Three marks were put on a real panel and judged at the size the bar
actually draws them. A bell sat inches from Plasma's own notification
bell and meant something entirely different. A handset with an outgoing
arrow read as a telephone feature. Breeze has people and it has
telephones and the two never meet, so this is drawn in Breeze's language
instead: an adult, a child, and one small speech bubble, on Breeze's
22-unit grid with its ColorScheme-Text class, so it recolours with the
session and needs no second file for the light theme.
Quick Launch carries it. The Icon widget copies the entry into the user's
home so an update could never change it; a task manager reads the entry
live but also shows every running window, which filled the auxiliary
corner with the lesson's tasks.
One defect found on the way, and it affected the Wonder Ink icon that is
already shipping: gdk-pixbuf recognises an SVG by sniffing the first
bytes, and a licence-length comment above the opening tag pushes it out
of that window. Every GTK program reported "couldn't recognize the image
file format" while Qt rendered the same file happily. The comments live
inside <svg> now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Two findings, both from watching the bar refuse to change.
The Icon widget copies the desktop entry into the user's home and uses
the copy. A classroom that had already run kept the old icon and the old
command for ever: the package no longer contained a bell and the bar kept
showing one. The button is a task manager holding a single launcher now,
which resolves /usr/share/applications live — the place an OTA update
writes to — and costs nothing, because the classroom already runs one for
the applications.
NoDisplay=true then hid the entry from the very index that resolves
launchers, and the bar drew a blank page. There is no application menu in
this classroom for the entry to clutter, so it is indexable now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The coordinator already existed on the control computer and its contract
is frozen, so this is the classroom half of a contract that was read from
its README and source rather than guessed: four fields out, the status
topic subscribed before anything is published, and every word the teacher
reads taken from the coordinator's own message field.
It is a separate process, not a Plasma applet. A broker library, a
network timeout and a text entry have no business inside the only way a
teacher has of getting anywhere; if this dies the bar is untouched.
The panel mark is Breeze's call-outgoing. The old one was a bell, sitting
two inches from Plasma's notification bell in the same bar and meaning
something entirely different.
Two things it will not do: claim a call was displayed, and let a teacher
type the room. The machine already knows which room it is.
Sixty tests cover the contract without a broker. The live path was proven
against the real coordinator running in the lab, on a loopback broker,
with ProPresenter mocked and the church's networks rejected from inside
the container first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Removing gtk-layer-shell from the dependencies broke classroom-dvd on the
first run, and deleting the dock's stylesheet took the DVD control bar's
styling with it. Both go back: the template under a name that says what
still uses it, and the dependency with a line in the package description
explaining that it is there for the disc player and not for a dock.
A probe overlay confirms gtk-layer-shell works under KWin, so the loading
cover survives the move. The focus helper still speaks sway, which is
written down rather than papered over.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Building the package found two things reading the tree did not.
dpkg refused it outright: plasma-workspace already owns
/etc/xdg/plasmanotifyrc and friends, and two packages cannot own one
path. The room's settings move to a directory of their own with
/etc/environment.d putting it in front of /etc/xdg, which is KConfig's
own cascade rather than a file fight.
The postinst then failed on a chmod for a command that no longer
exists. It now walks what the package installed instead of naming
files, removes the login shell that used to start sway on tty1, and
enables SDDM and the audio service.
Verified by installing the built package on a fresh machine and
starting the session from it: restrictions in force, palette applied,
audio service enabled and running, panel supervision unconditional.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Building the package showed what reading the tree did not: classroom-dvd
still calls classroom-window, classroom-mqtt still calls classroom-notify,
and the DVD overlay still imports the icon and stylesheet helpers the dock
shared. They go back in, and the write-up now counts what was actually
removed rather than what could be.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The install list loses the dock, the window helper, the Chrome window
arbiter, the notification wrapper, the compositor and bar configs and the
GTK icon and stylesheet machinery, and gains a look and feel package, a
colour scheme, window rules, Kiosk restrictions and two supervised user
services. Dependencies follow: Plasma and SDDM in, sway, waybar, mako and
gtk-layer-shell out.
