fidzu : Ubuntu

With the release of Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine", Ubuntu Server is available for the Raspberry Pi 4 for the first time. With the Pi 4's major boost in performance, once we can install Ubuntu Server, we can install and run any of the flavors. Let's get to it!

Getting the Server Image

First off, head to the Ubuntu 19.10 release images. We want one of the Preinstalled server images, since booting on the Raspberry Pi is still a tricky fiasco. You'll see two installation options:

Two options, but only one right for the desktop.

We'll want to choose the first option, Hard-Float. While the Pi 4 does in fact support the 64-bit ARM image, unfortunately USB devices fail to initialize with this option. If you have no need for mouse and keyboard, feel free to use the 64-bit option. This should be resolved in time for the 20.04 release.

Installing the Server Image

Once your server image has been downloaded, download and run Etcher. If you've never used Etcher before, it's a simple, cross-platform solution for installing disk images to USB devices. It's reliable and easy to use, and will help you avoid overwriting your hard drives.

Select your image and destination, then flash!

Select the downloaded image (.xz is fine, no need to extract), select the correct storage location, and the click Flash! After a few minutes, the image will be installed and validated, and you'll be ready to go. Re-insert your MicroSD card into your Raspberry Pi, connect an ethernet cable, power it on, and proceed to the next step.

Note: Once USB installation finished, I received an error that the checksums did not match, but everything seems to work correctly afterward.

Logging In

This part tripped me up for a while. Once installed, the default username and password are both "ubuntu". However, the first login to your Raspberry Pi has to be via SSH! First step, find the IP address of your Raspberry Pi device.

Be mindful that if you're in a corporate or other shared environment, scanning for devices might be frowned upon. With that warning out of the way, let's use nmap to look for our device. I'm not going to cover usage here, but a quick DuckDuckGo search can point you in the right direction. The server installation image defaults the hostname to "ubuntu", so look for that.

$ nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24
...
Nmap scan report for ubuntu.attlocal.net (192.168.1.230)
Host is up (0.00036s latency).
...

Once you know where the device is, SSH in and reset your password. Enter "yes" to continue connecting if prompted for the fingerprint.

$ ssh ubuntu@ubuntu.attlocal.net
ubuntu@ubuntu.attlocal.net's password: 
You are required to change your password immediately (administrator enforced)

WARNING: Your password has expired.
You must change your password now and login again!
Changing password for ubuntu.
Current password: 
New password: 
Retype new password: 
passwd: password updated successfully
Connection to ubuntu.attlocal.net closed.

Now, SSH in once more with your new password, and let's install Xubuntu!

Installing Xubuntu

We're almost done! Now it's time to decide: Do you want Xubuntu Core, the minimal Xubuntu base that you can easily customize to your needs, or Xubuntu Desktop, our standard installation option? I'll be doing installing Core for this guide, but if you want to install Desktop, just replace "xubuntu-core^" with "xubuntu-desktop^".

Also worth noting, while setting up Xubuntu on the Raspberry Pi, I came across an issue that causes our default login screen to fail. This has been fixed upstream, but to work around this issue now we will be using Slick Greeter for our login screen. Now, let's get back to the installation. Please note that the caret, ^, is not a typo!

sudo apt update
sudo apt install xubuntu-core^ slick-greeter

This will take a while. Once everything's installed, the final step is to set Slick Greeter as the login screen. Create /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf with the following contents using your favorite command-line editor.

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=slick-greeter

And finally, reboot!

sudo reboot

Installation Complete

Your Raspberry Pi 4 will now boot into a graphical environment, and you'll be greeted by Slick Greeter. Login with the password you created earlier, and the Xubuntu desktop will load, same as you'd find outside of the Raspberry Pi.

Up and running with Xubuntu 19.10!

What's Next?

That's up to you, but the first thing I recommend is creating a new user. The default Ubuntu user is an administrator, and has a bit more power than you'd normally have on the a desktop installation.

Beyond that, the Pi's the limit! Have fun, and enjoy running the mouse-based distribution on your mouse-sized computer.

Thanks!

I purchased my Raspberry Pi 4 with funds from my Patreon, so my patrons helped make this project possible. I'll continue experimenting with the Pi 4, so look forward to even more awesome projects. Thanks everybody!

20 Oct 2019 1:11pm GMT

The Kubuntu community is delighted and proud to ship Kubuntu 19.10. As a community of passionate contributors we need systems and services that enable us to work together, and host our development tools.

Our sponsors page provides details and links to the organisations that have supported us through our development process.

