Taking the launcher off the bar is half of a feature switch. The command
has to refuse as well, or a device that does not offer an application can
still be talked into running it by a stale desktop entry, a leftover
window rule or a technician's muscle memory.
Wonder Ink already did this. Parent Call now does the same, through the
same helper and with the same default: absent means yes, so every
existing room is unaffected.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The women's Bible study laptop is a fixed appliance: AC power, battery
out, lid shut, one television on HDMI. Its own panel should be off.
DISPLAY_MODE=external-only says so, and it is a setting rather than
something inferred from having a lid, because another laptop may want its
own screen or both. Nothing reads DEVICE_TYPE to decide it.
The built-in panel is identified by kscreen's output TYPE — 7 is Panel —
rather than by connector name. Matching "eDP-1" would be matching one
machine's spelling: eDP, LVDS and DSI are all internal, numbered
differently per driver and renamed between kernel versions. The names are
kept only as a fallback for a driver that reports no type, which some
virtual devices do.
One rule overrides the setting: never leave the machine with no screen. A
laptop asked for external-only whose television is off keeps its own
panel and says so in the journal. A machine nobody can see is one nobody
can fix standing in front of it, and it corrects itself the next time
this runs with the set on. Only the outputs that are not already right
are touched, so a television power cycle is not a stream of mode sets.
Applied at login from an autostart entry named to sort before the scale
one, so the scale lands on the displays this leaves enabled.
The lid itself needed no new code — logind ignores every lid event,
PowerDevil's lidAction is 0 in all three profiles with
triggerLidActionWhenExternalMonitorPresent=false, the profiles are
immutable and the classroom account cannot reach suspend through polkit.
That was all already true for towers. What was missing was a test saying
so, and there is one now, because it is the property the laptop depends
on and nothing would have noticed it regressing.
KNOWN LIMITATION, and it is written into docs/testing.md rather than left
to be discovered: the mode is applied at login, not continuously. If KWin
re-enables the internal panel when the television is power cycled, it
stays enabled until the next login. The lab has no lid and no HDMI
hotplug, so this cannot be settled here; the physical procedure says to
check it specifically, because the answer decides whether the follow-up
needs an event-driven applier like the audio policy's.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
https://updates.riverofglorymn.org/stable/latest.debhttps://updates.riverofglorymn.org/canary/latest.deb
A symlink beside each channel's manifest, pointing at the versioned
package the manifest names. Deliberately not a second record of which
version is current — the manifest stays the only answer to that, and the
publish scripts derive the pointer from it rather than from anything they
know themselves.
The versioned files are never rewritten. A release uploads its package,
then the manifest, then swaps the pointer by rename. Atomic, so nothing
downloads a half-written pointer; and last, so the pointer can lag the
manifest by a moment and can never lead it. A pointer that led the
manifest would offer a package the channel had not published.
Both latest.deb and manifest.json are served no-store on the update
server. Cloudflare sits in front of it and caches .deb by extension, so
without that header a room could be handed the previous release from an
edge for hours. The versioned packages keep no such header because they
are immutable and worth caching.
The server change is one matcher in the Caddyfile's updates block, and it
took three attempts to land for a reason worth recording: the Caddyfile is
a FILE bind mount, so `mv` over it replaces the inode and the container
goes on serving the old one. Two apparently successful reloads changed
nothing. It is written through the mount now, and the host copy is
identical so the next container restart is a no-op. Caddy was reloaded,
never restarted; the church's other sites were not interrupted.
Installing from a channel URL still does not move a machine onto that
channel. CHANNEL in device.conf decides which manifest the updater
follows, and the postinst only appends settings that are missing, so
fetching the canary package by hand to repair a machine leaves it on
stable.
Verified end to end against the live server: both URLs deliver bytes whose
sha256 matches their channel's manifest, both carry the no-store header,
and the versioned package does not.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
These are shared computers in rooms full of people, and in a stock Plasma
desktop "use the network" and "read the network's password" are much
closer together than they look.
