GNU rejected TUI, for the moment

Hello everyone

As TUI can show its true power only when it is already installed on your system, so one could simply share the scripts that  rely on TUI, just like one shares any bash or other shell script, I wanted to become part of GNU.

That is no easy task, specialy if you come from a 4 year old project that hasnt had this goal from start.
So, for the past 10 months, its been in the GNU Evaluation queue and just until a day ago it look very promising.

However, it got rejected for the moment, as more user feedback is wanted for them to evaluate the need/profit of making TUI part of the GNU family.

With one of the arguments beeing that we would need some user feedback for further evaluation.

That is, because TUI has a new approach to the terminal...
An approach mainwhile quite the same, but also quite different.

In the beginning, I wanted the 'ultimate' dir/menu browser for (a single specific) directory based script project/s.
In the end I extracted those functions as I wanted to have the scripts provided in named directories to look/match the containing 'ultimate' menu, so I made them individual commands.

Due to this change, one can also create great (single file) wizzards or wrappers around other cli/clu applications or make tools that act (but dont look like) 'ip' or 'iw' commands, just for your custom directory-tree structure.

It comes with many commands/functions for often used tasks, such as tui-yesno, tui-select, tui-read, as well as nice optical commands such as tui-header and tui-title.

As it is a command and line-based-output framework, it might look weird if you just try a single command.
To get started - once installed, you might want to check:

tuirc samples
tuirc provides

To get the manual, please check either:

info tui
tuirc info
tuirc html  # Only if you used "make install all"

I'm asking here for this required feedback:

• Which OS/Distro?
• Does Installer work?
• Does running 'tuirc' raise any, and if - what kind of - error messages? (Besides initial creating of user configuration)
• Any other errors/bugs/unexpected behaviour you came along?

Additionally according to your skill, time and preferences:

• What are our thoughts about the 'tuirc samples'  and info page?
• Did you find any security bugs? - have any advice how to fix them?

Get it from: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/tui/

Issue is, all i can say for sure is that it runs well on my system.
I'd very much like to have confirmed reports on which OS or Distro it installs and runs well or not.
That is also required to get it working for that OS/Distro, eventhough most of them work alike, there are differences i might not be aware to catch and handle (properly) without reports and hints how its done on your OS.

Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts about TUI.

Almost there...

Oh yeah, i'm happy already, allthough it has not yet passed evaluation.

What i'm talking about?
I'm talking about TUI - Text User Interface for scripts, which has reached 0.8.9-GNU-RC16 yesterday evening, and if everything works out as expected, it will reach "GNU TUI 0.9.0" this week.

I've been using TUI already for about 3 years for my own 'production', but by now, it has achieved a state that deserves the label 'stable'!

The feedback, so far, has been good and promising.

What to expect when it passes the evaluation?
I plan to move the project home to: http://www.gnu.org/software/tui to share the texinfo manual and to be the first and primary point of announcements regarding it.

Obviously i'll post here about it too, but more in a human-speaking way, and less technical as there.

Oh im so excited, that i just cant hide it...
*dance dance*

How to start coding GNU/Linux software

An often asked question is:

How do i start coding for the GNU/Linux community?

Well, assuming you already can write code, we can focus on GNU/Linux specific issues.

First read:
Coding Standards: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/
Translating using gettext: http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html

While preparing your documention:
texinfo: http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/texinfo.html

Then, with your first example project following those guide lines, go ahead and dig into:
Autconf: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html
Automake: http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html
These tools will help to compile your project at the enduser side without issues.

I figured the hard way, created a project, and then had to apply (at least some of) these standards afterwards.. which caused lots of unrequired work...


Other than that, try to make something new, not yet another media converter based upon ffmpeg or avutils.
To do so, search the already existing software at:

• http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html#allgnupkgs
• http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page

Of course, just as/for a training project, you can do whatever you like, just dont expect anyone to jump around in that case.

Hope this helps

YASSI 1.0.1 - Final release

I'm happy to announce the final release of YASSI.

YASSI does not need to be installed, unless you want to 'info yassi'.
The project name and version 'yassi'/1.0.1, and both lines with 'Report bugs...' are read from the configuration file,
and therefor will adjust to your project settings.

