It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.28.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• fix crash in images support

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.26.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• fix crash in images support

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.24.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• fix crash in images support

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• fix crash in images support

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.20.

What’s new?

• fix crash in images support

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.18.

What’s new?

• fix a crash in images support

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.28.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• gnome-shell extension cleanups
• allow disabling the confirmation dialog for emptying history

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.28.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• gpaste-daemonn now emits a dbus signal when an item is selected
• gpaste-client can now print the history in reverse order
• drop gtk4 support, it will come back later
• API adjustments to prepare for the future gtk4 port
• ask confirmation before emptying an history

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.26.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• fix regression in gnome-shell extension
• fix another potential images memory leak

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.24.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• fix regression in gnome-shell extension
• fix another potential images memory leak

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• fix regression in gnome-shell extension
• fix another potential images memory leak

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.20.

What’s new?

• fix memory leaks in images support
• silence a warnings in the gnome-shell extension

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.18.

What’s new?

• fix memory leaks in images support
• silence a warnings in the gnome-shell extension

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.26.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• fix memory leaks in images support
• silence a warnings in the gnome-shell extension

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.24.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• fix memory leaks in images support
• silence a warnings in the gnome-shell extension

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• fix memory leaks in images support
• silence a warnings in the gnome-shell extension

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 20 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

Keybindings are documented here.

What’s new in this release?

• silence runtime vte warning
• correctly update title as needed

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 19 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

Keybindings are documented here.

What’s new in this release?

• port to vte 0.50
• provide a systemd service
• support copying as HTML

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.26.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• Javascript modernizations
• Adapt to gjs 1.50
• Adapt to gnome-shell/mutter 3.26
• use the new clipboardText feature in the search provider
• gtk4 3.91.2 compatibility

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.24.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• Pagination fixes in the gnome-shell extension
• Fix some cransh in gpaste-ui

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.24.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• gpaste-client add now accepts reading from stdin
• you can’t have two passwords with the same name in the history anymore
• prevent a bug adding a password both as password and text in come case

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• gpaste-client add now accepts reading from stdin
• you can’t have two passwords with the same name in the history anymore
• prevent a bug adding a password both as password and text in come case

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.24.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• fix a regression in passwords handling

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.24.

If you’re looking for the legacy applet, it’s available here.

What’s new?

• change the history format to 2.0 to be more flexible (backward compatible)
• unify and consolidate some clipboard interactions
• handle text/html and text/xml mime types

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.24.

What’s new?

• applet and unity app-indicator have been removed
• a minimal applet is available there: https://github.com/Keruspe/gpaste-applet
• Dutch translation has been added
• gtk4 is now supported (–with-gtk=4.0)
• gnome-shell/mutter 3.24 are now supported and required
• ui will now close when you select an item (configurable)
• more intuitive search interactions in the ui
• preparations for future other storage backends
• preparations for mime types support
• more reliable “paste” behaviour part in some corener cases

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• fix switch in gnome-shell extension
• fix some wrongly detected growing line

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.20.

What’s new?

• fix switch in gnome-shell extension
• fix refresh with search in the ui
• fix some wrongly detected growing line

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• fix memory leaks in the debugging logs
• fix some corner case in images handling
• fix crash in UI when refreshing during search
• stability improvements

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.20.

What’s new?

• fix memory leaks in the debugging logs
• fix some corner case in images handling
• stability improvements

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a release for using with with GNOME 3.18.

What’s new?

• fix memory leaks in the debugging logs
• fix some corner case in images handling
• stability improvements

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a preview release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• Fix some build system issues for vala and gobject-introspection

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 18 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

Keybindings are documented here.

What’s new in this release?

• add settings to display window decoration
• build system modernization

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a preview release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• Depend on gtk+ 3.22, glib 2.50, gobject-introspeciton 1.50
• Bug fixes and simplifications in pagination handling for gnome-shell
• Fix bug with clipboard/primary selection synchronisation
• Fix racy calls to gtk_clipboard_store

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a preview release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• Lots of fixes in the gnome-shell extension pagination
• Fix a crash when trying to add binary data with gpaste-client
• Use GLib new structured logging
• Update appstream files

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 17 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

Keybindings are documented here.

What’s new in this release?

• fix startup on gnome 3.22
• port to newer vte, require pcre2

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is a preview release for using with with GNOME 3.22.

What’s new?

• Port from intltool to gettext
• pkg-config 0.29 is now required
• Port to the internal mutter-clutter
• gnome-shell extension cleanup
• Add pagination to gnmoe-shell extension

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.20.

What’s new?

• fix some extensive CPU usage in some cases

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is the latest release for using with with GNOME 3.18.

What’s new?

• fix some extensive CPU usage in some cases

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.20.

What’s new?

• Fix soname versioning

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.20.

What’s new?

• Add missing icon

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.20.

What’s new?

• fix crash when a search goes wrong
• fix hanging issue due to gtk+ race (?) in gtk_clipboard_store
• fix the gnome-shell menu sometimes displaying twice
• add debug logs to the core library
• fix some build issues with some toolchains

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is the latest release for using with with GNOME 3.18.

What’s new?

• fix crash when a search goes wrong
• fix hanging issue due to gtk+ race (?) in gtk_clipboard_store
• fix the gnome-shell menu sometimes displaying twice
• add debug logs to the core library

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

TOTP? 2FA? What is this all about?

Usually, when you want to authenticate yourself, you decline your identity with either a user name or an email address, and you provide one factor of authentication, most likely being a password, a pass phrase or a PIN code.

That’s good, but that’s far from good enough. 2FA (two factor authentication) brings another factor of authentication as a requirement to authenticate yourself so that you now need two of those.

There are three kinds of factors:

• who you are (fingerprint, etc)
• what you know (password, etc)
• what you possess (a smart pone, a USB device, etc)

The most popular 2FA method in the biggest popular web services (such as Google, Facebook, etc) is TOTP (Time-based One Time Password). The concept is fairly simple: you share a secret key with the service, and this secret key is used to generate a code, which varies every 30 seconds. There are a lot of applications to manage those but the most popular is certainly google-authenticator. It’s simple to use: the service displays you a QR code when you enable 2FA, you flash it with the application, and then, in order to log in, you have to type both your password and the code displayed in the application.

Why would I do that on my laptop

My laptop is not only my personal computer. It also contains a lot of data that is Intellectual property of Clever Cloud, the company I work for, and some keys to access lots of servers from projects I contribute to.

As a lot of people rely on me and the integrity and security of what I manage, my computer needs to be secure. My hard drive is obviously fully encrypted, but shit always can happen with shoulder surfing, or surveillance cameras, for example. A well organised malicious person could maybe get my password while I type it, so the password is not enough. Time to be paranoid and put an extra security measure.

How do I enable 2FA on my laptop?

Google doesn’t only provide a nice client application, they also provide a PAM module, that’s what we’re gonna use.

First you’ll need to install that. It should be available on most of distributions (for exherbo, the package is called google-authenticator in the ::keruspe repository).

During the whole setup procedure, keeping a root shell around to fix stuff in case of an error is highly recommended.

First, run google-authenticator as your user. The agent will prompt you with several questions regarding configuration, and will print you a QR code once the setup is finished (if you have libqrencode installed, which you will if you’re using the exherbo package) that you can flash using the application. Do the same for the root user too.

By default, this will generate a ~/.google-authenticator file belonging to the user. That’s not really acceptable as I don’t even want my user to be able to read that configuration (with the secret key in it). I thus created a /etc/google-authenticator directory, and I moved my two files in it, using the user name as file name. I thus have /etc/google-authenticator/keruspe and /etc/google-authenticator/root. Next important step is to make sure the rights and ownership are right.

chown root:root /etc/google-authenticator/*
chmod 0400 /etc/google-authenticator/*

Now, our files are read-only and belong to root, which is quite safer than a file in your home directory that even your web browser can read.

Last step: actually enable the feature and make it use those files. For that, you need to locate the pam configuration file responsible for system authentication. On exherbo, that is /etc/pam.d/system-auth. At the very beginning of that file, You just need to add this first line (or second if you want to enter your password before the verification code):

auth        required    pam_google_authenticator.so user=root secret=/etc/google-authenticator/${USER}

With that set, each time you try to login, use sudo, unlock your computer or authorise an admin action, you will be prompted for the TOTP code, and then for your password. The user=root part in the configuration will automatically make the authentication fail if the file in /etc/google-authenticator doesn’t belong to root.

Now let’s check that everything is working properly by logging as your user (su - keruspe for me) and as root (su -). If everything works fine, you’re done.

Voila, your computer is now more secure. The only way to bypass it is to edit the pam configuration file, which is not possible without your decryption key if your system is fully encrypted like mine.

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 16 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

Keybindings are documented here.

What’s new in this release?

• Style fixes for gtk+ 3.20
• Do not use deprecated vte api

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.20.

What’s new?

• Relicensing from GPL-3 to BSD-2
• Detect the presence of more features at runtime instead of compile time
• The gpaste-client cli has been mostly rewritten
• gpaste-client file now supports adding images to the history
• The legacy gpaste cli is gone
• gnome-shell extension cleanups and compatibility with 3.20
• automake 1.15 is required
• pkg-config 0.27 is required
• gtk+ 3.20, vala 0.32 (if –enable-vapi) and gobject-introspection 1.48 are required
• gpaste-ui now has a “new” button to add new contents to the clipboard
• The daemon now reexecs itself on SIGUSR1
• Avoid having two passwords under the same name in history
• libgpaste now logs into its own G_LOG_DOMAIN
• GPaste components now write their pid to a file
• A new tool is provided for debugging, but not installed: clipboard-watcher
• systemd user units are provided
• Build system cleanups
• Outdated translations have been dropped
• gobject-introspection fixes
• Fix style with gtk+ 3.20
• Implement the new shotcut window from gtk+
• Various code cleanups

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

What is creds? What is a credentials mangler?

You can see my complete article about this there.

How do I get it?

creds is available on github

Version 3 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new in this release?

• don’t require xsltproc and docbook-xsl when building a release
• support CREDS_GPG_ARGS environment variable to pass additional args to gpg
• don’t crash on some commands when we do not have anything stored yet

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

What is creds? What is a credentials mangler?

You can see my complete article about this there.

How do I get it?

creds is available on github

Version 2 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new in this release?

