It’s 7 PM. I sit down at my Fedora Linux PC and start a MMORPG. We want to brawl with Red Alliance over some systems they attacked; the usual stuff on a Friday evening in EVE. While we are waiting on a Titan to bridge us to the fighting area, a tune comes to my mind. “Carola, I wanna hear hurricanes.” My HD LED starts to blink for a second and I hear Carola saying “I found one match” and the music starts.

What sounded like Sci-Fi twenty years ago is now a reality for many PC users. For Linux users, this is now possible by installing “Carola” as your Personal Voice Assistant (PVA)^[1].

Carola

The first thing people often ask is, “Why did you name it Carola?” This is a common misconception. Carola is not the project name. It’s the keyword the PVA reacts to by default. It is similar to “Alexa” or “OK, Google” for those who are familiar with those products. You can configure this keyword. You can also configure other things such as your location, which applications to use by default when opening media files, what CardDAV server to use when looking up contact information, etc. These settings can be personalized for each user. Some of them can even be changed by voice command (e.g. the name, the default TTS engine, and the default apps).

In 2021 I read an article about the Speech-To-Text (STT) system Vosk^[2] and started to play a bit with it. The installation was easy. But there was no use-case except for writing what one said down to the screen. A few hours and a hundred lines of Java code later, I could give my PC simple commands. After a few more days of work, it was capable of executing more complex commands. Today, you can tell him/her/it to start apps, redirect audio streams, control audio and video playback, call someone, handle incoming calls, and more. If you have a smart-home (which I haven’t ) you can even switch on the light in the kitchen. But back to why I chose “Carola” — it was the most recognizable by the STT system I was using at the time. 

Note: This PVA has no English translations yet because it was developed in German. I will use rough translations here which should work once someone helps with translating the config. There are videos out about Carola which show these kinds of interactions in reality^[6]. For now, because a few dependencies are unavailable from Fedora Linux’s default repositories, you will need to install the system manually. But don’t be afraid, it is all described in the READ.ME and it is pretty simple.

The time of eSpeak has run out

A voice assistant doesn’t just react to your speech. It can also reply back to you. You might expect it to sound like a creepy robot voice from the 1960s when it was invented. But trust me, Fedora Linux can do better.  Naturally, eSpeak was the first choice because it was installed on the system by default. But today we can choose (even by voice command ) what speech engine we want to use.

Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems

Text-To-Speech systems translate the written text to a listenable waveform. Some systems output the waveform directly. Others produce MP3 or WAV files which you can then play with, for example, sox. Over the last year, we’ve experimented with several TTS systems. One outputs the text via the Samsung TTS engine on an Android device. It sounds great, but it requires your cellphone and a special server application. 

One of the first speech engines I tried was MBROLA^[3]. It produces more understandable audio than eSpeak. But it’s still far from being “good”, as it relies on eSpeak. Think of it as an eSpeak pre-processor. Unfortunately, it is not currently available from Fedora Linux’s default repositories.

Next was Pico2Wave, which still uses the same technique as eSpeak, but on a higher level. Still, this does not meet our vision of speech quality. Also, it has to be extracted from an old Ubuntu package because it isn’t available from the Fedora Linux repositories.

With MaryTTS^[4] we reach the first speech processor that produces human speech patterns combined with accent and dialect. MaryTTS was developed in Germany at the Saarland University & the German Research Center for AI. It’s not meant to run on your local PC (but does quite well). Rather, it is meant to run on a network to offer speech output to any kind of client that asks for it. Because modern PCs have way more CPU power than it requires, you can also run it solo on your PC. However, running it locally requires compiling the source code which can be a little tricky to do.

MaryTTS comes with different languages and one remarkable voice for Germans — an old Bavarian woman. This voice model was trained from an old speech archive in Munich and it’s so good that you’d think your PC is at least seventy years old. This also makes it seem like you are giving commands to an old women who should be in retirement. This makes giving commands to your PC problematic; trust me. 

The top of the line of available TTS systems is GTTS^[5]. It is available from the default Fedora Linux repositories. This TTS produces the best sound quality for a wide variety of languages and, for standard voices, “the first 4 million characters are free each month”^[7]. The downside of this TTS is that the text is sent to Google’s servers^[8] for processing and translation into an audible speech format. This might be a privacy concern depending on the nature of the data that you are sending for translation. Be mindful that the PVA will repeat parts of what you said if it did not understand your command or when it tells you things in response to your question. For this reason, GTTS is not the default TTS. However, it is pre-configured in the PVA repo^[1] and ready to use.

Let’s talk about privacy

You just read that your TTS system could rat you out to Google. This leads to other questions. Namely, “Does the STT system do this too?” It doesn’t. Vosk runs entirely on your PC. There are no cloud services involved. But of course, your assistant needs to know things in order to assist you.

One of the simpler functions is to produce a weather report. For this to work, the assistant needs to relay your question to the weather provider’s API server. The provider can reasonably assume that you normally aren’t interested in the weather for places you do not live. So the server can derive where that you live based on what city you most frequently inquire about and it can collaborate its deduction based on your device’s IP address.

Consequently, if you configure a service in your PVA’s config, you should ask yourself if this service will cause a privacy problem for you. Many PVA functions won’t because they work locally or they use services under your control (the CalDAV and CardDAV address book services, for example). The same is true for the upcoming IMAP feature. You will use the same email provider that your email app is already configured to use. So there are no extra concerns for the IMAP feature. But what happens if you decided to use GTTS because these simple text fragments are “no big deal” and the PVA reads out loud the incoming email? Here the decision for a TTS engine gets more and more important.