Bytemark is a UK based hosting provider that generously provide racked and hosted bare metal hardware upon which our build chain KCI ( Kubuntu Continuous Integration ) operates.

Kubuntu Continuous Integration Server, provided and sponsored by Bytemark

Linode, our US based hosting provider that generously provide scalable hosting upon which our build chain KCI operates.

Build and Packaging Servers provided and sponsored by Linode

Big Blue Button provide an online virtual classroom primarily targeted for online learning environments, but has proved itself a valuable tool for remote collaborative working, and community events.

Video conference and training suite, as used by Kubuntu Podcast, provided by Big Blue Button

We are deeply grateful for the support these organisations provide, and we welcome others to come join our community and pitch in.

18 Oct 2019 7:05pm GMT

Kubuntu 19 .10 has been released, featuring the beautiful KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop.

Codenamed "Eoan Ermine", Kubuntu 19.10 integrates the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 5.3-based kernel, Qt 5.12.4, KDE Frameworks 5.62.0, Plasma 5.16.5 and KDE Applications 19.04.3. Firefox 69 is the default browser and LibreOffice 6.3 is provided by default in the full installation, along with updates and bugfixes to latte-dock, Elisa 0.4.2, Kdenlive, Yakuake, Krita, Kdevelop and Ktorrent.

Getting Kubuntu 19.10

Upgrading from 19.04
Detailed upgrade instructions can be found here: Kubuntu 19.04 to 19.10 Upgrade

Download a Disk Image
Download a Bootable image. Direct downloads, torrents, and zysnc are available as options.

For more about the changes in the Ubuntu base, see the Ubuntu Release Notes

Since Plasma 5.17 has been released too late in our release cycle to make it into 19.10 as default, users can install these via our backports PPA.

A Plasma Wayland session can be added by installing the package plasma-workspace-wayland, but is not officially supported. This will add a Plasma (wayland) session option at the login screen. Users needing a stable desktop experience should select the normal 'Plasma' (without Wayland) option at login.

NVIDIA drivers are now included with the ISO, which allows the installer to select and install these when the 3rd party and restricted drivers and codecs option is chosen, even if you are installing offline.

ZFS on root installer support landed too late in the Eoan cycle to implement and test for the Ubiquity KDE front end. This option is therefore targeted for the 20.04 LTS release.

See our Release Notes for more information: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu

18 Oct 2019 5:49pm GMT

Codenamed "Eoan Ermine", 19.10 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

The Ubuntu kernel has been updated to the 5.3 based Linux kernel, and our default toolchain has moved to gcc 9.2 with glibc 2.30. Additionally, the Raspberry Pi images now support the new Pi 4 as well as 2 and 3.

Ubuntu Desktop 19.10 introduces GNOME 3.34 the fastest release yet with significant performance improvements delivering a more responsive experience. App organisation is easier with the ability to drag and drop icons into categorised folders and users can select light or dark Yaru theme variants. The Ubuntu Desktop installer also introduces installing to ZFS as a root filesystem as an experimental feature.

Ubuntu Server 19.10 integrates recent innovations from key open infrastructure projects like OpenStack Train, Kubernetes, and Ceph with advanced life-cycle management for multi-cloud and on-prem operations, from bare metal, VMware and OpenStack to every major public cloud.

The newest Ubuntu Budgie, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu are also being released today.

More details can be found for these at their individual release notes:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes#Official_flavours

Maintenance updates will be provided for 9 months for all flavours
releasing with 19.10.

To get Ubuntu 19.10

In order to download Ubuntu 19.10, visit:

https://ubuntu.com/download

Users of Ubuntu 19.04 will be offered an automatic upgrade to 19.10. For further information about upgrading, see:

https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/upgrade

As always, upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge.

We recommend that all users read the release notes, which document caveats, workarounds for known issues, as well as more in-depth notes on the release itself. They are available at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes

Find out what's new in this release with a graphical overview:

https://ubuntu.com/desktop
https://ubuntu.com/desktop/features

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but aren't sure, you can try asking in any of the following places:

#ubuntu on irc.freenode.net
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
https://ubuntuforums.org
https://askubuntu.com

Help Shape Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at:

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/contribute

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, IoT, cloud, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional services including support are available from Canonical
and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information
about support, visit:

https://ubuntu.com/support

More Information

You can learn more about Ubuntu and about this release on our website listed below:

https://ubuntu.com

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu's very low volume announcement list at:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

Originally posted to the ubuntu-release mailing list on Thu Oct 17 17:25:11 UTC 2019 by Adam Conrad, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team

18 Oct 2019 2:21am GMT

As developers, we do not always have access to a production-like environment to test new features and run proof-of-concepts. This is why it can be very interesting to deploy Kubernetes on a single machine. Of course, there is the new microk8s snap that allows a super fast deployment of a k8s cluster on a laptop (and it is definitely worth a try, look here to see how I deployed and tested it in just a few minutes), but if you're looking for the full experience, here's how I deployed the Charmed Distribution of Kubernetes on LXD containers in a single bare-metal machine.

