OpenRiot v8.0.18: Keys, Pages, and Pigeons

“Three things stopped lying on the same day. The pigeon finally delivered the attachment instead of staring at an HTTP 400. The page turned dark without being asked twice. And the lock gave the keys back without swallowing the first three of them. Three small miracles, one release.” – The OpenRiot Crew, v8.0.18

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Release Overview

v8.0.18 fixes three things that had quietly stopped working.

Signal attachments upload again. LibreOffice opens with a dark page instead of a bright white sheet. The screen lock stops dropping password characters and stops leaving the Control key stuck after it lets you back in.

None of these are glamorous. All of them are the difference between a desktop that works and a desktop that makes you type slowly and re-select a color scheme every morning.

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The Pigeon Finally Lands

gurk 0.10.2 pins a presage revision that predates a Signal server change. The server now requires an uploadLength query parameter on attachment uploads, and the older rev does not send it. The result is an HTTP 400 on every attachment, which is the technical way of saying the pigeon flies out and comes back empty.

scripts/gurk.sh now pins presage to 4b817406, the commit that sends uploadLength. The build script also drops --locked so the pin can actually take effect, and uses rg instead of grep for the patch check, because OpenBSD.

config/bin/gurk is rebuilt with the fix. Attachments land again.

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The Page Goes Dark on Its Own

The LibreOffice dark scheme was selected, the first-run wizard was gone, and the document background was still white. The reason was one missing color: the dark scheme’s AppBackground was unset, so LibreOffice painted the page white until the user opened Appearance and re-selected Dark.

The bundled registry now sets AppBackground = 3355443, the #333333 the Appearance page writes when you pick Dark by hand. The page is dark on the first launch, no second selection required.

The wizard fix from v8.0.17 stays. This is the missing half of the same bug.

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The Keys Come Back

The lock screen had two habits. It ate the first few password characters when you typed fast, and after several lock cycles it left the Control key latched so it took a dozen presses to snap out of it.

The fast-typing fix from the 7.9 era was a one and a half second settle after xset r off, giving X11 time to finish grabbing the keyboard before i3lock accepted input. That delay was later cut to nearly nothing, and the dropped characters came back.

source/lock/lock.go restores the settle, resets the keyboard before each lock to clear any leaked state, and restores repeat rate after unlock. The first characters stay yours. The Control key stays a key.

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🧾 Files Changed

File	Change
scripts/gurk.sh	Pin presage to the attachment-upload fix
config/bin/gurk	Rebuilt gurk binary
source/lock/lock.go	Restore lock settle, reset keyboard
	state before and after
config/libreoffice/registrymodifications.xcu	Dark AppBackground
install/openriot	Rebuilt

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🗣️ Final Words

“The pigeon landed with the package. The page stopped pretending to be noon. The lock returned the keys one at a time, in order, without a grudge. Three small miracles, and not one of them needs a re-run.” – The OpenRiot Crew, v8.0.18