The Linux Experiment

With the recent questions surrounding the security of TrueCrypt there has been a big push to move away from that program and switch to alternatives. One such alternative, on Linux anyway, is the Linux Unified Key Setup (or LUKS) which allows you to encrypt disk volumes. This guide will show you how to create encrypted file volumes, just like you could using TrueCrypt.

The Differences

There are a number of major differences between TrueCrypt and LUKS that you may want to be aware of:

• TrueCrypt supported the concept of hidden volumes, LUKS does not.
• TrueCrypt allowed you to encrypt a volume in-place, without losing data, LUKS does not.
• TrueCrypt supports cipher cascades where the data is encrypted using multiple different algorithms just in case one of them is broken at some point in the future. As I understand it this is being talked about for the LUKS 2.0 spec but is currently not a feature.

If you are familiar with the terminology in TrueCrypt you can think of LUKS as offering both full disk encryption and standard file containers.

How to create an encrypted LUKS file container

The following steps borrow heavily from a previous post so you should go read that if you want more details on some of the commands below. Also note that while LUKS offers a lot of options in terms of cipher/digest/key size/etc, this guide will try to keep it simple and just use the defaults.

Step 1: Create a file to house your encrypted volume

The easiest way is to run the following commands which will create the file and then fill it with random noise:

# fallocate -l <size> <file to create>
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=<file to create> bs=1M count=<size>

For example let’s say you wanted a 500MiB file container called MySecrets.img, just run this command:

# fallocate -l 500M MySecrets.img
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=MySecrets.img bs=1M count=500

Here is a handy script that you can use to slightly automate this process:

#!/bin/bash
NUM_ARGS=$#

if [ $NUM_ARGS -ne 2 ] ; then
    echo Wrong number of arguments.
    echo Usage: [size in MiB] [file to create]

else

    SIZE=$1
    FILE=$2

    echo Creating $FILE with a size of ${SIZE}MB

    # create file
    fallocate -l ${SIZE}M $FILE

    #randomize file contents
    dd if=/dev/urandom of=$FILE bs=1M count=$SIZE

fi

Just save the above script to a file, say “create-randomized-file-volume.sh”, mark it as executable and run it like this:

# ./create-randomized-file-volume.sh 500 MySecrets.img

Step 2: Format the file using LUKS + ext4

There are ways to do this in the terminal but for the purpose of this guide I’ll be showing how to do it all within gnome-disk-utility. From the menu in Disks, select Disks -> Attach Disk Image and browse to your newly created file (i.e. MySecrets.img).

Don’t forget to uncheck the box!

Be sure to uncheck “Set up read-only loop device”. If you leave this checked you won’t be able to format or write anything to the volume. Select the file and click Attach.

This will attach the file, as if it were a real hard drive, to your computer:

Next we need to format the volume. Press the little button with two gears right below the attached volume and click Format. Make sure you do this for the correct ‘drive’ so that you don’t accidentally format your real hard drive!

Please use a better password

From this popup you can select the filesystem type and even name the drive. In the image above the settings will format the drive to LUKS and then create an ext4 filesystem within the encrypted LUKS one. Click Format, confirm the action and you’re done. Disks will format the file and even auto-mount it for you. You can now copy files to your mounted virtual drive. When you’re done simply eject the drive like normal or (with the LUKS partition highlighted) press the lock button in Disks. To use that same volume again in the future just re-attach the disk image using the steps above, enter your password to unlock the encrypted partition and you’re all set.

But I don’t even trust TrueCrypt enough to unlock my already encrypted files!

If you’re just using TrueCrypt to open an existing file container so that you can copy your files out of there and into your newly created LUKS container I think you’ll be OK. That said there is a way for you to still use your existing TrueCrypt file containers without actually using the TrueCrypt application.

First install an application called tc-play. This program works with the TrueCrypt format but doesn’t share any of its code. To install it simply run:

# sudo apt-get install tcplay

Next we need to mount your existing TrueCrypt file container. For the sake of this example we’ll assume your file container is called TOPSECRET.tc.

