Book your BoF for Akademy 2020 now!

BoF sessions are an integral part of Akademy, it's the "let's discuss and plan how to make things happen" oriented part after the more "this is what we've done" oriented part of the talks.

So go to https://community.kde.org/Akademy/2020/AllBoF and book a session to discuss with the rest of the community about something you're passionate! :)

20.08 releases branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the 20.08 releases to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Feature Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 16 of July.

More interesting dates
    July 30, 2020: 20.08 RC (20.07.90) Tagging and Release
  August  6, 2020: 20.08 Tagging
  August 13, 2020: 20.08 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/release_service/20.08_Release_Schedule

Cheers,
  Albert

20.08 releases schedule finalized

It is available at the usual place https://community.kde.org/Schedules/release_service/20.08_Release_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in four weeks (July 9) and Feature Freeze a week after that, make sure you start finishing your stuff!

Racism is bad - a Barcelona centered reflection

I hope most of people reading this will not find "Racism is bad" to be controversial.

The problem is even if most (i'd hope to say all) of us think racism is bad, some of us are still consciously or unconsciously racist.

I am not going to speak about the Black Lives Matters movement, because it's mostly USA centered (which is kind of far for me) and there's much better people to listen than me, so go and listen to them.

In this case I'm going to speak about the Romani/Roma/gypsies in Barcelona (and from what i can see in this Pew Research article, most of Europe).

Institutionalized hate against them is so deep that definition 2 of 6 in the Catalan dictionary for the Romani word (gitano) is "those that act egoistically and try deceive others" and definition 5 of 8 in the Spanish dictionary is "those that with wits and lies try to cheat someone in a particular matter"

Here it is "common" to hear people say "don't be a gitano" meaning to say "don't cheat/play me" and nobody bats an eye when hearing that phrase.

It's a fact that this "community" tends to live in ghettos and has a higher percent crime ratio. I've heard people that probably think themselves as non racist say "that's just the lifestyle they like".

SARCASM: Sure, people love living in unsafe neighbourhoods and crappy houses and risking going to jail just to be able to eat.

The thing is when 50% of the population has an unfavourable view of you just because of who your parents are, or your surname is, it's hard to get a [nice] job, a place to live outside the ghetto, etc.

So please, in addition to saying that you're not a racist (which is a good first step), try to actually not be racist too.

Send your talks for Akademy 2020 *now*

The Call for Participation is still open for two weeks more, but please make us a favour and send yours *now*.

This way we don't have to panic thinking if we are going to need to go chasing people or not, or if we're going to have too few or too many proposals.

Also if you ask the talks committee for review, we can review your talk early, give you feedback and improve it, so it's a win-win.

So head over to https://akademy.kde.org/2020/cfp, find the submit link in the middle of that wall of text and click it ;)

chmk a simple CHM viewer

Okular can view CHM files, to do so it uses KHTML, makes sense CHM is basically HTML with images all compressed into a single file.

This is somewhat problematic since KHTML is largely unmaintained and i doubt it'll get a Qt6 port.

The problem is that the only other Qt based HTML rendering engine is QtWebEngine and while great it doesn't support stuff we would need to use it in Okular, since Okular needs to access to the rendered image of the page and also to the text since it uses the same API for all formats, be it CHM, PDF, epub, wathever.

The easiest plan to move forward is probably drop CHM from Okular, but that means no more chm viewing in KDE software, which would be a bit sad.

So I thought, ok maybe I can do a quick CHM viewer just based in QtWebEngine without trying to fit it into the Okular backend to support different formats.

And ChmK was born https://invent.kde.org/aacid/chmk.

It's still very simple, but the basics work, if you give it a file in the command line, it'll open it and you'll be able to browse it.



As you can see it doesn't have *any* UI yet, so Merge Requests more than welcome.

kwallet-pam >= 5.18.4 and ecryptfs homes

If you are using kwallet-pam to unlock your kwallet wallets *and* have a encryptfs home, the automatic unlocking probably stopped working for you with Plasma 5.18.4 and you are getting a "Wallet failed to get opened by PAM, error code is -9" in the system log.

Why?

kwallet-pam uses something called a salt file.

Before Plasma 5.18.4 the salt file was read (or created if not existing) in the "authenticate" step of pam. Now that happens on the "open_session" step of pam.

This is very important because on the open_session the encrypted home is already mounted while in the authenticate step it is not.

What that means is that before Plasma 5.18.4 there was a /home/youruser/.local/share/kwalletd/kdewallet.salt *outside* your encrypted home (that was created/read on the "authenticate" step).

Now with Plasma >= 5.18.4 the /home/youruser/.local/share/kwalletd/kdewallet.salt is created/read correctly inside your encrypted home like the rest of your files.

This is all nice for new users, but if you have an existing user, the kwallet auto unlocking will stop to work.

Why?

Because your wallet was salted with the file that was outside your encrypted home folder, now since kwallet-pam can no longer read that, it fails.

How to fix it?

* Reboot your system
* Login as root (or as a different user)
* See that there is a /home/youruser/.local/share/kwalletd/kdewallet.salt (FILE_A)
* Copy that file somewhere safe
* Now login as the youruser user
* If you have a /home/youruser/.local/share/kwalletd/kdewallet.salt copy it somewhere else safe too (you shouldn't need it but just in case)
* Copy the FILE_A you stashed somewhere safe to /home/youruser/.local/share/kwalletd/kdewallet.salt
* Reboot your system and now everything should work