser <your-username>
$ psql postgres
postgres=# alter user <your-username> createdb;
postgres=# \q;
# exit

Then we set up the database access with your regular user account:

$ createdb akonadi-<your-username>

Now we stop Akonadi and delete or move the settings. This is especially important if you have already had started Akonadi!

$ akonadictl stop
$ rm -rf ~/.local/share/akonadi

We adjust the connection to the database server in the file ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc as follows:

[%General]
Driver=QPSQL

[QPSQL]
Host=/tmp/akonadi-<your-username>.hash
InitDbPath=/usr/bin/initdb
Name=akonadi
Options=
ServerPath=/usr/bin/pg_ctl
StartServer=true

Finally restart Akonadi and you are ready to go:

$ akonadictl start

Last night, the linux.org DNS was hijacked and redirected to a page that doxed her. Coraline is doing extremely valuable work with the Contributor Covenant code of conduct, which many free software projects have adopted already.

Coraline has been working for years in making free software, and computer technology circles in general, a welcome place for underrepresented groups.

I hope Coraline stays safe and strong. You can support her directly on Patreon.

My first file manager on Linux was Konqueror. Compared to anything I at that time it was by far the best thing I’ve ever used. So many options, so many customization features and so many ways to find out information about your files. Looking at it today, I still think it is still by far … Continue reading Konqueror is Still Awesome →

I just realized that I forgot to publish my presentation from this year's GUADEC. Sorry, here it is!

You can also get the ODP file for the presentation. This is released under a CC-BY-SA license.

This is the video of the presentation.

Update Dec/06: Keen readers spotted an incorrect use of opaque pointers; I've updated the example code in the presentation to match Jordan's fix with the recommended usage. That merge request has an interesting conversation on FFI esoterica, too.

I am working on another project and whilst doing so, I was reintroduced to a kind of irritating problem with Desktop Linux. Nothing huge, just annoying enough. Formatting Removable or USB media. This is one area where I agree with the statement that Linux is not as easy to use as Windows. The Linux solutions … Continue reading USB or Removable Media Formatting in Linux →

GNU Health Con is an annual conference that brings together enthusiasts and developers of the Free/Libre Health & Hospital Information System. It hosted in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain on November 23rd until 25th.

I met the people behind the project during the openSUSE conference 2018. Since I'm health professional, this projects fits me. So I introduced myself to the community and started to write some articles and translate in Greek. I didn't have in mind to join GNU Health Conference by that time. I just liked the project and wanted to contribute. The idea to attend came after summer, during another conference. GNU Health is sponsored by openSUSE. So openSUSE planed to be there both with a presentation and a booth. I would like to thank openSUSE sponsoring me to attend to such an awesome conference.

My Odyssey for me started going from Thessaloniki to Hamburg (about 3 hours flight) and then Hamburg to Las Palmas (about 5 hours flight). I arrived just before midnight and the weather was rainy. Heavy rain. I didn't feel it much because I was exited to attend the conference.

The first day of the conference there were couple of interesting presentations such as Digital Health: Health for all by Tomas Karopka, Patient information governance standards by Dr Richard Fitton where he talked about the GDPR, Orthanc: Free ecosystem for medical imaging by Sebastien Jodogne, a project that is very useful even to veterinarians. I liked Isabela's presentation about Privacy and security of your health information. She introduced us to Tor project and mission. A cool thing I learnt there was the facebookcorewwwi.onion (it allows access to Facebook through the Tor protocol) and onionshare (an open source tool that lets you securely and anonymously share a file of any size). Ghazal Hassan explained what it's happening in Morocco. The title of his presentation was Challenges in health data management in low-income countries. The day closed with Ludwig Nussel presenting openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed an overview. The feedback was very positive on openSUSE. Many implementations are on openSUSE and the guys that use it, they say that it's very stable system even they have some obstacles to overcome on infrastructure. The day closed with a round table about open source on health. A conclusion that came out from this talk is that we have to document everything we do, so more people can use our product.

During the coffee break, we had our group photo.



The second day started with Axel Braun talking about the community followed by Vincenzo Virgilio that analyzed what is happening with migrants in Italy. It's something that it's happening in my country also and it's important to have a managing health platform for immigrants. Armand Mpassy-Nzouma analyzed how you can manage a project with GNU Health. He made a quite funny and inspiring talk. My friends from Argentina, Ingrid Spessotti and Francisco Moyano Casco talked about Diamante health information system. Francisco mentioned that they use Pentium 4 as servers. It's an example that if there is no money for technology, use what ever you have at the time. Emillen Fouda talked about the impact that GNU Health has at the Bafia District Hospital. Closing the day, Luis Falcon introduced the book of life and the GNU Health Federation. The day ended with GNU Health Social Medicine Awards 2018 and a dinner at a fancy restaurante.


Sunday was the last day of the conference. Actually it was workshop day. There was a demo of the federation and also the command line.

Personally, I helped at the booth, although there were not countless attendees. We had a pretty cozy booth. People got swag and asked questions about Leap and how it's connected to SUSE.


My experience was unbelievable. I'm very happy that openSUSE community supports a fantastic "health and healthy community". Usually doctors aren't that enthusiasts when it comes to conferences. But if you mix with open source, you get a hybrid. I can't wait to meet you again guys. Maybe FOSDEM, maybe next conference.

Here is a vlog (in Greek) about my trip to Las Palmas and the conference.


to see more from my trips, subscribe to my channel...

Some time ago, a coworker convinced me to get in on a Kickstarter for the Pine64. It’s the only Kicksarter I have ever backed which makes 100% of my Kickstarter experiences successful. Not many can say that. When I first recieved the machine, I couldn’t get the thing to boot. Not a single image I … Continue reading Pine A64 Set Up and First Run →

Weblate 3.3 has been released today. The most visible new feature are component alerts, but there are several other improvements as well.

Full list of changes:

• Added support for component and project removal.
• Improved performance for some monolingual translations.
• Added translation component alerts to highlight problems with a translation.
• Expose XLIFF unit resname as context when available.
• Added support for XLIFF states.
• Added check for non writable files in DATA_DIR.
• Improved CSV export for changes.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

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