• add: don’t act as add-raw when piped (regression in pass2creds)

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

What is creds? What is a credentials mangler?

Nowadays, we tend to use more and more online services. Some of them have nice integration with third-party providers such are google or github for authentication, but not all of them, and you might not want to use it for some services anyway.

What strategy should I use to manage my online credentials?

The easy way

There’s the easy way: using the same username and password everywhere. The advantage is that it’ll be easy for you to remember.

Don’t

Doing that is the worst idea you’ll ever get in your life. The global level of security is always equal to the level of security of the weakest link. In the tons of services where you’ll use these credentials, if one of them has a security breach, any attacker will have access to your accounts on all the services where you use the same credentials.

Use more that one username, when possible

As you get more and more accounts, some services might leak your information to some advertising company, or to some attackers who might try to use these to bruteforce other services. In order to easily identify the source of the leak, I strongly advice that you use one username per service.

If you have a custom domain name, it can be something like sevice1@mydomain.com, service2@mydomain.com which will work nearly everywhere.

If you don’t have one and are using gmail, for example, and you address is foobar@gmail.com, you can use foobar+service1@gmail.com and so on. Unfortunately, not all services accept + in the username.

Passwords - the (random) seed way

Now that you have some good usernamed, let’s talk about passwords.

One very common way of having passwords that you can remember while using a different one for each service is to start from a “seed”. You will decide that all you password will contain some phrase/word or match some pattern, more or less randomly. The you’ll use this as a base to construct the password for each service, trying to remember a logical link between the service and the variable part of your password.

This is far better than the previously seen “easy way”, and that’s actually what a lot of people will tell you to do in order to be “secure”. It actually works pretty well.

What happens now if two or three of those services leak your credentials because they’re stupid and store them as plain text? Well, if you’re lucky, you’ll only have to change your password for those. If you’re not, some attacker might understand which pattern you use to create your passwords, and how you create the variable part depending on the service and you’ll be screwed.

Passwords - the safe way

The easier way to have a strong and secure password for each service is … not knowing it. There are several tools capable of generating passwords, such as pwgen.

If you don’t know what your password is and if even you can’t remember it, there’s no chance that a leaky service could cause you any harm on the other services you use.

But then, how do you use it, if you don’t know it?

That’s where the credentials manager gets in. I’ve used password-store for a long time. It’s a really handy tool that generates passwords, store them on your disk encrypted using your GPG key so that only you can decrypt it. When you need a password you just ask pass to give it to you, it will be decrypted using your key and you’ll be able to use it. Once you get used to adding this extra step as part of the authentication mechanism, it becomes really powerful.

The problem with password-store though, is that it only keeps tracks of passwords. If you use several usernames, you might as well forget what your username was for some service. That’s where creds appears. I created creds so that it could track both your username and your passwords for all of your service. It’s basically a password-store on steroids.

As a bonus, creds comes with a pass2creds script to ease the migration but you should at least use creds 2 for it to work properly.

Typical creds workflow

The best experience you’ll get with creds is when you use it combined to GPaste.

Let’s say I wanna register to a new service www.foobar.com. Let’s generate a new password (imagine my email address is me@gmail.com)!

keruspe@Lou ~ % creds generate www.foobar.com 24
Username: me+foobar@gmail.com
[master dc4cfe2] Add www.foobar.com
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 www.foobar.com.creds
Sucessfully added to GPaste

Alright, my new 24-characters password has been generated, and I don’t even know what it is. GPaste only show it to me as [Password] www.foobar.com. Now I can create my account, just hitting Ctrl-V for pasting the password and that’s it.

If later on I want to log in to this service, all I need to do is creds www.foobar.com. My username will then be in my clipboard. I hit Ctrl-V to paste it. I now hit Ctrl-Alt-V to nuke it from my clipboard and replace it with the password (which is the next item in the history thanks to the nice integration in creds), I hit Ctrl-V in the password box, and I’m logged in, despite the fact that I still have no idea whatsoever of what that password could be.

How do I get it?

creds is available on github

Version 1 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 15 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

Keybindings are documented here.

What’s new in this release?

• build system cleanup
• audible bell is configurable
• environment handling fixes
• multi-windows fixes
• add a –version

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is the latest release for using with with GNOME 3.18.

What’s new?

• fix synchronisation issues between clipboard and primary selection
• fix a memory leak
• never handle images when images support is disabled

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is the first release for using with with GNOME 3.18.

What’s new?

• fix disabling legacy cli
• fix gnome-shell empty button
• fix emptying the active history
• fix showing about dialog
• update brazilian portuguese translation

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is the first release for using with with GNOME 3.18.

What’s new?

• few build system cleanups
• gobject-introspection fixes

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is the first release for using with with GNOME 3.18.

What’s new?

• fix a regression in growing lines detection

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.16.

What’s new?

• fix a regression in growing lines detection

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is the first release for using with with GNOME 3.18 with a lot of new features and cleanup.

“163 files changed, 7334 insertions(+), 3159 deletions(-)”

What’s new?

• Warning, this is a big release, with changes in API, you might have to kill your old daemon after upgrading
• The “gpaste” cli is now “gpaste-client”. old name can still be enabled with –enable-cli for now
• The “gpaste settings” tool is gone, use the “burger” menu from “gpaste-client ui”
• The graphical tool now allows you to fully manage your histories
• The graphical tool now allows you to restart the daemon
• The graphical tool now allows you to edit an element from the history
• The graphical tool new allows you to upload an element to a pastebin service (requires wgetpaste)
• The graphical tool now displays the size of each history
• The graphical tool now displays the index of each element in the history
• The graphical tool has been slightly redisigned
• A new gnome-shell search-provider is provided by the daemon
• When searching e.g. “42”, the 42nd element from hsitory will be included in search results
• gpaste-client gained a new subcommand: “get-history” to get the name of the current history
• gpaste-client gained a new subcommand: “replace” to replace the content of an item in the history
• Compatibility with gnome-shell 3.18
• The daemon now “works” on wayland using XWayland and gnome-shell 3.18
• The dbus interface name is now org.gnome.GPaste1
• The “Empty” dbus method has been renamed “EmptyHistory”
• The “NameLost” and “ReexecuteSelf” dbus signals are gone
• Three new dbus signals: “DeleteHistory”, “EmptyHistory” and “SwitchHistory”
• The daemon gained new dbus methods: GetItemKind, GetElements, GetHistoryName, Replace
• BackupHistory EmptyHistory and DeleteHistory now take the history as a parameter instead of the current one
• GPasteClient hasn’t the “name-lost” and “reexecute-self” signals anymore
• GPasteClient gained three new signals: “delete-history”, “empty-history” and “switch-history”
• GPasteHistory gained a new “switch” signal
• GPasteHistory now tracks dconf to switch between histories
• A few formerly private constructors and methods are now publicly available
• The way GPaste handles dbus conection and objects have significantly been reworked
• Everything is now handled using 64bits types (the numeric settings have thus been reset and some max values changed)
• A lot of code cleanup and rearchitecturation
• Signals are now properly documented for gobject-introspection and thus bindings
• Various build system cleanups (gobject-introspection and vapigen are now required to build from git
• Shell completion updates
• Translations updates

And don’t forget to run gpaste-client dr aka gpaste-client daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste-client daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 14 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

Keybindings are documented here.

What’s new in this release?

• gtk+ 3.10.0 is required
• fix a few bugs introduced in v13

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

What is facron?

A full description of facron is available in these two articles from 2012:

• http://www.imagination-land.org/posts/2012-12-04-facron-fanotify-cron-system.html
• http://www.imagination-land.org/posts/2012-12-07-facron-released.html

How do I get it?

facron is available on github

1.1 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

You must have fanotify included in your kernel (most recent systems should have it by default).

What’s new in this release?

• fix a bug when reloading configuration
• code cleanup

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 13 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

Keybindings are documented here.

What’s new in this release?

• automake 1.15 is required
• .tmux.conf is no longer required
• gtk+ 3.4.0 is required
• now all windows will be managed by a single Germinal instance
• Germinal is now dbus activated
• appstream file is provided

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 12 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

Keybindings are documented here.

What’s new in this release?

• new keybindings
• code cleanup
• build system cleanup

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.16.

What’s new?

• various gnome-shell extension fixes
• prevent potential crash from external library users

This will allow you to do like echo "password" | gpaste add-password mail

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.16.

What’s new?

• fix error in pipe detection

This will allow you to do like echo "password" | gpaste add-password mail

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.16.

What’s new?

• allow password to be taken from stdin

This will allow you to do like echo "password" | gpaste add-password mail

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.14.

What’s new?

• fix error in pipe detection

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.14.

What’s new?

• allow password to be taken from stdin

This will allow you to do like echo "password" | gpaste add-password mail

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.16.

What’s new?

• bump max history size
• fix weird behaviour wrt screensaver

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

Settings utility

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 11 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new in this release?

• depend on glib 2.44
• depend on vte 0.40
• use new g_autoptr stuff from glib
• new setting: word-char-exceptions matching the new one from vte
• fix live changes from settings with new glib
• you can now quit from the right click menu or with ctrl-shift-q

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is the first release for using with with GNOME 3.16 with a lot of new features and cleanup.

Excluding translations: 203 files changed, 4487 insertions(+), 5424 deletions(-)

What’s new?

• new subcommand: gpaste merge to merge various entries (with –decoration and –separator)
• new tool: gpaste-ui (minimal graphical interface)
• legacy applet reworked to use gpaste ui
• ubuntu app indicator reworked to use gpaste ui
• new keybinding to launch gpaste ui
• new keybinding to upload clipboard content to a pastebin service (requires wgetpaste >= 2.26)
• the daemon now returns standard DBus errors on invalid input
• name dbus parameters
• gnome-shell 3.16 support (require gnome-shell 3.16 because of breaking changes)
• require glib 2.44 and gtk 3.16
• compatibility with new glib autoptr mechanism
• fully switch to appstream
• updated shell completions
• updated translations
• various libgpaste api cleanups (bump soname to 3, rework libtool versioning)
• detect applet and app-indicator at runtime instead of build time
• fix bug with recent glib
• make a lot more stuff async
• gpasted is dead (long live gpaste-daemon)
• Changed DBus signal is dead
• drop old ubuntu compat patches
• drop gpaste-config.h
• drop old manual pages for applet and app-indicator
• drop legacy gpaste subcommands (raw, oneline, zero, favor –raw, –oneline and –raw)
• various bugfixes
• some progress regarding wayland support

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Graphical tool

Ubuntu application indicator and legacy status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.14.