Measured on Debian 13 with NetworkManager 1.52 and Plasma 6.3:
* org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.settings.modify.own ships as "yes" for
an active session — no prompt, no administrator. It covers any
connection whose connection.permissions names that user, and a Wi-Fi
network added from the desktop is created exactly that way. So a
password a teacher types in is readable by the next person to sit
down.
* the applet offers "Show Network's QR Code" on every saved wireless
connection, and the QR code contains the pre-shared key.
* that action, and the "Configure…" beside it, are contextual actions in
ConnectionItem.qml and do NOT consult
authorizeControlModule("kcm_networkmanagement"). The Kiosk key gates
the toolbar button only. Hiding buttons was never going to be the
answer.
Every one of those paths ends at NetworkManager's GetSecrets, so that is
where this is answered. A polkit rule refuses settings.modify.own,
settings.modify.system, both wifi.share actions and the machine-wide
settings, for the classroom user by name.
Deliberately NOT refused: network-control, wifi.scan and the
enable/disable actions. None returns a secret, and they are what
connecting and seeing a network are made of. Automatic reconnection does
not go through polkit at all — NetworkManager does it as root — so nothing
here can stop the room coming back on the network after a reboot, which is
the property that matters most on a Sunday.
An administrator's account and root are untouched, and the override route
is the same one the sleep rule has.
classroom-wifi is the other half, and it is a requirement rather than a
convenience: it provisions the church Wi-Fi as a SYSTEM connection, with
no connection.permissions, psk-flags=0 and a 0600 root:root file. A
connection the machine owns is one nobody in the room can read. Verified
against real NetworkManager in the lab — the classroom account gets
"Permission denied" on the file, "--" from nmcli and "Insufficient
privileges" from GetSecrets, while autoconnect stays on.
There is deliberately no teacher-facing join dialog. Anything that lets
the room add a connection lets the room own it, and an owned connection is
a readable one; docs/networking.md says so rather than leaving it to be
rediscovered.
The rule is plain JavaScript, so the test evaluates it with polkit's
objects stubbed and asserts both halves: which actions come back NO, and
which are left alone. What it cannot test is the last mile — polkit
resolves a subject through logind and a container has no graphical seat
session, so every check there is denied for reasons unrelated to this
rule. That one is a physical check, and it is written down as one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
A laptop is going in for the women's Bible study, and the obvious way to
build that — a laptop profile that turns off the children's church
applications — is the wrong way. A laptop may well take children's church,
and a tower may well be a Bible study. Hardware cannot be allowed to
decide purpose, so every optional application gets a setting of its own:
WONDERINK_ENABLED already existed; behaviour unchanged
DVD_ENABLED new
PARENT_CALL_ENABLED new
and DEVICE_TYPE says only what the hardware IS. classroom-desktop-layout
never reads it, and there is a test that says so, because this is the rule
that will be under pressure the first time somebody adds a device.
All three default to true, so an existing classroom that has never heard
of any of them comes up exactly as it did before. The settings are
appended to device.conf by the same mechanism every other setting has
used, so an upgrade gains them without losing a byte an administrator
wrote.
The disc player is the one place hardware still votes, and it is a veto:
DVD_ENABLED can take the player away from a machine that has a drive,
nothing can put it on a machine that has none. A button that cannot work
is worse than no button.
The layout's launcher markers are replaced by a feature block of three
plain booleans. The old mechanism commented a line out of an array, which
worked for launchers and could not express Parent Call, because that is a
whole widget rather than one entry. Three booleans express both, and the
launcher list is now built from them in one fixed order, so a disabled
application closes the row up rather than leaving a gap, and the same
enabled set produces the same bar on every machine in the church.
Also here, because it is the bar and not a feature: sortingStrategy=0.
Plasma's default is 1, "manually", and the task manager accepts a
reordering drop only in that mode — MouseHandler.qml tests
tasksModel.sortMode === SortManual before it will move anything. The
classroom never wrote the key, so it had the default, and any teacher
could drag the launchers into a different order. This is the applet's own
lever refusing the drop rather than something of ours putting the bar back
afterwards.
The test now runs the layout the package actually ships, in node, with
Plasma's API stubbed, and asserts the launcher string that comes out.
