Little Waders took the Plasma build and reported what a container
cannot. A disc player on a machine with no optical drive, a clock nobody
at the back of the room could read, a browser at half the size of the
panel around it, and Parent Call with no broker to call.
The broker is the same for every classroom, so it is a default now and
not something to fill in room by room. classroom-migrate brings an
existing room to the same place without touching its name, its username
or its password, and Parent Call distinguishes a broker it cannot reach
from one that was never set up: those send somebody to look at
completely different things.
The disc player's detection was right and ran too late — alongside the
session rather than before it, and the panel is built from the layout the
moment a session starts. It runs before the display manager now, and
again from udev when a drive is plugged in.
UI_SCALE had a ceiling of 1.5, which cannot express a 4K television; a
clock pinned at 15 points, which is the same size at every scale; and a
browser that was never told the number at all. All three are fixed and
the room doubles together at 200%.
This also brings 0.1.47's work into the repository, where it had only
ever existed in a build directory under /tmp: the hidden display dialog,
its authenticated writer, the polkit action, and the church's own
wallpaper. One piece of it is deliberately left out. The custom volume
display needed a shell package of our own, and with one selected
plasmashell builds no panel at all — measured twice, with that build's
own files, on a classroom that deletes its panel configuration at every
login by design.
The lab connected to the real church broker the moment the package
defaulted to it. Nothing was left behind, which was checked, but the
guard that should have stopped it had never worked: it used iptables,
which the lab image does not have, and probed with /dev/tcp under dash,
where that always fails. Both reported success.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
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]>
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]>
Three things a volunteer should never have to see.
Sway was drawing its own title bar above Chrome's tab strip, which
already carries the window controls. Verified on a real session: Chrome
is an xdg_shell client with app_id "google-chrome" and sway was giving
it border "normal". A scoped rule removes the compositor decoration
only — Chrome keeps its tabs and address bar, stays a normal window, and
still maximises and minimises. A class rule covers an XWayland fallback.
Nothing else changes: the only other window in this classroom is VLC,
which is already borderless, so no broader rule is warranted.
"Restore pages? Chrome didn't shut down correctly" is suppressed with
--hide-crash-restore-bubble. Note the name. The switch this was going to
use, --disable-session-crashed-bubble, is not present in Chrome 152 at
all — checked against the strings of the installed binary — so it would
have silently done nothing.
That hides the prompt; the profile was still being marked as crashed,
which is the untidy half. Chrome's browser process shuts down cleanly on
SIGTERM, so a shutdown unit now gives it one and waits up to eight
seconds before the session is torn out from under it. Best effort by
construction: a shutdown that will not finish is far worse than a crash
flag.
Password prompts go off with the PasswordManagerEnabled policy, on the
path the classroom already manages. Existing profile and session data
are untouched, and website logins are unaffected: Wonder Ink and YouTube
stay signed in.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The scratchpad technically minimized Chrome, but sway hands scratchpad
windows back floating, so restoring gave a draggable window instead of
the maximized one the user put away. Park windows on a hidden workspace
as ordinary tiled containers instead, and move them back to the visible
workspace on restore.
classroom-window carries the whole state machine, so the dock buttons
and Super+M share one implementation:
not running -> launch
unfocused -> focus
focused -> minimize
minimized -> restore, tiled and maximized
Fullscreen is dropped on the way out, since a container parked while
still fullscreen keeps drawing over everything else. floating disable on
the way back also rescues windows left floating by the old scratchpad
path.
Super+Shift+M restores the newest minimized window, so nothing can get
stranded on the hidden workspace.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