One of PVA’s functions is playing music on command. By itself, this function may not seem concerning. However, an upcoming feature might change this. It will be able to tell what you want to listen to by the use of abstract requests like “Jazz”. At the moment, the PVA searches for this term in filenames and metadata it found in your MP3 archive. In the future, it will have a local track list of all the audiophile wishes you had in the past and it will produce a TOP song list for the search term.

It will write every file you added to the playlist to a database and it will count how many times a match to your abstract request is found and play the song(s) with the best score. On the plus side, you get your favorite music. But what happens if an external plugin or hacked app takes this list and exfiltrates the data to someone who pays for this kind of information?

Now this feature becomes a privacy concern. There is no great risk at the moment since this feature needs to be enabled and, for now, PVA is not widespread enough to be a target. But this may change and you should be aware of these kinds of privacy concerns before they become a problem.

As a best effort to address such privacy concerns, PVA will disable features that require external communication by default. So if you use the base installation, there should be very few privacy concerns. There is one known exception — all texts sent to the PVA app are recorded in ~/.var/log/pva.log. This should make it easier to find flaws in the STT engine and track down other problems.

Always keep in mind that privacy can also be undermined by third-party add-ons.

What can you expect from your assistant?

PVA auto-configures itself on first start-up with a basic configuration. For example, it adds the default paths from the freedesktop.org specs to all your pictures, music, documents and videos. It creates a local cache and config directory where you can place your version of the config files, add new ones, or overwrite existing ones. Usually user customizations are added to the config. But you can overwrite existing values. Before we dig deeper, let’s present some more of PVA’s features.

The Weather Report app is a classic. No assistant would be complete without it. All it needs to know is the name of your hometown. The weather provider used is wttr.in. You can point your browser at this URL to find for your city’s unique identifier. You have no idea how many “Neustadt” exists in Germany alone.  Because it is a webservice, you don’t need to install anything. It works out-of-the-box using cURL.

Asking your PVA what time it is, is also a classic and it works out of the box. You can also ask your PC how it feels: “Carola, what is the actual load?” Or, more abstractly, “Carola, how do you feel?”

For playing audio, PVA uses QMMP by default. It comes with an easy to use command line interface and a rich feature set. You will need to install this app before you can use it. Luckily, Fedora Linux ships this. QMMP gives you remote control over loudness, track number, track-position, playback, and it gives us information about what is currently playing. So you can ask your PVA what is playing when it is playing random tracks.

Controlling QMMP by voice is one of the features I cannot do without again. I often end up in situations where I have full-screen windows with complex code on the screen. If you loose your focus, you loose your workflow. Developers call this “being in the flow” or “in the tunnel”. Here, voice control comes in very handy. You do not need to divert your focus from your work. You can just say what you want and it “magically” it happens!

The phone-call feature works in a similar way. You can now ask your SIP software to make a call to a contact in your CardDAV address book without diverting your focusing from your work. As this is a complex process, it needs a little extra care. There is a special internal function for handling the parsing of the command sentence. “Carola, call Andreas” is enough to initiate a call. The first match in the address book will be called. If you know more than one person with the same name, I hope they have nicknames. Also, since one contact might have multiple phone numbers (e.g. for home and for work), you can specify which number should be called: “Carola, call Andreas at work.”

Even if it doesn’t look like a complex problem, consider which of the words the PVA receives are part of the name and which are just binding words like “at” in the above example? It is not that easy to determine. So we need to follow a precise syntax. But it needs to be natural or humans will not use it. Another thing that is important when interacting with humans is that they tend to alternate their command structures. Parsing a human sentence is more complex for a computer than you might think. It’s natural for you, but the opposite of logic for a computer. Keep this in mind as you read further. It is a reoccurring challenge.

Another example of when voice control can come in handy is controlling video playback is while you exercise. You are likely not in reach of a mouse or a remote (KDE Connect) nor do you want to stop your work out just because someone asks you something. With voice control, you can ask the PC to pause playback and then ask it to resume after you have answered the question or otherwise addressed the problem.

For audio and video players that offer a MPRIS2 interface on DBUS, you can control them on the spot without adding the CLI (command line interface) commands to your config. Based on MPRIS2 you can even control Netflix or YouTube in your Firefox browser. OK, you can’t currently choose the track to watch. But you can change the volume and (un)pause the playback. And all of this can be done with the same set of commands in your config.

There are many situations where voice control is superior or even necessary. What I haven’t told you yet is that the first device I deployed PVA to was a PinePhone. Smartphones can be used for many things. You might use it as an MP3 player while you drive or as a navigational tool. It doesn’t work with Gnome Maps (yet). But controlling a PinePhone via voice while driving will be more and more important in the Linux community. So hopefully further advancements will be made in this area. Fun fact/tip, if you use it as an MP3 player, don’t make it too loud. Or better yet, use an external speaker system^[6].

If you use Thunderbird to manage your email, it is capable of composing and sending an email using only CLI arguments. Consequently, your PVA can compose and send email using Thunderbird. All you need to do is to tell your PVA the recipient, the subject, and then dictate the content of the body. It will also do some minor interpretation for you. While I still write my emails by hand, I can imagine situations where it could be useful. I did not have an opportunity to work with a disabled person to test this method of email composition. But it might be interesting.

The PVA can also be handy for short reminders. You can tell your PVA when and what it should remind you about. For example, “Carola, remind me in 10 minutes to check the kitchen” or, “Carola, remind me at 10 to call Andreas”. The PVA will respond if it understood and acknowledge your reminder.

The best comes last. With Twinkle, your PVA can take a call and interact with the caller just as it does with you. One thing I have not explained yet is that your PVA requires authorization codes for vital or potentially dangerous operations. I find it reminiscent of a scene from “Star Trek”.

