Nitrux Weekly Summary — 1st-8th November 2019

Photo by Harley-Davidson on Unsplash

Hi, and welcome to this week’s weekly summary. This week’s recap is the sixth overall and the first for November 2019.

MauiKit Development

• Implemented KAccounts listing/adding/removing functionality.
• We are working on fixing the build errors regarding Gstreamer in the VVave AppImage.
• The inline notification dialog in applications now has a dedicated button to trigger a response action instead of having to click the popup to perform such actions, which was unclear.
• The flickable ToolBar now has edge shadows to indicate that the content goes beyond the border and can be flicked.
• For Index, Components like the FileBrowser, used by Index and also by the FileDialog component, have been improved: the search now works as expected by also looking into the filename’s suffixes. On abstract locations like tags:// or applications:// The search now works by filtering the content. The preferences like “sorting order” are now correctly saved per application using these components.
• For the Tags view, The FileBrowser has been cleaned up visually. The configurable options have been moved to its configuration dialog.
• Added a configuration dialog for Index. The Places sidebar now auto-refreshes when new tags are created. You can open a path-bar path in a different tab. Menu items have been better organized and now have icons.
• For VVave, VVave now makes use of URL structures instead of strings to better identify local files from remote ones; this is some initial work to support streaming from remote locations. Many parts have been moved to loaders to improve the performance and launch time by only loading them when needed. The artwork is now once again correctly fetched from online sources, and the delegates are updated once new artwork has been found one by one, instead of reloading the whole set. The main playlist sidebar no longer overlaps other content, like menus and dialogs.
• VVave playlist, The tracklist, and album grid delegates are using MauiKit item delegates for better visual integration with the other apps. The floating disk is back, and it indicates a track is playing. By clicking on it, the main playlist is revealed. There is a new dedicated “focus” view that hides unnecessary controls.
• VVave focus mode, For a better experience tracks, are now added and start playing once you tap on them, instead of just appending them to the main playlist.
  The selection mode now works as it does on Index, you can select multiple tracks, and the selected state is preserved.
• VVave Selection mode: Finally, VVave can now stream music files from the NextCloud Music app. You just need to set up a valid account, and the tracks will appear under the Cloud view, this is still a work in progress.
• We have added cloud integration.
• The improved SelectionBar component behaves more like most touch applications in selection mode. Now the SelectionBar has a list of actions to perform on the selected files. The SelectionBar can still group files or items across different locations. A list is shown to peek at which files have been selected and allow adjusting the selection.
• The templated delegates used by Maui apps in the list and grid views have been polished even more. Additionally, they are now used in more places.
• In vvave tracks can now be quickly appended or removed from the main playlist using a dedicated button. It also can save the current playlist to a personal playlist now.
• The new focus view has been improved visually. VVave can quickly filter tracks if the list is big enough using the templated data models from MauiKit.
• Maui Apps can also be built for Windows.

VVave builds running on Windows.

ZNX

• Solved issue #58.
• Znx doesn’t read raw bytes from the image anymore to get the update URL. We rely only on the .INFO file.
• Added the -k flag to the deploy command, to allow bypassing SSL certificate checking.
• Added the -d and — debug flags to enable debugging messages.
• We have fixed a bug with. znx is now able to generate ISO images from directories (useful for deploying an image of a live session).
• The build script was updated to use the latest tools.
• znx can check for updates without applying them.
• Error messages are more informative.
• The help content was improved.

Infrastructure

• Minor fixes to synth.
• Minor fixes to copier.
• mkiso can now handle the update URL, the hash URL, and the version (commit or whatever).

Nitrux/tools

• The build script to create ISO files generates a md5sum, instead of a sha256sum; as required by znx.
• We got rid of the old (dangerous) way of storing/reading the update URL, which was handling raw bytes.

Nitrux/znx

Other

• Worked on self-hosting the documentation server. The ReadTheDocs documentation is now being hosted on our server.
• The documentation server is almost ready for production use but still needs some fixing.

Distribution

• Removed dpkg from the Development ISO branch.
• Slightly improve the build script that generates our ISO files when using mksquashfs.
• Further improved the boot time fo Nitrux to approx. 10.6 seconds (from boot menu entry to desktop).
• Our ISO will now use ZNX new update format (.INFO file).