What’s new?

• fix crashes related to images support

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.14.

What’s new?

• improve zsh completion
• fix a bug causing the gnome-shell extension to randomly crash

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 10 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new in this release?

• Fix running on wayland

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 9 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new in this release?

• Be more verbose and don’t crash on error
• Update translations

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 8 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new in this release?

• Display an error message when we cannot tmux attach

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

What is Germinal?

Germinal is a minimaliste terminal emulator based on vte and tmux.

It starts as a maximised borderless window which allows you to have a “fullscreen” terminal not overriding your status bar.

The default startup command attaches a tmux session, but it’s customisable through dconf.

The default startup command requires you to have a ~/.tmux.conf file containing

new-session

This will cause tmux to automatically start a new session if you use tmux a and none exists.

How do I get it?

Germinal is available on github

Version 7 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new in this release?

• port to new vte API

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

What is facron?

A full description of facron is available in these two articles from 2012:

• http://www.imagination-land.org/posts/2012-12-04-facron-fanotify-cron-system.html
• http://www.imagination-land.org/posts/2012-12-07-facron-released.html

How do I get it?

facron is available on github

1.0 release tarball is available here, get it while it’s hot!

You must have fanotify included in your kernel (most recent systems should have it by default).

What’s new in this release?

• fixed systemd unit
• $* stands for accessing process pid
• new internal counter with $+ $- and $=
• customisable config file
• fix interaction with folders

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.14.

What’s new?

• search is now always done by the daemon, not the gnome-shell extension
• new gpaste subcomand: search
• gpaste now accepts --online --raw and --zero options
• search is now async
• various gnome-shell extension fixes
• updated completions
• we now restore the clipboard contents when unlocking the screensaver

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.14.

What’s new?

• update for latest gobject-introspection
• support gnome-shell 3.14
• start redesign of the gnome-shell extension
• new gpaste show-history command

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.12 and is the last one supporting it.

What’s new?

• a bug preventing the history to be saved to disk has been fixed
• prevent a segfault when loading large histories
• add a new gpaste oneline-history command

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

If your distribution ships with gnome-settings 3.8 and thus a patched version of gnome-shell 3.10 (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0002-ubuntu-fix-for-ubuntu-breaking-gnome-shell-API-compa.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.10 and is the last one supporting it.

What’s new?

• a bug preventing the history to be saved to disk has been fixed
• prevent a segfault when loading large histories
• add a new gpaste oneline-history command

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

If your distribution ships with gnome-settings 3.8 and thus a patched version of gnome-shell 3.10 (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0002-ubuntu-fix-for-ubuntu-breaking-gnome-shell-API-compa.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.12 and is the last one supporting it.

What’s new?

• gpaste-daemon now has an Update dbus signal more precise than Changed
• desktop files fixes
• all calls to clipboard are now async
• performance improvements
• gpaste-client has been updated to match gpaste-daemon changes with an update signal
• gnome-shell extension has been ported to the update signal
• applets have been ported to the update signal
• gnome-shell search bar now matches the user theme

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

If your distribution ships with gnome-settings 3.8 and thus a patched version of gnome-shell 3.10 (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0002-ubuntu-fix-for-ubuntu-breaking-gnome-shell-API-compa.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.10 and is the last one supporting it.

What’s new?

• gpaste-daemon now has an Update dbus signal more precise than Changed
• desktop files fixes
• all calls to clipboard are now async
• performance improvements
• gpaste-client has been updated to match gpaste-daemon changes with an update signal
• gnome-shell extension has been ported to the update signal
• applets have been ported to the update signal
• gnome-shell search bar now matches the user theme

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

If your distribution ships with gnome-settings 3.8 and thus a patched version of gnome-shell 3.10 (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0002-ubuntu-fix-for-ubuntu-breaking-gnome-shell-API-compa.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.12.

What’s new?

• gpasted has been renamed gpaste-daemon
• Desktop files have been fixed
• Fixes for the ubuntu app-indicator
• Keybinding to mark an item as being a password
• All libgpaste-* have been merged into a single libgpaste
• Misc bugfixes reported for debian packaging

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

If your distribution ships with gnome-settings 3.8 and thus a patched version of gnome-shell 3.10 (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0002-ubuntu-fix-for-ubuntu-breaking-gnome-shell-API-compa.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is only compatible with GNOME 3.9.90 and above. if you’re still using an older version, please check GPaste 3.3.1.

What’s new?

• gpasted has been renamed gpaste-daemon
• Desktop files have been fixed
• Fixes for the ubuntu app-indicator
• Keybinding to mark an item as being a password
• All libgpaste-* have been merged into a single libgpaste
• Misc bugfixes reported for debian packaging

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

If your distribution ships with gnome-settings 3.8 and thus a patched version of gnome-shell 3.10 (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0002-ubuntu-fix-for-ubuntu-breaking-gnome-shell-API-compa.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is for using with with GNOME 3.12.

What’s new?

• systemd support has been removed
• GPaste is now compliant with https://wiki.gnome.org/HowDoI/DBusApplicationLaunching
• GPaste now has built-in support for managing passwords, blog post coming.
• Completions and man pages have been updated
• Translations have been updated
• Miscellaneous bugfixes with static analysis
• The search feature of the gnome-shell extension has been improved

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

If your distribution ships with gnome-settings 3.8 and thus a patched version of gnome-shell 3.10 (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0002-ubuntu-fix-for-ubuntu-breaking-gnome-shell-API-compa.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is only compatible with GNOME 3.9.90 and above. if you’re still using an older version, please check GPaste 3.3.1.

What’s new?

• systemd support has been removed
• GPaste is now compliant with https://wiki.gnome.org/HowDoI/DBusApplicationLaunching
• GPaste now has built-in support for managing passwords, blog post coming.
• Completions and man pages have been updated
• Translations have been updated
• Miscellaneous bugfixes with static analysis
• The search feature of the gnome-shell extension has been improved

If your distribution does not provide a appdata-tools package (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0001-ubuntu-disable-appdata-stuff.patch

If your distribution ships with gnome-settings 3.8 and thus a patched version of gnome-shell 3.10 (like ubuntu 14.04), you can use ubuntu-patches/0002-ubuntu-fix-for-ubuntu-breaking-gnome-shell-API-compa.patch

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new?

• Improved compatibility with GNOME 3.12

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is only compatible with GNOME 3.9.90 and above. if you’re still using an older version, please check GPaste 3.3.1.

What’s new?

• gpasted no longer fails at runtime if gnome-shell’s settings schema is not installed
• growing lines are detected for lines getting expanded at their left too
• gnome-shell extension has been rewritten
• gnome-shell extension now has a search bar
• translations update
• misc bugfixes

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Gnome-shell extension

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is only compatible with GNOME 3.9.90 and above. if you’re still using an older version, please check GPaste 3.3.1.

Starting with this huge release, GPaste will follow the GNOME versionning system (or it would have been 4.0). This is the recommended version for use with GNOME 3.10 and above, 3.12 will follow soon.

This is the first release compatible with Unity (for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and higher). Sadly, due to how Unity indicator work, there is no way to delete an item from the history from the indicator, you’ll have to do it with the command line.

What’s new?

• Follow GNOME versionning
• Don’t display error on daemon-reexec
• Fix coredumps due to g_error
• New library: libgpaste-applet
• Unity support (for Ubuntu 14.04 and above) using libgpaste-applet
• Port legacy applet to libgpaste-applet and rename to StatusIcon
• Redesign GPaste StatusIcon to make it simpler and similar to gnome-shell extension
• Vala is no longer required to build the applet (rewritten in C)
• Lower automake dependency to 1.11
• Be compatible with gnome-shell up to 3.12
• libgpaste-settings: add reset
• gpaste settings: add reset buttons
• gpaste settings: add a switch to enable the gnome-shell extension
• The gnome-shell gsettings schema is now required when –enable-gnome-shell-extension is provided (default)
• gpasted: GetElement now returns the display string
• gpasted now forwards the full history via dbus, letting the client manage the display limit
• gpasted gained GetHistoryLength, GetRawHistory, GetRawElement and About
• gpasted gained a new Version property
• Add about dialog to all components
• Prefer dark theme
• Display more info at the end of configure
• Provide appdata files
• Parallel build fixes
• Fix build issues for Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian
• clang related fixes
• Fix warnings
• Translations update

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

You then can run gpaste daemon-version to check that the correct daemon is running.

Screenshots

Ubuntu application indicator

Status icon

Gnome-shell extension

Settings utility

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is the last release supporting GNOME <3.10.

What’s new?

• Build fixes for debian wheezy

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

Blogging about my personal life is not one of my habits, but tonight is the exception, because it’s worth it.

Context

Since September, 2013, I’m living in Japan, near Nagoya.

In Japan, there’s a traditional kind of meal called bento.

A bento is basically a meal better served cold, often brought as a picnic or quick lunch, carried in a special box.

Japanese people really like so-called “cute” things and tend to make their bentos as artistic as possible, like some kinds of paintings.

Exherbo + bento = ?

Tonight, my girlfriend made me the surprise of cooking me the geekest bento ever.

Exherbo’s mascot: Zebrapig as a plate, github’s mascot: octocat as a dessert.

Pure Japanese awesomeness.

cave show keruspe (the command line written under zebrapig outputs this, on my machine:

* repository/keruspe
::repository              0 {no slot}
::unavailable             (0)A {no slot}
::unavailable-unofficial  (0)A* {no slot}
repository/keruspe-0::repository
repository/keruspe-0::unavailable-unofficial
Repository description    Keruspe's dev repository
Repository format         e
Repository homepage       http://www.exherbo.org
Repository sync           git://git.exherbo.org/dev/keruspe.git
    Masked
        already configured This repository is already configured

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This is the last release supporting GNOME <3.10.

What’s new?

• New growing-lines feature (backported from 3.8)

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is only compatible with GNOME 3.9.90 and above. if you’re still using an older version, please check GPaste 3.2.2.

What’s new?

• Fix german translation
• No longer depend on libxml
• Update Portugueuse and French translations
• New growing-lines feature
• Misc bufixes

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

/!\ EDIT: the tarball contained a typo and has been reuploaded at 12:00 UTC. Please re download if you downloaded before or the gnome-shell extension won’t work.

