Past days have been very flatpaky to me and productive enough for creating some new material.

A Flatpak getting started video tutorial

Joining my mates at HackLab Almería, who took the initiative of a set of video talks supporting the #YoMeQuedoEnCasa initiative fighting against the boredom COVID-19 confinement in Spain (thanks Víctor), I felt ready enough to give a talk about guerrilla Flatpak packaging using as examples my work on recent bundles:

Talk is in Spanish. If interested you can ask or comment at the HLA forum entry. The recording quality is not good enough: it’s the first time I record a talk with the amazing OBS application. It’s not a great work but it does the job.

JClic published at Flathub

I’m very happy to announce the JClic educative opensource application it’s now published at Flathub! This is relevant because the Clic project has been developed for more than two decades, it’s being used by teachers of all the world and has more than 2500 educative activities published.

Other Flatpak bundles in the works

As I’m getting experience with Flatpak and java apps I’m preparing other ones I think they deserve to be really widespread:

• Freeplane, a mindmaping fork of Freemind, waiting to be approved by Flathub;
• OmegaT, the best opensource professional CAT tool, waiting some feedback from upstream before nominate it to Flathub;
• Archi, the leading opensource Archimate enterprise architecture modeling tool, waiting for upstream feedback too;
• and providing some technical support to my friend Jesús Marín who’s packaging TLA+ Toolbox.

Hope all of these will be published at Flathub at some moment.

Enjoy!

It took me a while since I announced I retired OmegaT from Fedora and my first try to deploy it with Flatpak and, I hope, Flathub. There were some reasons:

• I was completely new to Flatpak,
• the big amount of work to write the manifest of a non trivial application compiled completely from scratch,
• the complexity at that time of working with Java and Flatpak.

Well, it has been time to resume the task. I’m not really an OmegaT user (I’ve used it just a few times in all these years) but I feel committed helping it to be better known and used in the Linux Desktop. In the past I made a lot of work with technical translations and I fully understand the power of the tool for profesional users and it’s opensource: as far as I know OmegaT is the best CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) opensource tool in the world.

So I’m here again and did some work for a final product. Today the work is a lot of easier because the existence of the OpenJDK Flatpak extension (see this update from Mat Booth). Thanks for this extension! It’s so nice I’m finishing other two java programs to be published at Flathub: Freeplane and JClic. For this release series I’m taking the easy way of packaging the binary portable bundle instead of compiling from sources because… it’s tedious. I am concerned it’s not the best practice. And this time I’ve started from a more recent version beta 5.2.0.

I invite you to give it a try and provide some feedback if any. Some details:

• install it:
  • $ wget https://dl.bintray.com/olea/org.omegat.App.flatpak (about 170Mb);
  • $ flatpak install --user org.omegat.App.flatpak
• a merge request at upstream for moving the XDG metadata resources;
• it will be using org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.openjdk11, the LTS OpenJDK extension at Flathub.

Remember when you install a Flatpak package it is fully self-contained, you don’t need to install anything more (in this case the JRE is included in the bundle) and it’s isolated from the rest of the desktop so you’ll be able to keep an install indefinitely without worrying it will broke on any operating system update.

Remember too you could install this bundle in any modern Linux desktop. The only requirement is to have Flatpak installed, as more recents versions of Linux are.

Next steps:

• finishing a final manifest to propose to Flathub in a couple days or so, which will be, as far as I am concerned, the main publishing site of the Flatpak bundle; when in Flathub any user could install it pointing and clicking as in any other app store;
• getting accepted at upstream my minor contributions, basicaly metadata;
• extending the bundle with some of the most popular OmegaT extensions and dictionaries;
• and eventually rewrite the manifest for compiling from sources.

Hope you’ll find it useful.

PD: fixed how to install the package from CLI and changed a couple times the downloading URL :-/

Hace unos días expliqué un método para descargar mapas fronterizos a partir de OpenStreetMap. El interés era crear unos mapas de las comunidades autónomas españolas que una compañera de WMES necesitaba para sus clases en la universidad. Así que una vez que he sabido cómo he aprovechado para prepararlos.

Aquí pues está disponible el mapa de bordes fronterizos de España y sus comunidades autónomas para vuestro uso y disfrute.

Los datos están licenciados según las indicaciones de copyright de OSM:

© Colaboradores de OpenStreetMap
Los datos están disponibles bajo la licencia Open Database License (ODbL).

A partir de ahí podéis disponerlo con toda libertad.

Cómo usar el mapa

Se pretende que casi cualquier persona con conocimientos básicos de ofimática pueda usarlos. Una rápida explicación de cómo:

• El mapa está compuesto por varias capas: una por cada autonomía y ciudad autónoma y otro con los bordes fronterizos de España.
• Observaréis que las fronteras del país incluyen una parte marítima: son los límites legales de las aguas territoriales.
• Para vuestro proyecto hay que abrir el fichero completo, con todas las capas. Si sólo necesitáis alguna de las capas podéis desactivar o eliminar las demás.
• El fichero está en formato KMZ y debería poder abrirse con casi cualquier software que trabaje con mapas. En este caso ha sido compuesto con Google Earth Pro, software multiplataforma disponible gratuitamente.
• ¿Puedo usar el mapa en Google Maps? En teoría sí porque técnicamente es compatible pero el tamaño es mayor del permitido, así que no puedes importar el mapa completo. Pero si sólo necesitas parte del contenido basta editarlo con aplicación, por ejemplo el mencionado Google Earth, y exportar solamente las capas precisas a un fichero y a su vez importarlo a un mapa en My Maps.

Obviamente si trabajas directamente con datos de OSM no necesitarás este mapa.

Disfrutadlo con salud.