Hi
Was one of you able to solve (i.e. permanently) the fact that Mate calculator is/was not providing currencies conversion as it was before ?
i.e. without having to download the link to database each time (which is cumbersome… better go with a web based FX page (like XE) instead.
Thanks
W
No, I can’t get it working.
Tested in Ubuntu-MATE 24.04 and 26.04 , respectively MATE 1.26 and 1.28.
It is a known issue that not has been solved yet.
And on my systems, the valuta conversion doesn’t do anything at all.
Hi, @tkn
Actually, I believe @Watford is talking about the problem for which he had opened the following discussion topic, in the “Ubuntu MATE Community”, about a year go (on 23rd February 2025):
In that discussion, @Watford has mentioned that he had opened a “bug” / “issue” about this problem (but didn’t reveal what issue he had opened). By doing some searches, I’ve now found that “issue” that he reported, on 24th February 2025, in the “mate-calc” repository of the “mate-desktop” organization in “GitHub” (“Mate Calculator doesn’t provide the exchange rates conversion anymore” - https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-calc/issues/229):
I see that a user nazarux posted a nice workaround for the problem, on 15th June 2025:
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-calc/issues/229#issuecomment-2973382546
Thanks. Here’s my workaround by putting this at the end of $HOME/.profile :
# wait 4 minutes after login sleep 240 && # Check if there is an internet connection if (wget -q --spider http://google.com); then # workaround for currency update wget -q "http://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/data/rms_five.aspx?tsvflag=Y" -O "$HOME/.cache/mate-calc/rms_five.xls" wget -q "http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml" -O >"$HOME/.cache/mate-calc/eurofxref-daily.xml" fi
And @Watford apparently was so happy with that (nice) workaround, that he closed the issue himself, on that same day (15th June 2025)!
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-calc/issues/229#issuecomment-2973825648
Watford11 on Jun 15, 2025
It did work me me too !
THANKS
Watford11 closed this as completed on Jun 15, 2025
So, @Watford, let me humbly suggest that you comment again, on that same issue in “GitHub”, and explain that - while the workaround that nazarux has provided does work and is nice and is appreciated - you’re reopening the issue to kindly ask that the “MATE Calculator” developers fix the underlying problem.
I hope this helps
I just ended up installing gnome-calculator and never really thought about it again.
To me that seems the best solution
I had my revenge on mate-calculator
“not doing valuta conversion ? OK, then I won’t let you use the network”
I love opensnitch 
Thank you, Thom!
I will need to look at that to see if I can avoid rebuilding my own iptables firewall and IP-blocklist scripts, which I will need to do sometime this year given the industry move to nftables. 
Nope, it does not replace iptables:
iptables (and nftables for that matter) works at most on protocol level and can not see which application uses that protocol.
That means that you can, for instance, block certain protocols, IP-addresses and ports, but you can not block applications individually.
opensnitch is an application level firewall.
It can not do what iptables can do, but it can block applications from networking based on their identity (name/path whatever)
Application firewalls are reasonably new (and hard to find) for Linux although for MS-Windows there were several for many decades. (I used ‘outpost’ in my (hated) windows years and that was 25 years ago).
Even the standard windows-10 firewall can filter based on application and asks you permission if a new application wants to use the network. It keeps a whitelist for allowed applications.
It turns out that the architecture of UNIX derivatives is actually not suitable to accommodate application firewalls, so it is quite a challenge to design one.
I only know of two attempts to create an application firewall for Linux.
Those are Douane! and Open Snitch (github)
It turns out that opensnitch is in the standard repository of Ubuntu 
So I immediately installed it and it works like a charm.
I’m a happy camper since 
But wouldn’t it be possible to set up a password Group that controls internet access for applications, and only allow applications that are member of that group to have access to the internet, using the appropriate rule of course?
On the commercial side, there was a company called Trustifier Inc. which had built and deployed a Kernel Security System, basically a wrapper intercepting all Linux Kernel calls and passing them thru a customized security filter which encompassed
privilege assignment, escalation, demotion or rejection.
I know for a fact that it had passed US DOD testing (which also considered it for their “Army of One” program, circa 2007-2008) during which it was subjected to RED-Team attacks, which all failed. I can’t remember whether that involved a Honeypot setup as well, and whether the RED-Team was able to discern, or not, that it was a honeypot.
It kind of disappeared after that, with the company folding, so I don’t know what happened to the technology. Given the above results, we can make a conjecture as to what happened.
BTW, if you are ever trying to identify if any particular systems have been Certified agains Common Criteria Protection Profiles (PPs, TOEs, EALs), you can perform a seach on their website here:
In a way, but no.
‘No’ because:
It means; creating a ‘network’ user that owns all network capable applications with permission 550.
If you are added to the group, that means that you, including everything you start, will have network permission, so that won’t work out as planned.
You’l have to ‘su network’ which opens another can of worms.
‘In a way’ because:
An orthogonal permission system is doable on a server for packets that are not part of the repositories. I’ve done that for a server application I wrote, the application worked under its own useraccount with very very strict permissions and was started by the system (not by me) using su
(b.t.w. If you look at the ‘users’ in /etc/passwd you can see that this idea of giving applications their own useraccount is being used in some form or another for some daemons.)
EDIT: SE-Linux and AppArmor can do the job because they manage capabilities of applications. In the past months we’ve seen many bugreports of applications not running or doing their job because their AppArlor settings were not properly set.
Yes, but not application based 
Yes, watertight against everything. Except against malicious applications started by trusted persons that qualify for passing the security filter.
It is still people-based, not application based
Hi, everyone
I’ve just noticed that the “Mate Calculator doesn’t provide the exchange rates conversion anymore” issue / bug, for the “Mate calculator” (“mate-calc”) - that had been opened by @Watford in February 2025 - was reopened, about a week ago (on 19th April 2026), by “mbkma” - who is one of the members of “mate-desktop” in GitHub - “Members · People · mate-desktop · GitHub” - and that he assigned the “bug” type to that issue. So, I’m guessing there is now hope in seeing that bug get fixed