8 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
ekklesiaandClaude Opus 5.5 7b4ac39cd2 fix: a desktop Plasma makes after the layout has run gets the classroom's wallpaper
Tiny Pebbles came through the 0.2.2 upgrade on Plasma's own purple
wallpaper: its desktop was containment 10, made after the layout had run
(most likely the television arriving after a night-time reboot), with no
wallpaper configured. The look and feel's fallback could not catch it,
because it named a file and Plasma only accepts a wallpaper package there.

The fallback is now the EkklesiaClassroom package, whose one image links to
the classroom's picture. classroom-desktop-wallpaper, run before every
plasmashell start, writes the picture into every desktop containment the
file already has: found by plugin, never by number; panels and everything
else byte for byte; a file that is already right not written at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-29 18:05:44 -05:00
ekklesiaandClaude Opus 5.5 3855989029 fix: a presentation that runs out of memory says so, and the service survives it
On a 4 GB VM the kernel killed the import service mid-conversion. Measured:
LibreOffice needs 0.2 GB for a text deck and 1.4-2.1 GB for decks of many
different photographs, for about twenty seconds — a spike, not a leak.
What made it a problem was the rest: OOMPolicy=stop took the watcher down
with LibreOffice, it restarted and resumed the same conversion with no
limit, and the library said "Getting this ready" throughout.

The service is capped at 40% of memory, is first in line when memory runs
short everywhere, and survives a killed LibreOffice (OOMPolicy=continue).
A killed conversion is a failed import of kind "memory"; an import
interrupted twice is not tried a third time; the card says the computer
needed more memory, to close other programs and choose Try again; an
import nobody has worked on for 20 minutes shows the same card; and an
exclusive lock keeps it to one import at a time.

Lab, the real service and LibreOffice: at a 4 GB-machine ceiling the
2.1 GB deck still imported; with no swap and a 300 MB ceiling LibreOffice
was killed, the watcher kept its PID and the card offered Try again,
which worked; the whole service killed during two attempts gave up after
the second; three decks at once never ran two LibreOffices together.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-23 22:16:50 -05:00
ekklesiaandClaude Opus 5 55f4c183c7 feat: Presentations, for a teacher who downloaded tonight's session
PRESENTATIONS_ENABLED, off by default, independent of everything else. A
teacher downloads a session in ordinary Chrome and it is on the
Presentations screen a few seconds later, ready for the television. No
file manager, no import button, no Impress.

WHY NOTHING LAUNCHES A DOCUMENT APPLICATION. The brief was to use
existing presentation software, so the existing software was tried
first, on Debian 13, before any of this was designed. `soffice --show`
does start a real fullscreen slideshow — and needs XDG_SESSION_TYPE plus
a VCL plugin or it dies with "Failed to open display", shows a splash,
opened a "Tip of the Day: 1/225" dialog over the slides, and leaves the
Impress editor when the show ends. `okular --presentation` opens THREE
windows: the presentation, the ordinary document window behind it, and
an information dialog. zathura is not a presenter. pdfpc is the closest
and is another dependency with a presenter-console model. Every one of
them leaves an application on screen that can open any file on the
machine, and none of them knows there is a library to go back to.

So LibreOffice converts once, headless, at import, with no window on any
screen; poppler renders the pages; the classroom shows the pictures.
Measured: 0.34s for a ten-slide PPTX, 0.03s for its ten thumbnails,
0.10s for one slide at 1920px. That is not a new renderer — it is the
same engine Impress would have used live — and it means Escape is ours,
presenting is instant, and a PDF exported from Google Slides skips the
conversion entirely and keeps the appearance Google gave it.

THE THREE THINGS KEPT APART. The library thumbnail, the starting slide
and the retention clock are independent, because the first slide of a
Bible study session is a generic opening shared by every session and the
one that names it is usually the second. Quick Look chooses the picture;
it does not change where the slideshow starts and it does not count as
having presented anything. mark_presented() is called when a slide is
actually drawn, not when Present is pressed: an intention is not a
presentation, and a viewer that failed to start must not buy another
thirty days.

IMPORTING. The teacher's download is copied, never moved, renamed or
deleted. A file with a .crdownload beside it is still arriving. Wonder
Ink's own folder is not looked at. Two downloads of the same name are
two presentations, the second titled (2) — found in the lab, where a PDF
and a PPTX of one session both came out with the same name because the
import being named was excluded from the taken-titles set BY TITLE, and
a set holds one copy of a repeated string.

Metadata is written saying "importing" before any work, so a reboot
mid-conversion leaves a directory the next startup sweeps and imports
again. A file that cannot be converted gets a card saying so, offering
only Remove, with the teacher's download untouched.