Note: This is an adaptation of Michael Iatrou's post with the newer LXD version 3.18 and Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver.

You will need a machine equipped with at least 4 CPU cores, 16GB RAM,100GB free disk space, preferably SSD and one NIC. I am using MAAS to deploy Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS on a machine. I configured a Linux bridge (br0) and attached one NIC (eno1) to it. Here is the /etc/netplan/config.yaml configuration of my machine.

$ cat /etc/netplan/config.yaml
network:
    bridges:
        br0:
            addresses:
            - 172.16.7.50/24
            gateway4: 172.16.7.1
            interfaces:
            - eno1
            macaddress: 2c:60:0c:f9:3c:23
            mtu: 1500
            nameservers:
                addresses:
                - 10.246.96.1
                search:
                - maas
            parameters:
                forward-delay: 15
                stp: false
    ethernets:
        eno1:
            match:
                macaddress: 2c:60:0c:f9:3c:23
            mtu: 1500
            set-name: eno1

First step is to SSH into our machine and download the various components needed for this task. Juju and LXD are now available with snaps, which is the recommended way to deploy these tools.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
$ sudo snap install juju --classic
$ sudo snap install lxd

We get the Juju version 2.6.9-bionic-amd64 and the LXD version 3.18. The next step is to launch the LXD init to set it up.

$ /snap/bin/lxd init
Would you like to use LXD clustering? (yes/no) [default=no]:
Do you want ot configure a new storage pool? (yes/no) [default=yes]:
Name of the new storage pool [default=default]:
Name of the storage backend to use (btrfs, ceph, dir, lvm, zfs) [default=zfs]: dir
Would you like to connect to a MAAS server? (yes/no) [default=no]:
Would you like to create a new local network bridge? (yes/no) [default=yes]: no
Would you like to configure LXD to use an existing bridge or host interface? (yes/no) [default=no]: yes
Name of the existing bridge or host interface: br0
Would you like LXD to be available over the network? (yes/no) [default=no]:
Would you like stale cached images to be updated automatically? (yes/no) [default=yes]:
Would you like a YAML "lxd init" preseed to be printed? (yes/no) [default=no]:

We can now bootstrap our local Juju controller with LXD. Juju is the tool with which we will deploy a Kubernetes environment.

$ juju bootstrap lxd lxd-local

If this command ran successfully, you should get a message saying that a controller was launched on localhost/localhost, and that an initial model "default" has been added. You can double check by looking at the output of these two following commands.

$ juju controllers
Use --refresh option with this command to see the latest information.

Controller  Model    User   Access     Cloud/Region         Models  Nodes    HA  Version
lxd-local*  default  admin  superuser  localhost/localhost       3      1  none  2.6.9 

$ juju models
Controller: lxd-local

Model       Cloud/Region         Type  Status     Machines  Cores  Units  Access  Last connection
controller  localhost/localhost  lxd   available         1      -  -      admin   just now
default*    localhost/localhost  lxd   available         0      -  -      admin   20 hours ago

And you can see that the controller that was spawned is listed in the lxc container list.

$ lxc list

Great! Now, we need to create a new model for our Kubernetes deployment:

$ juju add-model kubernetes
$ juju models
Controller: lxd-local

Model       Cloud/Region         Type  Status     Machines  Cores  Units  Access  Last connection
controller  localhost/localhost  lxd   available         1      -  -      admin   just now
default    localhost/localhost  lxd   available          0      -  -      admin   20 hours ago
kubernetes*  localhost/localhost  lxd   available        0      -  -   admin   59 minutes ago