Not even 2 months ago I had started with this project, and it already provides all the functions i've wanted for it.While I initially started it for another project of mine where i needed to focus on the duty, i wanted to have it as its own project, to use with ther projects.

I do hope you helps you as much as it does for me.

What is YASSI again?

Yet Another Simple Script Installer

What is it for?

It requires a single file to provide all information for an installation custom to your needs,
while staying easy change-able by the end user.

Get it

• Projectpage: https://github.com/sri-arjuna/yassi
• Release: https://github.com/sri-arjuna/yassi/releases/tag/v1.0.2

Funny error message

Been trying to write a task manager for a script, with the recent changes for GNU TUI evalutation, this is an error i've recieved while working on VHS (Video Handler Script, using ffmpeg)...
Wondering if my security concerns were too much... 

The german words means: "Line 224: .. Syntax  Error: Operator expected. (Error causing character is \033[....)"




So basicly, aborting failed because the aborting text string for the user contained a smiley ';)'
While mainwhile the the printing fails due to an unprintable character, escape string.
But the aborting, after all, aborts successfull.

Usualy errors are just annoying, but this one i found rather funny.

BTW, these 3 bugs are fixed now.

Learn about TUI
Learn about VHS

Download them at github.

Minimalistic prompt (PS1)

The most usefull and minimalstic command prompt i can imagine for scripters or sys-admins:

PROMPT_COMMAND='RET=$?'
RET_VAL="$(echo $RET)"
export PS1="$RET_VAL \\$ "

If if its within a terminal window, you'll see the path you're in in the task- or titlebar.
If you really want to have the path in your shell, try this line:

export PS1="$RET_VALUE \W \\$ "

Hope you enjoy and have fun!

Linux, minimal WIFI on Laptop

Every now and then i do a new installation or try out a new (or new version of an already known) distro.

The most irritating part with many linux installations is the following:

They provide wifi tools on the install image, but they are not part of the core system to be installed.

The core system expects a desktop computer, or just any device having a wired only connection to the internet (or LAN for that reason) .

So, first of a remainder of the packages required:

• dhcpcd, and ifconfig (or ip) (should already be installed)
• wpa_supplicant
• iw

As for all my scripts, it uses TUI, so you might want to install GIT or just download it from the http://github.com/sri-arjuna/tui page.

Now, the concept is, to have one script per spot, and have logfiles for each of the spots.

The logfiles are created according to the script its name, and create the key (creds) file automaticly if its missing.

Add the missing pieces, AP, password and your wifi device.

Then, save the code as something like: wifi-home.

#!/bin/bash
#
#    Variables
#
    WIFI=wlp3s0        # Your WIFI device
    SSID="AP-name"    # The AP its name
    PASS="AP-pass"        # Password for that AP
    URL="google.com"    # Which URL to ping
    ME=${0##*/}
    KEY="$HOME/.config/$ME.key"    # Where to save the keyfile
    #
#    Internals
#
    start=${start:-false}
    [ 0 -eq ${UID:-0} ] && \
        LOG=/var/log/$ME.log || \
        LOG=$HOME/.local/logs/$ME.log
#
#    Functions
#
    wifi_createkey () { # SSID PASS FILE
    # Creates a wpa key file if none exists yet
    #
        [ -d "$(dirname $3)" ] || mkdir -p "$(dirname $3)"
        wpa_passphrase "$1" "$2" > "$3"
    }
    wifi_start() {
    # Start wpa supplicant in background
    #
        wpa_supplicant -B -i$WIFI -c"$KEY" 1>>"$LOG" 2>>"$LOG" &
        dhcpcd -B 1>>"$LOG" 2>>"$LOG"
    }
    p() { ping -c 1 "$URL" 1>/dev/zero 2>/dev/zero;}
#
#    Display and action
#
    # Is there a key file?
    [ ! -f "$KEY" ] && wifi_createkey "$SSID" "$PASS" "$KEY"