This release is only compatible with GNOME 3.9.90 and above. if you’re still using an older version, please check GPaste 3.2.2.

What’s new?

• “Paste and Pop” is now only “Pop”
• Fix SEGV when deleting last item of history
• New gnome-shell DBus client library
• DBus client libraries are now async
• Keybinder now uses gnome-shell if available to grab keys
• Preparations for wayland port
• Enhance internal memory management
• Code cleanup
• Misc bug fixes

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release and the couple of following ones (3.3 and maybe 3.4) are the last releases supporting GNOME <3.10.

3.3 will add an ubuntu unity applet.

3.4 will be bugfixes/maintainance release if needed.

What’s new?

• “Paste and Pop” is now only “Pop”
• Fix SEGV at startup
• Fix SEGV when deleting last item of history

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release and the couple of following ones (3.3 and maybe 3.4) are the last releases supporting GNOME <3.10.

3.3 will add an ubuntu unity applet.

3.4 will be bugfixes/maintainance release if needed.

What’s new?

• Update translations
• Fix build with old glib

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is only compatible with GNOME 3.9.90 and above. if you’re still using an older version, please check GPaste 3.2.

What’s new?

• GPaste settings look has been updated to better fit with recent GNOME
• Performance improvements
• Daemon now fully evenmential (no more polling, less power consuption)
• GPasteClipboard now has a “owner-change” signal similar to GtkClipboard’s one
• Misc. bugfixes
• New setting to set the maximum amount of memory used by data in history
• FIFO mode has been dropped (lacking design)
• Code cleanup and modernisation
• g_paste_history_add is now transfer full
• g_paste_keybinder_add_keybinding is now transfer full

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release and the couple of following ones (3.3 and maybe 3.4) are the last releases supporting GNOME <3.10.

3.3 will add an ubuntu unity applet.

3.4 will be bugfixes/maintainance release if needed.

What’s new?

• Performance improvements
• Daemon now fully evenmential (no more polling, less power consuption)
• GPasteClipboard now has a “owner-change” signal similar to GtkClipboard’s one
• Misc. bugfixes
• New setting to set the maximum amount of memory used by data in history
• FIFO mode has been dropped (lacking design)
• g_paste_history_add is now transfer full

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release is only compatible with GNOME 3.9.90 and above. if you’re still using an older version, please check GPaste 3.1.

What’s new?

• Compatibility with gnome-shell 3.9.90 and above
• The gnome-shell applet has totally been rewritten and is now more intuitive.
• Port to newer glib
• Don’t use deprecated stuff from gtk+
• The X11 keybinder is now optional
• New keybinding to sync the clipboard to the primary selection
• New keybinding to sync the primary selection to the clipboard

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

This release and the couple of following ones (3.2, maybe 3.3 and 3.4) are the last releases supporting GNOME <3.10.

3.2 will include a new setting to manage the maximum memory usage of GPaste, and some internal enhancement.

3.3 and 3.4 will be bugfixes/maintainance releases if needed.

This code is now managed in the 3.0 branch of the GPaste repository.

What’s new?

• Compatibility with gnome-shell up to 3.9.5
• New keybinding to sync the clipboard to the primary selection
• New keybinding to sync the primary selection to the clipboard

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

My experience and evolution

I am not a old great guru with a heavy beard using linux since the 90s. I started using computers quite late, back in year 2000 or such. My first computer was running Windows XP (yes, I know…). Believe it or not, at this time, my computer didn’t attract me at all and I did not want to know more of it.

A couple of years before taking my Bachelor degree, my maths teacher taught me how to write tiny programs to get stuff automatically done on a calculator. This introduction to software writing was like a revelation to me. I decided a few years after to start learning computer sciences, in 2007. I couldn’t stand using this crappy m$ thingie anymore, so I decided to install “linux”, understand “whatever GNU/Linux distribution one would recommend me.

This is how I started using Ubuntu. I stood with it for a little more than a year, starting to learn the basics. After that, I felt it was becoming ugly and sloooooow, so I decided to change. As I said before, I then decided to give Gentoo a try, since I wanted to really start learning a system’s internals. It was quite a good choice and I really learnt a lot.

Contributing to Exherbo

You know after I discovered (and then contributed) to paludis, I decided to switch to another source-based distribution: Exherbo. If statistics are correct, I have contributed to Exherbo for the first time 743 days ago, at the time I’m writing this, which appears to be 2011, June the 25th. Not sure how long I had been using Exherbo before that though.

After 2 years and 1 day of contributions, discussions and support in the Exherbo community, I was finally asked on June, the 26th to join the team and become an official Exherbo developer.

Becoming an Exherbo developer

Exherbo takes a huge place both in my hobbies since I love to contribute to it ( it’s really an easy thing to do) and in my work. Some of my colleagues were running Gentoo on their laptops (which was a little because of me) and I felt quite sad for them, since their system broke quite often (so did mine when I was running Gentoo). With my shiny robust Exherbo system, I convinced them to switch, and they now are full Exherbo users too. Others are even currently switching too. This seem quite logical to us to use for production in our company the distribution we know the best and we know that works the best, so we chose Exherbo. Regarding this both personal and professional involvement into the Exherbo community, I couldn’t say anything but “Yes, of course I’ll join you!”.

So here I am, Exherbo evangelist, and now official developer!

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new?

• Fix build without gnome-control-center installed
• Fix focus when using <Ctrl><Alt><H> in gnome-shel extension

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

The release tarball for 3.0 was corrupted, release 3.0.1 with a sane one.

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new?

• Fix build

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

Finally version 3.0 is there. It’s lacking a few things that I wanted in, but I miss a lot of time these days, so I postponed these for 3.1.

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new?

• Various build fixes
• Support of gnome-control-center for setting keybindings
• Compatibility with newer gnome-shell

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

Why no post last week?

Last week, we were quite busy at Clever Cloud, since we were releasing an awesome offer and it took us quite some time since we migrated amongst other things from openstack to a custom home made solution which better fits our needs.

The future of “Knowing your system”

Two weeks ago, with Part 9, I actually finished my initial Roadmap for this saga of posts, so I won’t continue to make 1 post per week. I’ll keep posting them on Thursdays, as I find out interesting stuff about system internals.

I recommend you reading last Lennart’s post which explains a lot of things about the common myths regarding systemd.

What is multilib?

On classical systems running on machines with Intel or AMD processors (the vast majority of systems), you have the choice between installing a 32-bits (x86) or 64-bits (x86_64) system.

Most systems used to be 32-bits, but these last years, 64-bits systems mostly became the standard. Point is that you cannot run 32-bits binaries from a 64-bits system (the opposite is also true). Since some clients may need it, we switched all our applicative systems to multilib, at Clever Cloud.

Solution: On your 64-bits system, you can install 32-bits libraries in parallel of 64-bits one (the former will be in /usr/lib32, the latter in /usr/lib64, usually). Doing so allows you to run both 64 and 32-bits binaries on your system as long as you have the dependencies installed both for 64 and 32-bits. A good example is skype, which do not release a proper 64-bits version, so you need to run the 32-bits one, no matter your system.

Multilib system: the right way

Multilib is implemented in different ways depending on the distribution. Some of them like Debian or Gentoo provide huge packages with a while set of libraries in them, and only a subset or your system is available in 32-bits. For fedora, it’s kinda better, multilib packages are installed with <packages_name>.i386 for the 32-bits version and <package_name>.amd64 for the 64-bits version.

The only distribution I know of which allow you real native multilib installation is, you’ll have guessed it, Exherbo. The tutorial to switch to a multilib system is quite simple: http://www.mailstation.de/wordpress/?p=118, and once this is done, the only thing you have to do is enabling the multibuild_c: 32 option to all the packages that you want to be available in 32-bits too. That’s it, you can get your whole system in both 64 and 32-bits just like this, natively.

A good example of this is Clement’s article telling how he switched his system to multilib in order to be able to run dwarf fortress on Exherbo.

Followup to last week’s release, here is a new bugfix release.

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new?

• Fix a bug making gpaste settings ui a no-op
• Don’t close legacy applet menu when deleting an item
• Fix vala bindings
• Updated portuguese translation

This is 3.0 RC3 and should be the latest RC before the 3.0 release.

Feedback really appreciated!

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

A few months ago, I decided to track my configuration files using git, which I use for pretty much everything now.

The problem I had to face is that some of them contain passwords, so I couldn’t let them as is.

Setting up the test environment

keruspe@Lou ~/tmp % mkdir test.git && cd test.git && git init --bare && cd ..
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/keruspe/tmp/test.git/
keruspe@Lou ~/tmp % mkdir test && cd test && git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/keruspe/tmp/test/.git/
keruspe@Lou ~/tmp/test (git)-[master] % git remote add origin ../test.git 

Ok, we now have a remote repository in ~/tmp/test.git and a working directory in ~/tmp/test

Configuring the working directory to be “password-safe”

keruspe@Lou ~/tmp/test (git)-[master] % git config filter.password.clean "sed -e 's/mypassword/@PASSWORD@/' -e 's/anotherpassword/@PASSWORD2@/'"
keruspe@Lou ~/tmp/test (git)-[master] % git config filter.password.smudge "sed -e 's/@PASSWORD@/mypassword/' -e 's/@PASSWORD2@/anotherpassword/'"
keruspe@Lou ~/tmp/test (git)-[master] % cat > .git/info/attributes << EOF
myconf.conf filter=password
EOF

Ok, what’s going on there?

I’m creating a filter which I call “password”. A filter consist of two functions:

* clean is called on each file when you're committing, before creating the git objects corresponding to your commit.
* smudge is called when you checkout, each time git is recreating your working directory from the git objects.

You can note that this is not an in-place edition with sed, since I did not add the -i argument, these commands are called during a piping process, not directly on files.

I then create a .git/info/attributes file, in which I tell git to use my brand new “filter” password for the file myconf.conf. You can use any pattern that git understands here, and can obviously add multiple lines.