For our Kubernetes machines, we need to create a LXD profile that enables privilege machine containers and add an SSH key to it. Create a new YAML file juju-lxd-profile.yaml with the following configuration:

name: juju-kubernetes
config:
  user.user-data: |
    #cloud-config
    ssh_authorized_keys:
      - @@SSHPUB@@
  boot.autostart: "true"
  linux.kernel_modules: ip_tables,ip6_tables,netlink_diag,nf_nat,overlay
  raw.lxc: |
    lxc.apparmor.profile=unconfined
    lxc.mount.auto=proc:rw sys:rw
    lxc.cap.drop=
  security.nesting: "true"
  security.privileged: "true"
description: ""
devices:
  aadisable:
    path: /sys/module/nf_conntrack/parameters/hashsize
    source: /dev/null
    type: disk
  aadisable1:
    path: /sys/module/apparmor/parameters/enabled
    source: /dev/null
    type: disk

Make sure that you have generated an SSH key pair for user "ubuntu", before you execute the following one-liner:

$ sed -ri "s'@@SSHPUB@@'$(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)'" juju-lxd-profile.yaml

Then update the juju-kubernetes LXD profile:

$ lxc profile edit "juju-kubernetes" < juju-lxd-profile.yaml

Finally, deploy Kubernetes!

$ juju deploy charmed-kubernetes

At the time of writing this post, it is the version charmed-kubernetes-798 that was fetched and deployed. You can watch the status of each component as they get installed via the following:

When everything is green, active and idle, your deployment is ready to be used!

Note: if you are deploying on a machine behind a proxy, check this out! You will need to set the proxy in the Juju model and for some specific components.

17 Oct 2019 6:43pm GMT

Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 19.10 has been released! With the codename Eoan Ermine, Lubuntu 19.10 is the 17th release of Lubuntu and the third release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment. Support lifespan Lubuntu 19.10 will be supported for 9 months, until July 2020. If you […]

17 Oct 2019 6:38pm GMT

The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 19.10!

Xubuntu 19.10, codenamed Eoan Ermine, is a regular release and will be supported for 9 months, until July 2020. If you need a stable environment with longer support time, we recommend that you use Xubuntu 18.04 LTS instead.

The final release images are available as torrents and direct downloads from xubuntu.org/getxubuntu/

As the main server might be busy in the first few days after the release, we recommend using the torrents if possible.

Xubuntu Core, our minimal installation option, is available to download from unit193.net/xubuntu/core/. Find out more about Xubuntu Core here.

We'd like to thank everybody who contributed to this release of Xubuntu!

Highlights and Known Issues

Highlights

• Xubuntu 19.10 features Xfce 4.14, released in August 2019 after nearly 4.5 years of development. Backed by GTK 3 and other modern technologies, Xfce 4.14 includes many new features, improved HiDPI support, and the same great performance for which Xfce is known.
• Xfce Screensaver replaces Light Locker for screen locking. The new screensaver is built on years of development from the GNOME and MATE Screensaver projects and is tightly integrated with Xfce. It also features significantly improved support for Laptops.
• We've added two new keyboard shortcuts to make transitioning from other desktop environments and operating systems easier.
  • Super + D will show your desktop, while
  • Super + L will now lock your screen.
• ZFS on root is included as an experimental feature. Available in Ubuntu and the other flavors for this first time in 19.10, this feature enables full-disk installation of ZFS.
  • Remember, ZFS on root is experimental, so don't run it on your production machines!

Known Issues

• If more than one instance of the Xfce Pulseaudio Plugin is added to the panel, volume notifications will be duplicated.
• Tooltips can become unresponsive in the Xfce Task Manager. Usually a bit of movement will cause the tooltip to fade away.
  • This bug will be fixed in Xubuntu 20.04!

For more obscure known issues, information on affecting bugs, bug fixes, and a list of new package versions, please refer to the Xubuntu Release Notes.

The main Ubuntu Release Notes cover both many of the other packages we carry and more generic issues.

Support

For support with the release, navigate to Help & Support for a complete list of methods to get help.

17 Oct 2019 6:23pm GMT

Fizemos um mashup show com o Marius Quabeck do Nerdzoom.de, Jan Sprinz Ubports e a Rute Correia do White Market Podcast na Ubucon Europe 2019.

Apoios

Este episódio foi produzido e editado por Marius Quabeck da Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), cujo texto integral pode ser lido aqui. Estamos abertos a licenciar para permitir outros tipos de utilização, contactem-nos para validação e autorização.

17 Oct 2019 5:40pm GMT

17th October 2019: Canonical today announced the release of Ubuntu 19.10 with a focus on accelerating developer productivity in AI/ML, new edge capabilities for MicroK8s and delivering the fastest GNOME desktop performance.

"In the fifteen years since the first Ubuntu release, we have seen Ubuntu evolve from the desktop to become the platform of choice across public cloud, open infrastructure, IoT and AI. With the 19.10 release, Ubuntu continues to deliver strong support, security and superior economics to enterprises, developers and the wider community," said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical.