We need to use a loop device but before doing that we need to first find a free one. Running the following command

# sudo losetup -f

should return the first free loop device. For example it may print out

/dev/loop0

Next you want to associate the loop device with your TrueCrypt file container. You can do this by running the following command (sub in your loop device if it differs from mine):

# sudo losetup /dev/loop0 TOPSECRET.tc

Now that our loop device is associated we need to actually unlock the TrueCrypt container:

# sudo tcplay -m TOPSECRET.tc -d /dev/loop0

Finally we need to mount the unlocked TrueCrypt container to a directory so we can actually use it. Let’s say you wanted to mount the TrueCrypt container to a folder in the current directory called SecretStuff:

# sudo mount -o nosuid,uid=1000,gid=100 /dev/mapper/TOPSECRET.tc SecretStuff/

Note that you should swap your own uid and gid in the above command if they aren’t 1000 and 100 respectively. You should now be able to view your TrueCrypt files in your SecretStuff directory. For completeness sake here is how you unmount and re-lock the same TrueCrypt file container when you are done:

# sudo umount SecretStuff/
# sudo dmsetup remove TOPSECRET.tc
# sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0

This post originally appeared on my personal website here.

If you are not familiar with the concept of virtual hard drive volumes, sometimes called file containers, they are basically regular looking files that can be used by your computer as if they were real hard drives. So for example you could have a file called MyDrive.img on your computer and with a few quick actions it would appear as though you had just plugged in an external USB stick or hard drive into your computer. It acts just like a normal, physical, drive but whenever you copy anything to that location the copied files are actually being written to the MyDrive.img file behind the scenes. This is not unlike the dmg files you would find on a Mac or even something akin to TrueCrypt file containers.

Why would I want this?

There are a number of reasons why you may be interested in creating virtual volumes. From adding additional swap space to your computer (i.e. something similar to a page file on Windows without needing to create a new hard drive partition) to creating portable virtual disk drives to back up files to, or even just doing it because this is Linux and it’s kind of a neat thing to do.

What are the steps to creating a file container?

The process seems a bit strange but it’s actually really straight forward.

1. Create a new file to hold the virtual drive volume
   (Optional) Initialize it by filling it with data
2. Format the volume
3. Mount the volume and use it

Create a new file to hold the virtual drive volume

There are probably a million different ways to do this but I think the most simple way is to run the following command from a terminal:

fallocate -l <size> <file to create>

So let’s say you wanted to create a virtual volume in a file called MyDrive.img in the current directory with a size of 500MiB. You would simply run the following command:

fallocate -l 500M MyDrive.img

You may notice that this command finishes almost instantly. That’s because while the system created a 500MiB file it didn’t actually write 500MiB worth of data to the file.

This is where the optional step of ‘initializing’ the file comes into play. To be clear you do not need to do this step at all but it can be good practice if you want to clean out the contents of the allocated space. For instance if you wanted to prevent someone from easily noticing when you write data to that file you may pre-fill the space with random data to make it more difficult to see or you may simply want to zero out that part of the hard drive first.

Anyway if you choose to pre-fill the file with data the easiest method is to use the dd command. PLEASE BE CAREFUL – dd is often nicknamed disk destroyer because it will happily overwrite any data you tell it to, including the stuff you wanted to keep if you make a mistake typing the command!

To fill the file with all zeros simply run this command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=<your file> bs=1M count=<your file size in MiB>

So for the above file you would run:

dd if=/dev/zero of=MyDrive.img bs=1M count=500

If you want to fill it with random data instead just swap /dev/zero for /dev/urandom or /dev/random in the command:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=MyDrive.img bs=1M count=500

Format and mount the virtual volume

Next up we need to give the volume a filesystem. You can either do this via the command line or using a graphical tool. I’ll show you an example of both.

From the terminal you would run the appropriate mkfs command on the file. As an example this will format the file above using the ext3 filesystem:

mkfs -t ext3 MyDrive.img

You may get a warning that looks like this

MyDrive.img is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n)

Simply type the letter ‘y’ and press Enter. With any luck you’ll see a bunch of text telling you exactly what happened and you now have a file that is formatted with ext3!

If you would rather do things the graphical way you could use a tool like Disks (gnome-disk-utility) to format the file.

From the menu in Disks, select Disks -> Attach Disk Image and browse to your newly created file (i.e. MyDrive.img).

Don’t forget to uncheck the box!

Be sure to uncheck “Set up read-only loop device”. If you leave this checked you won’t be able to format or write anything to the volume. Select the file and click Attach.