“Carola, reboot PC.”
“Authorization code alpha is needed to perform this operation.”
“Carola, authorization code alpha three four seven.”

And if the code is correct, the requested action will proceed. Requiring these authorization codes helps to alleviate the fear that someone might hack your PC through the PVA and cause trouble. Though about the worst that could happen at the moment is that you could unwillingly send spam to someone or your PC might be left playing music all day long. However, if you have home automation running and configured, it is probably better not to have Twinkle answer the phone.

Let’s take a look behind the curtain

This list is long and detailed. So I will focus on some basics.

PVA comes with a rudimentary form of hard-coded human responses. You can modify and expand them as you like. But there is no intelligence in them. You can, however, build reaction chains that are so long that a normal human cannot detect the repeating phrases.

Here are two examples. Let’s ask the PVA for its name.

reaction:”what is your name”,””,”my name is %KEYWORD”

Here is a more complex example that uses the word “not”.

reaction:”this works”,”not”,”of course it does”
reaction:”this works not”,””,”uh oh, please contact my developer”

As the absence of the word “not” is crucial to the meaning of a sentence, reactions contain “positive” and “negative” terms to work. The rule is as follows.

Positive words MUST be inside the sentence, negative words MUST NOT be inside the sentence. In developer terms it can be written as “if ( p && !n ) do …”.

If your reaction texts give a human a new clue what to say next and you can anticipate this, then it is possible to build complex reaction chains that will simulate a conversation. I have even heard from people using this feature that they like talking to their PC (and these are not your stereotypical nerds ). As you can use the same trigger for multiple reactions, alternative chains are possible.

Starting applications

Part of the basic functionality is to start the apps that you’ve named. In the beginning, there was a fixed list of apps that was hard-coded. But now, you can extend this via the config. Let’s take a quick look at it.

app:”office”,”openoffice4″
app:”txt”,”gedit”
app:”pdf”,”evince”
app:”gfx”,”gnome-open”
app:”mail”,”thunderbird”

The corresponding voice commands would be “Carola, start mail”, “Carola, open mail” or, in free-form, you could say, “Carola, start Krita” (Krita is an OpenSource paint app that is available on Fedora Linux). You can configure several alternative versions of the command sentences. These can be regular expressions (regex) or multiple entries in the config file. These apps are also used in complex commands like searching for files and opening the resultant set with an app. For example, “Carola, search pictures of Iceland and open them with Krita.” The previous command would cause the PVA to search in your configured picture paths for filenames matching “iceland” and then open them with Krita. This works for all apps as long as their launchers accept filenames as arguments on their CLI. Even if this isn’t the case for your favorite app, you might still be able to write a small “wrapper” script in Bash and then use that script as the app target for the PVA.

Via voice command, you can switch apps out for a configured alternative on the fly.

alternatives:”firefox”,”web”,”firefox”
alternatives:”google chrome”,”web”,”google-chrome”
alternatives:”chromium free”,”web”,” chromium-freeworld”
alternatives:”chromium privacy”,”web”,” chromium-privacy-browser”
alternatives:”openoffice”,”office”,”openoffice4″
alternatives:”libreoffice”,”office”,”libreoffice”

By using the “use {alternative}” syntax you select what you want to use next. For example, “Carola use Firefox” or “Carola use Chromium free”. It’s working for any app in the app list. But how are these commands defined?

command:”start”,”STARTAPP”,”app”,””
command:”open”,”OPENAPP”,”app”,””

Quite simple: “Carola, start Firefox app” will start Firefox. “Carola, start Firefox” would also work because the term “app” is filtered out.

Next is the positive and negative list of words again. Here is the reaction syntax.

command:”how is the weather”,”CURRENTWEATHERNOW”,””,”tomorrow”
command:”how will the weather be”,”CURRENTWEATHERNEXT”,””,”tomorrow”
command:”how will the weather be tomorrow”,”CURRENTWEATHERTOMORROW”,””,””

The commands in the second column are some of PVA’s internal function names. They are coded internally because processing the result can be tricky. You can, however, outsource those commands to an external Bash script. Below is an example that shows how to call a custom Bash script.

replacements:”h d m i”,”hdmi”
replacements:”u s b”,”usb”

command:”switch .* to kopfhörer”,”EXEC:pulse.outx:x%0x:xhdmi”
command:”switch .* to lautsprecher”,”EXEC:pulse.outx:x%0x:xdefault”
command:”switch .* to .* now”,”EXEC:pulse.outx:x%0x:x%1″

The last of the above commands will switch the output device of a named (first “.*”) running app in pulseaudio to the named (second “.*”) device. As you can see, it works using regular-expression-like syntax. The syntax is not, however, fully-featured. All three of the above commands call the script pulse.out with two parameters. That is, “pulse.out <procname> <devicename>”. Now there is no need to start PAVUControl anymore. Instead, you can just grab your headset and tell your PC to use it.

There is no limit to the number of .* wildcards in the command or execution part. Feel free to code a response for something like, “Carola, switch on the light in the kitchen.”

command:”switch .* the light in .*”,”EXEC:smarthomex:x%0x:x%1″

If you are wondering about those “x:x” character sequences in the execution part, those are being used to escape whitespaces because they tend to appear in filenames.

Oops, it sent your mail to Hermine instead of Hermann

All these voice commands only work correctly when the STT system works flawlessly. Of course, it often does not. Do not have false hopes. It’s not perfect. However, PVA can auto-correct some common errors by configuring replacements.