New edge capabilities for Kubernetes

Ubuntu 19.10 brings enhanced edge computing capabilities with the addition of strict confinement to MicroK8s. Strict confinement ensures complete isolation and a tightly secured production-grade Kubernetes environment, all in a small footprint ideal for edge gateways. MicroK8s add-ons - including Istio, Knative, CoreDNS, Prometheus, and Jaeger - can now be deployed securely at the edge with a single command. This builds on existing snaps for edge gateways already available including EdgeX and AWS IoT Greengrass.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is supported by Ubuntu 19.10. The latest board from the Raspberry Pi Foundation offers a faster system-on-a-chip with a processor that uses the Cortex-A72 architecture (quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 at 1.5GHz) and offers up to 4GB of RAM. With the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, developers get access to a low-cost board, powerful enough to orchestrate workloads at the edge with MicroK8s.

Continued focus on improving the economics of multi-cloud infrastructure

Ubuntu 19.10 ships with the Train release of Charmed OpenStack - the 20th OpenStack release, backed by the Nautilus release of Ceph. This marks Canonical's long-term commitment to open infrastructure and improving the cost of cloud operations. Train provides live migration extensions to aid telcos in their infrastructure operations. Live migration allows users to move their machines from one hypervisor to another without shutting down the operating system of the machine. It is now also possible in telco-specific environments with NUMA topology, pinned CPUs, SR-IOV ports attached and huge pages configured. Nautilus introduces the automatic placement group tuning feature to improve the experience of operating a Ceph distributed storage cluster.

Integrated AI developer experience

Kubeflow is now available as an add-on to MicroK8s for improved machine learning and AI capabilities. In minutes, developers can set-up, develop, test and scale to their production needs. Kubeflow and GPU acceleration work out the box with MicroK8s. All dependencies are included with automatic updates and transactional security fixes so users can spend less time configuring and more time innovating.

Ubuntu 19.10 will ship with NVIDIA drivers embedded in the ISO image to improve the performance and overall experience for gamers and AI/ML users with NVIDIA hardware, saving the need for manual installation. Ubuntu 19.10 uses the 5.3 kernel, which introduces support for the AMD Navi GPUs and Zhaoxin x86 processors for workstations.

15 years on - still delivering the most usable Linux desktop

With GNOME 3.34, Ubuntu 19.10 is the fastest release yet with significant performance improvements delivering a more responsive and smooth experience, even on older hardware. App organisation is easier with the ability to drag and drop icons into categorised folders, while users can select light or dark Yaru theme variants depending on their preference or for improved viewing accessibility.

Native support for ZFS on the root partition is introduced as an experimental desktop installer option. Coupled with the new zsys package, benefits include automated snapshots of file system states, allowing users to boot to a previous update and easily roll forwards and backwards in case of failure.

Ubuntu 19.10 will be available to download here.

To learn more about Ubuntu 19.10, click here to join the webinar on 24th October 2019.

<Ends>

About Canonical

Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as the emerging categories of smart gateways, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise security, support and services to commercial users of Ubuntu. Established in 2004, Canonical is a privately held company.

17 Oct 2019 5:38pm GMT

The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 19.10, code-named "Eoan Ermine". This marks Ubuntu Studio's 26th release. This release is a regular release and as such, it is supported for 9 months. For those requiring longer-term support, we encourage you to install Ubuntu Studio 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" and add […]

17 Oct 2019 5:26pm GMT

This week we've been doing ITIL Foundation training. Following the release of Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine), we discuss our wish list items for Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 (Focal Fossa), bring you some command line love and go over all your feedback.

It's Season 12 Episode 28 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.

In this week's show:

• We discuss what we've been up to recently:
  • Mark has been doing ITIL Foundation training.
• We each present our wish list items for Ubuntu Desktop 20.04.

• We share a Command Line Lurve:

  • mosh - Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity

mosh user@host

• And we go over all your amazing feedback - thanks for sending it - please keep sending it!

• Image taken from Super Sprint arcade machine manufactured in 1986 by Atari Games.

That's all for this week! You can listen to the Ubuntu Podcast back catalogue on YouTube. If there's a topic you'd like us to discuss, or you have any feedback on previous shows, please send your comments and suggestions to show@ubuntupodcast.org or Tweet us or Toot us or Comment on our Facebook page or comment on our sub-Reddit.

• Join us in the Ubuntu Podcast Telegram group.

