XlsxWriter is a Python module for creating files in xlsx (MS Excel 2007+) format. It is used by certain python modules some of our customers needed (such as OCA report_xlsx module).
This module is available in pypi but it was not packaged for Fedora. I’ve decided to maintain it in Fedora and created a package review request which is helpfully reviewed by Robert-André Mauchin.
The package, providing python3 compatible module, is available for Fedora 28 onwards.
I happen to edit tabular data in LaTeX format quite a bit. Being scientific documents, the table columns are (almost) always left-aligned, even for numbers. That warrants carefully crafted decimal and digit alignment on such columns containing only numbers.
I also happen to edit the text (almost) always in Vim, and just selecting/changing a certain column only is not easily doable (like in a spreadsheet). If there are tens of rows that needs manual digit/decimal align adjustment, it gets even more tedious. There must be another way!
Thankfully, smarter people already figured out better ways (h/t MasteringVim).
With that neat trick, it is much more palatable to look at the tabular data and edit it. Even then, though, it is not possible to search & replace only within a column using Visual Block selection. The Visual Block (^v) sets mark on the column of first row till the column on last row, so any :<','>s/.../.../g would replace any matching text in-between (including any other columns).
To solve that, I’ve figured out another way. It is possible to copy the Visual Block alone and pasting any other content over (though cutting it and pasting would not work as you think). Thus, the plan is:
^v + y)Here’s a short video of how to do so. I’d love to hear if there are better ways.
git-prompt it is possible to display the dirty state (when a tracked file is modified) by setting the env variable GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=true. Powerline can display the status of a git repository, such as number of commits ahead/behind, number of modified files etc. using the powerline_gitstatus module.
Unfortunately, Fedora doesn’t have it packaged. I did some digging in, and found that there’s colour highlighting for branch_dirty and powerline.segments.common.vcs.branch function (which displays the current branch name) takes 2 parameters to modify its behaviour. Modify the shell theme /etc/xdg/powerline/themes/shell/default.json under the left segment (because only left works in shell) then as follows:
The branch will now be highlighted if a tracked file is modified (...{ "function": "powerline.segments.common.vcs.branch","args": {"ignore_statuses": ["U"], "status_colors": true},"priority": 20}...
ignore_statuses = ["U"] causes untracked files to be ignored).
Clean repository:
[This post was drafted on the day Fedora 27 released, about half a year ago, but was not published. The issue bit me again with Fedora 28, so documenting it for referring next time.]
UPDATE: The issue occurred in Fedora 28 because I had exclude=grub2-tools in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf which is the reason error “nothing provides grub2-tools” was coming up. Removing that previously added and then forgotten line fixes the issue with updating grub2 packages.
With fedup and subsequently dnf improving the upgrade experience of Fedora for power users, last few system upgrades have been smooth, quiet, even unnoticeable. That actually speaks volumes of the maturity and user friendliness achieved by these tools.
Upgrading from Fedora 25 to 26 was so event-less and smooth (btw: I have installed and used every version of Fedora from its inception and the default wallpaper of Fedora 26 was the most elegant of them all!).
With that, on the release day I set out to upgrade the main workstation from Fedora 26 to 27 using dnf system-upgrade as documented. Before downloading the packages, dnf warned that upgrade cannot be done because of package dependency issues with grub2-efi-modules and grub2-tools.
I simply removed both the offending packages and their dependencies (assuming were probably installed for the grub2-breeze-theme dependency, but grub2-tools actually provides grub2-mkconfig) and proceeded with dnf upgrade --refresh and dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=27. If you are attempting this, don’t remove the grub2 packages yet, but read on!
Once the download and check is completed, running dnf system-upgrade reboot will cause the system reboot to upgrade target and actual upgrade happen.
Except, I was greeted with EFI MOK (Machine Owner Key) screen on reboot. Now that the grub2 bootloader is broken thanks to the removal of grub2-efi-modules and other related packages, a recovery must be attempted.
It is important to have a (possibly EUFI enabled) live media where you can boot from. Boot into the live media and try to reinstall grub. Once booted in, mount the root filesystem under /mnt/sysimage, and EFI boot partition at /mnt/sysimage/boot/efi. Then chroot /mnt/sysimage and try to reinstall grub2-efi-x64 and shim packages. If there’s no network connectivity, don’t despair, nmcli is to your rescue. Connect to wifi using nmcli device wifi connect <ssid> password <wifi_password>. Generate the boot configuration using grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg followed by actual install grub2-install --target=x86_64-efi /dev/sdX (the –target option ensures correct host installation even if the live media is booted via legacy BIOS). You may now reboot and proceed with the upgrade.