PVA can correct simple mistakes.

replacements:”hi länder”,”highlander”
replacements:”cash”,”cache”
replacements:”karola”,”carola”

Or, it can perform context replacements. These are only done if a command has been recognized.

contextreplacements:”STARTAPP”,”kreta”,”krita”
contextreplacements:”STARTAPP”,”konfig”,”config”
contextreplacements:”ADDTITLE”,”föge”,”füge”

Shown above is the entry “Krita” which sounds like the German word “Kreta” which is a Greek island. STT Vosk likes “Kreta”. So we need to replace this. But not every time. If we perform a web search for “Kreta”, it would be counter productive to replace it with “Krita”. You can add simple replacements to the config. I suggest that you use the user config for these because other users my encounter different problems.

If you don’t know why a command is not being recognized correctly, you can the always check the log at ~/.var/log/pva.log.

Contribution

If you want to contribute to this project, feel free to do so. It is available on Github^[1]. Since Vosk now has support for eighteen languages, translating the texts to different languages would be a great place that a contributor could get started.

To get PVA installed on Fedora Linux, it is required to rebuild Vosk and its libraries with Fedora sources. We tried to do so earlier this year, but we failed when we ran into some exotic mathlib dependencies that we couldn’t get to compile on Fedora Linux. We are hoping that a good, skilled C developer could solve this problem and get those resulting packages reviewed by Fedora packagers.

I hope I have awoken some interest from our dear readers. The world of PVA needs your awesome configs!

Best regards,
Marius Schwarz

References

[1] https://github.com/Cyborgscode/Personal-Voice-Assistent

[2] https://alphacephei.com/vosk

[3] https://github.com/numediart

• /MBROLA
  
• /MBROLA-voices

[4] https://marytts.github.io

[5] Available from the Fedora Linux repositories:

• dnf install gtts

[6] http://static.bloggt-in-braunschweig.de/Pinephone-PVA-TEST1.mp4

[7] https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech

[8] https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/reference/rest

Introduction

Embroidered shirts are great custom gifts and can also be a great way to show your love for open source. This tutorial will demonstrate how to design your own custom embroidered polo shirt using Inkscape and Ink/Stitch. Polo shirts are often used for embroidery because they do not tear as easily as t-shirts when pierced by embroidery needles, though with care t-shirts can also be embroidered. This tutorial is a follow on article to Make More with Inkscape and Ink/Stitch and provides complete steps to create your design.

Logo on Front of Shirt

Pictures with only a few colors work well for embroidery. Let us use a public domain black and white SVG image of Tux created by Ryan Lerch and Garret LeSage.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><figcaption>Black and white image of Tux</figcaption></figure>

Download this public domain image, tux-bw.svg, to your computer, and import it into your document as an editable SVG image using File>Import...

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Image of Tux with text to be embroidered</figcaption></figure>

Use a Transparent Background

It is helpful to have a checkerboard background to distinguish background and foreground colors. Click File>Document Properties… and then check the box to enable a checkerboard background.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Dialog box to enable checkerboard document background</figcaption></figure>

Then close the document properties dialog box. You can now distinguish between colors used on Tux and the background color.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Tux can be distinguished from the document background</figcaption></figure>

Use a Single Color For Tux

Type s to use the Select and Transform objects tool, and click on the image of Tux to select it. Then click on Object>Fill and Stroke, in the menu. Type n to use the Edit paths by Nodes tool and click on a white portion of Tux. Within the Fill and Stroke pane change the fill to No paint to make this portion of Tux transparent.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Tux in one color</figcaption></figure>

Thi leaves the black area to be embroidered.

Enable Embroidering of Tux

Now convert the image for embroidery. Type s to use the Select and Transform objects tool and click on the image of Tux to select it again. Choose Extensions>Ink/Stitch>Fill Tools>Break Apart Fill Objects … In the resulting pop up, choose Complex, click Apply, and wait for the operation to complete.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Dialog to Break Apart Fill Objects</figcaption></figure>

For further explanation of this operation, see the Ink/Stitch documentation.

Resize Document

Now resize the area to be embroidered. A good size is about 2.75 inches by 2.75 inches. Press s to use the Select and Transform objects tool, and select Tux, hold down the shift key, and also select any text area. Then choose Object>Transform …, click on Scale in the dialogue box, change the measurements to inches, check the Scale proportionally box and choose a width of 2.75 inches, and click Apply.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Resized drawing</figcaption></figure>

Before saving the design, reduce the document area to just fit the image. Press s to use the Select and Transform objects tool, then select Tux.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Objects selected to determine resize area</figcaption></figure>

Choose File>Document Properties… then choose Resize to content: or press Ctrl+Shift+R

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Dialog to resize page</figcaption></figure>

The document is resized.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Resized document</figcaption></figure>

Save Your Design

You now need to convert your file to an embroidery file. A very portable format is the DST (Tajima Embroidery Format) format, which unfortunately does not have color information, so you will need to indicate color information for the embroidery separately. First save your design as an Inkscape SVG file so that you retain a format that you can easily edit again. Choose File>Save As, then select the Inkscape SVG format and enter a name for your file, for example AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserFront.svg and save your design. Then choose File>Save As and select the DST file format and save your design. Generating this file requires calculation of stitch locations, this may take a few seconds. You can preview the DST file in Inkscape, but another very useful tool is vpype-embroidery

Install vpype-embroidery on the command line using a Python virtual environment via the following commands:

virtualenv test-vpype
source test-vpype/bin/activate
pip install matplotlib
pip install vpype-embroidery
pip install vpype[all]

Preview your DST file (in this case named AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserFront.dst which should be replaced by the filename you choose if it is different), using this command:

vpype eread AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserFront.dst show

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Preview of design created by vpype-embroidery</figcaption></figure>

Check the dimensions of your design, if you need to resize it, you should resize the SVG design file before exporting it as a DST file. Resizing the DST file is not recommended since it contains stitch placement information, regenerate this placement information from the resized SVG file to obtain a high quality embroidered result.