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, none of them redesigns.
The close affordance for a secondary Chrome window was a separate
layer-shell surface anchored to that window's corner, repositioned by a
five-per-second poll. Any position change tore the surface down and
built another, so on real hardware it chased the window and flickered.
Removed entirely: the GTK button process, the geometry maths that placed
it, the --close-button mode that spawned it, and the poll loop that
drove it. The window helper no longer imports GTK at all.
The behaviour underneath it was right and is kept. The first Chrome
top-level is the classroom browser, tiled and borderless; later ones
float centred at about three quarters of the output. Creation order is
the only thing that can tell them apart — confirmed on a real session,
where every Chrome top-level shares app_id, shell, PID and a null
transient_for, and sway exposes no window properties for Wayland
toplevels at all. Titles are still not used. It now follows sway's own
window events instead of polling, so dragging a popup costs nothing.
Close moved into the dock, which was already on screen and does not
move, so it cannot chase anything. It appears only while a secondary
window is focused and runs kill on that one container. The helper
publishes which window that is; the dock watches the file rather than
polling. A stock sway title bar has no close button, so restoring the
border would not have solved this either.
Two bugs found by looking rather than by testing state. Chrome
renegotiates the size of a popup opened with explicit dimensions after
the resize returns, which left windows centred for a width they no
longer had; placement now settles and repeats once, at creation only, so
dragging is still free. And the dock's Close button came up empty
because show_all does not recurse into a no-show-all widget.
The printer's Location is now blank. CUPS prints it under the queue name
in every dialog, so "Ekklesia Classroom" was a second line the teacher
had to read past; the identity is one word. The already-configured check
includes Location, so a machine set up before this is corrected rather
than left as close enough.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
A classroom computer is shared. There is one local Chrome profile owned
by the room, teachers sign into websites, and nobody signs into Chrome.
BrowserSignin=0 stops Chrome asking who is using it, with SyncDisabled
set explicitly alongside it so the intent is in the file rather than
implied. BrowserAddPersonEnabled=false stops new profiles and
ProfilePickerOnStartupAvailability=1 stops the picker.
BrowserGuestModeEnabled=false is the answer to the other profile
switching entry point. Guest is the one that survives disabling add
person, and turning it off is the supported mechanism rather than hiding
UI. Guest is not the browsing model: the room needs one persistent
profile so the church YouTube login survives.
CookiesSessionOnlyForUrls scoped to [*.]wonderink.org, which covers
app.wonderink.org and every other subdomain, so a teacher's Wonder Ink
session does not outlive them. BackgroundModeEnabled was already false,
which is what lets a session actually end.
Every policy name was checked against the strings of the installed
Chrome 152 binary, with deliberately invalid names as a control so the
check is known to discriminate.
Two things are recorded honestly in docs/browser.md rather than claimed.
The avatar button stays in the toolbar — screenshotted with and without
these policies, it is in the same place either way; what changes is that
nothing behind it can create or switch a profile, and no Chrome 152
policy removes the button. And whether session-only cookies actually
sign Wonder Ink out is unverified: it needs a real Wonder Ink login,
which this machine does not have, and three attempts to prove the
mechanism against a local site were inconclusive because the positive
control never worked. The endpoint procedure to settle it, including how
to tell a cookie session from a localStorage one, is written down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Clicking Browser and watching nothing happen for several seconds is the
one place the classroom felt broken rather than quiet. The button now
becomes a throbber the instant it is pressed, and stays one until the
window actually appears in the sway tree.
Only a real launch spins. The dock asks sway whether Chrome is already
open first, so focusing or restoring an existing window stays immediate,
which is how it should feel. DVD is left alone: it has its own
full-screen loading surface and does not need two answers to one click.