Asserting against a copy of the file's text in the test was how the old
one worked, and a copy is a thing that drifts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The audio reliability fix, built as its own version. 0.2.2 is already
published and installed on the rooms, so it is left exactly as it is.
Stable stays at 0.2.2 and the stable manifest is not touched by this.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
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]>
0.2.1 is already published to canary and a rebuild of it would be
different bytes under a version somebody has already installed, so the
worksheet fix goes out as its own version.
Stable stays at 0.2.0 and the stable manifest is not touched by this.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Some Wonder Ink lesson links are a download rather than a page: the
server sends the PDF as an attachment, so there is nothing for a tab to
show and the file lands on disk.
In this room that is the same as it not arriving. There is no file
manager, no application launcher and no downloads bar, on purpose, and a
teacher is not going to open a maintenance terminal to print a Christmas
tree. 0.2.1 downloaded the worksheet, said so in a notification, and left
it somewhere unreachable. Found on the canary machine with a real lesson.
So a download that completes, and really is a PDF, opens as another tab.
Rendering is the engine's own viewer — the same PDFium Chrome uses — so
there is no second rendering library and no separate application. That
was verified against a completed local file rather than assumed from the
remote case: PdfViewerEnabled was already on, and a local file: URL is a
different question.
WHAT IS REFUSED. A completed download is not a usable worksheet. HTML
that a server called .pdf, an empty file, an unreadable one: all refused
on the first five bytes rather than on the name, because the alternative
is a blank tab that says nothing. An interrupted download says it did not
finish and to try again — and that needed stateChanged rather than
isFinishedChanged, which is not emitted for an interrupted download at
all. Connected to the obvious signal, this said nothing whatsoever about
a worksheet that failed to arrive, which is the one case a teacher most
needs told about. Measured.
WHICH LOCAL FILES. Exactly the ones the window opened itself. Opening a
worksheet adds one resolved path to a list, and the page's
acceptNavigationRequest refuses every file: URL that is not on it.
Chromium already refuses to let a remote page reach file: — verified with
a link, a location.href, and a link to a worksheet that had been
downloaded but not opened by the shell, all refused — so this is the
second lock rather than the only one. It is here because the first one is
somebody else's. Two Qt defaults are turned off beside it:
LocalContentCanAccessFileUrls, which is on by default and would let a
local document read other local documents, and its remote counterpart.
Print to File is removed from the print dialog, because choosing it
enables a path with a "..." button, which is a file chooser, in a room
whose whole design is that there is no file chooser. The PDF viewer's own
menus were audited: two-page view, annotations, present, properties, and
nothing that opens or saves anywhere a teacher chooses.
AND THE BROWSER IS NOT INVOLVED. The handler is connected to Wonder Ink's
own profile, so it only ever sees downloads that started in a Wonder Ink
tab. Nothing inspects a filename, nothing watches a directory, and Chrome
— a separate application with a separate profile — is untouched:
classroom-browser and the Chrome policies are byte-identical to stable
0.2.0. Worksheets go to ~/Downloads/Wonder Ink, which is tidiness and
mostly the security argument: it is the only place one can come from.
Only PDFs. Anything else downloads, says so, and is still unreachable;
that limitation and two small follow-ups are written down rather than
built, and nothing downloaded is ever executed.
Measured from the package on a rebooted machine, and again on one
upgraded from the published 0.2.1: the click-to-tab workflow end to end,
a name with spaces and brackets, multi-page navigation, printing to
Elmer, closing the worksheet without closing the lesson, and the four
refusals. 120 convergence checks and 24 worksheet checks pass on both.
Cookies are still session-only, the Present-view autoplay fix still
works, fullscreen still comes back maximised, and there is still no
address bar and no new-tab button.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The version the two 0.2.1 features are built as. Stable stays at 0.2.0
and the stable manifest is not touched by this.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Teachers prepare a lesson across several tabs — the lesson, its video,
the activity — and app mode is the one thing that cannot give them that.