Text on the Back of the Shirt

Now create a message to put on the back of your polo shirt. Create a new Inkscape document using File>New. Then choose Extensions>Ink/Stitch>Lettering.

Choose a font, for example Geneva Simple Sans created by Daniel K. Schneider in Geneva. If you want to resize your text, do so at this point using the scale section of the dialog box since resizing it once it is in Inkscape will distort the resulting embroidered pattern. Add your text,

Another Awesome 
Fedora Linux User

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Lettering creation dialog box</figcaption></figure>

A preview will appear, click on Quit

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Preview image of text to be embroidered</figcaption></figure>

Then click on Apply and Quit in the lettering creation dialog box. Your text should appear in your Inkscape document.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Resulting text in Inkscape document</figcaption></figure>

Create a checkered background and resize the document to content by opening up the document properties dialog box File>Document Properties…

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Document properties dialog box</figcaption></figure>

Your document should now be a little larger than your text.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Text in resized document</figcaption></figure>

Clean Up Stitches

Many commercial embroidery machines support jump instructions which can save human time in finishing the embroidered garment. Examine the text preview image. A single continuous thread sews all the letters. Stitches joining the letters are typically removed. These stitches can either be cut by hand after the embroidery is done, or they can be cut by the embroidery machine if it supports jump instructions. Ink/Stitch can add these jump instructions.

Add jump instructions by selecting View>Zoom>Zoom Page to enlarge the view of the drawing. Press s to choose the Select and transform objects tool. Choose Extensions>Ink/Stitch>Commands>Attach Commands to Selected Objects. A dialog box should appear, check just the Trim thread after sewing this object option.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><figcaption>Attach commands dialog</figcaption></figure>

Then click in the drawing area and select the first letter of the text

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><figcaption>Select first letter of the text</figcaption></figure>

Then click Apply, and some cut symbols should appear above the letter.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><figcaption>Scissor symbols above first letter</figcaption></figure>

Repeat this process for all letters.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><figcaption>Separately embroidered letters</figcaption></figure>

Now save your design, as before, in both SVG and DST formats. Check the likely quality of the embroidered text by previewing your DST file (in this case named AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserBack.dst – replaced this by the filename you chose), using

vpype eread AnotherAwesomeFedoraLinuxUserBack.dst show

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><figcaption>Preview of text to be embroidered created by vpype-embroidery</figcaption></figure>

Check the dimensions of your design, if you need to resize it, you should resize the SVG design file before exporting it as a DST file.

Create a Mockup

To show the approximate placement of your design on the polo shirt create a mockup. You can then send this to an embroidery company with your DST file. The Fedora Design Team has a wiki page with examples of mockups. An example mockup made using Kolourpaint is below.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><figcaption>Mockup image of polo shirt with design</figcaption></figure>

You can also use an appropriately licensed drawing of a polo shirt, for example from Wikimedia Commons.

Example Shirt

Pictures of a finished embroidered polo shirt are below

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><figcaption>Front of embroidered shirt</figcaption></figure> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><figcaption>Back of embroidered shirt</figcaption></figure> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><figcaption>Closeup of embroidered Tux</figcaption></figure> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><figcaption>Closeup of embroidered text</figcaption></figure>

Further Information

A three color image of Tux is also available, but single colors are easiest to achieve good embroidered results with. Adaptation of this shaded multiple color image is required to use it for embroidery. Additional tutorial information is available on the Ink/Stitch website.

Some companies that can do embroidery given a DST file include:

• Pappagallo Clothing Industry based in Cyprus
• Target Solutions based in Ghana
• Marvel Ark based in Kenya
• Core Digital based in South Africa
• Embroidery Your Way based in the USA

Search the internet for machine embroidery services close to you or a hackerspace with an embroidery machine you can use.

This article has benefited from many helpful suggestions from Michael Njuguna of Marvel Ark and Brian Lee of Embroidery Your Way.

The first concerted effort to support accessibility under Linux was undertaken by Sun Microsystems when they decided to use GNOME for Solaris. Sun put together a team focused on building the pieces to make GNOME 2 fully accessible and worked with hardware makers to make sure things like Braille devices worked well. I even heard claims that GNOME and Linux had the best accessibility of any operating system for a while due to this effort. As Sun started struggling and got acquired by Oracle this accessibility effort eventually trailed off with the community trying to pick up the slack afterwards. Especially engineers from Igalia were quite active for a while trying to keep the accessibility support working well.

But over the years we definitely lost a bit of focus on this and we know that various parts of GNOME 3 for instance aren’t great in terms of accessibility. So at Red Hat we have had a lot of focus over the last few years trying to ensure we are mindful about diversity and inclusion when hiring, trying to ensure that we don’t accidentally pre-select against underrepresented groups based on for instance gender or ethnicity. But one area we realized we hadn’t given so much focus recently was around technologies that allowed people with various disabilities to make use of our software. Thus I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent accessibility support!

Anyone who has ever worked for a large company knows that getting funding for new initiatives is often hard and can take a lot of time, but I want to highlight how I was extremely positively surprised at how quick and easy it was to get support for hiring Lukas to work on accessibility. When Jiri Eischmann and I sent the request to my manager, Stef Walter, he agreed to champion the same day, and when we then sent it up to Mike McGrath who is the Vice President of Linux Engineering he immediately responded that he would bring this to Tim Cramer who is our Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. Within a few days we had the go ahead to hire Lukas. The fact that everyone just instantly agreed that accessibility is important and something we as a company should do made me incredibly proud to be a Red Hatter.

