SL7DICEEnvironment < DICE < TWiki https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/SL7DICEEnvironment TWiki > DICE Web > ResearchAndTeachingUnit > SL7DICEEnvironment (04 Mar 2015, GrahamDutton) CompProj:311 - SL7 DICE Environment Project homepage for porting of the DICE environment software packages to the LCFG SL7 platform. The Observations section is also (occasionally!) updated. This page was referred to during the SL7Meeting20150106. CompProj:311 - SL7 DICE Environment 2015-02-22 - Alpine gripes 2015-02-19 - Display blanking 2015-02-18 - Switch flipped! 2015-02-18 - Development meeting talk 2015-02-10 - Towards a usable desktop 2015-01-27 - "Remaining" Tasks 2015-01-25 - New environment package lists 20 Nov 2014 - More login ramblings 12 Nov 2014 - Update 09 Nov 2014 - The Display Manager 07 Nov 2014 - More notes 04 Nov 2014 — Observations on SL7 so far 07 Oct 2014 - Notes on KDE 29 Sep 2014 - Proposal 24 Sep 2014 - discussion 1. What is the _env list for? 2. What constitutes "environment"? 2015-02-22 - Alpine gripes A roundup of two irritating issues with alpine ("updated" to 2.11 but I haven't checked its provenance yet; this is not a release from the original UW maintainers) as I found it on SL7: The packaged "default" speller hunspell (actually an RPM dependency), seems very poor in its default mode of operation. It's tripping over contractions and all sorts of words it should be able to avoid (and the SL6 speller has no problem with). attempts to open links in my web browser of choice (a custom w3m wrapper) fail because apparently the $HOME in my mailcap file (alpine uses mailcap's text/html entry) isn't being evaluated any more. Easily fixed but a strange change of behaviour. 2015-02-19 - Display blanking Investigated one case where a desktop display wouldn't sleep of its own accord (we won't be running a screensaver on the lightdm greeter, but we'd still expect displays to power down on machines that don't sleep). It appears that the X DPMS library was lying to us, or being lied to by the monitor, which claimed to be off (state "3"). Explicitly setting it back on (state 0) caused everything to work again as it should. I couldn't see any root cause, but noticed an EDID error in the system log. If anyone spots this behaviour on an SL7 machine, just get in touch. I'd rather we found and fixed the problem than had to deploy anything ... 2015-02-18 - Switch flipped! Apologies for the delay. Customisable login screens are here. Good sources of information on the customisation setup: $ man lcfg-webpic <dice/options/webpic.h> by "default" I've gone with an image of my own creation but I anticipate different sites / labs / machines functions will take advantage of the customisation. Exam PCs and "kiosk" machines, for example, will require custom setups. Remember that these values can all use LCFG template interpolation so it would be straightforward to advertise, for 1 of 8 02/11/16 18:17 SL7DICEEnvironment < DICE < TWiki https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/SL7DICEEnvironment example, which groups of users were permitted to log into a given machine. Added summary documentation at LoginScreens (authoritative webpic documentation will of course remain with the component). Notes about dice-getres: Note that there's a possible bootstrapping problem in the use of getres to provide background resolution: if lightdm starts before webpic no background will have been configured, and if webpic starts before the lightdm X session, there's a possibility no resolution can be determined and the component might either fail or fall back to default resolution. We'll see how bad this is in practice before investing any effort to fix it given that, either way, it can be solved with a single reconfigure. This could be related to Bug:847 but, no surprise, more investigation is required. A possible (extreme) solution would be to call webpic as part of the lightdm pre-greeter script, dissolving the webpic component into lightdm. 2015-02-18 - Development meeting talk Some outline points for today's talk. Package lists These are mostly (all?) in place. I'll explain which ones are where, what they're for, how to choose between them. devel package sets new rules for devel packages, and how to access them. Package list inclusion and why this isn't part of this project, but more of a negotiation with machine managers. When not to use package lists Where else to look before resorting to one. Pending changes to the workflow This includes streamlined "yummy" list generation and an as-yet undefined process for promoting packages to option sets. Suggestions? This has been designed so far towards RAT workflow, but we're not the only ones adding packages. If we rattle through the above I can talk about some of the side tasks attached to this project. Login screen: lcfg-webpic and included tools