MUA++ (or on to thunderbird)

by on 2017/03/24 at 6:11 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

So, a few weeks ago I moved my MUA (Mail User Agent) from claws-mail over to evolution. Last week I decided to move on and give thunderbird a try.

Mostly evolution worked, but it had some bugs I hit that were quite annoying: From time to time it would duplicate emails on my work imap server. Suddenly I would get 50 copies of some list post. I could of course select them and ‘delete duplicates’ but this was pretty anoying. I tried all sorts of tuning to get it to not do that, but nothing seemed to work. Additionally I found the keyboard shortcuts difficult to get used.

So, thunderbird. For this I needed to make a change I had been meaning to for a long time, but kept never getting around to: I needed to switch to using my home server’s imap server instead of delivering email to my laptop (thunderbird only does imap for incoming emails). Fortunately, it was easy to just change my .procmailrc to deliver to the server and serve it via imap. However then I ran into some real confusion: I had setup my server (dovecot) a number of years back to provide 2 ‘namespaces’ in imap: The first would be a Mailbox that it would deliver email to, and the second would be a Maildir that it used for folders (this was due to having some friends using my mail server who insisted on using mail clients via shell that didn’t understand Maildir). I had to do a bit of tweaking to get it working for me, but not breaking it for others. The mbox namespace also meant there was a mail directory with mailbox folders and if you were not careful how you set things up you would get those (mailbox is a good deal less permofrmant than Maildir, so I wanted to avoid them). Finally, I got it all working there.

So, after now using thunderbird for a week or so, the good:

  • thunderbird has no problems talking to various imap servers. No duplicate emails, no errors, everything works nicely and pretty quickly.
  • lightning plugin is now built in/included in thunderbird and it has had no problems talking to all my vaious calendars.
  • enigmail seems to do a fine job with encrypted emails and signing my outgoing emails.
  • The keyboard commands seem a lot easier to get used to, and with the Nostalgy extension it’s pretty easy to file emails and go to places.
  • The search features seem very fast and work well. I ‘star’ mails I want to deal with later, and have a search folder that shows all starred emails. I can from there easily open a tab with the entire conversation if I want to read the thread the email was in again.
  • There’s a handy sort by ‘Grouped’ thats nice for some things. It will show you for example todays emails and let you expand previous days if you like.

The bad:

  • I cannot quite seem to get the message view to look the way I want. It seems to change what fonts it uses sometimes based on “I am not sure what”. Possibly if the email is html only? Will keep looking into it.
  • I had to enter all my stupid filtering rules _again_. I just redid them for evolution, but now again for thunderbird. I really need to look into sieve and just doing it on the server. There outta be a standard!

and the things that are just related, but not directly thunderbird:

  • My mail is now in imap on my main server and I can read it via thunderbird, or roundcubemail.
  • I’ve unsubscribed or otherwise removed myself from a bunch of lists or things that were sending me email that I never read anymore or cared about. There’s still some more of these to go, but its good every once in a while to drop all your filters and rebuild them to see what should just never come in at all.

Will I stick with thunderbird? Time will tell. So far this week indications are good, but we will see.

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Email and RSS and their readers and writers

by on 2017/03/13 at 10:35 am
Posted In: fedora, linux

I’ve been using claws-mail to both read/compose emails and to read all the vast pile of RSS feeds I try and keep up with for quite a while now and it’s for the most part been fine. I never liked claws-mail use of mh folders instead of something more standard like Maildir, and it’s calendar integration is… not there, but it did a pretty good job.

Unfortunately, claws-mail uses a plugin called ‘fancy’ to render html (which sees heavy use when loading rss feeds). This plugin uses the old old webkit1 (webkitgtk package in Fedora). This package hasn’t been maintained upstream in quite a long while and the number of vulnerabilities in it has just grown and grown. Other distros have dropped it entirely, and Fedora is finally following suit very soon. This has caused the Fedora claws-mail maintainers to drop the fancy plugin to prevent dropping claws-mail entirely. However, without that plugin, RSS reading is… not very pretty.

So, after seeing Jiri Eischmann’s recent post ( https://eischmann.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/nextcloud-linux-desktop/ ) about using the nextcloud News app, I decided to give that a try. Installing was pretty easy, but note that it’s not in stable apps yet. Importing my feeds from claws-mail’s RSSyl was pretty easy, but the only want to put feeds in categories is drag and drop. Drag and drop when you have many many feeds is a real pain, I really wished for a ‘move to folder’ option. The Fedora “feedreader” app looks pretty nice and after a bit of tweaking handled things pretty well. The android OwnNews app also seems pretty nice and functional. I did notice some times when it seemed all three readers were not 100% in sync as to what was read or not, but things stayed pretty close. Being able to use my phone to browse feeds will be handy. I also took this time to cull a bunch of feeds that didn’t have any posts in the last few years or I didnt care about anymore or the like. Overall I think this will be a pretty reasonable replacement.