This will attach the file, as if it were a real hard drive, to your computer:

Next we need to format the volume. Press the little button with two gears right below the attached volume and click Format. Make sure you do this for the correct ‘drive’ so that you don’t accidentally format your real hard drive!

Make sure you’re formatting the correct drive!

From this popup you can select the filesystem type and even name the drive. You may also use the “Erase” option to write zeros to the file if you wanted to do it here instead of via the terminal as shown previously. In the image above the settings will format the drive using the ext4 filesystem. Click Format, confirm the action and you’re done. Disks will format the file and even auto-mount it for you. You can now copy files to your mounted virtual drive. When you’re done simply eject the drive like normal or press the square Stop button in Disks. To use that same volume again in the future just re-attach the disk image using the steps above.

To mount the formatted file from the terminal you will need to first create a folder to mount it to. Let’s say we wanted to mount it to the folder /media/MyDrive. First create the folder there:

sudo mkdir /media/MyDrive

Next mount the file to the folder:

sudo mount -t auto -o loop MyDrive.img /media/MyDrive/

Now you can copy files to the drive just like before. When you’re finished unmount the volume by running this command:

sudo umount /media/MyDrive/

And there you have it. Now you know how to create virtual volume files that you can use for just about anything and easily move from computer to computer.

This post originally appeared on my personal website here.

If you’ve used KeePass on Windows you may be very attached to its auto-type feature, where with a single key-combo press the application with magically type your user name and password into the website or application you’re trying to use. This is super handy and something that is sadly missing by default on Linux. Thankfully its also very easy to make work on Linux.

1. Start by installing the xdotool package

On Debian/Ubuntu/etc simply run:

sudo apt-get install xdotool

2. Next find out where the keepass2 executable is installed on your system

The easiest way to do this is to run:

which keepass2

On my system this returns /usr/bin/keepass2. This file is actually not the program itself but a script that bootstraps the program. So to find out where the real executable run:

cat /usr/bin/keepass2

On my system this returns

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/cli /usr/lib/keepass2/KeePass.exe "$@"

So the program itself is actually located at /usr/lib/keepass2/KeePass.exe.

3. Create a custom keyboard shortcut

The process for this will differ depending on which distribution you’re running but it’s usually under the Keyboard settings. For the command enter the following:

mono /usr/lib/keepass2/KeePass.exe --auto-type

Now whenever you key in your shortcut keyboard combo it will tell KeePass to auto-type your configured username/password/whatever you setup in KeePass. The only catch is that you must first open KeePass and unlock your database.

If you’ve had issues trying to get Thunderbird to send your PGP signed e-mail using anything other than SHA-1 there is a quick and easy fix that will let you pick whichever hash you prefer.

1) Open up Thunderbird’s preferences

2) On the Advanced Tab, under General click Config Editor…

3) In the about:config window search for “extensions.enigmail.mimeHashAlgorithm” without quotes. Double click on this and enter a value. The value will determine which hash algorithm is used for signing.

The values are as follows:

0: Automatic selection, let GnuPG choose (note that while this may be the default it may also be the one that doesn’t work depending on your configuration).
1: SHA-1
2: RIPEMD-160
3: SHA-256
4: SHA-384
5: SHA-512
6: SHA-224

This post originally appeared on my personal website here.

I recently invested in a NAS device to add a little bit of redundancy to my personal files. With this particular NAS the most convenient way to use the files it stores is via the Windows share protocol (also known a SMB or CIFS). Linux has supported these protocols for a while now so that’s great but I wanted it to automatically map the shared directory on the NAS to a directory on my Linux computer on startup. Thankfully there is a very easy way to do just that.

1) First install cifs-utils

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

2) Next edit the fstab file and add the share(s)

To do this you’ll need to add a new line to the end of the file. You can easily open the file using nano in the terminal by running the command:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Then use the arrow keys to scroll all the way to the bottom and add the share in the following format:

//<path to server>/<share name>     <path to local directory>     cifs     guest,uid=<user id to mount files as>,iocharset=utf8     0     0

Breaking it down a little bit:

• <path to server>: This is the network name or IP address of the computer hosting the share (in my case the NAS). For example it could be something like “192.168.1.1″ or something like “MyNas”
• <share name>: This is the name of the share on that computer. For example I set up my NAS to share different directories one of which was called “Files”
• <path to local directory>: This is where you want the remote files to appear locally. For example if you want them to appear in a folder under /media you could do something like “/media/NAS”. Just make sure that the directory exists (create it if you need to).
• <user id to mount files as>: This defines the permissions to give the files. On Ubuntu the first user you create is usually give uid 1000 so you could put “1000″ here. To find out the uid of any random user use the command “id <user>” without quotes.