What we hope to get from this is not only a better experience for our users, but also to allow even more talented engineers like Lukas to work on Linux and open source software at Red Hat. I thought it would be a good idea here to do a quick interview with Lukas Tyrychtr about the state of accessibility under Linux and what his focus will be.

Christian: Hi Lukas, first of all welcome as a full time engineer to the team! Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Lukas: Hi, Christian. For sure. I am a completely blind person who can see some light, but that’s basically it. I started to be interested in computers around 2009 or so, around my 15th or 16th birthday. First, because of circumstances, I started tinkering with Windows, but Linux came shortly after, mainly because of some pretty good friends. Then, after four years the university came and the Linux knowledge paid off, because going through all the theoretical and practical Linux courses there was pretty straightforward (yes, there was no GUI involved, so it was pretty okay, including some custom kernel configuration tinkering). During that time, I was contacted by Red Hat associates whether I’d be willing to help with some accessibility related presentation at our faculty, and that’s how the collaboration began. And, yes, the hire is its current end, but that’s actually, I hope, only the beginning of a long and productive journey.

Christian: So as a blind person you have first hand experience with the state of accessibility support under Linux. What can you tell us about what works and what doesn’t work?

Lukas: Generally, things are in pretty good shape. Braille support on text-only consoles basically just always works (except for some SELinux related issues which cropped up). Having speech there is somewhat more challenging, the needed kernel module (Speakup for the curious among the readers) is not included by all distributions, unfortunately it is not included by Fedora, for example, but Arch Linux has it. When we look at the desktop state of affairs, there is basically only a single screen reader (an application which reads the screen content), called Orca, which might not be the best position in terms of competition, but on the other hand, stealing Orca developers would not be good either. Generally, the desktop is usable, at least with GTK, Qt and major web browsers and all recent Electron based applications. Yes, accessibility support receives much less testing than I would like, so for example, a segmentation fault with a running screen reader can still unfortunately slip through a GTK release. But, generally, the foundation works well enough. Having more and naturally sounding voices for speech synthesis might help attract more blind users, but convincing all the players is no easy work. And then there’s the issue of developer awareness. Yes, everything is in some guidelines like the GNOME ones, however I saw much more often than I’d like to for example a button without any accessibility labels, so I’d like to help all the developers to fix their apps so accessibility regressions don’t get to the users, but this will have to improve slowly, I guess.

Christian: So you mention Orca, are there other applications being widely used providing accessibility?

Lukas: Honestly, only a few. There’s Speakup – a kernel module which can read text consoles using speech synthesis, e.g. a screen reader for these, however without something like Espeakup (an Espeak to Speakup bridge) the thing is basically useless, as it by default supports hardware synthesizers, however this piece of hardware is basically a think of the past, e.g. I have never seen one myself. Then, there’s BRLTTY. This piece of software provides braille output for screen consoles and an API for applications which want to output braille, so the drivers can be implemented only once. And that’s basically it, except for some efforts to create an Orca alternative in Rust, but that’s a really long way off. Of course, utilities for other accessibility needs exist as well, but I don’t know much about these.

Christian: What is your current focus for things you want to work on both yourself and with the larger team to address?

Lukas: For now, my focus is to go through the applications which were ported to GTK 4 as a part of the GNOME development cycle and ensure that they work well. It includes adding a lot of missing labels, but in some cases, it will involve bigger changes, for example, GNOME Calendar seems to need much more work. During all that, educating developers should not be forgotten either. With these things out of the way, making sure that no regressions slip to the applications should be addressed by extending the quality assurance and automated continuous integration checks, but that’s a more distant goal.

Christian: Thank you so much for talking with us Lukas, if there are other people interested in helping out with accessibility in Fedora Workstation what is the best place to reach you?

Actually for now the easiest way to reach me is by email at ltyrycht@redhat.com. Be happy to talk to anyone wanting to help with making Workstation great for accessibility.

It is bittersweet to announce that I have decided to move on from my role as the Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator (FCAIC). For me, this role has been full of growth, unexpected challenges, and so much joy. It has been a privilege to help guide our wonderful community through challenges of the last three years. I’m excited to see what the next FCAIC can do for Fedora. If you’re interested in applying, see the FCAIC job posting on Red Hat Jobs and read more about the role below. 

Adapting to Uncertain Times

When I applied back in 2019, a big part of the job description was to travel the globe, connecting with and supporting Fedora communities worldwide. As we all know, that wasn’t possible with the onset of COVID-19 and everything that comes with a pandemic. 

Instead, I learned how to create virtual experiences for Fedora, connect with people solely in a virtual environment, and support contributors from afar. Virtual events have been a HUGE success for Fedora. The community has shown up for those events in such a wonderful way. We have almost tripled our participation in our virtual events since the first Release Party in 2020. We have more than doubled the number of respondents to the Annual Contributor Survey over last year’s turnout. I am proud of the work I have accomplished and even more so how much the community has grown and adapted to a very challenging couple of years.

What’s next for me

As some of you may know, I picked up the Code of Conduct (CoC) work that my predecessor Brian Exelbierd (Bex) started for Fedora. After the Fedora Council approved the new CoC, I then got started on additional pieces of related work: Supplemental Documentation and Moderation Guidelines. I am also working on expanding the small Code of Conduct Committee(CoCC) to include more community members. As a part of the current CoCC, I have helped to deal with the majority of the incidents throughout my time as FCAIC. 