A launch that never arrives gives up after thirty seconds, puts the icon
back and says so, so a broken start cannot spin all morning.
The throbber is drawn rather than a GtkSpinner: the stock one is capped
well below the size of the icon it replaces, so it read as a hesitation
rather than as work in progress. Pre-rendered frames swapped into the
same Gtk.Image keep the button an ordinary image with ordinary clicks,
and it falls back to GtkSpinner if cairo is ever missing.
The pointer also turns busy while it is over the dock. Wayland gives the
cursor to whichever client the pointer is over and sway offers no way to
set one globally, so this only holds on our own surface — which is
exactly where the pointer is at the moment a dock button is pressed.
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]>
UI_SCALE only ever reached the surfaces we draw ourselves. Chrome stayed
tiny — its tabs, omnibox and menus are Chrome's own pixels, and Ctrl+
only scales page content, which is no use to a volunteer reading a
toolbar from across the room.
UI_SCALE is a property of the television, not of one program, so it now
sets sway's output scale, which every client is measured against.
classroom-scale runs first in the session and applies it. The display
mode is untouched: the panel stays at 1920x1080 and only the logical
coordinate space shrinks, which is what makes everything in it larger.
Our own surfaces stop scaling themselves. They are measured in the same
logical pixels sway is already scaling, so applying UI_SCALE again would
double it. SHELL_SCALE is that decision in one named place, and setting
it back to ui_scale(config) would restore per-surface scaling without
touching a template.
Measured at 1920x1080 with Chrome 152. Chrome's tab strip 40 -> 49 ->
59px against 1.0, 1.25, 1.5; sway's title bar 25 -> 31 -> 38px; the
classroom dock 74 -> 92 -> 110px. Everything scales once, together, and
1.0 is identical to no scaling at all.
Two tradeoffs, both measured rather than assumed. GTK 3 has no
fractional scaling, so at 1.5 it renders at 2x and sway scales down —
very slightly softer, invisible at classroom distance. XWayland is
softer too: terminal text at 1.5 showed about 50% more intermediate-tone
pixels than at 1.0. VLC is the only XWayland application here, and in
DVD mode none of its interface is on screen, only video from a 720x480
disc that is being upscaled regardless. Chrome is a native Wayland
client and stays sharp, which is what matters for reading.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Pressing DVD now enters DVD mode rather than opening VLC. VLC is still
the backend, because its dvdnav module is what decodes disc menus and
nothing else on Debian does that reliably, but nothing a person can see
or press belongs to it any more.
classroom-dvd-session owns the whole thing. It puts a full-screen black
layer-shell surface up the moment the button is pressed, starts VLC
behind it, and drops it once playback is actually on screen — so the
harsh cut from wallpaper to VLC's black window is gone, and no partial
VLC window or reserved dock strip is ever visible. A deadline drops the
surface regardless, because DVD mode must never leave a black screen
with nothing behind it.
The controls are a classroom bar on the overlay layer, the one layer
sway draws above a fullscreen window. It slides up when the pointer
reaches the bottom of the screen and hides again shortly after it
leaves. It is drawn from the dock's own stylesheet at the room's UI
scale, so it is the same surface, the same radius and the same white
icons. While hidden it only accepts the pointer in a thin strip along
the bottom edge, so a click on a disc menu goes to the disc.
The bar reaches VLC through an HTTP interface on loopback behind a
password generated per session, sending hotkey *actions* by name. That
is what makes the next part possible.
All 108 hotkeys VLC 3.0.23 defines are unset, then Space, Esc and the
arrow keys plus Enter are bound. Crop, aspect ratio, subtitles, audio
tracks and deinterlacing are no longer reachable by pressing a key at
random, and the arrow keys no longer change VLC's volume — the
television owns volume, and CEC will own it properly later.
Esc quits instead of leaving fullscreen. There is nothing to leave, and
leaving it was what stranded people on a black VLC window. Close, Eject
and Esc all ask VLC to quit and escalate to SIGTERM then SIGKILL if it
does not; when VLC exits by any route, including a crash, the session
ends and the classroom desktop comes back.