17 Oct 2019 2:00pm GMT

Stress testing CPU temperatures is not exactly straight forward. CPU designs vary from CPU to CPU and each have their own strengths and weaknesses in cache design, integer maths, floating point math, bit-wise logical operations and branch prediction to name but a few. I've been asked several times about the "best" CPU stressor method in stress-ng to use to make a CPU run hot.

As an experiment I ran all the CPU stressor methods in stress-ng for 60 seconds across a range of devices, from small ARM based Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 to much larger Xeon desktop servers just to see how hot CPUs get. The thermal measurements were based on the most relevant thermal zones, for example, on x86 this is the CPU package thermal zone. In between each stress run 60 seconds of idle time was added to allow the CPU to cool.

Below are the results:

17 Oct 2019 10:24am GMT

Brief history of Calamares in Debian

Before Debian 9 was released, I was preparing a release for a derivative of Debian that was a bit different than other Debian systems I've prepared for redistribution before. This was targeted at end-users, some of whom might have used Ubuntu before, but otherwise had no Debian related experience. I needed to find a way to make Debian really easy for them to install. Several options were explored, and I found that Calamares did a great job of making it easy for typical users to get up and running fast.

After Debian 9 was released, I learned that other Debian derivatives were also using Calamares or planning to do so. It started to make sense to package Calamares in Debian so that we don't do duplicate work in all these projects. On its own, Calamares isn't very useful, if you ran the pure upstream version in Debian it would crash before it starts to install anything. This is because Calamares needs some configuration and helpers depending on the distribution. Most notably in Debian's case, this means setting the location of the squashfs image we want to copy over, and some scripts to either install grub-pc or grub-efi depending on how we boot. Since I already did most of the work to figure all of this out, I created a package called calamares-settings-debian, which contains enough configuration to install Debian using Calamares so that derivatives can easily copy and adapt it to their own calamares-settings-* packages for use in their systems.

In Debian 9, the live images were released without an installer available in the live session. Unfortunately the debian-installer live session that was used in previous releases had become hard to maintain and had a growing number of bugs that didn't make it suitable for release, so Steve from the live team suggested that we add Calamares to the Debian 10 test builds and give it a shot, which surprised me because I never thought that Calamares would actually ship on official Debian media. We tried it out, and it worked well so Debian 10 live media was released with it. It turned out great, every review of Debian 10 I've seen so far had very good things to say about it, and the very few problems people have found have already been fixed upstream (I plan to backport those fixes to buster soon).

Plans for Debian 11 (bullseye)

New slideshow

If I had to choose a biggest regret regarding the Debian 10 release, this slideshow would probably be it. It's just the one slide depicted above. The time needed to create a nice slideshow was one constraint, but another was that I also didn't have enough time to figure out how its translations work and do a proper call for translations in time for the hard freeze. I consider the slideshow a golden opportunity to explain to new users what the Debian project is about and what this new Debian system they're installing is capable of, so this is basically a huge missed opportunity that I don't want to repeat again.

I intend to pull in some help from the web team, publicity team and anyone else who might be interested to cover slides along the topics of (just a quick braindump, final slides will likely have significantly different content):

• The Debian project, and what it's about
  • Who develops Debian and why
  • Cover the social contract, and perhaps touch on the DFSG
• Who uses Debian? Mention notable users and use cases
  • Big and small commercial companies
  • Educational institutions
  • …even NASA?
• What Debian can do
  • Explain vast package library
  • Provide some tips and tricks on what to do next once the system is installed
• Where to get help
  • Where to get documentation
  • Where to get additional help

It shouldn't get to heavy and shouldn't run longer than a maximum of three minutes or so, because in some cases that might be all we have during this stage of the installation.

Try out RAID support

Calamares now has RAID support. It's still very new and as far as I know it's not yet widely tested. It needs to be enabled as a compile-time option and depends on kpmcore 4.0.0, which Calamares uses for its partitioning backend. kpmcore 4.0.0 just entered unstable this week, so I plan to do an upload to test this soon.

RAID support is one of the biggest features missing from Calamares, and enabling it would make it a lot more useful for typical office environments where RAID 1 is typically used on worktations. Some consider RAID on desktops somewhat less important than it used to be. With fast SSDs and network provisioning with gigabit ethernet, it's really quick to recover from a failed disk, but you still have downtime until the person responsible pops over to replace that disk. At least with RAID-1 you can avoid or drastically decrease downtime, which makes the cost of that extra disk completely worth while.