So for example my added line in fstab was

//192.168.3.25/Files     /media/NAS     cifs     guest,uid=1000,iocharset=utf8     0     0

Then save the file “Ctrl+O” and then Enter in nano.

3) Mount the remote share

Run this command to test the share:

sudo mount -a

If that works you should see the files appear in your local directory path. When you restart the computer it will also attempt to connect to the share and place the files in that location as well. Keep in mind that anything you do to the files there also changes them on the share!

If, like me, you’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 only to find out that for whatever reason you can no longer VNC to that machine anymore (either from Windows or even an existing Linux install) have no fear because I’ve got the fix for you!

Simply open up a terminal and run the following line:

gsettings set org.gnome.Vino require-encryption false

Obviously if you use VNC encryption you may not want to do this but if you’re like me and just use VNC on the local network it should be safe enough to disable.

I’ve recently become addicted to Minecraft. I realize that I’m late to this game, having only recently discovered it despite its popularity over the past couple of years. As readers know, I typically switch between a few different machines throughout my day, and indeed between a few different operating systems. Luckily, Minecraft is portable and can be played on any platform – but how to go about transferring saved games?

By default, Minecraft puts your user data and game saves in a hidden folder within your home folder. In particular, save game data is stored at ~/.minecraft/saves/. My solution to the cloud save problem was to create a minecraft folder in my DropBox, and then symlink the default save folder to this location.

Start by creating a folder in your DropBox (or other cloud share platform) folder:

jonf@UBUNTU:~$ mkdir ~/Dropbox/minecraft
jonf@UBUNTU:~$ mkdir ~/Dropbox/minecraft/saves

Next, back up your existing save games folder. We’ll restore these once the symlink has been created.

jonf@UBUNTU:~$ mv ~/.minecraft/saves/ ~/.minecraft/saves.old

Now create the symlink between the new DropBox folder and the save game location:

jonf@UBUNTU:~$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/minecraft/saves/ ~/.minecraft/saves
jonf@UBUNTU:~$ ls -la ~/.minecraft
total 24
drwxrwxr-x  3 jonf jonf  4096 Feb 21 08:58 .
drwx------ 43 jonf jonf 12288 Feb 21 08:55 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 jonf jonf    38 Feb 21 08:58 saves -> /home/jonf/Dropbox/minecraft/saves/
drwxrwxr-x  2 jonf jonf  4096 Feb 21 08:55 saves.old

As you can see, the saves folder under the .minecraft folder now points to the saves folder that we created inside of our DropBox folder. This means that if we put anything inside of that folder, it will be automatically written to the DropBox folder, which will be synced to all of my other computers.

Finally, let’s restore the existing saved games folder into the new shared folder:

jonf@UBUNTU:~$ mv ~/.minecraft/saves.old/ ~/.minecraft/saves

If I take the same steps on my other machines, then I can play Minecraft from any of my machines with my saved games always available, no matter where I am. Keep in mind that the ln syntax for Mac OSX is slightly different than the example above. The steps remain the same, but you’ll want to check the docs if you’re trying to adopt these steps for a different platform.

This past year I purchased a laptop that came with two drives, a small 24GB SSD and a larger 1TB HDD. My configuration has placed the root filesystem (i.e. /) on the SSD and my home directory (i.e. /home) on the HDD so that I benefit from very fast system booting and application loading but still have loads of space for my personal files. The only downside to this configuration is that linux is sometimes not the best at ensuring your SSD lives a long life.

Unlike HDDs, SSDs have a finite number of write operations before they are guaranteed to fail (although you could argue HDDs aren’t all that great either…). Quite a few linux distributions have not yet been updated to detect and configure SSDs in such a way as to extend their life. Luckily for us it isn’t all that difficult to make the changes ourselves.

