Media toolchain
Briglia reads PDFs and images, extracts frames from video and renders office documents with a handful of well-known open-source tools. On macOS most of this is built in; on Linux Briglia installs or manages them for you.
What is used for what
| Tool | Used for | Required? |
|---|---|---|
| poppler-utils | PDF text extraction, page rendering, split/merge | yes (Linux) |
| ImageMagick | image conversion and resizing before the model sees them | yes (Linux) |
| ffmpeg / ffprobe | audio extraction for voice notes, video frames and scene probing | yes (Linux) |
| pandoc | document generation (~150 MB) | optional |
| LibreOffice (headless writer/calc/impress) | DOCX / XLSX / PPTX → PDF rendering (~350–600 MB) | optional |
Verify the pipeline any time with briglia media-selftest; briglia doctor reports the toolchain too.
Desktop and server Linux
The setup wizard detects what is missing and offers the exact package-manager command (sudo apt install poppler-utils imagemagick ffmpeg on Debian/Ubuntu, or dnf/pacman equivalents). Nothing is installed without your consent, and updates come from your distribution as usual.
Ubuntu Touch: the userdata prefix
The phone's system partition is small (~3 GB) and read-only, and an OTA update wipes anything you apt install onto it. So Briglia installs the tools into your user data instead — ~/.local/share/briglia/toolchain/prefix — with no root and no changes to the OS partition: packages are downloaded through apt and extracted (never installed via dpkg), wrapped with small launcher scripts, and each wrapper is verified with a real probe (LibreOffice must actually convert a document, not just print a version). The core trio installs automatically on Ubuntu Touch during setup; LibreOffice and pandoc are opt-in.
briglia toolchain statusbriglia toolchain install [--pandoc] [--libreoffice] | install what is missing (self-healing: a tool that fails its probe because of a missing shared library gets the library fetched and retried) |
briglia toolchain upgrade | refresh apt metadata, detect stale or renamed packages, rebuild transactionally |
briglia toolchain remove | delete the prefix and wrappers |
Rebuilds are transactional: the new prefix is staged, validated and swapped in with a durable commit marker; a crash or power loss mid-way rolls back to the working prefix. Operations take a cross-process lock, so two installs can't collide.
A userdata prefix does not receive your distribution's security updates by itself. Run briglia toolchain upgrade when you want them — or tap “Check for tool updates” in the companion app's Settings. Briglia never schedules toolchain updates on its own; that is deliberate.
Ghost packages: on some phones dpkg believes LibreOffice and friends are installed while their files are gone; Briglia's prefix is independent of that state. briglia doctor also detects dangling apt-state symlinks left over from older manual setups and prints the exact repair command.