Retention: 180 days never presented, 30 days from the last presentation,
every presentation starting the thirty over. The cleanup never touches a
presentation being shown, never leaves the library directory, and never
looks at Downloads.

The dock order is unchanged: Presentations is appended after the disc
player, so Wonder Ink, the browser and the player keep the places
teachers have been reaching for. There is a test for exactly that.

classroom-wonderink now asks feature() rather than carrying its own copy
of the default, so the panel and the command cannot disagree.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-22 20:21:19 -05:00
ekklesiaandClaude Opus 5 27cd64a668 fix: the room asks for its output again, not only once at boot
River Kids came up silent on stable 0.2.2. The decision this policy makes
was right and was never asked for.

classroom-audio applied its policy once at startup and then only when a
PipeWire event arrived. pactl talks to PipeWire's PulseAudio server, and
the unit was ordered after pipewire and wireplumber but not after that.
At boot it therefore raced the server and lost: the single startup apply
failed with "Connection refused", the subscription attached cleanly a few
seconds later, and from that moment the daemon waited for an event that
had already happened. systemd said active, the subscription was live, and
the policy had never run at all.

That is why the card was found on output:analog-stereo+input:analog-stereo
with its HDMI port available. That profile is WirePlumber's own pick, not
one this policy would ever produce, which is the evidence it never ran.

Reproduced in the lab against real PipeWire 1.4.2 and WirePlumber 0.5.8 by
starting the daemon with pipewire-pulse stopped and then starting it: the
old daemon sits idle forever, the new one converges.

The shape is now: wait for the server, apply, subscribe, apply again the
moment the subscription attaches, and coalesce each burst of events into
one decision. Applying on attach is the fix for the race. While the room
has not got the output it would prefer it also looks again on a backing
off timer capped at a minute, so a television switched on hours later is
picked up whether or not ALSA's jack change ever reaches us as an event.
Once the room has what it wants it stops looking entirely, and a machine
with no digital output never looks at all.

Also here, all of it found by measuring the real server rather than
reading the code:

  * sink lookup matched on fields a sink does not have. Two of its three
    conditions could never be true; the one that worked returned whichever
    sink of the card came first rather than the one for the chosen port.
  * volume and mute are no longer touched. The old code unmuted and forced
    70% on every output change, so every television power cycle reset a
    volume the teacher had set and could unmute an output muted on
    purpose. WirePlumber already remembers volume per device. A machine
    this policy has never configured still gets 70% once.
  * the profile chosen keeps the card's input, which is the difference
    between output:hdmi-stereo and the output:hdmi-stereo+input:analog-stereo
    an administrator reaches for by hand.
  * a card profile is only set when it is not already in place, and only
    so many times, so a sink that never appears cannot become a switching
    loop.
  * a machine with no sound server at all says so once and backs off,
    rather than filling the journal. pactl subscribe's own stderr is
    dropped because saying it is this daemon's job, and a subscription is
    only treated as healthy once it has lasted, since pactl starts
    successfully and then fails to connect.
  * the fixtures described a machine nobody has. Real pactl puts no
    "direction" on a port at all and says "availability unknown" rather
    than nothing, so a test could not have caught this.

Existing streams are moved explicitly. Measured both ways on the real
stack: changing the default sink does move a stream that never asked for
a particular sink, but a stream pinned to a device stays where it is with
no policy running, and this moves it back without the application being
restarted.

tests/test-classroom-audio-daemon.sh drives the real daemon through the
boot race, a television switched on with and without an event announcing
it, a power cycle, a set that never comes on, and a room already correct.
It uses a pactl mock because no loopback or dummy sound driver has an HDMI
port, so the one thing a lab cannot prove is that the real jack change
arrives; docs/testing.md carries the physical procedure for that and says
not to take a passing build as evidence of it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-20 14:46:46 -05:00
ekklesiaandClaude Opus 5 23dff0b7b4 feat: close the chord that let a teacher hibernate the room
Ctrl+Alt+Delete opened Plasma's session screen and a teacher hibernated a
classroom computer from it. A hibernated room cannot be recovered by
anybody standing in front of it, which on a Sunday morning is everybody.

logout=false was already set and did not stop it. That restriction
governs Plasma's own actions — what plasmashell draws in a menu or an
applet. The chord is a KGlobalAccel shortcut registered by ksmserver and
it asks D-Bus for the greeter without consulting a Plasma action at all.
A restriction on a menu cannot see a key.

Three layers, because each one alone has a way past it.