Chrome cannot be asked for "tabs but no omnibox". App mode has no tabs; a
normal window has an address bar and no policy, flag or extension removes
it; tabbed web apps need a manifest on a site that is not ours and push
off-origin links out into a normal browser window, which is the whole of
what this design exists to prevent. So the tab strip is ours, and the
engine is Chromium either way.
QtWebEngine, from Debian, measured before it was chosen rather than
after. The usual and correct objection is codecs: on Debian 13 it reports
H.264, AAC, MP3, VP8 and VP9 all playable, MediaSource supports avc1,
mp4a and vp9, and a 720p H.264 file decoded and played to the end in the
lab. app.wonderink.org loads, and its sign-in is an ordinary email and
password form rather than a Google flow that would mind an embedded
browser. The user agent has the QtWebEngine token stripped so a site
gating on it sees the Chromium this actually is, and Widevine is handed
over from Chrome's own bundle when the machine has Chrome, which a
classroom always does.
[ Lesson ] [ Video ] [ Activity ]
The strip appears only above one tab, so an ordinary lesson looks exactly
like the application it replaces. A tab can only come from the lesson —
target=_blank, window.open, a middle click, a Ctrl+click — and there is
no address bar, no search and no button that makes a blank tab. No
allowlist of domains either, on purpose: a list would have to be right
about every video service a lesson might ever embed.
Three bugs the lab caught and this fixes. A lesson calling window.print()
did nothing at all, which is worse than no print button because a teacher
concludes the printer is broken; printRequested is now bound to the page
that asked. Leaving fullscreen left the window 200 pixels wide in the
corner — a window that has only ever been maximised has no ordinary
geometry to return to — so the fullscreen bit is cleared rather than
maximised being re-requested. And the Present view video failure written
up in docs/wonder-ink.md is acted on at last: that investigation named
the autoplay gesture chain as the likeliest cause and declined to fix it,
because in Chrome the only lever governed the ordinary browser as well.
Here it does not — this profile is Wonder Ink and nothing else — so a
lesson may start its own video and no other page in the room may.
Reproduced both ways in the lab with an unmuted video started by a script
with no gesture: NotAllowedError at Chrome's default, playing as shipped.
That is not proof Present view is fixed; the lab has no Wonder Ink
account, and candidates 2 and 3 in that document are still open.
Measured on a rebooted machine, from the package: tabs open from a link
and from window.open, switch, and close; closing one leaves the others;
closing the last closes Wonder Ink; H.264 video plays and fills the
display in fullscreen and comes back maximised with its tabs; the print
dialog offers the room's own Elmer queue; a download lands in ~/Downloads;
back and forward work from a right-click menu that is built rather than
filtered; pressing the panel button twice raises one window rather than
starting a second on the same profile; KWin reports the window as
ekklesia-wonderink, which is one panel button and not two.
Separate from the browser as before, in its own profile, with cookies
that live only as long as the window — what the Chrome policy did for
wonderink.org, and the reason closing Wonder Ink ends a teacher's
session. Chrome's old profile directory is left untouched beside it, and
the browser's own policy is not edited by any of this.
Wonder Ink is now optional per device, through WONDERINK_ENABLED in
device.conf, because one future device is a laptop that will not have it.
It rides the mechanism the disc player already uses: one marked line in
the packaged layout, edited by classroom-desktop-layout. False takes the
launcher off the panel and makes the command refuse to start; the
browser, Parent Call and the disc player are untouched and the panel
stays balanced. Absent means yes, so every existing room is unchanged.
One scale, still. Chrome has to be handed UI_SCALE because it was
measured not to follow the compositor; Qt does follow it — devicePixelRatio
2.0 at UI_SCALE=2.0, measured — so Wonder Ink is deliberately not told,
or the room would get it twice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
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]>
0.1.50 was taken to the church and the things a container cannot answer
were answered on the hardware: boot, autologin, the panel after a reboot,
panel and browser scaling, Wonder Ink, Parent Call opening in the corner
and reaching the sanctuary with a typed name, readable and silent
notifications, HDMI audio and the volume keys.
The promotion is a fast-forward. The experiment was cut from the
published stable source and never diverged from it, so master reaches
this work without a merge and there is one history.
