My first two books were written online using Pressbooks in a browser. A change in the company’s pricing model prompted me to migrate another edition of the second book to LaTeX. Many enjoyable hours were spent searching online for how to implement everything from the basics to special effects. After a year and a half a nearly finished book suddenly congealed.

Here’s what I’m using: Fedora’s TeX Live stack, Emacs (with AUCTeX and the memoir class), Evince, and the Citations flatpak, all on a GNOME desktop. The cover of the first book was done professionally by a friend. For the second book (first and second editions) I’ve used the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

For print on demand, Lulu.com. The company was founded by Bob Young, who (among other achievements) rejuvenated a local football team, coincidentally my dad’s (for nearly 80 years and counting). Lulu was one of the options recommended by Adam Hyde at the end of the Mallard book sprint hosted by Google. Our book didn’t get printed in time to take home, so  I uploaded it to Lulu and ordered a few copies with great results. My second book is also on Amazon’s KDP under another ISBN; I’m debating whether to do that again.

Does this all need to be done from GNOME? For me, yes. The short answer came from Richard Schwarting on the occasion of our Boston Summit road trip: “GNOME makes me happy.”

The long answer…
In my career working as a CAD designer in engineering, I’ve used various products by Autodesk (among others). I lived through the AutoCAD-MicroStation war of the 1990s on the side of MicroStation (using AutoCAD when necessary). MicroStation brought elegance to the battle, basing their PC and UNIX ports on their revolutionary new Mac interface. They produced a student version for Linux. After Windows 95 the war was over and mediocrity won.

Our first home computer was an SGI Indy, purchased right in the middle of that CAD war. Having experienced MicroStation on IRIX I can say it’s like running GNOME on a PC: elegant if not exquisite compared to the alternative.

For ten years I was the IT guy at a small engineering company. While carrying out my insidious plan of installing Linux servers and routers, I was able to indulge certain pastimes, building and testing XEmacs (formerly Lucid Emacs) and fledgling GNOME on Debian unstable/experimental. Through the SGI Linux effort I got to meet online acquaintances from Sweden, Mexico, and Germany in person at Ottawa Linux Symposium and Debconf .

At the peak of my IT endeavours, I was reading email in Evolution from OpenXchange Server on SuSE Enterprise Server while serving a Windows workstation network with Samba. When we were acquired by a much larger company, my Linux servers met with expedient demise as we were absorbed into their global Windows Server network. The IT department was regionalized and I was promoted back into the engineering side of things. It was after that I encountered the docs team.

These days I’m compelled to keep Windows in a Box on my GNOME desktop in order to run Autodesk software. It’s not unusual for me to grind my teeth while I’m working. A month ago a surprise hiatus in my day job was announced, giving me time to enjoy GNOME, finish the book, and write a blog post.

So yes, it has to be GNOME.

In 2004 I used LaTeX in XEmacs to write a magazine article that was ultimately published in the UK. This week, for old times’ sake, I installed XEmacs (no longer packaged for Fedora) on my desktop. This requires an EPEL 8 package on CentOS 9 in Boxes. It can be seen in the screenshot. The syntax highlighting is real but LaTeX-mode isn’t quite operational yet.

After World War II, Jack Kirby and his partner Joe Simon began their first foray into the genre of crime comics. (Kirby would return to the topic briefly in 1954 and 1971.) Beginning in 1947 and tailing into 1951, the stories appeared largely in Headline Comics and Justice Traps the Guilty for Crestwood’s Prize Publications. In 2011, Titan Books published a selection of these stories in hardcover, but sixty percent of the stories from this time period aren’t included in the book, and at least 20 stories have never been reprinted. Unlike Simon & Kirby’s much more prolific romance offerings, all of the comics in question are in the public domain and available on Digital Comic Museum and Comic Book Plus sites, thanks to multiple volunteers. I set about creating my own collection of scanned pages.

When the downloaded .cbz files are extracted into a folder, the resulting image files have names like scan00.jpg, scan01.jpg, etc. In GNOME Files, selecting all the files for a given issue and pressing F2 brings up the batch rename dialogue.

Selecting the Find and replace text option, I replace “scan” with the book title and issue number, with “p” as a separator for the page number.

When all the stories have been added, the pages will be sorted by title and issue number. To enable sorting chronologically, a four- or six-digit prefix can be used to specify the cover date, in this case “4706” for June 1947. To add this I press F2 on the same selected files and use the Rename using a template option.

Using the Jack Kirby Checklist as a guideline, and discarding (very few) stories for insufficient Kirby content, my project yielded a folder containing 633 pages including covers.

Jack Kirby (1917-1994) was a pioneer in American comic books. He grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City (where he encountered real and aspiring gangsters first hand) and fought in northeastern France in 1944 as an infantryman in Patton’s Third Army. As a partner in Simon and Kirby and the manager of the S&K studio, Kirby defined the word cartoonist—he generally wrote, penciled, inked, and occasionally coloured his own stories.