Add Debian-specific options

The intent is to keep the installer simple, so adding new options is a tricky business, but it would be nice to cover some Debian-specific options in the installer just like debian-installer does. At this point I'm considering adding:

• Choosing a mirror. Currently it just default to writing a sources.list file that uses deb.debian.org, which is usually just fine.
• Add an option to enable popularity contest (popcon). As a Debian developer I find popcon stats quite useful. Even though just a small percentage of people enable it, it provides enough data to help us understand how widely packages are used, especially in relation to other packages, and I'm slightly concerned that desktop users who now use Calamares instead of d-i who forget to enable popcon after installation, will result in skewing popcon results for desktop packages compared to previous releases.

Skip files that we're deleting anyway

At DebConf19, I gave a lightning talk titled "Is it possible to install Debian in a lightning talk slot?". The answer was sadly "No.". The idea is that you should be able to install a full Debian desktop system within 5 minutes. In my preparations for the talk, I got it down to just under 6 minutes. It ended up taking just under 7 minutes during my lightnight talk, probably because I forgot to plug in my laptop into a power source and somehow got throttled to save power. Under 7 minutes is fast, but the exercise got me looking at what wasted the most time during installation.

Of the avoidable things that happen during installation, the thing that takes up the most time by a large margin is removing packages that we don't want on the installed system. During installation, the whole live system is copied from the installation media over to the hard disk, and then the live packages (including Calamares) is removed from that installation. APT (or actually more speficically dpkg) is notorious for playing it safe with filesystem operations, so removing all these live packages takes quite some time (more than even copying them there in the first place).

The contents of the squashfs image is copied over to the filesystem using rsync, so it is possible to provide an exclude list of files that we don't want. I filed a bug in Calamares to add support for such an exclude list, which was added in version 3.2.15 that was released this week. Now we also need to add support in the live image build scripts to generate these file lists based on the packages we want to remove, but that's part of a different long blog post all together.

This feature also opens the door for a minimal mode option, where you could choose to skip non-essential packages such as LibreOffice and GIMP. In reality these packages will still be removed using APT in the destination filesystem, but it will be significantly faster since APT won't have to remove any real files. The Ubuntu installer (Ubiquity) has done something similar for a few releases now.

Add a framebuffer session

As is the case with most Qt5 applications, Calamares can run directly on the Linux framebuffer without the need for Xorg or Wayland. To try it out, all you need to do is run "sudo calamares -platform linuxfb" on a live console and you'll get Calamares right there in your framebuffer. It's not tested upstream so it looks a bit rough. As far as I know I'm the only person so far to have installed a system using Calamares on the framebuffer.

The plan is to create a systemd unit to launch this at startup if 'calamares' is passed as a boot parameter. This way, derivatives who want this who uses a calamares-settings-debian (or their own fork) can just create a boot menu entry to activate the framebuffer installation without any additional work. I don't think it should be too hard to make it look decent in this mode either,

Calamares on the framebuffer might also be useful for people who ship headless appliances based on Debian but who still need a simple installer.

Document calamares-settings-debian for derivatives

As the person who put together most of calamares-settings-debian, I consider it quite easy to understand and adapt calamares-settings-debian for other distributions. But even so, it takes a lot more time for someone who wants to adapt it for a derivative to delve into it than it would to just read some quick documentation on it first.

I plan to document calamares-settings-debian on the Debian wiki that covers everything that it does and how to adapt it for derivatives.

Improve Scripts

When writing helper scripts for Calamares in Debian I focused on getting it working, reliably and in time for the hard freeze. I cringed when looking at some of these again after the buster release, it's not entirely horrible but it can use better conventions and be easier to follow, so I want to get it right for Bullseye. Some scripts might even be eliminated if we can build better images. For example, we install either grub-efi or grub-pc from the package pool on the installation media based on the boot method used, because in the past you couldn't have both installed at the same time so they were just shipped as additional available packages. With changes in the GRUB packaging (for a few releases now already) it's possible to have grub-efi and grub-pc-bin installed at the same time, so if we install both at build time it may be possible to simplify those pieces (and also save another few precious seconds of install time).

Feature Requests

I'm sure some people reading this will have more ideas, but I'm not in a position to accept feature requests right now, Calamares is one of a whole bunch of areas in Debian I'm working on in this release. If you have ideas or feature requests, rather consider filing them in Calamares' upstream bug tracker on GitHub or get involved in the efforts. Calamares has an IRC channel on freenode (#calamares), and for Debian specific stuff you can join the Debian live channel on oftc (#debian-live).

17 Oct 2019 9:01am GMT

¡Bienvenidos!