Example

Let’s now create the myconf.conf file we mentioned earlier, let’s push it to the remote repository, and clone it from anywhere else, to see the result.

keruspe@Lou ~/tmp/test (git)-[master] % cat > myconf.conf << EOF
user = johndoe
password = mypassword
bddurl = root:anotherpassword@mysql.local
EOF
keruspe@Lou ~/tmp/test (git)-[master] % git add myconf.conf && git commit -m "initial config" && git push origin master
[master (root-commit) 46153a1] initial config
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 myconf.conf
Counting objects: 3, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 283 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ../test.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master
keruspe@Lou ~/tmp/test (git)-[master] % cd ..
keruspe@Lou ~/tmp % git clone test.git test2
Cloning into 'test2'...
done.
keruspe@Lou ~/tmp % cat test/myconf.conf
user = johndoe
password = mypassword
bddurl = root:anotherpassword@mysql.local
keruspe@Lou ~/tmp % cat test2/myconf.conf
user = johndoe
password = @PASSWORD@
bddurl = root:@PASSWORD2@@mysql.local

As you can see, in my ~/tmp/test working directory, where I have my filter set up, nothing has changed at all, whereas in the brand new clone ~/tmp/test2 (and thus, in the server), all my passwords are masked and are not accessible. This way, you can track your configuration files using git and sharing it with other without even thinking of your passwords, as long as everything is in your filter.

In the part 7, I described my workflow for contributing to Exherbo. Since then I had a few remarks (from kloeri, the Exherbo’s father, amongst others) on how I could improve it.

My new workflow

What I liked about my previous workflow is that it was exactly the same for contributing to Exherbo or to upstream. This is why it isn’t completely done. Most of it is actually still here, but in another way. What’s new is cave sync’s option -s, aka --source which allows you to specify multiple sync sources for a repository. For each repository that I install, I edit its configuration file changing sync = git://git.exherbo.org/arbor.git to sync = git://git.exherbo.org/arbor.git local: git+file:///home/keruspe/Exherbo/arbor, for example.

What I do now is:

• If I do not have a copy of the repository locally I clone it, otherwise I pull new changes from upstream
• I write my patch and commit it
• I sync the repository from my local patched clone: cave sync -s local <repository>
• I try my patch, compiling the related packages
• If it fails, I go back to step two to fix my patch
• If it succeeds, I upload it with git pe -<number_of_commits> | wgetpaste -r -s poundpython and I submit it.

For the record, the command which I run to upload my patch is a git alias, git pe means git format-patch -M -C --find-copies-harder --stdout

What has become my previous workflow?

This does not at all look like my previous workflow, but I said I kept it around… Why?

Actually, my previous workflow comes right after that. Once I’ve sumitted my patch, I add it to my autopatch folder:

mkdir -p /etc/paludis/autopatch/<repository>
curl <patch_url> > /etc/paludis.autopatch/<repository>/my.patch

This way, they automatically get applied when I sync back the real repository instead of my copy. If a sync fail, I rebase my patches and resubmit them. Once the patch is pushed, I can safely remove it from my autopatch directory.

Note that this whole second step can fully be ignored for repositories you have push access to, simplifying even more this light workflow.

Next chapter

Read the continuation

Followup to yesterday release, here is a bugfix release getting a few cutting edge problems solved.

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new?

• Fix a few typos in the conditional code for applet and extension
• Fix make install when GPaste is not yet installed
• Clean desktop files

This is 3.0 RC2 and no major changes should append before the 3.0 release.

Feedback really appreciated!

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

EDIT: packagers should backport https://github.com/Keruspe/GPaste/commit/61947fa2b5ea6b19b2a9cdb7db2b328e4a703f85 with this release.

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

I’s still hosted on github.

What’s new?

• Compatibility with recent development releases of gnome-shell
• gpaste f now defers the file reading to the GPaste daemon
• libgpaste-client does now fully cover the GPaste DBus API
• libgpaste-keybinder has been ported to use XInput2
• keybindings have been fixed
• The gnome-shell extension has been ported to use libgpaste-client
• A systemd user unit is now provided
• New library: libgpaste-settings-ui
• gpaste-settings has been ported to libgpaste-settings-ui
• The gnome-shell extension now has a pref.js module based on libgpaste-settings-ui
• An autostart desktop file is now provided with the legacy applet
• gobject-introspection and vala support are now optional

This is actually 3.0 RC and no major changes should append before the 3.0 release.

Feedback really appreciated!

And don’t forget to run gpaste dr aka gpaste daemon-reexec after upgrading GPaste to activate new functionalities ;)

How did I start contributing?

When I started to really dig into my system to fully understand how it works, breaking everything to know of to fix it, I decided to do even worse and started using scm packages. Scm packages download the source code directly for the upstream development repository using git, subversion, mercurial or whatever other vcs.

Doing this I ended up with a more-that-bleeding-edge system, causing a lot of breakages when stuff went incompatible with recent versions of other. That’s perfect, since that’s exactly the state I wanted to reach. If I wanted to recover a functional system, the easy solution that I adopted when I did not have much spare time was to revert my last changes and get back to an earlier version of the guilty package, but this was not the goal of the operation. What I really started to do at this point was to patch the broken stuff to make it compatible with the newer version of the guilty stuff which broke everything. It was sometimes really trivial, sometimes way less. I mostly did this for Gnome projects. It’s a really good experience since you have to dig in a lot of projects and documentation, making you know better how various parts of your system work internally. Once I had everything back working, I then submitted my patches to the developers of the projects upstream, so that it gets fixed for everyone.

Now that I have way less spare time, I no longer have such a bleeding edge system, or at least I have way less scm packages. Sometimes I still need to patch stuff though, so I still use the same procedure.

My work flow

My work flow for contributing to upstream is not much different to the one I use for contributing to Exherbo. I also use an autopatch mechanism which is slightly different. My hook for automatically patch software is available there: https://github.com/Keruspe/paludis-config/blob/exherbo/hooks/ebuild_prepare_pre/patches.bash. If I remember correctly it was initially written by Ciaran McCreesh, the paludis’s lead developer. When I want to patch something, I get a copy locally, I write and commit my patch, I generate a patch file and move it to /etc/paludis/autopatch/<category>/<package>/ where <category> is for example “x11-dri” and <package> is “mesa”, according to exherbo’s packages name. Each time I install a package, it applies all this patches before configuring and compiling the software. If it works, I submit it upstream, if not, I fix it and retry.

I highly recommend you to try contributing to open source projects, to fix or improve them, like adding new functionalities. The only risk is to learn a lot.

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The exherbo contribution mechanism

Basically everything regarding exherbo is discussed and managed via the #exherbo IRC channel on irc.freenode.org.

Before contributing, you should first read the topic of the channel, the zebrapig patchbot documentation, the exheres for smarties tutorial (You do not have to read the whole thing, but always keep it around), and you can also keep the contributing guide around.

Using zebrapig

Zebrapig is exherbo’s IRC patchbot. You can use three commands to interact with it:

• !pq <patch_url> ::<repository> => Use this to submit the patch available at the given URL (use git format-patch --stdout -M -C -C -1 | wgetpaste -r to get an URL for your git commit) to the repository you specified.
• !pd <pattern> => Use this to mark all the patches matching the given pattern as done, useful when you want to resubmit an updated version of your patch.
• pl <pattern> => Don’t ever use it in the channel, only use it in a private query with zebrapig. It will list all patches matching this pattern (which is optional).

A special use-case is to submit your personal repository, you’ll submit it as a patch, given its git URL and specifying ::unavailable-unofficial as the repository.

Everything submitted to the bot will be reviewed by developers who’ll tell you what’s wrong in your patch and how you could improve it. You’re expected to be quite present in the channel if you start submitting stuff. Once your patch is ready, it will be pushed to the repository and available to everyone.

What I love about this mechanism is that it’s really simple, handy and powerful.

My personal work flow for contributing

When I want to contribute to a repository, for a version bump or any bug fix, I proceed in 7 steps:

• If I do not have a copy of the repository locally I clone it, otherwise I pull new changes from upstream
• I write my patch and commit it
• I upload my patch with git pe HEAD~<number_of_commits> | wgetpaste -r -s poundpython (I’ll explain this command later)
• I put a copy of my patch in my autopatch directory (which I’ll explain after):

mkdir -p /etc/paludis/autopatch/<repository>
curl <patch_url> > /etc/paludis.autopatch/<repository>/my.patch

• I sync the repository so that the autopatch gets applied: cave sync <repository>
• I try my patch, compiling the related packages
• If everything succeeds, I submit my patch, otherwise, I get back to step 2 to fix my patch

The command which I run to upload my patch is a git alias, git pe means git format-patch -M -C --find-copies-harder --stdout and takes as an argument the commits to publish, HEAD~3 means 3 commits for example, I put -s poundpython as extra args for wgetpaste since gist.github.com which is the default fails quite often for me.

The other interesting part of it is how I manage the autopatch system. I have a paludis hook placed in /etc/paludis/hooks/sync_post which cause every patch located in /etc/paludis/autopatch/<repository>/ to be applied each time I sync the said repository.

Next time I’ll explain how I contribute to upstream projects using nearly the same scheme, pointing out even more how intuitive and integrated this process is in my every day work.

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As we are supposed to take good resolutions for 2013, mine has been to switch from gnome-session to systemd for managing my user session. Here is how I replaced gnome-session with systemd.

How did it come to my mind?

Since its beginning, systemd has been created for both system and session management. The default is obviously the system manager, aka systemd --system, but what less people know is that you also can run systemd --user.

Since I’ve been using systemd as my init system for a while and have been quite happy with it, I often thought of trying a migration for my session. Recently, I started playing with my mails, first with fetchmail and procmail, and then with offlineimap (I’ll blog about this later). With offlineimap, I needed a way to fetch periodically my emails.

I could have installed a cron system, but I don’t like installing such things to only use them for a single command. Since systemd handles natively cron jobs with its timers, I thought back to systemd --session.

One problem, three solutions, which one to take?

The first solution was to run systemd --session as an autostart app for my session (e.g. writing a .desktop file for it and putting it in /etc/xdg/autostart: http://standards.freedesktop.org/autostart-spec/autostart-spec-latest.html.

With this solution I would have ended up with a first session manager (gnome-session) launching a second one (systemd –user), and the latter would only have been used for offlineimap… Come on! We can do better.