One thing changed for the release. The channel rules turn around:
classroom-v2 and hyprland are the obsolete channels now and a room on
either comes home to stable, while canary — where the next development
release goes — and any channel somebody named by hand stay where they
were put. A fresh installation has always defaulted to stable.
Nothing else moved. This is the 0.1.50 that was verified, with a version
number and a channel rule.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Parent Call told rooms they had never been set up. Nothing about the
rooms was wrong. Read from the church broker: …/coordinator and
…/pending are retained and …/mode is absent, and the coordinator's own
source says why — it publishes the retained mode only in answer to an
operator writing to …/mode/set, and nobody ever has. Every classroom
waited a second and a half for a message that will never exist.
A missing mode is now read as the coordinator's own default rather than
as an unconfigured room: the room offers the call and lets the sanctuary
end answer, because that is the end that knows. A mode that really is
off still refuses, in the coordinator's words, and a broker that is
missing or unreachable still says which of those it is. Proved against a
rig broker made to match the church's exactly, with a call landing on
the sanctuary mock.
The card is anchored to the bottom-left corner instead of centred, by
layer shell, which is what the disc player's cover has used under KWin
for months. Anchoring rather than positioning is what makes it right at
1080p and at 4K without a coordinate anywhere. It falls back to the
centred card if the library is missing.
Notifications are sized for a room. Every Plasma measurement is a grid
unit and a grid unit is the height of the general font, so the font is
the lever — 15 point instead of Breeze's 10, which takes the card from
about 350x110 to about 410x145 at 100% and doubles again at 200%. Text,
icon, padding and buttons move together. The chime stays off. No shell
package: that path cost the panel and is not coming back.
And the product name is gone from everything a teacher sees. The
notification card is from Classroom, the disc player's from DVD.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
classroom-migrate knew how to remove a setting, move a channel and point
a room at the broker, and knew nothing about which settings the classroom
has gained since a room was installed. That list is in
classroom_config.py and it stays there: the migration now hands the file
to ensure_device_config when its own work is done, rather than growing a
second copy of it.
It matters for the command rather than the package. postinst already
called the shared helper before running the migration, so an install
converged; a technician running `sudo classroom-migrate` by hand on an
old machine got a file that was still short of LIVE_ENABLED,
AUDIO_OUTPUT and UI_SCALE. Both paths end in the same place now, and the
release gate runs the command by hand on an already-converged machine to
prove it.
The validator's own expectation was the release-blocking failure, and it
was not what it looked like: it stops at CHANNEL=canary, before it ever
reaches the LIVE_ENABLED count. canary is the sway line, and moving a
migrated room off it is deliberate — a Plasma room left there is handed
the old desktop back by the next release published to it. The fixture now
expects the move, checks that every setting this release has arrived
exactly once, and checks it again after a reinstall.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
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]>
A real room upgraded to 0.1.45 and came up as stock Debian Plasma with
the old Waybar across the top, mako still catching notifications, and a
lock screen on an account that has no password.
The cause was one line, and it was in the lab: the harness handed the
session under test XDG_CONFIG_DIRS by hand, so every result it had ever
produced was a result about a machine somebody had already configured.
On a machine SDDM starts the session through PAM, PAM does not read
/etc/environment.d, and Debian's own plasma-workspace env.sh then set the
variable from scratch — so the classroom's settings directory was not in
the cascade at all. No layout, no lock policy, no Kiosk restrictions.
The settings now arrive the way Plasma delivers them, through a file in
/etc/xdg/plasma-workspace/env. Around that: the look and feel is
immutable on its own key so a stale profile cannot answer for it; the
palette is composed into the package, because naming a colour scheme does
not produce one and the dark bar had been coming from a technician's
hand; the desktop reset converges another desktop's appearance state and
keeps the room's own; and classroom-migrate stops, deactivates and masks
the old shell, including the D-Bus activation that brought mako back
while the panel was down — found only by killing the panel on a migrated
machine.
device.conf loses COMPOSITOR and comes off the hyprland channel, which
would otherwise have handed the room the experiment back.