rasterize.js, getres update: documented in LoginScreens Alternative window managers: MATE, wmii, fvwm2, and the use of xscreensaver and idle_curiosity. bash default .rc names: again, this is a discussion first and foremost. already discussed: .brc remains (but .bashrc is supported!) There is outstanding work attached to X config including .xinit infrastructure (including the screensaver and idle_curiosity) and wmii/fvwm2 default config. UPDATE: points raised during the talk: building custom bash: RAT need to rebuild "our" bash patches for SL7. Or rather include them: I reckon I built the package some time ago... Subversion the version mismatch is getting annoying for those of us straddling operating systems. I'll deploy svn-1.7 to SL6 machines after a sys-announce notice period. Alternative WMs we should document Gnome → MATE and other alternatives. Don't forget Cinnamon would be a nice extra alternative in addition to MATE. Liaise with Alastair about enforcing / encouraging xscreensaver on other desktop managers I need to export my handy yumtopklist script into the utils directory (I realise now I was hoping to add partitioning by package source, first) this is done. Other packages: missing the cosignego stack. 2015-02-10 - Towards a usable desktop Since last update... 2 of 8 02/11/16 18:17 SL7DICEEnvironment < DICE < TWiki https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/SL7DICEEnvironment Package lists have been tweaked and streamlined, and the rules for their use improved, though this hasn't been heavily tested yet. The -devel package lists have been moved into the env lists, with instructions to add the packges wherever possible. Plenty of new "base" packages added to the environment lists as appropriate. This is of course ongoing and we're currently investigating problems with pidgin and SASL/GSSAPI authentication against the Informatics XMPP server (everything else seems to work(!)) The MATE environment has been added as an alternative desktop/WM. fvwm2 is soon to join them. The lcfg-webpic component has been completed, allowing fully dynamic control of the lightdm greeter's appearance. A major goal of this development was to allow "unusual" configurations to take advantage of alternative login screens without the effort involved in SL6, for example on lab exam desktops. However in addition to this the dynamic nature of the component (allowing full content control from LCFG, local file or even web if required) means it can have much wider utility, for example displaying lab status or site information. A last-minute addition to the lcfg-webpic infrastructure is the dice-getres utility which retrieves the resolution of the primary display so that background images can be presented correctly at (theoretically) any resolution. Progress on the sleep-compatibility of non-standard desktop environments continues as part of the idle_curiosity project. Numerious other little tweaks here and there... Also since the last update I'm attempting to change the way effort is reported against this project, so I'm trying to attribute even tenuous, tangential development effort against the SL7 project if at all possible. 2015-01-27 - "Remaining" Tasks The bulk of the blocking work has now been done, so I ought to recap what remains. Not all of this falls strictly under the remit of this project so I'll link to alternative tracking sources where they become apparent. Guidance documentation on where to add packages - the new package lists aren't the only / best place to add optional packages. Actually adding packages! This will be done under guidance from RAT or the documentation as above. Yummy modifications to support generation of the package lists. Mechanism to produce rpms lists from yummy files - in consultation with MPU. ~Mechanism for delivery of devel packages: this will depend on the above mechanism.~ ~Additional options for window management~ Compatibility of non-standard desktop environments with sleep [this is definitely off-project but part of some ongoing CPD] 2015-01-25 - New environment package lists I'll talk more about the rationale as part of the next update, but in collaboration with Stephen I've reworked the SL7 environment lists and made plans for the next stage to ease management. I removed most of the provisional env lists which had been put in place: REMOVED dice_el7_*.rpms : we don't need to handle any difference between SL7 and EL7 at the DICE layer. Should we require it, I'd propose renaming each SL7 file to its EL7 equivalent and using a simple #include in the SL7 file to manage only the differences. REMOVED dice_[es]l7_desktop.rpms : we no longer want to have a definition of "desktop" at the package list level. This should live at the header level, allowing each type of machine to pick package lists as appropriate REMOVED dice_[es]l7_env.rpms : the env list has been heavily abused.