I recently found myself in need of reading and sending emails from an MS Outlook server. To that end, I have packaged the sasl-xoauth2 (upstream, AUR package) tool for AUR, as well as have taken over maintenance of the orphaned python-msal (upstream, AUR package) library. The actual setup for mbsync and postfix is quite involved, and will be documented in a separate post ..read more

After having worked about 18 years on getting Debian users a great TeX experience, things have turned sour between Debian and me. So I think it is time to look a bit at my contributions over these years, for this I have prepared repo stats of the most important TeX related repositories. Here are the repo stats for repo stats for tex-common: The common infra structure, source/bin package: tex-common repo stats for texlive-bin: Binaries build from the source tree of TeX Live, source package: texlive-bin, various binary packages, mostly texlive-binaries and libkpathsea repo stats for texlive-no ..read more

Get the Champagne ready, we have released the final images of TeX Live 2023. The biggest change in this year’s release is the switch to 64bit Windows binaries, and renaming the binary directory from win32 to windows. This change triggered updates in several additional repositories, like tlcontrib and tlgpg: tlcontrib’s current points to 2023 and cannot be used with older versions , use the respective year directly instead of current tlgpg as is can only be used with TL 2023. If you need tlgpg for TL2022 and before, use tlgpg-2022 instead of tlgpg Another interesting change is the inclusio ..read more

It has been many years that I have provided up-to-date builds of KDE/Plasma for Debian stable, testing, unstable. It is now more than a year that I don’t use Debian anymore. Time to send this off. As already mentioned in some comments to various blog posts here, I will not invest more work into the current repositories. I invite anyone with interest in continuing the work to contact me. I will also write up a short howto guide on what I generally did and how I worked with this amount of packages. I feel sad about leaving this behind, but also relieved from the amount of work, not to speak of ..read more

Over the years, and in particular with preparing videos of a conference for publication on YouTube, I have accumulated a few reminders how to do things with FFmpeg. It is such a fantastic beast full of features, that I will never run out of new things to learn. So here we go, in some rather random order: split at time stamps Basic usage: ffmpeg -i INPUT -ss STARTTS -to ENDTS -c copy OUTFILE WARNING: since splitting is only possible at keyframes, this will by default set an “editlist” and start at the previous keyframe, and tell the player to start playing after the required difference. Now ..read more

Monthly update on KDE/Plasma on Debian: Updates to Frameworks and KDE Gears Short summary of recent changes and updates: Frameworks updated to 5.99.0 Plasma 5.24 LTS (repo plasma524) has been updated to the latest patch level 5.24.7 Plasma 5.25 updated to the latest patch level 5.25.5 KDE Gears 22.08 updated to latest patch level 22.08.3 Krita updated to 5.1.3 (hopefully) everything recompiled against new Qt from Debian If you see some strange behavior, please report. Concerning Plasma 5.26 Debian unstable and testing already have (albeit outdated) packages for Plasma 5.26, and I have tried ..read more

So now some Debian boohoos are complaining about my blog which is aggregated at Planet KDE, directly to KDE, how nice. They were bothered by the following statement: Usual disclaimer: (1) Considering that I don’t have a user-facing Debian computer anymore, all these packages are only tested by third parties and not by myself. Be aware! (2) Funny to read the Debian Social Contract, Point 4. Our priorities are our users and free software, obviously I care a lot about my users, more than some other Debian members. Funny that those few ….. over at Debian cannot get a grip on reality and continue ..read more

Monthly update on KDE/Plasma on Debian: Updates to Frameworks and KDE Gears I have packaged KDE Gears 22.08 as well as the latest frameworks, and Plasma got a point release. The status is as follows (all for Debian/stable, testing, unstable: Frameworks: 5.97 Gears: 22.08.0 Plasma 5.25: 5.25.4 Plasma 5.24 LTS: 5.24.6 I repeat (and update) instructions for all here, updated to use deb822 format (thanks to various comments on the blog here): Get the key via curl -fsSL https://www.preining.info/obs-npreining.asc | sudo tee /usr/local/share/keyrings/obs-npreining.asc Add the sources definitio ..read more

The one single person within Debian who has worked for years to get me ostracized and thrown out of Debian is … Enrico Zini. Probably because I made a joke about him and his ridiculous statement “Debian is a relationship between multiple people” (how trivial can you be to be printed on a huge poster?), and me without knowing that his buddy Martina Ferrari is trans, criticizing them for spreading lies. Well … I should have known that doing this to a DAM (and back then also Anti-Harassment-Team member) could bring me into “devil’s kitchen”. Funny to see what kind of head-banging creating concoct ..read more

Long time I haven’t posted a lot about KDE/Plasma for Debian, most people will know the reason. But I have anyway updated my repos at OBS, which now contain the latest releases of frameworks, gears, and plasma! The status is as follows: Frameworks: 5.96 for Debian/stable, testing, unstable Gears: 22.04.3 for Debian/stable, testing, unstable Plasma 5.25: 5.25.3 for Debian/testing and unstable, but not for stable, since it needs too new a Xorg Plasma 5.24 LTS: 5.24.5 for Debian/stable, testing, and unstable. Unfortunately, compiling Plasma 5.25 didn’t work out due to dependencies on newer ver ..read more