But this again failed at the upgrade stage because of grub package clash that dnf warned earlier about.
Once booted into old installation, take a backup of the /boot/ directory, remove the conflicting grub related packages, and copy over the backed up /boot/ directory contents, especially /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grubx64.efi. Now rebooting (using dnf system-upgrade reboot) had the grub contents intact and the upgrade worked smoothly.
For more details on the package conflict issue, follow this bug.
There is a dearth of good Unicode fonts for Malayalam script. Most publishing houses and desktop publishing agencies still rely on outdated ASCII era fonts. This not only causes issues with typesetting using present technologies, it makes the ‘document’ or ‘data’ created using these fonts and tools absolutely useless — because the ‘document/data’ is still Latin, not Malayalam.
Rachana Institute of Typography (rachana.org.in) has designed and published a new traditional orthography ornamental Unicode font for Malayalam script, for use in headings, captions and titles. It is named after Sundar, who was a relentless advocate of open fonts, open standards and open publishing. He dreamed of making available several good quality Malayalam fonts, particularly created by Narayana Bhattathiri with his unique calligraphic and typographic signature, freely and openly to the users. The font is licensed under OFL.
The font follows traditional orthography for Malayalam, rather than the unpleasing reformed orthography which was solely introduced due to the technical limitations of typewriters in the ’70s. Such restrictions do not apply to computers and present technology, so it is possible to render the classic beauty of Malayalam script using Unicode and Opentype technologies.
‘Sundar’ is designed by K.H. Hussain — known for his work on Rachana and Meera fonts which comes pre-installed with most Linux distributions; and Narayana Bhattathiri — known for his beautiful calligraphy and lettering in Malayalam script. Graphic engineers of STM Docs (stmdocs.in) did the vectoring and glyph creation. Yours truly took care of the Opentype feature programming. The font can be freely downloaded from rachana.org.in.
The source code of ‘Sundar’, licensed under OFL is available at https://gitlab.com/rit-fonts/Sundar.
Official Raspbian images based on Debian Stretch by default has the Pixel desktop environment and will login new users to it. But if you have had a Raspbian installation with another DE (such as LXDE), here are the steps to install and login to the Pixel desktop.
apt-get install raspberrypi-ui-mods
sed -i 's/^autologin-user=pi/#autologin-user=pi/' /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
update-alternatives --set x-session-manager /usr/bin/startlxde-pi
sed -i 's/^Session=.*/Session=lightdm-xsession/' ${USER}/.dmrc
Make sure the user’s ‘.dmrc’ file is updated with the new startlxde-pi session as that is where lightdm login manager looks to decide which desktop should be launched.
VLC Media Player has the ability to convert video/audio files into various formats it supports, since a long time. There is a dedicated “Convert/Save” menu for converting single or multiple files at once into a different format, with limited ‘editing’ features such as specifying a start time, caching options etc. It is quite useful for basic editing/cropping of multimedia files.
As an example, one of the easiest ways to create a custom iPhone ringtone is to create a “.m4r” (AAC format) file exactly 40 seconds long. It is a matter of selecting your favourite music file and doing a “Convert/Save” with appropriate “Profile”. A “Profile” specifies the video/audio encoding to be used, which can be easily customized by selecting different audio and video codecs.
The options “Caching time”, “Play another media synchronously” (think adding different sound track to a video clipping) and a “Start time” etc can be specified under “Show more options” button and even more advanced functionality is available by making use of the “Edit Options” line. Internally, all the options specified at this line are passed to the converter.
There was one thing lacking in this “Convert/Save” dialog though – there was no possibility to specify a “Stop Time” akin to the “Start Time”, in the GUI (although it can be manually specified in the “Edit Options”, but you need to calculate the time in milliseconds). VLC 2.x series convert looks like as follows – notice the lack of “Stop time”:
Being bugged by this minor annoyance, I set out to add the missing “Stop-time” functionality. Going through the codebase of VLC, it was relieving to see that the converter backend already supports “:stop-time=” option (akin to “:start-time=”). It was then a matter of adding “Stop Time” to the GUI and properly updating the “Edit Options” when user changes the value.
A working patch was then sent to vlc-devel mailing list for review and feedback. After 5 rounds of review and constructive feedback from Filip Roséen the code was cleaned up (including existing code) which is now committed to the master branch. This functionality should be available to users in the upcoming 3.0 release. Screenshot below:
