Faintly whispers the ethereal moon
But none to hear the voice, though bend
The tides to rhythm, the swell and swoon
– a dance her dying thought to send

But stars! In numberless verse arcane
Their ageless wisdom upon me rain
In infinite words! A hurricane!
And countless books, born to contain

But measureless Heaven! For me too vast
And blade of Time! For me too swift
Cursed to hollowness, I flail and drift
And hoard the letters, all vain! At last
I sink with them into the dust

Yet still my voice shall raise the clamor
Of senseless utterance from my depths drawn
That heaven might echo my soul’s tenor
When new sun rises in wavering dawn

 

Then lo, the darkness answered, saying
Alas! None know the shifting futures
I lift my hands to emptiness, praying
I grasped and held the frozen ethers

O despair, O wind, over me blow!
To pages of Past, all dream and sorrow
Reduce! The world in twilight sleep
And forward, and steady, my steps I keep
Toward that nameless, blameless tomorrow

 

Lune oqui cr pos tatumn.
Homu aude cr dis Soenan.
Cure Tint le vid siesta.
Mimo scap ler nox grad.

Astr scrib cr pos arcan.
Homu scire cr dis Abesn.
Infor Sintac le tabu vern.
Gigan Leinau le nascour.

Cae lie imam plati nor main.
Tempo le imam celer or mint.
Nihil dis scio Igo rina nis.
Colle Sintac mi
Sina cader plutien.

Igo clama re nihil minus.
Dis sciren ex Soenan.
Conti affir mia Celest.
Nova Sol ie rad four.

So after a long hiatus I chose the Plasma QuickShare applet (which is sort of the Plasma5 replacement for the old Pastebin Plasmoid) as my point of re-entry into KDE code work. There was after all a deal of itches there I wanted scratched. It’s been quite a bit of fun figuring out the various interesting frameworks QuickShare is connected to at the backend. Anyways, some days ago I got a rudimentary Nextcloud plugin past review and pushed it, which should mean it’ll soon be coming to a 5.10-powered desktop near you :)

• Let’s you upload files/text snippets/clipboard data onto your Nextcloud directly from your Plasma Desktop!
• Uploads to the root folder by default “/”, but it’s possible to specify another folder by typing.
• Supports all types of files/contents that the QuickShare applet currently supports, though raw clipboard data (like image data) don’t work too well because it doesn’t get the right file extension on server.
• Automatically appends numbers to the filename to avoid overwriting an identically named file in the target location

It uses the KAccounts framework so you’ll need to create an ‘owncloud’ account in the “Online Accounts” settings module in order to use it (you can click the button on the applet to open the settings module). So far it’s been tested to work with a Nextcloud 11 instance, though it’s mostly WebDAV so it should work for previous versions as well.

Uploaded items should be private by default for now as it does not create shares out of them. This is probably what I’ll look into working on next.

If you’re not familiar with QuickShare, it’s a Plasma Applet that sits on your desktop and lets you share/move a file, or multiple files, or arbitrary clipboard contents, to various places (eg Pastebin, your mobile device via KDE Connect, Imgur, Youtube – and now Nextcloud!). You could either drag and drop the items you want shared onto the applet, or you could copy and paste.

Apart from fixing some crash situations and HiDPI hijinks with the applet, I also improved QuickShare’s keyboard navigation support, so it should be overall more friendly come 5.10. Notably, the keyboard shortcut setting actually does activate the plasmoid now, and the plugin list is now navigable with keyboard arrow keys.

To share a file from Dolphin, say, it is now possible to, with the file selected on Dolphin, ctrl+c, hit QuickShare’s keyboard shortcut binding to show the share plugin list, choose one with the keyboard arrow keys, and select by hitting enter.

So there are a good number of threads for zypper/yast hanging up in the middle of various actions, but none were relevant to my particular problem, so throwing this out into the googlespace for the next person who might end up facing my problem.

The Symptoms: Yast Software Manager and Zypper would randomly freeze and stay frozen apparently indefinitely – at least for hours. The freeze occurs seemingly randomly in the midst of any action that may require downloading – including refreshing repositories and actually downloading packages/updates.

What is happening: Staring at zypper output on -vv I began noticing that it always hangs up when trying to download something from download.opensuse.org. It doesn’t do so consistently: most of the time the download happens, but sometimes it doesn’t and it freezes forever – but always when attempting to download from download.opensuse.org. With some research I found out that download.opensuse.org isn’t actually a centralized download repository but uses something called mirrorbrain that transparently redirects you to a chosen download mirror. So it would appear that one of those mirrors were having trouble with me – perhaps my IP is somehow blacklisted by that server. What’s confounding is that it doesn’t seem to be able to flag an error or at least timeout so I can be served another mirror or simply retry – it just goes on staying stuck forever.

Solution: With the hypothesis that one of the mirrors is somehow rejecting me in this inexplicable way, a direct solution would be to simply find a mirror that is happy with me, and force zypper/yast to use it. For core OpenSUSE packages (distribution and update), a list of mirros is available here. For the repositories at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/ though, I couldn’t find a mirror list. Instead, I discovered that when you open the listing of packages on a browser, for eg here, you can click on ‘details’ next to any package and that shows a list of mirrors you can get the package from.

So armed with this knowledge, I simply went through all my enabled repositories, looked for all repositories that have download.opensuse.org as source, and replaced the url with that of a specific mirror. After that zypper and yast operated without problems.

Of course, this is a non-optimal set up, so after a while you might consider switching back to download.opensuse.org and see if the problem has gone away.

Or not.

Titans. Sentinels.
Colossal monuments of ancient stone.
Seemingly numberless, vanishing
into the mist
Like a silent army poised
in a valley vaster than vastness
far as the beholder beholds

Young humanity, ever marching
with science and steel in ceaseless conquest
placed them at our feet
than those unspeakable enormities of cliff and shrub
we stand higher, on our pedestal of power
We look out upon them as above clouds

Yet even up here
lifted in the fancy
of humanity’s seeming victory
The mere man
surveying the conquered landscape
cannot but tremble
at the expanding, shattering image; stumble
smothered in the blanketing embrace
of ageless, inexorable nature
In the dizzying consciousness that the very stone
hard and strong beneath his weak feet
is but the speck of the hubris of Man
hewn in tiny steps and paths
upon the awful shoulder of an unfeeling giant
for which the dawn and rise of our age
is but a wink in a long and ancient dream

Recent versions of Chromium (and, presumably, Google Chrome) appear to be capable of differentiating between input from a touch screen, and input from a mouse. The problem is, on Linux, you’ll often find the capability a counter-productive one, since chromium sometimes outright IGNORES all touch input, rendering chromium utterly inoperable with a touchscreen. Mouse and touchpad operates chromium okay? Touchscreen operates other applications okay but you can’t so much as click a link on Chromium? You’re probably experiencing what I’m talking about.

There’s a report here, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at the moment. Apparently Ubuntu carries a patch that tries to fix this, and I’m not sure how well it works, but at least on OpenSUSE we appear to be on our own. Fortunately, it’s possible to workaround, based on a suggestion in the comments.

First, on the terminal, type

xinput list

You should get a listing that looks like

⎡ Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Atmel Atmel maXTouch Digitizer            id=10   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                         id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                                 id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Lenovo EasyCamera                         id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Ideapad extra buttons                     id=11   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard              id=12   [slave  keyboard (3)]

You need to look for the name of your touch screen hardware. In the above case, that is “Atmel Atmel maXTouch Digitizer”. Note the id number for the hardware on the right, 10 in the above case.

What you need to do is pass this id as a parameter to Chromium/Chrome. Like so:

chromium --touch-devices=10

Replace 10 of course with the id of your device. Launched this way, touch input should actually work reasonably on Chromium. In particular – you can switch tabs with touch, touch links to visit them, and even touch-scroll.

Of course, it’s a little tedious to do this every time you want to start Chromium. Fortunately, it’s not hard to put it all in a script. Like so:

#!/bin/bash
SCREEN=`xinput list | awk '/maXTouch/ { gsub(".*id=",""); print $1 }'`
exec chromium --touch-devices=$SCREEN

Of course, you’ll need to change ‘maXTouch’ above to a suitable identifier for your particular device, but running the script should start Chromium in touch-usable state. If you want, you can even modify your application menu entry to call this script instead of the Chromium binary directly.