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]>
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]>
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]>
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 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]>
