Thursday, June 16, 2016

Perusing Progress at Randa Meetings 2016

Over the last couple of days, the 40 or so people here in Randa have been, amongst other things, been learning how to pronounce the name of the village correctly, treated to some lovely food and chocolate, and most importantly, been very, very busy learning from each other and producing great amounts of both code and plans, and as you can see from the picture below, smiles.



One of those who have been learning new things is Chris, aka Makenshi or chaz6, my better half, who has gained KDE developer access, and is now hard at work on adding GDAL support to Marble. As you can see below, it is coming along very nicely! Not only that, the initial version of the plugin has been submitted as a review request.


For my own part, i have been hard at work getting Peruse whipped into shape for release, which has meant the getting the series navigation done more pleasantly, and the addition of translation contexts to all strings in the application. As you can see below, the drawer with book information isn't that pretty, but it works, and it pops up when you try and move past either end of the book you are reading, just like you might recognise it from your ebook reader.


It has also meant building packages for a distribution i have very little experience with. While i may be a fairly proficient user of the open build service, which i have used a great deal for rpm packages over recent years, the creation of deb packages has always been something of a dark art to me. Over the last couple of days, however, that has become much more clear. A painful sort of clarity, certainly, but clarity none the less.

The end result is that i now have, on the Peruse website, a repository of deb packages for Peruse, and for Kirigami and the Okular frameworks branch both of which it depends on, all still built on obs, which means that updating the packages is very, very simple for me, and they're shipped to the users moments after they are built. In the words of Jazz Show host Louis Balfour: Nice.


The word of the day is: peruse - because i'm a silly person who likes that word, and thinks that perusing is the most sensible way of describing the experience of consuming comic books and graphic novels :)

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9 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Hello and very cool to hear about your progress via PlanetKDE!

I checked out Peruse and attempted to install it for Kubuntu 16.04 via the instructions.

However, when I did a "sudo apt update", I received this message:

>>>
W: GPG error: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/leinir:/peruse/xUbuntu_16.04 ./ Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 4D7F08584B169865
E: The repository 'http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/leinir:/peruse/xUbuntu_16.04 ./ Release' is not signed.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.
<<<

So how do I get a signing key for this repository?

Normally in the Kubuntu world, I'd do a:

sudo apt-add-repository _____

and that would create the appropriate repo file and pull in the signing key.

17 June, 2016 08:43  
Blogger leinir said...

Heyhey there, and thanks! :)

Right, so that will be my unfamiliarity with apt based systems showing - but, according to this link, there should be a fairly straightforward solution, could you try this and tell me if it works when you add the key like this?

17 June, 2016 09:28  
Blogger Unknown said...

You're welcome and I was able to piece together what to do from that link, although their example didn't work, so it would be frustrating for someone coming to it.

I was able to get it working successfully, and so I suggest that you replace all of your xUbuntu install instructions with what follows. It's simpler and more automated:

echo "deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/leinir:/peruse/xUbuntu_16.04 ./ #Peruse" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/peruse.list

sudo wget --output-document - http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/leinir:/peruse/xUbuntu_16.04/Release.key | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt update
sudo apt install peruse

20 June, 2016 09:10  
Blogger Unknown said...

P.S. Peruse has a slick interface!! I noticed that on startup, it scanned my home and Downloads folder for ebooks, which I don't want, because it picked up *a lot* of non-books. So I went into the settings and eventually figured out how to remove those, and added the folders of my ebooks. However, the Welcome screen didn't reflect the addition and only showed the old scan. I restarted Peruse, and it showed me the proper list of books, but the PDF's didn't have a preview for their icon, and when clicking on them, the result was an empty, white interface. The console showed this debug output:

>>>
file:///usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/qml/org/kde/kirigami/ApplicationHeader.qml:156: TypeError: Cannot read property of null
file:///usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/qml/org/kde/kirigami/ApplicationHeader.qml:217: TypeError: Cannot read property 'title' of null
qml: Mimetype is application/pdf
"1 instead of 0 arguments to message {Closes the book info...} supplied before conversion."
"1 instead of 0 arguments to message {Enter full screen mo...} supplied before conversion."
file:///usr/share/peruse/qml/viewers/okular.qml:27:1: module "org.kde.okular" is not installed
<<<

Funny that it should say that Okular isn't installed, because it is, and it runs fine by default. This is a Kubuntu 16.04 64-bit system.