Change #1 – noatime

The first change that I do is to configure my system so that it no longer updates each files access time on the SSD partition. By default Linux records information about when files were created and last modified as well as when it was last accessed. There is a cost associated with recording the last access time and including this option can not only significantly reduce the number of writes to the drive but also give you a slight performance improvement as well. Note that if you care about access times (for example if you like to perform filesystem audits or something like that) then obviously disabling this may not be an option for you.

Open /etc/fstab as root. For example I used nano so I ran:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Find the SSD partition(s) (remember mine is just the root, /, partition) and add noatime to the mounting options:

UUID=<some hex string> /               ext4    noatime,errors=remount-ro

Change #2 – discard

UPDATE: Starting with 14.04 you no longer need to add discard to your fstab file. It is now handled automatically for you through a different system mechanism.

TRIM is a technology that allows a filesystem to immediately notify the SSD when a file is deleted so that it can more efficiently manage the underlying storage and improve the lifespan of the drive. Not all filesystems support TRIM but if you are like most people and use ext4 then you can safely enable this feature. Note that some people have actually had drastic write performance decreases when enabling this option but personally I’d rather have that than a dead drive.

To enable TRIM support start by again opening /etc/fstab as root and find the SSD partition(s). This time add discard to the mounting options:

UUID=<some hex string> /               ext4    noatime,errors=remount-ro,discard

Change #3 – tmpfs

If you have enough RAM you can also dedicate some of it to mounting specific partitions via tmpfs. Tmpfs essentially makes a fake hard drive, known as a RAM disk, that exists only in your computer’s RAM memory while it is running. You could use this to store commonly written to temporary filesystems like /tmp or log file locations such as /var/logs.

This has a number of consequences. For one anything that gets written to tmpfs will not be there the second you restart or turn the computer off – it never gets written back to a real hard drive. This means that while you can save your SSD all of those log file writes you also won’t be able to debug a problem using those log files on a computer crash or something of the like. Also being a RAM disk means that it will slowly(?) eat up your RAM growing larger and larger the more you write to it between restarts. There are options for putting limits on how large a tmpfs partition can grow but I’ll leave you to search for those.

To set this up open /etc/fstab as root. This time add new tmpfs lines using the following format:

tmpfs   /tmp    tmpfs   defaults  0       0

You can lock it down even more by adding some additional options like noexec (disallows execution of binaries on the filesystem) and nosuid (block the operation of suid, and sgid bits). Some other locations you may consider adding are /var/log, /var/cache/apt etc. Please read up on each of these before applying them as YMMV.

The default sort order in Nautilus has been changed to sorting alphabetically by name and the option to change this seems to be broken. For example I prefer my files to be sorted by type so I ran

dconf-editor

and browsed to org/gnome/nautilus/preferences. From there you should be able to change the value by using the drop down:

Seems easy enough

Unfortunately the only option available is modification time. Once you change it to that you can’t even go back to name. This also appears to be a problem when trying to set the value using the command line interface like this:

dconf write /org/gnome/nautilus/preferences/default-sort-order type

I received an “error: 0-4:unknown keyword” message when I tried to run that.

Thanks to the folks over on the Ask Ubuntu forum I was finally able to get it to change by issuing this command instead:

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences default-sort-order type

where type could be swapped out for whatever you prefer it to be ordered by.

Great Success!

A while back I made it my goal to put together an open source project as my way of contributing back to the community. Well fast forward a couple of months and my hobby project is finally ready to be shown the light of day. I give you… CoreGTK

CoreGTK is an Objective-C binding for the GTK+ library which wraps all objects descending from GtkWidget (plus a few others here and there). Like other “core” Objective-C libraries it is designed to be a very thin wrapper, so that anyone familiar with the C version of GTK+ should be able to pick it up easily.

However the real goal of CoreGTK is not to replace the C implementation for every day use but instead to allow developers to more easily code GTK+ interfaces using Objective-C. This could be especially useful if a developer already has a program, say one they are developing for the Mac, and they want to port it to Linux or Windows. With a little bit of MVC a savvy developer would only need to re-write the GUI portion of their application in CoreGTK.