Because of my experience with all this CoC work, I will be moving into a new role inside of Red Hat’s OSPO: Code of Conduct Specialist. I will be assisting other Community Architects (like the FCAIC role) to help roll out CoC’s and governance around them, as well as collaborating with other communities to develop a Community of Practice around this work. I am excited and determined to take on this new challenge and very proud to be a part of an organization that values work that prioritizes safety and inclusion. 

What’s next for Fedora

This is an amazing opportunity for the Fedora community to grow in new and exciting ways. Every FCAIC brings their own approach to this role as well as their own ideas, strengths, and energy. I will be working with Matthew Miller, Ben Cotton, and Red Hat to help hire and onboard the new Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator. I will continue as FCAIC until we hire someone new, and will help transition them into the role. Additionally, I will offer support, advice, and guidance as others who have moved on have done for me. I am eager to see who comes next and how I can help them become a success. And, as I have for years prior to my tenure as FCAIC, I will continue to participate in the community, albeit in different ways. 

This means we are looking for a new FCAIC! Do you love Fedora? Do you want to help support and grow the community full time? This is the core of what the FCAIC does. The job description has a list of the primary job responsibilities and required skills- but that is just a taste of what is required and what it is to support the Fedora community full time. Day-to-day work includes working with the Mindshare Committee, managing the Fedora budget, and being a part of many other teams and in many places. You should be ready and excited to write about Fedora’s achievements, policies, as well as generate strategies to help the community succeed. And, of course, there is event planning and support (Flock, Nest, Hatch, Release Parties, etc). It can be tough work, but it is a lot of fun and wonderfully rewarding to help Fedora thrive. 

How to apply

Do you enjoy working with people all over the world, with a variety of skills and interests? Are you good at setting long term goals and seeing them through to completion? Can you set priorities, follow through, and know when to say “no” in order to focus on the most important tasks for success? Are you excited about building not only a successful Linux distribution, but also a healthy project? Is Fedora’s mission deeply important to you? If you said “yes” to these questions, you might be a great candidate for the FCAIC role. If you think you’re a great fit, please apply online, or contact Marie Nordin, or Jason Brooks.

One of the key aspects of system security is encrypting storage at rest. Without encrypted storage, any time a storage device leaves your presence it can be at risk. The most obvious scenario where this can happen is if a storage device (either just the storage device or the entire system, server, or laptop) is lost or stolen.

However, there are other scenarios that are a concern as well: perhaps you have a storage device fail, and it is replaced under warranty — many times the vendor will ask you to return the original device. If the device was encrypted, it is much less of a concern to return it back to the hardware vendor.

Another concern is anytime your storage device is out of sight there is a risk that the data is copied or cloned off of the device without you even being aware. Again, if the device is encrypted, this is much less of a concern.

Fedora (and other Linux distributions) include the Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) functionality to support disk encryption. LUKS is easy to use, and is even integrated as an option in the Fedora Anaconda installer.

However there is one challenge that frequently prevents people from implementing LUKS on a large scale, especially for the root filesystem: every single time you reboot the host you generally have to manually access the console and type in the LUKS passphrase so the system can boot up.

If you are running Fedora on a single laptop, this might not be a problem, after all, you probably are sitting in front of your laptop any time you reboot it. However, if you have a large number of Fedora instances, this quickly becomes impractical to deal with.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><figcaption>If you have hundreds of systems, it is impractical to manually type the LUKS passphrase on each system on every reboot</figcaption></figure>

You might be managing Fedora systems that are at remote locations, and you might not even have good or reliable ways to access a console on them. In this case, rebooting the hosts could result in them not coming up until you or someone else travels to their location to type in the LUKS passphrase.

This article will cover how to implement a solution to enable automated LUKS volume unlocking (and the process to implement these features will be done using automation as well!)

Overview of Clevis and Tang

Clevis and Tang are an innovative solution that can help with the challenge of having systems with encrypted storage boot up without manual user intervention on every boot. At a high level, Clevis, which is installed on the client systems, can enable LUKS volumes to be unlocked without user intervention as long as the client system has network access to a configurable number of Tang servers.

The basic premise is that the Tang server(s) are on an internal/private or otherwise secured network, and if the storage devices are lost, stolen, or otherwise removed from the environment, that they would no longer have network access to the Tang server(s), and thus no longer automatically unlock automatically at boot.

Tang is stateless and doesn’t require authentication or even TLS, which means it is very lightweight and easy to configure, and can run from a container. In this article, I’m only setting up a single Tang server, however it is also possible to have multiple Tang servers in an environment, and to configure the number Tang servers the Clevis clients must connect to in order to unlock the encrypted volume. For example, you could have three Tang servers, and require the Clevis clients to be able to connect to at least two of the three Tang servers.

For more information on how Tang and Clevis work, refer to the GitHub pages: Clevis and Tang, or for an overview of the inner workings of Tang and Clevis, refer to the Securing Automated Decryption New Cryptography and Techniques FOSDEM talk.

Overview of Linux System Roles

Linux System Roles is a set of Ansible Roles/Collections that can help automate the configuration and management of many aspects of Fedora, CentOS Stream, RHEL, and RHEL derivatives. Linux System Roles is packaged in Fedora as an RPM (linux-system-roles) and is also available on Ansible Galaxy (as both roles and as a collection). For more information on Linux System Roles, and to see a list of included roles, refer to the Linux System Roles project page.

Included in the list of Linux System Roles are the nbde_client, nbde_server, and firewall roles that will be used in this article. The nbde_client and nbde_server roles are focused on automating the implementation of Clevis and Tang, respectively. The “nbde” in the role names stands for network bound disk encryption, which is another term to refer to using Clevis and Tang for automated unlocking of LUKS encrypted volumes. The firewall role can automate the implementation of firewall settings, and will be used to open a port in the firewall on the Tang server.