20 June, 2016 09:21  
Blogger leinir said...

Yay for getting it to work, thank you for trying that out :D

i was actually trying to avoid the more automated version, primarily because of the whole mirrorbrain thing, but going with that method you describe, yup, totally works (and the mirrors haven't picked up the packages yet anyway, so oh well, nothing of value was lost and all that ;) ). i shall put those instructions in as a replacement for what's there now, with a suggestion that if mirrors are available, the url should be changed to something more local :)

Re P.S.: Thank you! :D And thank you also for that report, it certainly should update the welcome page when it rescans, i shall get that sorted :)

The okular issue you are having is because, i guess, i have not made the requirement on the okular package in the peruse repository hard enough, and it just accepts any ol' okular ;) The problem is, peruse need the Frameworks branch of okular, and the package isn't coinstallable, and will replace your system installed okular with the unreleased version. The reason for the error you're getting is that the non-frameworks version doesn't have Qt Quick components, which is what i need to show PDFs.

20 June, 2016 09:37  
Blogger Unknown said...

Great! :)

> The problem is, peruse need the Frameworks branch of okular

Do you mean the very latest branch of Frameworks? Because I have this on my system:

Plasma version 5.6.4
Frameworks version 5.22.0
Qt version 5.5.1
Kernel 4.4.0-24-generic

21 June, 2016 11:13  
Blogger leinir said...

No, i mean the frameworks git branch of Okular itself, which is not yet released (and according to the maintainer is not likely to get a release anytime soon, which is why i've rolled a package of it for use with Peruse) :)

21 June, 2016 11:17  
Blogger Unknown said...

Ah. And now I see the package is in the repo, thanks.

Playing with Peruse now, I can see the content. I am paging through a .cbz comic book novel of .jpg's. It appeared properly, but I didn't see how to page through it. I finally figured out that clicking in the black areas on the left and right side of the page took me to the previous or next page. I wish that there was some kind of visual clue as to where to click, somehow so that I wasn't feeling lost. Pressing the right-arrow key or the space bar didn't advance the page as I was expecting either. Pressing Esc didn't bring me back to the main interface.

Viewing pdfs was difficult because the bottom part of the page would be cut off and advancing to the next page wouldn't auto-reposition the view to the top of the next page.

But from the excellent progress it has so far, I'm sure that these minor issues will be resolved and this will be a stellar addition to the KDE scene :)

22 June, 2016 07:52  
Blogger leinir said...

i slightly changed the way i was packaging up okular for peruse, so the deb package only requires the Qt Quick components from okular-frameworks, which are coinstallable (unlike okular itself, which would replace your system one). Thank you for spotting that bit of oddness :)

The instructions will need a bit of work, yes - it is good feedback to get, on what is obvious and what is not, when there are no instructions at all. That the arrow keys aren't working is strange, that certainly is a bug (as at least it /has/ worked in the past). Guess we have our first real bug! ;) The escape key not going out of full screen is clearly something that should happen, and i had not thought of that. Good idea :)

PDFs are decidedly subpar, yes, but as someone mentioned to me a week or so ago (though in somewhat harsher terms), if you're releasing comics as PDFs, you're a very silly person ;) Rest assured, though, that this will be sorted! Obviously, being a reading application, it need fixing, it just was not a priority... yet :)

Thank you very much! :D i'm quite excited about it as well ;)

22 June, 2016 15:22  

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