Next up was mail. I could have just stuck with claws-mail for just mail, but without the fancy plugin any html emails would not render really at all. So, I figured I would bite the bullet and look at evolution again. I switched over my work and gmail accounts first as they use imap and state is (mostly) remote anyhow. They setup pretty easily. Next I added a account that was all my old claws-mail folders in mh format. In the past when I tried this evolution crashed, but this time it seemed to handle it ok. I later disabled this account for now, as it caused fetching new emails to take a while and I only need it if I need to find an old email and can enable it then. Finally I switched over my main mail stream. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to import my old claws-mail filters, but this did give me a chance to cull emails that I get. As things came in saturday and sunday I added filter rules, unsubscribed, or otherwise made a note to stop whatever it was sending me email. There’s definitely some oddities I will have to get used to with evolution, but overall I think I can make it work. The biggest frustration is that the shortcut keys to do things don’t seem to work for me. (ie, . and , are supposed to go to the next or previous unread message, but they do not here. They don’t do anything). There doesn’t seem to be a way to quickly go to a particular folder. After a bit of use, I figured out the problem: The shortcuts are focus specific, and I don’t really see any indicator which pane I have focused. ;(

Right now I think the RSS change is likely to stick, not entirely sure on evolution, but if it doesn’t there’s a number of other clients to try out (thunderbird, mutt, or back to emacs 🙂

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Rawhide notes from the trail, the 2017-03-04 edition

by on 2017/03/04 at 6:14 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

Well, branching of Fedora 26 off rawhide has come and gone, and it was a bit of a rocky ride this time sadly.

The branched composes were failing at first, then working, but not actually syncing to the master mirrors in order for mirrormanager to notice it and people to you know, actually use it.

This time we tried to make sure both branched f26 and rawhide were signed the entire time by the right keys. They currently are, but sadly, there’s a old/obsolete/bad/nolonger used/no good/varmit of a Fedora 26 key thats in the fedora-release-25 package. So if you are trying to upgrade you may need to find/get the right f26 key before doing so. Also, the resigning meant that mirrors had to pull basically every package again, so it’s going to be a bit before everyone is synced up on rawhide and f26 content.

If you want to keep following Fedora 26 to it’s release, you need to run a ‘dnf repo-sync –releasever=26’ to make sure you have the right releases and repos. If you want to stay riding on the rawhide trail, you can just dnf update and should get the fedora-27 release and repos.

Until next time, ride safe.

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Rawhide notes from the trail, 2017-02-22

by on 2017/02/22 at 5:02 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

Some recent gotchas in rawhide:

  • firefox doesn’t seem to compile correctly with gcc7 (and the optimization levels Fedora uses by default). The current rawhide version will install and run fine, but looks horrible. As a work around you can install a flatpak or a binary version from upstream or downgrade to firefox-51.0.1-2.fc26 from koji. This is tracked in: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1422532
  • A few weeks ago, python2-jinja2 was updated to 1.9.4, then 1.9.5. Unfortunately 1.9.4 broke ansible templating, and all the problems were not fixed by 1.9.5. As a consequence, ansible hasn’t been runable the last few weeks. Until today: I pushed ansible-2.2.2.0-rc1 into rawhide. This isn’t the final 2.2.2.0, but it hopefully fixes the jinja compatibility issues and gets rawhide ansible users back on track.
  • After my last post about composes failing due to an unsigned package, we ran into 3 other issues we had to fix to actually get a compose working: First, an nss update caused lorax to break. Turns out it was due to the mock chroot used not having /dev/urandom and nss noq requires that to be there. Next was the rdma-core package breaking things. It was untagged a while back to fix, but then the mass rebuild rebuilt it again and it got pushed out again. Finally policycoreutils-python started pulling a ton of more deps which broke the minimal installer chroot.
  • Even after we now have composes, livecd’s are not working due to an anaconda bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1425827 Hopefully we will have a fix for that soon and livemedia will be back.
  • There was a pungi bug preventing the ostree composes working, there’s a proposed fix for that one.
  • i386 images and media are all failing due to a weird dep solving issue where it says “will not install src.rpm”. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1416699

Lots of bugs, but we are moving forward on quashing them now. I am hoping we have some good composes later this week and then we can try and keep them that way.