So what does a CoreGTK application look like? Pretty much like a normal Objective-C program:

/*
 * Objective-C imports
 */
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import "CGTK.h"
#import "CGTKButton.h"
#import "CGTKSignalConnector.h"
#import "CGTKWindow.h"

/*
 * C imports
 */
#import <gtk/gtk.h>

@interface HelloWorld : NSObject
/* This is a callback function. The data arguments are ignored
 * in this example. More callbacks below. */
+(void)hello;

/* Another callback */
+(void)destroy;
@end

@implementation HelloWorld
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

    /* We could use also CGTKWidget here instead */
    CGTKWindow *window;
    CGTKButton *button;

    /* This is called in all GTK applications. Arguments are parsed
    * from the command line and are returned to the application. */
    [CGTK autoInitWithArgc:argc andArgv:argv];

    /* Create a new window */
    window = [[CGTKWindow alloc] initWithGtkWindowType:GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL];

    /* Here we connect the "destroy" event to a signal handler in 
     * the HelloWorld class */
    [CGTKSignalConnector connectGpointer:[window WIDGET] 
        withSignal:@"destroy" toTarget:[HelloWorld class] 
        withSelector:@selector(destroy) andData:NULL];

    /* Sets the border width of the window */
    [window setBorderWidth: [NSNumber numberWithInt:10]];

    /* Creates a new button with the label "Hello World" */
    button = [[CGTKButton alloc] initWithLabel:@"Hello World"];

    /* When the button receives the "clicked" signal, it will call the
     * function hello() in the HelloWorld class (below) */
    [CGTKSignalConnector connectGpointer:[button WIDGET] 
        withSignal:@"clicked" toTarget:[HelloWorld class] 
        withSelector:@selector(hello) andData:NULL];

    /* This packs the button into the window (a gtk container) */
    [window add:button];

    /* The final step is to display this newly created widget */
    [button show];

    /* and the window */
    [window show];

    /* All GTK applications must have a [CGTK main] call. Control ends here
     * and waits for an event to occur (like a key press or
     * mouse event). */
    [CGTK main];

    [pool release];

    return 0;
}

+(void)hello
{
    NSLog(@"Hello World");
}

+(void)destroy
{
    [CGTK mainQuit];
}
@end

Hello World in action

And because Objective-C is completely compatible with regular old C code there is nothing stopping you from simply extracting the GTK+ objects and using them like normal.

// Use it as an Objective-C CoreGTK object!
CGTKWindow *cWindow = [[CGTKWindow alloc] 
    initWithGtkWindowType:GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL];

// Or as a C GTK+ window!
GtkWindow *gWindow = [cWindow WINDOW];

// Or even as a C GtkWidget!
GtkWidget *gWidget = [cWindow WIDGET];

// This...
[cWindow show];

// ...is the same as this:
gtk_widget_show([cWindow WIDGET]);

You can even use a UI builder like GLADE, import the XML and wire up the signals to Objective-C instance and class methods.

CGTKBuilder *builder = [[CGTKBuilder alloc] init];
if(![builder addFromFile:@"test.glade"])
{
    NSLog(@"Error loading GUI file");
    return 1;
}

[CGTKBuilder setDebug:YES];

NSDictionary *dic = [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys:
                 [CGTKCallbackData withObject:[CGTK class] 
                     andSEL:@selector(mainQuit)], @"endMainLoop",
                 [CGTKCallbackData withObject:[HelloWorld class] 
                     andSEL:@selector(hello)], @"on_button2_clicked",
                 [CGTKCallbackData withObject:[HelloWorld class] 
                     andSEL:@selector(hello)], @"on_button1_activate",
                 nil];

[builder connectSignalsToObjects:dic];

CGTKWidget *w = [builder getWidgetWithName:@"window1"];
if(w != nil)
{
    [w showAll];
}

[builder release];

So there you have it that’s CoreGTK in a nutshell.

There are a variety of ways to help me out with this project if you are so inclined to do so. The first task is probably just to get familiar with it. Download CoreGTK from the GitHub project page and play around with it. If you find a bug (very likely) please create an issue for it.

Another easy way to get familiar with CoreGTK is to help write/fix documentation – a lot of which is written in the source code itself. Sadly most of the current documentation simply states which underlying GTK+ function is called and so it could be cleaned up quite a bit.

At the moment there really isn’t anything more formal than that in place but of course code contributions would also be welcome!

Update: added some pictures of the same program running on all three operating systems.

Hello World on Windows

Hello World on Mac

Hello World on Linux

This post originally appeared on my personal website here.