The second solution was to replace my X session with a new one, which would launch offlineimap on one side and gnome-session on the other, gnome-session taking care of all gnome-related stuff. This is way better! That’s the solution I adopted for a couple a hours and tries. I was pretty happy with it, but was still not convinced by the fact that two different software were managing my session at the same time. Here is my X session file: https://github.com/Keruspe/system-config/blob/master/data/systemd.desktop. It has to be placed in /usr/share/xsessions.

Then comes the third solution, the one I’m currently running. Since my session was now directly managed by systemd, I decided to migrate everything launched by gnome-session to systemd services, in order to remove totally gnome-session. I found some helpful basis here and there. I took some of them, modified them to fit my needs and wrote some myself, ending up with a nearly ready system.

Last problem, gnome-session runtime dependency

Some of the gnome parts such as gnome-shell require gnome-session to be available at runtime, in order to synchronize a few informations across the session, such as the presence status or whether you want notifications to be displayed or ignored. This is all done via DBus but gnome-session does not use a helper to do so, it does it itself. Since we cannot get totally rid of gnome-session, I decided to create a dummy gnome session that gnome-session would launch.

Next problem: gnome-session refuses to launch such a session… Yay! I thus patched it and opened a bug upstream to allow it and provide the dummy session I created. With this patch applied locally, I could run gnome-session --session=gnome-dummy in my systemd service to get a session which does not launch anything. And then I realized that it was still starting autostart applications, which I did not want since I only wanted it for its DBus interface. Passing -a /dev/null as an extra arg to gnome-session so that it looks for autostart applications nowhere instead of in /etx/xdg/autostart did this last trick.

My system user units are available there: https://github.com/Keruspe/system-config/tree/master/systemd/user. This folder corresponds to your ${HOME}/.config/systemd/user/.

The limits of Gentoo

As I said in part 3 of the knowing your system saga, I really started to dig into my system when I used Gentoo. I quickly spotted the limits of portage, its default package manager and switched to paludis. It really is easy to mess up your python installation, especially when you’re not a python developer and you don’t care about it. Of course there are tools to help you, such as python-updater, but it won’t be of great help if you’re not in a basic “breakage because of python update” case. Because of portage being written in python, you end up with an unmaintainable system which is painful.

A pretty good example of this is when I tried install Gentoo on my Playstation 3. At this time, the powerpc stage was kinda old. During the base system installation and update, you ended with the linux headers version being incompatible with your python installation, and portage was unusable. After 3 attempts without success, I tried once starting by installing paludis, and then doing everything with it. It worked like a charm.

Portage is not the only limitation of Gentoo. Its workflow is kinda insane. First of all, Gentoo aims to get every piece of software packaged in a same repository, external overlays being there only for testing purpose before merging. You end up with tons of packages being available on your machine, 95% of them won’t ever interest you. You could say it’s cool to get everything available without needing internet access to retrieve them, but you’ll still have to download the source tarballs so it’s pointless, it just make dependencies resolution slower.

Another problem is contribution. To contribute to Gentoo, you’ll open a bug on their bugzilla with a patch attached (I’m fine with this first step, the next ones are awful). When a developer or a proxy maintainer sees it, he applies it locally and push it to the centralised CVS server (which you sync using rsync on client side…). There is a HUGE lack of consistency in this process:

• As a simple contributor, you won’t ever be the author of the real commit, at most you’ll be mentioned in the commit message
• You don’t use the same tool to pull changes in that the one developer use to push them.

Exherbo is awesome

After having used paludis on Gentoo for one year or so, I decided to involve myself in its community. I started to send a couple of patches for my purpose, and to help beginners to deal with it. I then heard of another bigger project they were launching: a brand new source-based distribution, a kind of Gentoo rewritten from scratch in a more modern, modular, clean and strict way.

While I was still using Gentoo, I started to install exherbo in a chroot, to give it a try. First thing I really enjoyed was that everything is split into several repositories. If I do not have any C# application installed, the repository containing the mono stuff won’t be installed and those packages won’t be available on my system. If I finally decide to install mono, I will automatically be suggested to install the mono repository, and running cave resolve -x1 repository/mono will do all the stuff for you. Everything is managed by git both on the developer and “user” side. Being an exherbo “user” is kinda special, since every user is considered as a developer by the community.

Contributing to exherbo is really easy and smooth, I’ll explain my contribution workflow next week.

As exherbo is a “new” distribution, not every package is available, so you’ll probably end up creating your own repository to package your software. Once you get enough packages in it and you want to share it with the community, you just have to submit it, people will review it and tell you how you can make it better. It will then be added to the list of available repositories so that people will be guided to it when they try to install software you’ll have packaged. For example, at Clever Cloud, we use openstack for now, and we had to package it and its dependencies. Everything is available in our repository.

One more thing: exherbo policy is to be as vanilla as possible. Every patch used in packages must contain the upstream status of it, since they all have to be submitted. We want to maintain as few patches as possible.

My exherbo repository

Clever Cloud exherbo repository

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We last saw the paludis tool. Now, we’ll take a look at how we can handle a source-based distribution using paludis for large pools of servers.

Source-based distributions for huge server pools

At Clever Cloud, we decided to use a source-based GNU/Linux distribution called exherbo, which I’ll blog about next week, because of its strictness and flexibility. Since we have to manage hundreds of servers and virtual machines, it would have been a big overload in energy consumption and in time invested if we managed it the “conventional” way. Indeed, compiling everything on the hypervisors could cause instabilities because of the CPUs being monopolised by the compilation process, leaving no power to virtual machines. The virtual machines would have the same problem, and for much longer, since you do not have the same power in a virtual machine than in an hypervisor, so compilations last longer.

This is why we decided to manage everything using binary packages. Wait… What? Binary packages in a source-based distribution? How?!

The search is over: paludis’ pbins

Setup

Paludis comes with a very nice feature: pbins.

The concept is simple:

• You create an empty repository, anywhere in your filesystem, containing an empty packages directory, a profiles directory containing a file named repo_name which contents is your binary repository name, like mybinaries.
• In your repository, create a metadata containing a layout.conf file, with masters = arbor in it.
• On your compilation node, create a configuration file for you binary repository
• On the other nodes, create a configuration file for it too. It’s the same, without the lines starting with binary_ and modifying the sync line

A sample configuration file:

format = e
location = /var/db/paludis/repositories/mybinaries
sync = file:///var/db/paludis/repositories/mybinaries
importance = 100
binary_destination = true
binary_distdir = /var/cache/paludis/distfiles
binary_keywords_filter = amd64 ~amd64
binary_uri_prefix = http://mybinaries.com/exherbo/

location is the place where you put your empty repository.

sync is the same that location on the compilation node, and may refer to a git repository where you’ll publish your binary repository on the other nodes.

binary_distdir is the directory where binary tarballs will be placed. I recommend you to make it point to the same place as where paludis downloads its distfiles, since it will be easier to maintain in further use. That’s why I left the default value here.

binary_prefix is the URL where the generated tarballs will be available for the other nodes. Ensure that the /var/cache/paludis/distfiles directory is available via http at this URL.

Usage

You’re now fully ready! All you have to do is create the binary packages on your compilation node, push the updated repository to your git server, sync it on the other boxes and you will be able to install your freshly made binary packages without having to compile them on all of your machines.

It’s pretty simple to make binary packages, all you have to do is first to generate the binaries for everything you have installed:

cave resolve -xc world --make binaries --make-dependencies all

It will automatically generate packages and put tarballs in your distfiles directory. If you run this after updating your compilation box, it will only generate new binary packages for those that have changed.

Last thing you might want to know: to create a binary package for a package you do not have installed yet, just run

cave resolve -x --make binaries --make-dependencies all <insert a package name here>

It will create packages for all the dependencies, installing it afterwards, and finish by making the package for the software you asked.

Don’t forget to push all changes on your git server!

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Installing a source-based GNU/Linux distribution

As we last saw, I’m really fond of source-based distributions. Beyond the administration and the management of an installed system, you also have to install it in the first place. Because of the fact that you have to compile absolutely everything in your system, it may be really scary to install one.

I formerly told you to keep in mind that your system is fully usable whilst you’re upgrading it…

When you install a source-based distribution, it’s not using a shiny interface and clicking repeatedly on the “next” button. You have to use a “bootstrap” system, which can be a livecd such as the awesome sysrescuecd, but you also can decide to first install a binary distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu (you may probably already have one, so you obviously can use it).

When you have booted your “bootstrap” system, there will be 3 steps:

• Mounting the target partition to anywhere in your filesystem, like /mnt/newsystem
• Unpacking the base filesystem of your distribution into that folder (these are commonly called “stages tarballs”)
• Chrooting into this folder (you may have to mount several subsystems such as /dev beforehand, refer to the distribution documentation)

One you have chrooted, you will actually be (for the current shell) in your bare new system. However you can start to manage and install it from a shell within your “bootstrap” system that you can hopefully use to work during the installation. Note that you can also leave your computer do all the compilations during your idle time at night.

Here are two install guides that I recommend you to follow:

• Gentoo install guide
• Exherbo install guide

Paludis, the other package mangler

Now that you have all the minimal informations needed to understand what is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution and to understand how it works globally, We’ll give a closer look to the heart of the distribution: the package manager.

On Gentoo, the official package manager is portage, with the emerge command line. I used it the first weeks I tried Gentoo, but when I really wanted to play with my system, it was too restrictive so I decided to switch. Moreover, portage is written in python (so are a lot of core components of gentoo), and when your python installation gets broken… Game over.

When exploring the list of available packages, I found out paludis and decided to give it a try. Thanks to a provided script, I translated roughly my portage configuration to a paludis one (Paludis can use portage configuration but this is not recommended). It was not perfect, but was a good start. After cleaning and updating it a little by myself (the documentation is really exhaustive), I could start using it. The man pages are also really complete.

You can see my current configuration here: https://github.com/Keruspe/paludis-config. A first configuration will be a lot lighter, this is a configuration that have evolved during 4 years, from Gentoo to Exherbo.

Paludis command line cave is a modular tool which allow you to do a lot of things. Basically everything you would ever want to do, and some more.

The main cave subcommands are:

• cave resolve looks for the whole dependency tree of a package, in pretend mode by default, and you then can apply this resolution (to install stuff) by specifying the -x argument
• cave uninstall is the pendent of cave resolve for uninstalling
• cave purge looks for unused packages (as for all commands, pretending by default, and execution with -x)
• cave fix-linkage looks for broken binaries (because of libraries updates) and suggest you to rebuild them.

