sunweaver's NET

Here comes the 3rd article of the 5-episode blog post series on Polis, written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH.

Enjoy also this read on Guido's work on Polis,
Mike

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

1. Introduction
2. Initial evaluation and adaptation
3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals (this article)
4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
5. Current status and roadmap

Polis - Issues extending Polis and adjusting our Goals

After the [initial implementation of limited branding support][1], user feedback and the involvement of an UX designer lead to the conclusion that we needed more far-reaching changes to the user interface in order to reduce visual clutter, rearrange and improve UI elements, and provide better integration with the websites in which conversations are embedded.

Challenges when visualizing Data in Polis

Polis visualizes groups using a spatial projection of users based on [similarities in voting behavior][4] and places them in two to five groups using a [clustering algorithm][5]. ![Polis conversation][6] During our testing and evaluation users were rarely able to interpret the visualization and often intuitively made incorrect assumptions e.g. by associating the filled area of a group with its significance or size.

Lomiri Weather App goes Open Meteo

In Ubuntu Touch / Lomiri, Maciej Sopyło has updated Lomiri's Weather App to operate against a different weather forecast provider (Open Meteo). Additionally, the new implementation is generic and pluggable, so other weather data providers can be added-in later.

Big thanks to Maciej for working on this just in time (the previous implementation's API has recently been EOL'ed and is not available anymore to Ubuntu Touch / Lomiri users).

Lomiri Weather App - new Meteorological Terms part of the App now

While the old weather data provider implementation obtained all the meteorological information as already localized strings from the provider, the new implementation requires all sorts of weather conditions being translated within the Lomiri Weather App itself.

The meteorological terms are probably not easy to translate for the usual software translator, so special help might be required here.

Call for Translations: Lomiri Weather App

So, if you feel entitled to help here, please join the Hosted Weblate service [1] and start working on Lomiri Weather App.

Thanks a lot!

light+love
Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver)

[1] https://hosted.weblate.org/
[2] https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/lomiri/lomiri-weather-app/

Here comes the 2nd article of the 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH.

Enjoy also this read on Guido's work on Polis,
Mike

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

1. Introduction
2. Initial evaluation and adaptation (this article)
3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
5. Current status and roadmap

Polis - Initial evaluation and adaptation

The [Polis code base][4] consists of a number of components, the administration and participation interfaces, a common web backend, and a statistics processing server. Both frontends and the backend are written in a mixture of JavaScript and TypeScript, only the statistics processing server is written in Clojure.

In case of self hosting the preferred method of deployment is via Docker containers using Docker Compose or any other orchestrator.

This is the first article of a 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Thanks, Guido for being on the Polis project.

Enjoy the read on the work Guido has been doing over the past months,
Mike

A team lead by Raoul Kramer/[BetaBreak][2] is currently adapting [Polis][3] for evaluation and testing by several Dutch provincial governments and central government ministries. [Guido Berhörster][8] (author of this article) who is an employee at [Fre(i)e Software GmbH][1] has been involved in this project as the main software developer. This series of blog posts describes how and why Polis was initially modified and adapted, what issues the team ran into and how this ultimately lead them to start a new Open Source project called [Particiapp][7] for accelerating the development of alternative Polis frontends compatible to but independent from the upstream project.

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

1. Introduction (this article)
2. Initial evaluation and adaptation
3. Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
5. Current status and roadmap

Polis - The Introduction

What is Polis?

Polis is a platform for participation which helps to gather, analyze and understand viewpoints of large groups of participants on complex issues.

This is a call for testing of Debian Edu based on Debian bookworm. With the Debian 12.5 point release all required packages have landed in the Debian Edu ISO images that allow you to install a Debian Edu system based on Debian 12.

ISO Image Downloads

You can find the Blueray Disc ISO image (use for main server installation) at: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/amd64/iso-bd/debian-ed...

For standalone workstation installations or installations on an already up-and-running Debian Edu site, please use the netinst ISO image: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/amd64/iso-cd/debian-ed...

Quick Start HowTo

For testing Debian Edu 12, set up e.g. LXD or libVirt and install (at least) three virtual machines. In your virtualization software prepare an internal network where the VMs can reach one another without needing access to your local network.

The three VMs:

• setup a gateway VM (no DHCP service) at 10.0.0.1/8 (e.g. OPNsense, pfSense, Debian Edu Router, etc.), two NICs: one uplink, one NIC in the internal network
• install the Debian Edu mainserver from the ISO image on another VM, one NIC in the internal network
• then boot a 3rd VM via PXE and install your first workstation, on NIC in the internal network

Happy testing!