Marco | Costales | Tiago | Olive

Día 1

Pinebook

Conferencia de apertura

Conferencia 15 Cumpleaños

Privacy on the Net

Events in your Local Community Team

Comida

Creating an Ubuntu Phone app

Saloon 2

Cena

Día 2

Applied Security for Containers

Scripts de Vadim

Quabeck mostrando cómo crear y editar un podcast

Joan

Linux Containers

Explicándonos la fabricación de cerveza

Cervecería

¡Fiesta! :)

Día 3

Jan Sprinz narrando la historia de Ubuntu Touch

Usabilidad y diseño de Ubuntu Touch

Martin Wimpress

Dario Cavedon

Migración de Seixal

Fiesta de cumpleaños

Día 4

Michal y Jesús Escolar con reconocimiento ocular

Futura Ubuntu 20.04

El final

Comida

Los últimos supervivientes

El resumen

¡Hasta el próximo año!

15 Oct 2019 5:00pm GMT

Like each month, here comes a report about
the work of paid contributors
to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In September, 212.75 work hours have been dispatched among 12 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Adrian Bunk did nothing (and got no hours assigned), but has been carrying 26h from August to October.
• Ben Hutchings did 20h (out of 20h assigned).
• Brian May did 10h (out of 10h assigned).
• Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 30h (out of 23.75h assigned and 5.25h from August), thus anticipating 1h from October.
• Hugo Lefeuvre did nothing (out of 23.75h assigned), thus is carrying over 23.75h for October.
• Jonas Meurer did 5h (out of 10h assigned and 9.5h from August), thus carrying over 14.5h to October.
• Markus Koschany did 23.75h (out of 23.75h assigned).
• Mike Gabriel did 11h (out of 12h assigned + 0.75h remaining), thus carrying over 1.75h to October.
• Ola Lundqvist did 2h (out of 8h assigned and 8h from August), thus carrying over 14h to October.
• Roberto C. Sánchez did 16h (out of 16h assigned).
• Sylvain Beucler did 23.75h (out of 23.75h assigned).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 23.75h (out of 23.75h assigned).

Evolution of the situation

September was more like a regular month again, though two contributors were not able to dedicate any time to LTS work.

For October we are welcoming Utkarsh Gupta as a new paid contributor. Welcome to the team, Utkarsh!

This month, we're glad to announce that Cloudways is joining us as a new silver level sponsor ! With the reduced involvment of another long term sponsor, we are still at the same funding level (roughly 216 hours sponsored by month).

The security tracker currently lists 32 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 37 packages needing an update.

Thanks to our sponsors

New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• • TOSHIBA (for 48 months)
  • GitHub (for 39 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 16 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• • Blablacar (for 63 months)
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 59 months)
  • Linode (for 53 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 43 months)
  • Plat'Home (for 42 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• • The Positive Internet Company (for 65 months)
  • Domeneshop AS (for 64 months)
  • Nantes Métropole (for 58 months)
  • Dalenys (for 54 months)
  • Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 50 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 49 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 43 months)
  • maxcluster GmbH (for 37 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 33 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 27 months)
  • Vente-privee.com (for 24 months)
  • CINECA (for 17 months)
  • Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires Étrangères (for 11 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd
• Bronze sponsors:
• • Evolix (for 64 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 64 months)
  • MyTux (for 63 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 61 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 61 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 60 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 59 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 58 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 58 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 58 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 57 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 53 months)
  • Sig-I/O (for 51 months)
  • Entr'ouvert (for 48 months)
  • Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 46 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 40 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 40 months)
  • Tesorion (for 40 months)
  • Bearstech (for 32 months)
  • LiHAS (for 32 months)
  • People Doc (for 28 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 26 months)
  • Supagro (for 22 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 20 months)
  • TrapX Security (for 17 months)
  • Université Grenoble Alpes (for 6 months)

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15 Oct 2019 7:20am GMT

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 600 for the week of October 6 - 12, 2019. The full version of this issue is available here.

In this issue we cover:

• Eoan Ermine (19.10) Final Freeze
• Ubuntu Stats
• Hot in Support
• LoCo Events
• Mir 1.5.0 Release
• Other Community News
• Canonical News
• In the Press
• In the Blogosphere
• Featured Audio and Video
• Meeting Reports
• Upcoming Meetings and Events
• Updates and Security for 16.04, 18.04, and 19.04
• And much more!

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

• Krytarik Raido
• Bashing-om
• Chris Guiver
• Wild Man
• And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, this issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

14 Oct 2019 8:38pm GMT