The lab stops flattering the package: it restarts the machine, lets SDDM
actually autologin, and asks a fresh install and a machine upgraded from
the Hyprland package the same sixty questions. Both answer identically,
twice, and the panel still comes back from eight SIGKILLs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Records what was measured this pass and, as importantly, what was not.
KGlobalAccel will accept a bare Escape and its component carries both a
pressed and a released signal, so hold-and-cancel is expressible. What
could not be measured here is whether a global shortcut takes the key
away from applications, because key injection cannot reach the nested
session. The mechanism says it does — KWin matches shortcuts in an input
filter ahead of the focused surface — which would cost the classroom
every ordinary use of Escape. That is inference, and it is written down
as inference, with the thirty-second bench test that settles it.
The recommendation is to change the gesture rather than grab the key an
appliance uses most: hold-to-confirm on an on-screen control, which is
ordinary Qt inside our own surface, or a modifier chord like the one the
maintenance terminal just proved. Either keeps the deliberate ceremony
without an input daemon.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Two layers for the button, because one is not enough: while a session is
running PowerDevil holds logind's handle-power-key inhibitor and acts on
the button itself, so a logind drop-in alone would be overruled. logind
covers the machine before the session starts, after it ends, and if
PowerDevil is not running. Verified: after the drop-in is installed and
logind reloaded, it reports ignore for the power, suspend, hibernate and
lid keys, and the running session was not disturbed by the reload.
Holding the button still cuts the power. That is firmware, below any
operating system, and it is deliberately left alone as the only recovery
a person standing at a wedged machine has.
The maintenance terminal is Meta+Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K, declared in the
package rather than seeded into a teacher's configuration, where an
update could not reach it. KGlobalAccel read it and registered the
component; invoking it opened a working shell.
It needed a wrapper. The classroom's Kiosk policy sets shell_access=false
and Konsole honours it — measured: with the classroom configuration in
its cascade Konsole starts and says "Program to run not set." The
restriction is worth keeping everywhere else, so it is lifted for this
one process by leaving the classroom's configuration directory out of
its cascade. It grants no privilege: the classroom user has no sudo
rule, and that restriction was always a barrier in the interface rather
than a privilege boundary.
Konsole's own entry is shadowed and hidden from /usr/local/share, so
nothing is patched and Konsole's package stays maintainable. Nothing is
pinned to the panel; a task button appears only while a terminal is
open, and closing it returns the bar to three launchers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Three things in this window that a container cannot answer, and they are
now the top of the next-steps list: a real key pressed into Parent Call,
a television switched on after the computer, and a disc that plays.
Also brings the comments in the shared libraries up to date. The only
mention of sway left in the tree is the upgrade step that removes the
sway-era login shell from a room being upgraded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Run against the lab as the package built it, not a session edited by
hand. The panel came back from eight SIGKILLs a second apart in about
2.2s each time, the compositor in 0.1s, the audio policy from three, and
neither Parent Call nor the browser dying disturbed the panel.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
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]>
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]>
The development host is a VM without /dev/kvm, so a candidate desktop
cannot be given a virtual machine here. It gets a systemd container
instead, with the session nested inside a headless sway so that grim can
photograph it and sway's IPC can aim a real pointer at it.
Plasma 6.3.6 comes up in it, software-rendered, at 1920x1080.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Records the exact stable base commit, the fact that the development host
cannot create a VM, and the first measurement worth having: Debian 13
already ships Plasma 6.3.6.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The render helper sat on top of the Print dialog, so the dialog could
not be reached and nothing could be printed.
Two causes. The daemon could not see window titles at all — the tree
walk never collected them — and both windows arrive close enough
together to be configured in the same pass, in whatever order the tree
lists them. Configuring a window focuses it, so whichever was done last
ended up in front, and that was not reliably the dialog.
The dialog is now recognised by its exact title and configured last, and
if a Chrome popup takes focus while it exists, focus is handed straight
back. Focus is only ever reclaimed from another popup: clicking the main
browser or the dock is the teacher's business and is left alone.
A title match, narrowly, and only for this one known dialog. Creation
order still decides which Chrome window is the browser; nothing else is
classified by what it happens to be called.
