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Watching the Geminispace through a "Telescope" (part 1)

Introduction

Gemini is a, relatively, new protocol but there are already several GUI and TUI clients available for it. If Lagrange took already its place on the GUI realm as one of the best if not the best Gemini's GUI client, in the TUI space several clients are pushing hard to find their space. Among the latter one is climbing bravely the slope pushed by the passion infused by its author!

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It is a nice and features reach, despite its early stage, TUI client for Gemini made by Yumh; which is also the author of GMID: the server that runs this capsule.

The main pages project are available through the links below:

gemini://telescope.omarpolo.com

https://telescope.omarpolo.com

Telescope is inspired by Emacs and W3M but do not worry the usage is quite intuitive, however I am not covering this yet; as a matter of this is the first part, of out of three, where I am going to cover a bit about Telescope.

In this first part I simply noted how to compile it from the git branch in order to get the latest features since its developing is quite active.

In the second part I will cover briefly usage and customization plus some basic commands, while in the third part I will show you how to connect Telescope to Duckling-proxy.

However If you are extremely curious a screenshot is worth of thousand words:

Telescope plus Duckling-proxy in action, isn't it gorgeous?

Installation on Linux

Telescope is available directly through Guix or GuixSD, whether your distribution provide the Guix package manager or is GuixSD itself be sure to be on 1.3 or you won't get Telescope.

1. The Lazy Way

Pre-compiled binaries are available for AARCH64 and for AMD64, just download the one related with your CPU architecture and give it the execution permit, for instance if you have already installed "wget" and you have and AMD64 OS:

wget https://github.com/omar-polo/telescope/releases/download/0.3/telescope.linux.amd64
chmod +x telescope.linux.amd64
./telescope.linux.amd64

And there you go!

telescope.linux.aarch64

telescope.linux.amd64

2. Compiling - general recommendations

However if you want the "latest and greatest" features and your CPU architecture is not one of the two aforementioned, aside GuixSD all the others platforms (but OpenBSD) need to compile Telescope, these are dependencies required:

On FreeBSD and OpenBSD all those libraries are available but Debian doesn't provide libreSSL or libretls at all.

3. Compiling - DEB recommendations

Since I am using as desktop OS Debian/Devuan I can only recommend packages for Debian based distros, below the ones that are needed for compiling just Telescope:

bison
libevent-dev
libncurses-dev
Where is "libtls"?

4. Compiling - getting libtls A.K.A. libretls

Unfortunately "libreSSL" and "libretls" aren't available in Debian, I haven't dig enough to trace back the reasons, but here you may find out some insights:

Debian Bug report logs - #754513 RFP: libressl -- SSL library, forked from OpenSSL

I can't tell you what libraries are required specifically for "libretls" because I test and compile new software often, hence I can have most of the dependencies required already installed for other reason but at least one was missing:

More information about libretls are available here:

https://git.causal.agency/libretls/about/

To download the latest (now 3.3.3p1) tarball:

check before to see if newer and patched version are available.
wget https://causal.agency/libretls/libretls-3.3.3p1.tar.gz
tar xvf libretls-3.3.3p1.tar.gz
cd libretls-3.3.3p1
./configure
make
sudo make install or sudo checkinstall

To learn more about checkinstall:

Debian Wiki: CheckInstall

5. Compiling Telescope

Here we are, finally!

Yumh always suggests to use the tarball but we may miss the newer and exciting features; as a matter of fact from his writing pen:

Please keep in mind that the main branch, from time to time, may be accidentally broken on some platforms. Telescope is developed primarily on OpenBSD/amd64 and commits on the main branch don't get always tested in other OSes. Before tagging a release however, a comprehensive testing on various platforms is done to ensure everything is working as intended.

Anyway I am too eager, hence let's go straightforward to the git version:

You need git installed on your OS!
git clone https://git.omarpolo.com/telescope.git
cd telescope
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install or sudo checkinstall

That's it! Ready to observe the Geminispace through a telescope and have a lot of fun!

Wrapping This Up!

Now I will be able to install Telescope also on my home workstation! In the second part I'll try to cover Telescope more in depth, maybe suggesting some area where improving it in order to make it easy to use for anyone!

Go to part two

For comments or suggestion write me at:

freezr AT disroot DOT org

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