Jack Kirby photo property of the Kirby Estate. Used with permission.

Petr and I had an hour to kill on the final evening of the West Coast Hackfest. He’d heard about a local statue that needed to be seen (and photographed to prove we were there). Some research showed that it was a few blocks from the hotel, just over 200 m — the downtown blocks are 61 m on a side. In fact, we must have passed it every morning on the way to the bus stop.

We arrived at the site to find The Portland Building undergoing substantial renovations, the reason we hadn’t paid it much attention. The sidewalk was covered by scaffolding and the view was barred by construction hoarding. Some informative signs attached to the hoarding showed the Portlandia story: photographs of the statue on a barge on the river, its original unveiling, and an architect’s rendering of the finished renovation. However, a peek inside yielded no clue as to where the statue might have stood before the renovations began. The Wikipedia entry later told us that the statue’s location was visible as a protective wrap partway up the front of the building: we’d passed it every morning without noticing.

Aftermath of Scooperfest.

We went looking for another photogenic landmark, and wound up in the Pioneer Courthouse Square as Scooperfest was winding down. Later on our way for supper we passed an interesting column at the Friday evening workspace, Powell’s City of Books.

Column at alternate Powell’s entrance.

The West Coast Hackfest was a terrific experience. The venue, the Urban Office coworking space, was ideal. Sharing the space, and the energy, with the Engagement and GTK teams was inspirational. Thanks in particular to Britt for his thoughtful presentation on growing the team.

The workspace at Urban Office.

Thursday, the first day, we had a brainstorming session. We triaged and then started attacking the GitLab issues for gnome-user-docs. Over the hackfest, we reduced 28 outstanding issues to 12.5. This entailed 33 commits and 105+ user help pages modified (in addition to a few pages in the Sys Admin Guide, and the wiki).

My part consisted of Bluetooth and Wacom pages, touchscreen gestures (still in progress, the 0.5 of an issue), general Settings updates, and some of the terminology fixes.

Nifty Control Panel feature — like others, the Wacom panel is hidden if no device is connected. This would seem to defeat the help instructions. However, when you search and select the panel from the activities overview, Settings opens to the Wacom panel and its hidden message of No stylus found/No tablet detected.

Hard at work on docs.

Friday evening we worked late in the coffee shop of Powell’s City of Books, with (a hint of) free wifi, easily accessible hot chocolate and cookies, and acres of reference material.

On Saturday, we discussed the logistics of replacing library-web with Pintail for User Docs, and Petr and Jim started implementing it.

Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Saturday evening was the fun all-team event. We experienced the Portland Night Market, a combination craft fair and rib fest in the space between the off-ramps in the Industrial District.

Three-team event on Saturday night (photo courtesy of Christian Hergert).

Portland is a good place for a hackfest. The transit system is excellent, and there is a nicely photogenic mountain just over 80 km away. Thank you to the organizers for a tremendous event, and thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel and accommodation.

Mount Hood looming over the Skyline. Unlike the postcard version, you have to zoom in.

In February, Matthias Clasen started a series of blog posts about Fedora Atomic Workstation (now Team Silverblue) and Flatpak. I gave it a try to see how the container would work with the documentation tools.

The screenshot below shows the setup I used to submit this merge request. The buildah container is in the shell window on the right where git and Emacs operate in the /srv directory. At the same time on the Silverblue desktop, gitg and Yelp see the same files in the /var/srv directory.

Recently I launched buildah and found it wasn’t connecting to the network. It goes without saying that I needed to look no further than GUADEC for the solution (Matthias indicated that “–net=host” was now required on the command line). Now I create the container like this:

sudo chcon -R -h -t container_file_t /var/srv
sudo buildah run --net=host -v /var/srv:/srv:rslave fedora-working-container bash

Emacs bindings for Mallard are courtesy of Jaromír Hradílek.

I’m feeling extremely grateful for the shot in the arm GUADEC provides by way of old friends, new friends, expert advice, enthusiasm, time-worn wisdom, and so many reminders of why we do this.

I use FreeCAD for freelance work, and build the development version from git periodically. There is a copr nightly build for recent versions of Fedora, but not for Rawhide. The first person to whom I related this experience, David King, said the software would be ideal for the Flatpak treatment. Since then I’ve been getting a tutorial on building the YAML manifest, and after four days of hard work (thanks Dave!), it’s on the very brink of completion.

On the docs front, having adapted to GitLab and getting a merge request committed to the Desktop Help in the spring, it’s time to refresh some of the topics. I’ll be starting with the Settings pages.

A couple of jokers photobomb André’s portrait session.

Thanks to Ismael Olea, Rubén Gómez and the organizing team for a spectacular event and a wonderful cultural experience! Thank you GNOME Foundation for the sponsorship.

My favourite CAD software used to run on at least ten different platforms, including my trusty SGI Indy. There was even a Linux student version. Evidently the market spoke, and for nearly twenty years the software has been Windows-only.

