accessibility tools could be automatically removed / you probably should remove them

News
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Originally published at: News - Whonix Forum

If you do not use any accessibility tools (gnome-orca, espeakup, console-braille, florence, dasher, kdeaccessibility, kvkbd, kmousetool, kmag, kmouth, jovie, xbrlapi, festival, qt-at-sp), you will not miss anything. (You would probably know if you are using them.)

Soon, there will be a Whonix stable upgrade. The package whonix-gateway-shared-packages-shared-meta will no longer depend on anon-shared-kde-accessibility. This means, when you run sudo apt-get purge kdeaccessibility && sudo apt-get autoremove after the upgrade, these accessibility packages will be automatically removed.

Non-Qubes-Whonix only: brltty should be removed, since it currently is causing a performance issue.

Otherwise if you just want to remove brltty, use sudo apt-get purge brltty. If you want to keep almost all or only not those you manually uninstalled, you can use sudo aptitude keep-all.

If you want these installed, you are still very much free to have them installed. Just install them the usual way.

This is because those have some issues.

Can these packages also be uninstalled before the Whonix stable upgrade? - Due to technical limitations, this is not that easy. However, it is documented here: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Whonix_Debian_Packages Non-Qubes-Whonix only: If you just want to stop the brltty syslog spam, you could use the following workaround to reliably stop it.

sudo systemctl stop brltty
sudo systemctl mask brltty

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2

Upgraded anon-meta-packages version 3.4.2-1 (whonix-gateway-shared-packages-shared-meta) is now available from Whonix jessie-proposed-updates and testers repository.

3

Thanks. Working.

I see the complementary updates for Whonix-WS lead to the complaint (ironically) in Whonixcheck:

Outdated: Installed whonix-workstation-packages-dependencies 3.4.2-1 is outdated! You should update. You can automatically update using Whonix’s internal updater. Please update using:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

There are no further updates to apply according to Konsole…

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Thanks. Fixed.

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Merged into Whonix stable (jessie) repository.

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With kaccessible package installed, the execution of any GUI application will start the KDE Accessible. This will show a useless icon in on the panel the and also leave a long meaningless log to the terminal when quiting the GUI :

kdesudo(12193) Bridge::setRootObject: "KAccessibleBridge: setRootObject object=" "kdesudo (KApplication)"
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::Private::app: Connected with the org.kde.kaccessibleapp dbus-service
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "prompt (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "errorMessage (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "anonymousRadioButton (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "usePasswordButton (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "userNameLabel (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "userEdit (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "domainLabel (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "domainEdit (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "passwordLabel (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "passEdit (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "keepCheckBox (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "credentialsGroup (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "KPasswordDialog (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" "Password  KdeSudo"
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "internal clipboard owner (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" "internal clipboard requestor (QWidget)" "name=" ""
kdesudo(12193) Bridge::notifyAccessibilityUpdate: "ObjectDestroyed" "object=" " (QWidget)" "name=" ""

For unknown reason, even if both

sudo apt-get purge anon-shared-kde-accessibility and sudo apt autoremove are performed accroding to the upgrading instruction, kaccessible package still survive.

Therefore, let’s explicitly do sudo apt-get purge kaccessible:

http://dds6qkxpwdeubwucdiaord2xgbbeyds25rbsgr73tbfpqpt4a6vjwsyd.onion/w/index.php?title=Upgrading_Whonix_13_to_Whonix_14&oldid=33414

1 Like
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Very likely because anon-shared-kde-accessibility is not installed while kaccessible is installed. Therefore, apt-get purge anon-shared-kde-accessibility will not trigger the removal of kaccessible.

1 Like