    # If it cant ping, then there is no internet
    if ! p 1>/dev/zero 2>/dev/zero
    then    start=true
        # If they are already running, they are blocking the new connection
        for used in dhcpcd ${0##*/}
        do    # Make sure those processes are killed if they are still running
        if ps|grep $used | grep -v $$ >/dev/zero && tui-yesno "$used is already running, stop it?"
        then    pkill $used
            kill $(ps|awk -v user=$used '/used/ {print $1}')
        fi
        done
    fi

    # Now only start if we need to
    if $start
    then    tui-status -r 2 "Starting WIFI..."
        wifi_start &
        tui-status $? "Started wifi"
    fi

Now lets prepare that thing to be executed upon boot, prepare:

[Unit]
Description=Wifi-Home

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/path/to/script/wifi-home.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

And place it in /etc/systemd/system as wifi-home.service.
And now finaly as root:

systemctl enable wifi-home
systemctl start wifi-home

Et voila, you should now have wifi at each new boot.

After a restart, you can check how long the loading took:

$ systemd-analyze critical-chain

The time after the unit is active or started is printed after the "@" character.
The time the unit takes to start is printed after the "+" character.

graphical.target @12.509s
└─multi-user.target @12.508s
  └─wifi-home.service @11.729s +778ms
    └─basic.target @11.382s
   ...

Hope this helps

ARCH: Ugly fonts in Firefox?

Oh yeah, some pages are hard to read with such pixelish fonts...

Smooth and easy solution, is to disable the bitmap fonts, which are often linked to the 75 and 100 dpi fonts.

su
ln -s  /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf \
  /etc/fonts/conf.d/

Background jobs, exit status

Figured another way to get an exit status of a job ran in background.

Obviously, these examples are simplified.
Each first of the two, is the 'one-liner' and the 2nd code box shows the structure with idention.

1) In this first one, we're sending the output of the background job into a variable, which we echo at the end.
This works, but doesnt really take advantage of a 'background' job.

ret=$(( sleep 2 ; [ -d not-existing ] ; echo $?) &)
echo $ret

ret=$(
    (
        sleep 2
        [ -d not-existing ]
        echo $?
    )&
)
echo $ret

2) This one applies alot more to what one usualy expects as a background job. (AFAIU) mkfifo lets the read-command wait until something is written to its passed file.

tmp=~/.cache/$$~ ; mkfifo "$tmp"
( sleep 10 ; [ -d not-existing ] ; echo $? > "$tmp") &
read RET < "$tmp" ; [ "$RET" = "0" ] && echo "GOOD!" || echo "BAD"
rm -f "$tmp"

tmp=~/.cache/$$~
mkfifo "$tmp"
(
    sleep 10
    [ -d not-existing ]
    echo $? > "$tmp"
) &
read RET < "$tmp"
[ "$RET" = "0" ] && echo "GOOD!" || echo "BAD"
rm -f "$tmp"

3) And to close the top 3, my most used code of these three.
This one loops while the background job is active and prints dots while its running. One could replace the printed string to update the text accordingly.

tmp="~/.cache/$~"
( sleep 5 ; [ -d not-existing ] ; echo $? > "$tmp") &
pid=$!
while ps $pid 1>/dev/zero;do sleep 0.5 ; printf ".";done
cat "$tmp"

tmp="~/.cache/$~"
(
    sleep 5
    [ -d not-existing ]
    echo $? > "$tmp"
) &
pid=$!
while ps $pid 1>/dev/zero
do
    sleep 0.5
    printf "."
done
cat "$tmp"

Last but not least, i'll have a tool to help with such a task.
Its called: tui-psm, which names Text User Interface - Paralell Script Manager.
You can pass as many scripts as an array can hold, and limit the paralell executed scripts to any number you want (5 is default).

tui-psm script1.sh script2.bash script3.csh

But it can more, for example, if you need at least 3 scripts to be executed successfully before you attempt to run script 5, this could be your approach:

tui-psm -cq script1.sh script2.bash script3.csh ./script4.zsh
[ $? -ge 3 ] && ./script5.ash

Hope this helped.
Have fun scripting!

Taming the beast, TUI back to stable

Now after the big excitement of the successfull changes to use an invidiual rc file for all its used variables, basic usage seems to be back to normal again.