A lot of other subcommands are available, and a lot of options for each of these. Amongst other things, cave allows you to stop the installation process at a certain phase, or resume at another. This allows you to abort at compile phase to apply custom patches, and them resume at compile phase to compile the package with your patches applied. It also support a hooks mechanism.

We’ll see some more advanced paludis features in a next post of the knowing your system saga.

Last thing, The way I update my system is:

cave sync
cave resolve world -c -km -Km -Cs

It syncs repositories with upstream to get latest versions of the packages, and then resolve world which is the set containing all the packages you have installed, with a complete dependency tree, as deep as it can, with -c aka --complete and reinstalling all packages for which metadata have changed because of -km -Km aka --keep if-same-metadata --keep-targets if-same-metadata. If a failure occurs, it continues to build the rest while the dependencies still are satisfied thanks to -Cs aka --continue-on-failure if-satisfied. I then run this last command again with -x aka --execute to apply the available updates.

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After a little reminder on UNIX-like systems and a quick view to the init process, we’ll now see the kind of distributions which I really love, where you really control everything.

What is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution?

The principle may be a bit scary, but is actually simple.

In most distributions (called binary distributions), software are packaged to be “ready to use”, all configured by the distribution maintainers, and you then get a list of available packages that you can install. When you ask for a package to be installed, it will download the software and its dependencies and install everything.

In source-based, the package manager will also handle all the dependencies, downloading and installing stuff. The thing which changes with them is the thing you actually download, and what is being done between the downloading and the installing phases of the process.

Instead of downloading the software, the package mangler will download its source code, unpack it, configure it and then compile it. You’re basically compiling your whole system with those distributions.

Why “wasting” that much time makes sense?

As you probably know, compiling can be very long. It mostly depends on your hardware, and most of the projects will compile in a couple of minutes, but some of them, like the compiler itself or your web browser can take up to several hours on certain boxes.

This can be seen as a PITA but this is the price of real liberty. With source-based distributions, you can choose which components of each software you want to build, and exactly which options you want. With binary distributions, if you’re missing a feature, you’ll have to do everything by yourself outside your package manager, and this will really be a PITA to maintain. With source-based distribution, it’s way easier to contribute, as we’ll see in a later post of this saga of posts. The package does not contain all the binaries, it’s just a text file you have to edit to add an option you’re missing. Everything becomes easier to customize, you become the God of your system.

You must also keep in mind that while you’re compiling stuff, your system is still fully usable, so you can just do it in background.

The Gentoo example: My beginning with source-based distributions

My first GNU/Linux distribution was Ubuntu, which seemed to be popular (and which still is), a binary distribution of course. I was quite happy with it for the first months, but as soon as I wanted to explore my system more deeply, like compiling my own kernel, or when I wanted to do really specific operations, I was immediately limited by the design of this distribution.

I was a student at this time, and my class-mate (and now colleague) Kevin Decherf told me he was using Gentoo. on his server. I immediately asked him if he agreed to plan an Install Party the week just after that. During this session, I installed a minimal system, discovering the distribution. At the end of the day, it was barely booting to an xterm.

I wanted to really explore my distribution to understand exactly how everything works, so I started “playing” with it, modifying packages, checking how things reacted. I broke my system and reinstalled it 5 times in 3 weeks, playing harder and harder, until I knew how to make my system work again after a wanted major breakage.

You really should try source-based distributions, to really get how things work. It can take a few months to understand them if you just play a little with them on an irregular basis, but it’s really worth it. Gentoo was my choice since it’s the most popular source-based distribution, and the only one I heard of at this time. It’s quite good, but you’ll see in my next post that I didn’t really like its default package manager, and I no longer use Gentoo.

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Usually, every Thursday I publish another post in my “Knowing your system” saga, but this week I was busy working on facron. I plan to publish the part three on next Monday, it will be about source-based GNU/Linux distributions.

What’s in this release?

Since last time I wrote about it, a few things have changed: the code is more robust and much cleaner, and several improvements have been made:

• You’re now able to pass arguments containing spaces if you surround them with quotes or double quotes in the configuration file.
• The fanotify flags handling have slightly changed with a new separator, the comma. If you specify FAN_MODIFY|FAN_CLOSE_WRITE,FAN_OPEN the event caught will be: either FAN_MODIFY AND FAN_CLOSE_WRITE, or FAN_OPEN.
• $@ is now the dirname of the file, $# the basename ($$ is still the full path)
• A manual is now provided
• A systemd service is now provided (supporting the reload action to reload the configuration)
• You can now pass the --background argument to facron to launch it in background on non-systemd systems.

How do I get it?

The release tarball is available there: https://github.com/Keruspe/facron/downloads.

You must have fanotify included in your kernel (most recent systems should have it by default).

Here are the steps you need to run in order to get it up and running:

wget https://github.com/downloads/Keruspe/facron/facron-0.9.tar.xz
tar xf facron-0.9.tar.xz
cd facron-0.9
./configure --sysconfdir=/etc --with-systemdsystemunitdir=/usr/lib/systemd/system
make
sudo make install

Then just create your configuration file as I said in the previous post or following the manual instructions (man facron).

When everything is ready, you just have to run

sudo systemctl start facron.service

Or for non-systemd systems

sudo facron --background

If you edit the configuration file, you can reload it without restarting the daemon by running

sudo systemctl reload facron.service

Or for non-systemd systems

sudo kill -USR1 $(pidof facron)

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute!

It’s available on github: https://github.com/Keruspe/facron

The filesystem cron principle

At Clever Cloud, we often have to manage stuff based on filesystem events. In order to react dynamically, we will sometimes have to reload some specific configurations when the config file has changed, or we’ll want to wrap some files which just appeared to grab them in the global flow.

Filesystem crons allow you to do this kind of things. What you have to do is specify the files you want to monitor with the events you want to react to and the action you want to proceed when those events occur.

Incron

Incron is the filesystem cron we’ve been using so far. It’s based on the inotify linux system. Inotify was the replacement to dnotify which has been deprecated for quite a long time now. Thanks to inotify, incron watches for filesystem changes and act accordingly, given the configuration file you provide.

Incron does not support FUSE which is used by several filesystems, since inotify doesn’t support it either.

We experienced quite a few instabilities with incron which was not as reliable as we expected, ending up with ugly bash hacks to do the job correctly. That’s why I decided we needed our own solution.

Facron

Facron is my vision of the filesystem cron problematic. It is based on the “new” fanotify ABI which is more reliable and have better performances than the now deprecated inotify one. I started to write it two days ago, it’s at a stage where it’s usable. It’s not yet perfect and I want to improve it a little but you already can try it.

The configuration file (/etc/facron.conf) looks like:

/path/to/a/file FAN_MODIFY|FAN_EVENT_ON_CHILD /path/to/script fromFacron $$

The first element is the file or directory to watch (of course multiple lines are supported), the second one corresponds to all fanotify events that you want to follow, and then your script or application (full path is recommended) + arguments. $$ is a special token which will be replaced by the full path of the file which has emitted the event.

The available fanotify events are:

• FAN_ACCESS
• FAN_MODIFY
• FAN_CLOSE_WRITE
• FAN_CLOSE_NOWRITE
• FAN_OPEN
• FAN_Q_OVERFLOW
• FAN_OPEN_PERM
• FAN_ACCESS_PERM
• FAN_ONDIR
• FAN_EVENT_ON_CHILD
• FAN_CLOSE
• FAN_ALL_EVENTS
• FAN_ALL_PERM_EVENTS
• FAN_ALL_OUTGOING_EVENTS

Two more special tokens will appear: $@ which will contain the dirname of the file, and $# which will contain its basename.

A systemd service file and a release tarball will be provided soon.

You can reload the configuration at any time by sending a SIGUSR1 to facron:

kill -USR1 $(pidof facron)

It’s available there, get it while it’s hot!

What’s new?

• Fix memory leak when handling images
• Fix duplicated images in history
• Fix “changed” signal in GPasteSettings

Introduction to clipboard managers

I started to use some clipboards manager a few years ago. If you’re a developer and you don’t use one yet, I highly recommend you to do so!

What is a clipboard manager?

A clipboard manager is a tool which allows you to keep a trace of what you’re copying and pasting. Is is really useful when you go through tons of documentation and you want to keep around a bunch of functions you might want to use, for example. The clipboard manager will store an history of everything you do, so that you can get back to older copies you now want to paste.

If you never tried using one, download and install one and give it a try for a few days. Chances are high that you’ll immediately get addicted.

Which one should I use?

Well, it depends on your operating system. If you’re on a non UNIX-like one, I won’t be of great help to find yours. If you’re running Mac OS X, a lot of friends of mine use JumpCut and are really happy with it.

If you’re running a GNU/Linux system like me, here is my experience:

I tried around ten different clipboards manager. I used parcellite for a couple of years, it was kinda great and lightweight. But then it got unmaintained and used some deprecated stuff. I then forked it and made parcellite3 which was parcellite ported to gtk+-3 and with many bugs fixed. But then I was not happy at all with the way it worked internally. At this time, I was student at university and wanted to learn vala (which is a great language by the way) and decided to write my own clipboard manager: GPaste. GPaste aims to be a new generation parcellite. For some reasons, I since rewrote a large part of it in C, but that will be another story in another post.

GPaste structure is really modular. It’s split in a few libraries:

• libgpaste-setting to handle user settings using dconf
• libgpaste-keybinder to handle keybindings leading to actions in the daemon
• libgpaste-core is the place where the history and the items composing it are managed
• libgpaste-daemon is a set of functions to create your own GPaste daemon
• libgpaste-client is a set of function to easily create your own client application

All these libraries are written with a full gobject-introspection compatibility, so you can use them from any compatible language (python, javascript, perl…). Vala bindings are also shipped.

On top of these libraries, the components of the GPaste stack are:

• gpasted, the daemon which is available over dbus
• gpaste, a command line tool to manage gpasted
• gpaste-settings, a graphical interface to manager GPaste settings
• gpaste-applet, the legacy applet which shows you the list of the history managed by GPaste
• gnome-shell-extensions-gpaste, a gnome-shell extension similar to gpaste-applet

All development takes place on github, so feel free to contribute and to test it!

GPaste is packaged by myself for the exherbo GNU/Linux distribution and by other people for ubuntu, fedora, debian, archlinux and frugalware, at least.

