COOLDays 2022 - Berlin

This year Collabora Productivity organized hybrid conference in Berlin. I've participated virtually by presenting video with recent improvements in JSDialogs which provides dialogs knwon from the LibreOffice for Collabora Online. Second talk was a short case study / tutorial how to add new component based on a mentioned framework.

Raspberry Pi OS with LUKS

Short notes with setup for working remote LUKS decrypt. Unofrtunately after cryptroot-unlock success it shutdowns the system :) Maybe I will try again when will find some time.

1. Burn Rasberry Pi OS Lite image

2. Create additional partition for encrypted root partition.

3. Update and restart:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
sudo shutdown -r now

4. Install deps:

apt-get install busybox cryptsetup dropbear-initramfs lvm2

5. Prepare partition:

cryptsetup -v -y --cipher aes-xts-plain64 --key-size 256 luksFormat <newroot>
cryptsetup -v luksOpen <newroot> sdcard
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/sdcard
cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/sdcard

6. Configure partition in the system: check :

blkid | grep crypto_LUKS

open /etc/crypttab and add:

sdcard    <newroot>    none    luks,initramfs

open /etc/fstab and replace original root partition with:

/dev/mapper/sdcard      /       ext4    defaults        0       1

open /boot/cmdline.txt and replace existing partition config with:

root=/dev/mapper/sdcard cryptdevice=<newroot>:sdcard

also add at the end of the same file dhcp configuration:

ip=:::::eth0:dhcp

7. Configure early decryption:

echo 'DROPBEAR_OPTIONS="-RFEsjk -c /bin/cryptroot-unlock"' > /etc/dropbear-initramfs/config
echo "CRYPTSETUP=y" >> /etc/cryptsetup-initramfs/conf-hook

8. Fix issue with short timeout for decryption:

sed -i 's/^TIMEOUT=.*/TIMEOUT=100/g' /usr/share/cryptsetup/initramfs/bin/cryptroot-unlock

9. Configure early remote access over SSH:

touch /boot/ssh
echo '<your_public_ssh_key>' > /etc/dropbear-initramfs/authorized_keys

10. Copy files from original root partition to the new encrypted partition. 11. Generate initramfs:

sudo mkinitramfs -o /boot/initramfs.gz
echo "initramfs initramfs.gz" >> /boot/config.txt

12. Reboot and try to connect remotely. Configs for ssh:

Host pi
    HostName <ip>
    User user
    PreferredAuthentications password

Host pi-enable
    HostName <ip>
    User root
    StrictHostKeyChecking no
    UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<your_public_ssh_key>

Links:

https://github.com/ViRb3/pi-encrypted-boot-ssh

https://www.paxswill.com/encrypted-raspberry-pi/

https://www.kali.org/docs/arm/raspberry-pi-with-luks-full-disk-encryption/

https://www.arminpech.de/2019/12/23/debian-unlock-luks-root-partition-remotely-by-ssh-using-dropbear/

New formulabar in Collabora Online

I still continue conversion of various UI components in Collabora Online to "native" HTML widgets. This helps us to get better user experience especially on touch / mobile devices. This time I converted formulabar which is used to edit data in cells in the spreadsheets.

Previous "tunneled" approach had some disadvantages like blurry look under some conditions and cursor position setup depending on a pixel based coordinates. Now it become edit field which is rendered by the browser - so we have always crisp text. Position of the carret is represented as a logical value and also handled by the browser - so on touch devices it is much easier to type.

Here you can see how it looks on a smartphone:

FOSDEM 2022 - Building Collabora Online UI using LibreOffice Components

Last weekend I participated in online event - FOSDEM 2022. Well known conference in the Open Source community, as described on the webpage: "FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate.".

I've presented my work from the recent year. Video and slides can be found here:
https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lotech_buildingcoolui/

Sidebar converted to „native” HTML controls

In the past I’ve converted sidebar into contextual menus for mobile version of Collabora Online. Since that time I was waiting for a moment when it will be possible to do similar thing for the desktop version of Collabora Online, the one that you use in the browser on your laptop. It is a good step to make UI unified and more convenient for a user.

In the new approach we use HTML controls with „native” listboxes and spinfields instead of pictures generated by the server. The data transfer from the server to the browser for fields invalidation should be reduced as we don’t have to send images. Widgets can be now styled using the same CSS like other UI components what will improve look of the sidebar. Thanks to the conversion for a desktop I also improved the mobile menus and did few optimizations.

Sidebar is still under development but looks promising:

LibreOffice & OpenSUSE Conference 2020

Recently I participated in the annual LibreOffice conference. This year it was different: first because it was done together with OpenSUSE community and second it was online event. I had two talks about features I implemented last year: mobile tool palette and notebookbar on desktop.

Notebookbar

Mobile tool palette - reused sidebar from the desktop application.

Here you can see my slides:

Native widgets on mobile for Online - prototype

In the desktop suite we have the sidebar which is a context dependant feature improving user performance eg. in chart editing. Unfortunately it's not the perfect UI for a mobile clients, so the new concept is to tunnel the UI description to the browser and create native widgets there. I did some prototyping work in this area and I can see first results:

As we can see all basic widgets and layout are preserved. All sections are visible, it will be possible to create an UI where user will see only one section at time for better mobile experience. Complex controls like color selectors are not available yet (I'm going to use our color selector present in the toolbar). The development takes place in the feature branch.