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Fedora macbook pro testers++

by on 2017/02/20 at 7:31 am
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

In the final run-up to the Fedora 25 release, we slipped a week because there was a bug in installs on apple osx (now macos again) hardware. This was (and is) a use case the Workstation working group cares about, as they would love for folks with apple hardware to install Fedora and use it on that hardware. Sadly, we don’t have too many testers with this hardware to help our testing cycles, and many community members with this hardware also are using it day to day and cannot afford to reinstall and test at the drop of a hat.

I use my personal yoga 900 for my main machine, so my work laptop has always been for me a test machine or a backup in case of failure. There are a number of reasons for this: I prefer to pick and use laptops that aren’t standard corporate offerings, I like to know that I can do anything I choose with the laptop, and if (god forbid) I moved to a new job I wouldn’t have to give my primary laptop back.

So, when I was up for laptop refresh and I saw that a macbook pro 13″ model (12,1 apparently) was available, I decided to choose that and help out with Fedora testing efforts on this hardware. I do feel a bit bad about this as I am not a big fan of Apple and this does mean giving them money, but on the other hand, hopefully I can test Fedora and help avoid slips due to lack of hardware. Also, I can run rawhide on it and see if I can get everything working fully.

The macbook arrived the other day and yesterday I unpacked it and did some initial testing:

First, the hardware: Seems nice enough, but I am not sure why anyone would get one of these over a Dell XPS 13 or a yoga 900/910. It’s got a lower resolution screen than those, 8gb memory instead of 16, and only an i5 cpu instead of an i7. The feel is very solid, but it makes it just makes it seem too heavy to me. Otherwise the screen is bright and nice, the keyboard backlight is nice (The yoga 900 only has off, dim, bright for the keyboard backlight, but this macbook you can set it to whatever you like), the power connector is neat in that it has a light on it telling you if it’s charging (orange/amber) or fully charged (green). The keyboard and trackpad seem fine.

I decided I would go through the normal macos setup first and then try and setup Fedora to dual boot, as I imagine that would be a common setup. Part of the setup instructions that came from my corporate overlords was mention of enabling File Vault full disk encryption. So, I did that and got everything installed and seemed to be working fine (at least as far as I could tell, not being a macos user normally).

Still following what I would think would be the more traveled path, I went to https://getfedora.org and downloaded the Fedora Media Writer. Download went fine and it was no trouble to run it, but it did give me a warning that this was something I had “DOWNLOADED” from the internet. I don’t guess we have much way around that warning as we are signing the binary fine and it’s not saying it’s unsigned, just that it was downloaded and are you sure you want to run it. Download and burn to usb went just fine, no problems at all with FMW. It might be nice if there is an option to download Rawhide images if you really wanted them.

Hold down the option key and power on and you get the boot selector thing. Choose FedoraMedia and there’s the Fedora Live USB. Everything booted up nicely and I poked around to see what was working or not working. Turns out so far the only thing that doesn’t appear to be working out of the box is the webcam. It seems to be a broadcom model that some folks are working on reverse engineering, but haven’t gotten that done enough to merge into the mainline kernel ( https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie ). I might try that out sometime down the road. The power connector activity seems a bit odd as well: when you plug or unplug the power it seems to take a minute or two before it notices and starts updating.

Next I pulled up the Anaconda installer and looked to install Fedora along side the existing OS. I needed some space to install in, so I selected the largest partition which I knew was the main macos volume (but oddly was showing up as Unknown), and told anaconda to shrink it. That seemed to work fine, and I installed Fedora in the newly freed space. The install finished fine and I rebooted.

On reboot, I now got grub and Fedora booted and worked fine. The macos entries however, errored and didn’t work at all. Turns out this is a long standing, known bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=893179 I tried various things suggested in the bug to chainload, but with no luck. Luckily you can still hold down option and get the native bootloader.

So, I did that and tried to boot the macos install, but it would think for a while and then error with a picture that was a circle and crossbar and fail to boot. After poking around it seems I now hit: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1033778 ( https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F24_bugs#apple-core-storage-wipe ). So, my macos partition was unknown to anaconda, so it let me shrink it, but it messed it up completely and nuked all data that was on it. Had I not encrypted things it would have worked, but since I did it was gone.

Luckily apple has the advantage of controlling the hardware platform in this case, so I just needed to boot with option command r to get a network rescue. This let me wipe the drive, repartition it, reinstall macos, then boot the Fedora USB again and install Fedora in the space I left for it. So, it wasn’t the end of the world, but it would sure have been anoying if I had data there.

After all that installing, I moved the Fedora install from F25 to rawhide. No issues there, everything seems to work and be fine after that.

So, if we could somehow fix the two bugs I ran into for f26 I think it would help macbook folks a fair bit. If anyone needs me to install or test anything on this platform, just let me know. I plan to keep the macbook ready to (re)install most anytime and hopefully can provide more test coverage for upcoming cycles.

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