As we last saw, when we start an UNIX-like system, the kernel gives the hand to a main process called “init”. We’ll now see how it works.

The goal of the init process

The init process is the most important software running on your system. Its goal is to start everything up in order for your system to work properly. It will manage everything, report errors (and maybe act regarding them) and supervise everything. When a process gets orphaned (because its father process, the one which started it, exits or dies), init will automatically become its father process.

The init process allows you to get a trace of what your processes are doing, where they do come from, and whether they’re in a decent or zombie state.

The legacy System V init

UNIX System V is probably the most known UNIX system. It was one of the most used operating systems in the 80s-90s for servers. Its init system is the base of most of our actual systems’ ones.

SysVInit design splits the boot process into several steps (usually 6 or 7 for recent versions) called “runlevels”:

• the runlevel 0 corresponds to the system shutdown
• the runlevel 1 corresponds to the “single user” mode, it’s the step when the system’s basic components are started
• the runlevel 2 corresponds to the “multi user” mode, all things that do not require networking are started there
• the runlevel 3 corresponds to the “multi user with network” mode, all things requiring networking are started there
• the runlevel 4 is usually unused, you can use it for specific custom purpose
• the runlevel 5 usually starts the graphical user interface, but a lot of distributions already does it in runlevel 3
• the runlevel 6 is used to reboot the system

Services that need to be started when you start the system must provide what is called an “init script” which will tell SysVInit how to start the said service. This is usually a bash script which takes as argument either start, stop or restart. If none is provided by upstream, you still can write your own one. You then assign these services to some runlevels, and they will be started in a random order when SysVInit will reach this runlevel. Usually they are started in alphabetical order so you can specify the order you want by prefixing the init scripts with a numerical value such as “03” or “99” so start in n early or late stage of this runlevel. Everything is done one after another, each task waits for the previous one to finish before starting.

In /etc/inittab, you specify which runlevel you want to reach by default at startup, so you can tell it to stop at runlevel 3 for example. You will be able later to run “init 5” to start everything for example. You also can run “init 6” which is equivalent to “reboot” or “init 0” which is equivalent to “shutdown now”

The new generation init systems

Here are four examples of alternatives to SysVInit. There are other but these are the most used.

OpenRC

OpenRC is Gentoo’s init process. It is not a standalone one as it relies on SysVInit, it’s only there to add handy features and performance to SysVInit.

OpenRC allows you to explicitly specify dependencies between services, which makes the task a lot easier than having to prepend numbers to services names. It also adds the ability to get configuration files separated from init scripts.

Runit

Runit is a replacement to SysVInit that also handles runlevels. It is not compatible with the legacy ones, though. Runit splits the init process into three runlevels named “stages”:

• the stage 1 corresponds to the system initialization. If anything goes wrong here, runit drops you to a rescue shell.
• the stage 2 corresponds to everything that needs to be started (like SysVInit’s runlevel 5)
• the stage 3 corresponds to shutdown tasks.

Runit can read and handle SysVInit runlevels through an external compatibility layer called runsvdir but this is not how it is intended to be run.

Runit’s goal is to be as small and light as possible, it does exactly what you ask it to, and nothing more. You end up with a system as small as possible, but you must not forget anything since it won’t automatically do it for you.

Upstart

Upstart is an Ubuntu attempt to make the system boot faster. It is fully event-driven and hence only waits for stuff that needs to be waited for when it starts every process needed by the system. It allows to start all these processes in parallel making them wait for dependencies only once they need them. When a process fails or crashes, Upstart can handle this event to restart it automatically.

Upstart is fully compatible with SysVInit and the transition should be smooth and quite easy. Some software may need specific init scripts though, especially to take advantage of upstart features.

systemd

systemd (yes, no caps here) is Red Hat’s attempt to make the boot smarter (and thus faster), especially for its desktop distribution: Fedora. systemd is widely inspired from Upstart, the Upstart’s TODO list, and from Apple’s Mac OS X init system: launchd.

systemd is as lazy as possible. It does not handle “runlevels” but rather “targets”. Everything handled by systemd is called a “unit”. A unit can either be a “target” (runlevel equivalent) or a “service” (the software itself), a “socket”, a “mount” operation, an “automount” operation or even a “timer” (cron-like) which will run your service in a regular fashion.

Some targets are provided by default but you can create your owns as you wish, with the names you want. You can specify which target has to be reached by default at system startup. In each unit, you can specify before or after which unit it should be started, whether it requires or is required by other units, if it conflicts with other units, and to which target it belongs. This allows systemd to know which targets and services it should start before starting the specified default target. To each target corresponds a target.wants directory, where the unit which should be started with this target are symbolic-linked. The sockets and mount operations are kinda more specific. Mount and automount operations are auto-generated from /etc/fstab (auto-mounting means that the filesystem appears to be mounted, but it really is mounted only once it has been accessed, which leads to a consequent gain of time). If a socket unit corresponds to a service one, systemd supports the socket activation of this service, which means that the service will really be started only when another service starts to communicate with it.

systemd is a real source of conflict between people against it and people in favor of it. The main argument of people which are against it is that it does too many things, it’s too complex and ships too many functionalities. I think this is a fake problem, since most of the functionalities are optional (and thus can be disabled), and everything is split into several binaries (systemd doesn’t do all this stuff itself but calls tools that it ships to do so). It is fully modular, and not modular like its “opponents”.

One of the interesting tools provided by systemd is the “journal”. The journal is basically a logging utility directly integrated in the init process (well, it actually only communicates with it, it’s not really in it). This allows you to get rid of an external logging utility such as syslog-ng or rsyslog. You can browse all the logs with the “journalctl” command which allows you to apply a lot of filters on them.

A really interesting serie of blog posts by Lennart Poettering (systemd’s lead developer) is available here.

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Before starting to blog about more technical stuff, I’d like to recall a few basis about UNIX-like systems.

I use a GNU/Linux based distribution most of the time, so I’ll speak about this kind of system, but most of it is true for any UNIX-like system such as the BSDs and Mac OS X.

What is GNU/Linux ?

First of all, let’s make things clear: I’m talking about “GNU/Linux”, not Linux. What is the difference? Linux is “only” a kernel, the heart of your system. Linux is the piece of your OS which will provide you several interfaces to interact with the hardware and to manage your processes. GNU is a set of libraries (a set of utilities for a developer) and tools such as the well known glibc, gcc, tar and sed. GNU is used most of the time on top of Linux, but can be used on top of other kernels, like Debian shown us with its GNU/kFreeBSD version.

GNU/Linux is not a full system, it’s only the kernel with only a few set of core components on top of it. This set can be distributed in several different ways, with different team managing them: the GNU/Linux distributions. The most common desktop distributions are:

• Debian GNU/Linux
• Ubuntu GNU/Linux (Which is Debian-based)
• Fedora GNU/Linux

It’s better with colors

These distributions provide the GNU/Linux set packaged with a bunch of other software, like a graphical environment (aka desktop/window manager). The most common desktop managers are:

• GNOME
• KDE
• XFCE

But there is also another kind of desktop managers which become more and more popular, like:

• xmonad
• i3
• awesome

They all run on top of a graphical server which aim is to display what we ask it to: X11. A new compositor (a part of a graphical server) is raising: wayland. Wayland will allow application to be a lot more flexible and will improve performances, but it will be lazier (applications will have to do more stuff by themselves).

The X.org server, wayland, and all related libraries and tools are part of the freedesktop project. Freedesktop aims to provide a free and opensource grapical user experience to everyone.

A GNU/Linux system structure.

On a UNIX-like system, everything is a file. A folder is just a specific kind of file, which can contain some other files. Each piece of harware stuff is seen as a file. You write and read this file to interact with the real hardware. All of these files are stored in a tree respecting the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

• / is the parent folder of everything, we call it “slash”.
• /boot is the folder where everything needed by the bootloader (The menu where you select which OS to start) is stored.
• /dev contains all the files corresponding to hardware devices or core functionalities.
• /etc contains all the system-wide configuration files.
• /home contains the personal directories of the users.
• /media used to be the place where external storage devices used to be automounted (the place where we accessed their files).
• /mnt is the place where we explicitly mount external (or internal) storage devices.
• /opt is the place where we put software we install system-wide using automatic installers
• /proc contains data specific to currently running processes
• /root is the home directory of “root” (administrator)
• /tmp is the place where are stored temporary data
• /var is the place where will be stored variable content such as logs and databases content
• /run is the folder used by software to store runtime specific data
• /run/media is the replacement to the deprecated /media
• /lib is the place where are stored libraries (there also can be /lib32 and/or /lib64)
• /bin is the place where the executables are stored
• /sbin is the place where administrative executables are stored
• /usr (unix shared resources) is a legacy directory where we used to put all the binaries, libraries and data which were not necessary to boot the system, when the main hard drive was too small to store everything. It’s now becoming the standard place in which are moved /bin, /sbin and /lib.

There is now a standard filesystem hierarchy for data stored in each user home directory, guided by freedesktop: The XDG base directory specification.

The GNU/Linux boot process

When you start your computer, you (usually) get to a bootloader. This bootloader asks you to select which system you want to start. What you actually do when you select an entry is to select a couple of informations:

• A kernel (you can have several ones installed at the same time, but you only boot using one of them).
• The part of your hard drive where your system lays.
• Extra configuration for your kernel.

When your kernel has successfully initialized everything, it then gives the power to a root process, commonly called “init”, which goal is to track all the other processes that you and your system will run. The init process will then reach a few breakpoints (which can be called runlevels, or targets). To each of these breakpoints correspond a list of process that must be started. This is how all the root components of your system are started in the right order. One of the last things to start is the graphical interface.

Next chapter

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Welcome

It has been a long time since I first wanted to get a blog.

I’ll mostly speak here about free software and stuff I like to hack, from sysadmin to development and debugging. I write code mostly in Java for my job, but my language of choice is the C for my personal projects. This is why this blog is written in haskell.

Just to be clear, what I mean by sysadmin is not

sudo apt-get install kde

I’m a source-based distributions enthusiast and prefer tutorials and tips about raw software over distro-specific ones.

Special thanks

This blog is powered by Hakyll.

It was written by Clément Delafargue and I shamelessly stole it from him.

This blog is available as a git repository and hosted on The Clever Cloud which is the company I work for.