Demo environment overview

In my environment, I have a Raspberry Pi, running Fedora 36 that I will install Linux System Roles on and use as my Ansible control node. In addition, I’ll use this same Raspberry Pi as my Tang server. This device is configured with the pi.example.com hostname.

In addition, I have four other systems in my environment: two Fedora 36 systems, and two CentOS Stream 9 systems, named fedora-server1.example.com, fedora-server2.example.com, c9s-server1.example.com, and c9s-server2.example.com. Each of these four systems has a LUKS encrypted root filesystem and currently the LUKS passphrase must be manually typed in each time the systems boot up.

I’ll use the nbde_server and firewall roles to install and configure Tang on my pi.example.com system, and use the nbde_client role to install and configure Clevis on my four other systems, enabling them to automatically unlock their encrypted root filesystem if they can connect to the pi.example.com Tang system.

Installing Linux System Roles and Ansible on the Raspberry Pi

I’ll start by installing the linux-system-roles package on the pi.example.com host, which will act as my Ansible control node. This will also install ansible-core and several other packages as dependencies. These packages do not need to be installed on the other four systems in my environment (which are referred to as managed nodes).

$ sudo dnf install linux-system-roles

SSH keys and sudo configuration need to be configured so that the control node host can connect to each of the managed nodes in the environment and escalate to root privileges.

Defining the Ansible inventory file

Still on the pi.example.com host, I’ll create an Ansible inventory file to group the five systems in my environment into two Ansible inventory groups. The nbde_servers group will contain a list of hosts that I would like to configure as Tang servers (which in this example is only the pi.example.com host), and the nbde_clients group will contain a list of hosts that I would like to configure as Clevis clients. I’ll name this inventory file inventory.yml and it contains the following content:

all:
  children:
    nbde_servers:
      hosts:
        pi.example.com:
    nbde_clients:
      hosts:
        fedora35-server1.example.com:
        fedora35-server2.example.com:
        c9s-server1.example.com:
        c9s-server2.example.com:

Creating Ansible Group variable files

Ansible variables are set to specify what configuration should be implemented by the Linux System Roles. Each role has a README.md file that contains important information on how to use each role, including a list of available role variables. The README.md files for the nbde_server, nbde_client, and firewall roles are available in the following locations, respectively:

• /usr/share/doc/linux-system-roles/nbde_server/README.md
• /usr/share/doc/linux-system-roles/nbde_client/README.md
• /usr/share/doc/linux-system-roles/firewall/README.md

I’ll create a group_vars directory with the mkdir group_vars command. Within this directory, I’ll create a nbde_servers.yml file and nbde_clients.yml file, which will define, respectively, the variables that should be set for systems listed in the nbde_servers inventory group and the nbde_clients inventory group.

The nbde_servers.yml file contains the following content, which will instruct the firewall role to open TCP port 80, which is the default port used by Tang:

firewall:
  - port: ['80/tcp']
    state: enabled

The nbde_clients.yml file contains the following content:

nbde_client_bindings:
  - device: /dev/vda2
    encryption_password: !vault |
          $ANSIBLE_VAULT;1.1;AES256
          62666465373138636165326639633...
    servers:
      - http://pi.example.com

Under nbde_client_bindings, device specifies the backing device of the encrypted root filesystem on the four managed nodes. The encryption_password specifies a current LUKS passphrase that is required to configure Clevis. In this example, I’ve used ansible-vault to encrypt the string rather than place the LUKS passphrase in clear text. And finally, under servers, a list of Tang servers that Clevis should bind to are specified. In this example, the Clevis clients will be configured to bind to the pi.example.com Tang server.

Creating the playbook

I’ll create a simple Ansible playbook, named nbde.yml that will call the firewall and nbde_server roles for systems in the nbde_servers inventory group, and call the nbde_client role for systems in the nbde_clients group:

- name: Open firewall for Tang
  hosts: nbde_servers
  roles:
    - linux-system-roles.firewall

- name: Deploy NBDE Tang server
  hosts: nbde_servers
  roles:
    - linux-system-roles.nbde_server

- name: Deploy NBDE Clevis clients
  hosts: nbde_clients
  roles:
    - linux-system-roles.nbde_client

At this point, I have the following files and directories created:

• inventory.yml
• nbde.yml
• group_vars/nbde_clients.yml
• group_vars/nbde_servers.yml

Running the playbook

The nbde.yml playbook can be run with the following command:

$ ansible-playbook nbde.yml -i inventory.yml --ask-vault-pass -b

The -i flag specifies which inventory file should be used, the –ask-vault-pass flag will prompt for the Ansible Vault password to decrypt the encryption_password variable, and the -b flag specifies that Ansible should escalate to root privileges.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption>play recap output from ansible-playbook command showing playbook successfully completed</figcaption></figure>

Validating the configuration

To validate the configuration, I rebooted each of my four managed nodes that were configured as Clevis clients of the Raspberry Pi Tang server. Each of the four managed nodes boots up and briefly pauses on the LUKS passphrase prompt:

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption>Systems boot up to LUKS passphrase prompt, and automatically continue booting after a brief pause</figcaption></figure>

However, after the brief delay, each of the four systems continued booting up without requiring me to enter the LUKS passphrase.

Conclusion

If you would like to secure your data at rest with LUKS encryption, but need a solution that enables systems to boot up without intervention, consider implementing Clevis and Tang. Linux System Roles can help you implement Clevis and Tang, as well as a number of other aspects of your system, in an automated manner.