Yesterday, the UBports core developer team released Ubuntu Touch Focal OTA-1

(In fact, Raoul, Marius and I were in a conference call when Marius froze and said: the PR team already posted the release blog post; the post is out, but we haven't released yet... ahhhh... panic... Shall I?, Marius said, and we said: GO!!! This is why the release occurred in public five hours ahead of schedule. OMG.)

For all the details, please study:
https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-ota-1-focal-re...

Credits

Thanks to all the developers, other contributors and funding providers that helped to reach this massive milestone.

Prologue

For over a year now, Fre(i)e Software GmbH (my company) is involved in Ubuntu Touch development. The development effort currently is handled by a mix of paid and voluntary developers/contributors under the umbrella of the UBports Foundation. We are approaching the official first release of Ubuntu Touch 20.04 with rapid pace.

And, if you are a non-Englisch native speaker, we'd like to ask you for help... Read below.

light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver at debian.org, Mastodon, IRC, etc.)

Internationalization (i18n) of Ubuntu Touch 20.04

The UBports team has moved most of the translation workflows for localizing Ubuntu Touch over to Hosted Weblate:

• https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/lomiri/
• https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/ayatana-indicators/
• https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/ubports/
• https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/open-store-io/

To contribute to the UBports projects you need to register here:

• https://hosted.weblate.org/accounts/register/

The localization platform of all UBports / Lomiri components is sponsored by Hosted Weblate via their free hosting plan for Libre and Open Source Projects. Many thanks for providing this service.

Translating Lomiri

The translation components in the Lomiri project have already been set up and are ready for being updated by translators.

What is Ubuntu Touch? (And what does sunweaver have to do with it?)

With Ubuntu Touch, the UBports Foundation offers a truly unique mobile experience - a viable alternative to Android and iOS. The UBports community provides a free and open-source GNU/Linux-based mobile operating system. One that can be installed and used today.

Currently, there is an intensive effort going on lifting Ubuntu Touch from its current Ubuntu 16.04 base up to an Ubuntu 20.04 base. (And very soon after that to an Ubuntu 22.04 base...).

With the Ubuntu Touch 20.04 base the progress bar is already at (I'd say) 89%, but we recently got hit by a drawback.

I am currently involved in the Ubuntu Touch core development team at UBports and on medium short notice our current ARM64 server sponsor has announced to decommission our ARM64 build server that currently powers all the ARM64 and armhf CI builds.

Call for Hardware Sponsoring

So, the UBports core development team is currently desperately looking for a sponsor (or a few sponsors) who can provide us with (datacenter-hosted) ARM-based CPU power. It is important, that also 32-bit ARM builds are possible with the hardware provided.

For testing, I recently ordered a HoneyComb LX2 (by SolidRun) as a possible solution (multi-node in the end), but the board arrived in a non-usable state, it seems. So this also didn't work out as easy as expected.

As the former provider/sponsor is about to pull the plug, this call for help is kind of urgent. Please get in touch if you can help us out or know people who can.

Thanks!!!

For those, who haven't realized, yet: MATE 1.26 has now been uploaded to Debian and should be available in Debian testing to all happy testers.

During December, me and the whole family, we had been infected with Covid-19. All of us have recovered well, by now. In fact, I was very happy about a proper fever which I haven't had in years. (Fever is a well-known form of cancer prevention / prophylaxis). Drinking a lot (of warm water!), not eating for five days, and additionally following some health practices from the natural healing context supported the recovery process really well.

The MATE 1.26 DEB package preparations had been done while sitting in bed with my hot water bottle in the back and a pot of honeyed thyme tea next to me on the window sill. Things were getting too boring while being sick, so the monotonous wrapping up of +/- 40 desktop environment DEB packages was a welcome change then (and not too complex for the reduced brain activity of mine, either).

Hope, that MATE 1.26 in Debian works well for many Debian users. I also plan to bring MATE 1.26 to bullseye-backports soon (second half of January, probably).

light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver at debian.org)

More as a reminder to myself, but possibly also helpful to other people who want to use Firefox on a tablet running Debian...

Without the below adjustment, finger gestures in Firefox running on a tablet result in image moving, text highlighting, etc. (operations related to copy+paste). Not the intuitively expected behaviour...

If you use e.g. GNOME on Wayland for your tablet and want to enable touch functionalities in Firefox, then switch the whole browser to native Wayland rendering. This line in ~/.profile seems to help:

export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

If you use a desktop environment running on top of X.Org, then make sure you have added the following line to ~/.profile:

export MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1

Logout/login again and Firefox should be scrollable with 2-finger movements up and down, zooming in and out also works then.

light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver at debian.org)