Between IRIX and Linux, I’ve never had a need to allow Windows across the threshold (not least because I could get my fill by going to work). Six years ago I needed to run the CAD software at home again, so I bit the bullet, bought a Windows DVD and started dual-booting it on a desktop machine.

Sensing the completion of the work, the hard drive died, and I dismantled the computer. When I needed to reinstall the CAD software this year for some freelance work, I used the DVD to install Windows into Boxes on my laptop. In the spirit of the Bill Gates quote that never happened, I specified twice as much disk space as I could ever imagine needing. Naturally, the OS and app together consumed the alotted disk space to within a few kilobytes. I needed to resize.

The Red Hat and Fedora Guest Resizing pages were nearly what I wanted, but my libguestfs tools are too new, the first partition is already a good size, and my second partition isn’t a logical volume. Here’s what worked (as usual, if there’s a better way please set me straight):

cd ~/.local/share/libvirt/images
mv Win7.qcow2 Win7.backup
qemu-img create -f qcow2 Win7.qcow2 100G
virt-df -h ./Win7.backup
virt-resize ./Win7.backup ./Win7.qcow2 --expand /dev/sda2

Since the drive resizing I’ve been able to downgrade the CAD software to an earlier version, so 40 GB probably would have been plenty. I think I’ll leave it, though, because my laptop is relatively new and has all the disk space I could ever need.

The lesson might appear to be Windows’ disinclination to be contained, but a licensing issue with the CAD software took a few weeks to resolve. In the interim I continued to do remarkable things with FreeCAD. I’ll use the proprietary software for details related to transferring the files, but FreeCAD is very close to keeping my CAD experience Windows-free.

Last March, the Toronto area GNOME 3.20 release party happened to fall on release day. This release day saw Nancy and me at the hospital for the birth of our second grandson, Gord and Maggie’s second boy. Name suggestions honouring the occasion (GNOME with any manner of capitalization, Portland, or Three Two Four) were politely rejected in favour of the original plan: Finnegan Walter “Finn” Hill. Welcome to Finn and the new GNOME.

Photo by attente.

I had the privilege of sitting in on the GTK+ hackfest in Toronto last week, getting re-energized for my day job by hanging out with developers from Canonical, Collabora, Endless and Red Hat. Toronto is a fabulous city for a hackfest, and Red Hat provided a great workspace.

While there, I reviewed some user help and updated some of the Settings pages. The Transformer makes a good hackfest computer, lightweight enough for a great deal of walking, and comfortable to use when paired with the right keyboard. Remarkably, it has sufficient resources for running Continuous-in-a-Box.

There’s nothing quite as dramatic as a GNOME controversy at its epicentre. The decision-making process is as open and visible in person as it is on IRC. There is no behind the scenes.

Debian Stretch

After successfully building 32-bit kernels using the Fedora method, I decided to try 64-bit Linux on my ASUS Transformer Book T100TA. The Debian multi-arch installer successfully deals with the 32-bit UEFI boot installation, and even better, certain pre-packaged Ubuntu kernels can simply be installed. Here’s my experience with the upgrade.

I started with the DebianOn ASUS T100TA wiki page. Particularly crucial is the grub command line switch for the cstates issue.

After a bit of trial and error with the install isos— couldn’t locate the correct wifi firmware on the Jessie non-free firmware netinst iso, the Alpha 5 Stretch multi-arch DVD iso would start but never complete the install to the eMMC drive—I settled on the Jessie multi-arch DVD iso with 3.16 kernel. This gave me a running Cinnamon desktop—the iso didn’t contain sufficient packages to switch to GNOME.

I located and installed the wifi firmware according to the wiki page instructions and connected using wpa_supplicant. The upgrade to Stretch and GNOME was a challenge because the wifi connection would drop every few dozen megabytes. It finished after several hours, and I had a running GNOME 3.20 desktop (something I never achieved on the Fedora install). I then…

• switched to NetworkManager and re-installed the wifi firmware (the latter seemed to fix the issue of the connection cutting out).
• installed non-free intel-sound firmware and the t100_B.state file, then applied Vinod Koul’s settings for working audio (be sure to keep the volume down for testing).
• enabled and started ModemManager and installed the mobile-broadband-provider-info package to tether my phone.

The ASUS T100 Ubuntu Google+ community is a volunteer effort geared toward establishing which kernel patches, firmware, and configuration settings are required to get the hardware in the various T100* models working in Linux. Although the stock Debian Stretch kernel (4.5.0) boots with working wifi, the Ubuntu kernel packages from the G+ page (4.4.8.2 and 4.4.9.1) boot with working wifi, sound, mobile broadband, and Bluetooth. There’s still work being done on the camera driver and I haven’t tried anything with the touch screen, but at the moment my GNOME tablet experience is reasonably complete.

Corrections and suggestions welcome.