Verified against VLC 3.0.23 on Trixie: every argument accepted, every
control action accepted over the control interface, a wrong password
refused, and quit exiting cleanly. The surfaces were rendered under a
headless sway and screenshotted to check the bar against the dock.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Stock VLC looks like a desktop media player, which is wrong for a room
where the TV is the whole interface. VLC stays the backend because its
dvdnav module is what provides the disc menus, and menus are the part
that matters on a commercial disc.
It is dressed down with documented VLC 3.x options, all verified against
the 3.0.23 build in Debian Trixie: minimal view, dark palette, no cone,
no tray, no now-playing popups, no resume prompt, no recent-disc
history, no title banner. sway draws no border on the window either, so
there is nothing above the video.
The auto-hiding fullscreen controller is deliberately kept: it is not
persistent chrome, and it is the only way a volunteer with a mouse can
pause or change chapter.
No skin is involved. Skins replace the interface wholesale and take the
keyboard and mouse handling that DVD menu navigation depends on with
them, as would --intf dummy.
Also drops --no-qt-updates-notif, which was not an option in Debian's
VLC at all. It made VLC exit before it started, so the DVD button could
never have launched a disc.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
A 32" panel a few feet from the children and a 65" set across a hall
want the same design at different sizes. UI_SCALE in device.conf now
sets that, and nobody has to edit CSS or source to tune a room.
The stylesheet and the notification config become templates carrying
measurement tokens. classroom-dock resolves the stylesheet in memory at
startup; classroom-notifications resolves the notification config into
the session's runtime directory and execs mako on it, so the process is
still just mako and everything that looks for it by name still finds it.
Neither template is rewritten on disk, so an update cannot lose a room's
setting and a room cannot drift from the packaged design.
Dock height and the reserved strip, corner radii, padding, button size,
spacing, every icon, the clock and its inset, and the notification
geometry all follow the scale. Colours, translucency and the hairline
borders do not: those are the design, not the size.
At UI_SCALE=1.0 the rendered stylesheet is byte-identical to the one the
shell used before any of this existed, which is the property worth
keeping. Values outside 0.8 to 1.5 are clamped and anything that is not
a number falls back to 1.0, so a typo in device.conf cannot produce an
unusable classroom.
Device configuration moves into a shared module, since the dock and the
notification daemon now have to agree about what a setting means.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
mako 1.10 only searches $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mako/config and ~/.mako/config
— confirmed against the shipped binary, and mako(5) documents no system
path. The config installed to /etc/xdg/mako/config would have been read
by nothing and every notification would have come out stock.
Ship it alongside the rest of the package's config in
/etc/ekklesia-classroom/mako/ and name it on mako's command line, which
also keeps it dpkg-owned instead of writing into the user's home.
Start mako before the dock as well, so nothing can send a notification
early and have D-Bus activate an unstyled instance that then holds the
bus name for the rest of the session.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Chrome stays a full browser. The managed policy only removes the things
a volunteer should never be asked about — the first-run tour, the
default-browser prompt, sync and sign-in promos, the profile picker —
and pins the Home button to Wonder Ink so there is always one obvious
way back. Startup URL is a recommended policy rather than a managed one,
so a teacher can still change it. Nothing restricts where they browse,
and the profile is untouched, so YouTube and other logins survive
reboots and updates.
Notifications were still stock mako, which looked nothing like the rest
of the shell. Give them the dock's palette: the same dark slate, the
same hairline white border, rounded, white text, top right. Kept a
little more opaque than the dock so text stays readable over video, and
on the overlay layer so a parent-call alert can still reach someone
watching a fullscreen DVD.
mako was only ever reaching the session through D-Bus activation. Start
it from the sway config so it is running before anything needs it.
classroom-notify-test sends a sample so the styling can be checked
without waiting for a real event.
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]>