Nothing auto-closes the helper. After Print is cancelled it stays, and
the sticky dock X still closes it.
Proven by looking rather than by state. The render window is given a
saturated background in the fixture so a screenshot answers "which
window is in front" unambiguously: Print opens in front, the helper is
then deliberately raised over it and Print comes back in front,
cancelling Print leaves the helper visible with the dock X still
offering it, and that X closes exactly the helper and leaves the main
browser untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The Close button followed focus, and moving the pointer down to the dock
moves focus off the popup. So the button disappeared somewhere on the
journey to it, and a secondary Chrome window could not be closed with a
mouse at all. Found on the endpoint; my fault.
The target is remembered instead. Once a secondary window has been
focused the dock keeps offering to close it, and losing focus — to the
dock, the main browser, a print dialog, any layer-shell surface —
changes nothing. It moves on only when that window closes or another
secondary takes over, and it falls back to another open secondary rather
than to nothing, so cancelling a print dialog leaves the render window
still closeable. It is chosen from the secondary list, which never
contains the first window, so it can never name the main browser.
Restoring the floating role to a window that already existed no longer
moves or focuses it. Moving it would undo wherever the teacher dragged
it; focusing it would raise the render window over the print dialog
sitting above it, which is one way the print flow was getting disturbed.
Verified by driving a real pointer through the exact path that was
broken: pointer over the popup, click to focus, then travel down to the
dock in steps, screenshotting throughout. The button is still there on
arrival, at 992,1041. Then the print flow: main browser, render window
and a separate Print dialog, pointer to the dock, button still there,
and killing the dialog leaves the render window as the new target with
the main browser untouched.
The button's own action could not be actuated in that harness, because
synthetic pointer input does not reach Wayland clients under headless
sway — the Browser button does not respond to it either. The action was
run directly instead, closing exactly the remembered container and
leaving main Chrome alive.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Published as 0.1.42 rather than the intended 0.1.41: update_canary.sh
increments from VERSION, which local builds had already advanced to
0.1.41. The content is the tested tree either way, and going back to a
lower number would leave a canary that nothing already on 0.1.42 would
accept.
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]>
The first piece of turning these machines into connected endpoints.
classroom-mqtt is one small service per room that subscribes, validates
what arrives, and hands the work to commands that already exist.
Nothing in the room depends on it. A broker that is down, a network that
is missing, a machine with no broker configured at all — each is a
service sitting quietly, not a classroom that fails. Nothing waits for
it at boot and the shipped default is off, so every existing classroom
upgrades into this release with messaging disabled until a broker
exists.
The room is the hostname, which is already how these machines are named.
Topics carry no product name because the broker is the church's and
these are just rooms: classroom/notify/all, classroom/notify/<room>, and
a retained classroom/status/<room> so anyone asking later can be told
which rooms are up without waiting for them to say so again.
Notifications are events and are never retained; status is state and is.
Stale messages cannot come back, which is the property that matters most
and has two halves. The session is clean, so a broker never hands over a
backlog from while the room was off. And retained notifications are
refused on arrival, because otherwise one would replay into every room
at every reboot forever. The honest limit is written down: MQTT only
flags a retained message when it is replayed to a new subscription, so a
retained publish delivered live is indistinguishable from an ordinary
one and is shown once — which is right, since it is live at that moment,
and the replay is the actual hazard.
Delivery reuses the session-aware sender rather than a second copy of
it. classroom-notify-test grew into the real thing, so it is now
classroom-notify with the sample sender a wrapper over it, and its 36
tests came along.
The broker password lives in device.conf, so that file stops being world
readable: 0640 root:classroom, which everything that reads it already
satisfies.
Transport logic is kept free of any broker library so it can be tested
without one — 40 checks on room identity, the topic contract and which
payloads become notifications. Separately verified against a real
mosquitto: connect, subscribe, retained status, per-room and all-room
delivery, urgency, duplicate and expired and malformed messages ignored,
the broker killed with the daemon surviving, reconnect, and a stale
retained notification left on the broker not reaching the screen when a
room boots.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