-> Taming the beast, back to stable! <-

It is causing a rush to figure one successfully installs the bash completition, accidently to a wrong and non-working path.

But this massive change also helped me to figure out which internal variables to share and which not, so i've added the function 'provides' to figure that out.

tui provides

Will print a hughe and long list with all the variables used internaly and which you may use as well.

If you

source  tui

you'll have all of those variables available, but sourcing just the rc file, and the wanted file providing the variables you want can increase usage speed.

source ~/.tui_rc || . tui
source $TUI_FILE_{APPS,SETTINGS}

Also several small hotfixes, of which i was sure i have had applied already 6 months ago....

Hope you like it, enjoy! :)

TUI 0.8.0-2, The RC File release

Get it here:
https://github.com/sri-arjuna/tui/releases/tag/v0.8.0-2

Read about it here:
http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-and-scripting/253496-tui-text-user-interface-framework-scripts.html

Also the installation script has changed:

Hope you like the changes.
Enjoy! :)

Todays achievement

I'm trying to provide some information on the variables used by TUI, reading them from 'memory' as env doesnt list them anymore (since heartbleed, still accessable by "echo ...").

Anyway, so me kind of proud this worked on first attempt :)
List all the variables starting with TUI_ and RET_:

echo ${!TUI_*} ${!RET_*}

While this is already nice, as it prints all variable names starting with either TUI_ or RET_, i'd like to show the values of these variables as well, so the user gets an idea what to expect.
Thought, eval might be usefull at this point, to show the current set paths, files, colors and default return values.

for foundVar in ${!TUI_*} ${!RET_*}
do    tui-printf -E \
           "$foundVar" \
           "$(tmp=\$$foundVar ; printf '%s' $(eval echo $tmp))"
done

Which then finaly printed (shortened):

:: TUI_DIR_CACHE                     /home/sea/.cache ::
:: TUI_DIR_CONF                              /etc/tui ::
:: TUI_DIR_DOCS                    /usr/share/doc/tui ::
:: TUI_DIR_INSTALL_ROOT                               ::
:: TUI_DIR_SYSTEM                      /usr/share/tui ::
:: TUI_DIR_THEMES               /usr/share/tui/themes ::
:: TUI_DIR_USER                 /home/sea/.config/tui ::
:: TUI_DIR_USER_LOGS       /home/sea/.config/tui/logs ::
:: TUI_DIR_USER_MANPAGES    /home/sea/.local/man/man1 ::
:: TUI_DIR_USER_SCRIPTS          /home/sea/.local/bin ::

Get the extension of a filename

Every now and then, one needs to decide upon a file its extension what to do.

This is what i've added as tui-str-extension:

out=""
FN=$( echo "$1" | sed s," ","",g)    # Remove any spaces and make it a single string
for chance in $(echo "$FN"|sed s,"\."," ",g)    # Use dots as string seperators
do    out="$chance"
done
if [ "$out" = "$FN" ]
then    echo ""
else     echo "${out%\ /}"     # Remove any tailing or single space
fi

Hope you like it :)

Dev-Scripts: Easily build 32 & 64 bit live images

This screenshot shows how easy one can build a kickstart project as 64 and 32 bit.
I love my tool :)

TUI - Themes, colors per user, and root is special

Heya, isnt that cool?!?

I've finaly applied a theme-mechanic so one can easily change among colors and borders used with TUI.
Root uses even another one, changeable only by root obviously.

But since my default linux is Fedora, the default theme is 'blue'.
And since the user root can do more damange, and Fedora is based upon Red Hat, the default root color theme is 'red'.

Here is a preview with the upcoming 'dev-scripts':

Above was called as regular user,
below was called as root user.

Readded 2-Pass encoding for VHS

1.0.7
- Reducded -Q dvd from v768 to v640
- Readded 2pass encoding: -2
- Fixed small typos

Isnt that just nice, after several weeks of asking for feedback, one actualy replied AFTER i decided it to be stable.
Oh well, at least i know now that the 2 pass encoding was working, for others at least, so i have readded this with this new update of my "Video Handler Script".

Hope you like it

ds prj list

Just done a little nice feature to keep track of the modules used with a project:

ds prj list