The key. kglobalshortcutsrc unbinds every ksmserver session action and
PowerDevil's Sleep, Hibernate, PowerDown and PowerOff, each entry marked
immutable. It is deliberately not in the xdg directory with the other
settings: kglobalacceld opens that file as a SimpleConfig, so it reads
one file in the teacher's home and no system directory at all. Measured —
with it in the cascade, kreadconfig6 reported the chord unbound while the
shortcut server went on answering Ctrl+Alt+Del. classroom-desktop-reset
copies the package's copy into place before the shortcut server starts,
the same way the panel is copied out of the package at every login.

The policy. A polkit rule refuses login1.suspend* and .hibernate* for the
classroom user and for nobody else. This is the layer that matters:
a key can be unbound and anything reaching logind can still ask.
Refusing here rather than masking sleep.target keeps a technician's own
account working, and is also what tells Plasma to stop drawing the
button — CanSuspend and CanHibernate come back no. Hybrid sleep and
suspend-then-hibernate have no action of their own in systemd 257; both
are authorised through hibernate, so denying it denies all three.

The greeter. Its D-Bus activation is shadowed with /bin/false, the same
mechanism already used for the old notification daemon. Layer one removes
the caller, this removes the callee.

Measured in the lab, from the package, after a reboot: the escape
reproduced first with the shadow removed — the greeter really does start
— and then refused, exited 1, with it back. The chord reports nothing
bound. systemctl suspend as the classroom user is denied. The maintenance
chord and the display chord both still answer, by key code, after the
shortcut file is replaced wholesale. A root process may still suspend,
hibernate, reboot and power off. 182 checks pass across a logout and back.

Screen locking stays disabled, the power button still does nothing, and
reboot and shut down are not newly denied to anybody.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-19 20:50:36 -05:00
ekklesiaandClaude Opus 5 d2d30d6b0c feat: take the last of sway out of the classroom
The DVD player was the only thing still speaking a compositor the room
no longer runs. It asked sway's tree whether VLC's window had really
gone fullscreen, because VLC reports playing while its window is still
the black startup one the loading cover exists to hide.

VLC's own status was measured as a replacement and is not one: it
reports fullscreen true in the same 250ms poll as playing, because the
flag is the option it was started with and not a report about its
window. So the cover is held for a floor and capped by the deadline that
was already there, and the compositor is not asked anything.

Focus-or-launch went the same way. The session already takes an
exclusive lock, so a second one cannot start, and bringing an existing
one to the front is the panel's job.

classroom-window, classroom_sway and classroom_chrome are gone with it —
the last of them was reachable from nothing at all.

DVD also moves out of the status row, where it sat beside the clock as
though a disc were a machine reading. It is an application: it is in the
row with Wonder Ink and the browser, and classroom-provision removes it
from the layout on a machine with no optical drive, which retires
DVD_ENABLED. A computer that moves between rooms takes its drive with
it; nobody remembers to edit a file when it does.

The panel is rebuilt from the package at every login now. Plasma keeps
whatever panel it first built, so an update could change the bar in the
package and never change it in a room — measured, with an icon that
outlived the file it came from. Editing the live panel configuration was
tried instead and destroyed the panel, because the shell owns that file.
Removing it before the shell starts is safe and makes the desktop
stateless.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-10 13:00:50 -05:00
ekklesiaandClaude Opus 5 2ff9d47be9 feat: decide the classroom's audio output from what is plugged in
The room that prompted this had a television on HDMI with working PCM
audio and nothing in the analog jack, and WirePlumber chose analog. A
teacher who corrected it by hand then had to restart the browser before
any sound came out.

The policy is a pure function so it can be tested against that room
rather than against a machine: an unavailable port is not a candidate,
an analog port merely existing is not evidence of a cable, and an
explicit AUDIO_OUTPUT overrides the lot. Twelve cases, the real room
among them.

The daemon follows PipeWire's own event stream rather than polling, and
moves streams that are already playing, which is the part that stops a
teacher having to close and reopen the browser.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-10 08:47:28 -05:00
ekklesiaandClaude Opus 5 87b55761c6 feat: give the classroom a desktop instead of a shell
The whole appliance UI is now configuration for a desktop Debian already
ships: a Plasma 6.3 session with a colour scheme, a look and feel package
that builds the bar, window rules, and KDE's own Kiosk restrictions.

Two things were measured rather than assumed, and both changed a decision.

Plasma restarts a crashed panel three times a minute and then gives up,
which is the failure a classroom has already had. Four lines of systemd
drop-in make it unconditional; the panel then survived eight SIGKILLs a
second apart, back each time in 2.4s.

Plasma draws a minimised task and a background task identically, so the
five states the room needs cannot all be shown. Rather than write a task
manager, the classroom removes minimise: clicking a launcher always means
show me this.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-09-10 08:35:12 -05:00