Most of my Debian contributions this month were
sponsored by Freexian.
You can also support my work directly via
Liberapay.
OpenSSH
OpenSSH upstream released
9.9p2 with fixes for
CVE-2025-26465 and CVE-2025-26466. I got a heads-up on this in advance from
the Debian security team, and prepared updates for all of testing/unstable,
bookworm (Debian 12), bullseye (Debian 11), buster (Debian 10, LTS), and
stretch (Debian 9, ELTS). jessie (Debian 8) is also still in ELTS for a few
more months, but wasn’t affected by either vulnerability.
Although I’m not particularly active in the Perl team, I fixed a
libnet-ssleay-perl build failure because
it was blocking openssl from migrating to testing, which in turn was
blocking the above openssh fixes.
A lot of my Python team work is driven by its maintainer
dashboard.
Now that we’ve finished the transition to Python 3.13 as the default
version, and inspired by a recent debian-devel thread started by
Santiago, I
thought it might be worth spending a bit of time on the “uscan error”
section. uscan is typically
scraping upstream web sites to figure out whether new versions are
available, and so it’s easy for its configuration to become outdated or
broken. Most of this work is pretty boring, but it can often reveal
situations where we didn’t even realize that a Debian package was out of
date. I fixed these packages:
cssutils (this in particular was very out of date due to a new and active
upstream maintainer since 2021)
In bookworm-backports, I updated python-django to 3:4.2.18-1 (issuing
BSA-121)
and added new backports of python-django-dynamic-fixture and
python-django-pgtrigger, all of which are dependencies of
debusine.
HamClock is a powerful tool designed for amateur radio operators, providing real-time propagation data, satellite tracking, and more. This guide will walk you through installing HamClock on various UNIX-like systems, including Raspberry Pi, macOS, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and others. Whether you’re using HamClock for monitoring solar conditions, DX cluster spots, or tracking satellites, this step-by-step tutorial will help you get started.
Step 1: Install Required Dependencies
Before installing HamClock, ensure your system has the necessary dependencies installed. These dependencies vary by operating system:
Once the dependencies are installed, proceed with downloading and installing HamClock. There are two methods depending on your operating system.
For Raspberry Pi (Automated Install):
cd
curl -O https://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham/HamClock/install-hc-rpi
chmod u+x install-hc-rpi
./install-hc-rpi
Follow the prompts and answer y or n as needed. This script will automate the installation for you.
For Other UNIX-like Systems (Manual Install):
cd
rm -fr ESPHamClock
curl -O https://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham/HamClock/ESPHamClock.zip
unzip ESPHamClock.zip
cd ESPHamClock
make -j 4 hamclock-800x480
sudo make install
This will install HamClock with a resolution of 800×480 pixels. If you need a different resolution, refer to Step 4.
Step 3: Run HamClock
After installation, you can start HamClock with the following command:
hamclock &
If everything is installed correctly, HamClock should open in a window displaying solar data, propagation info, and maps.
If you did not install a desktop icon, you can always launch HamClock from the terminal using the command above.
Step 4: Customize HamClock
HamClock supports different screen sizes. If you want to change the resolution, use the following commands:
cd ~/ESPHamClock
make clean
make -j 4 hamclock-2400x1440
sudo make install
Replace 2400x1440 with the desired resolution:
hamclock-1600x960
hamclock-2400x1440
hamclock-3200x1920
If you want HamClock to fill the screen completely, navigate to Page 5 in the Setup menu and enable the full-screen option.
Step 5: Auto-start HamClock on Boot
To ensure HamClock starts automatically on system boot, you can create an autostart entry.
For XDG-compliant systems:
cd ~/ESPHamClock
mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart
cp hamclock.desktop ~/.config/autostart
For macOS (Create a Clickable App):
If you’re using macOS, you can create a clickable app on your Desktop:
Right-click the new HamClock.app Desktop item and select Get Info.
Click the existing default icon in the top left corner.
Press ⌘-V to paste the new icon.
Conclusion
By following these steps, you’ll have HamClock running seamlessly for amateur radio use, helping you track propagation, monitor DX cluster spots, and track satellites. Whether you’re using a Raspberry Pi, macOS, or a UNIX-like system, HamClock is a great addition to any ham radio station. For more info, visit https://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham/HamClock/
As Canonical continues to grow, we have developed a unique onboarding process that enables our new hires to quickly settle and establish themselves in our globally distributed environment.
During your first few weeks, your manager will create an onboarding plan to introduce you to the business, your closest stakeholders and colleagues. You will also learn about our business tools and processes that allow us to work asynchronously across the globe. You can expect to develop a good understanding of the open source technologies that we develop such as our distributions for Openstack, Kubernetes, Kubeflow and Opensearch, in addition to Ubuntu, the world’s favorite Linux.
Regardless of your level or role, you will be invited to attend a 3 day induction sprint during your first few months. These are held in exciting locations around the world, with travel and accommodation fully covered by Canonical. You will attend a series of presentation style talks delivered by senior leaders on their functions and vision to help you understand how everything at Canonical fits together. It is a great way to gain a holistic understanding of the whole business. You will also get to engage in some fun team building activities whilst getting to know other new joiners from across the business.
In this series, we will be interviewing team members who joined the company within the last year to ask them about their experience so far. For this edition, we will be hearing from Akshara Pathak.
Meet Akshara
In February 2024, Akshara joined Canonical as part of the Customer Success team. Based in London, Akshara engages customers across the EMEA region to guide them to a deeper understanding of Canonical’s products and services, as well as best practices. As a Customer Success Manager (CSM), Akshara collaborates closely with Sales, Support, Product and other teams to improve the customer experience and drive retention and growth. CSMs also serve as the voice of the customer within Canonical, by sharing customer feedback and including suggestions or pain points with the relevant stakeholders to drive positive change. Let’s now hear from Akshara about her Canonical journey so far.
How would you describe your first few months at Canonical?
In my early days at Canonical, I was thrilled to see the strong sense of collaboration within the team. This motivated me to quickly adapt to my new role so I could contribute to the team’s success and deepen my understanding. The buddy program was incredibly helpful, and having Alyson (an experienced team member) as my go-to contact for any questions made the transition much smoother. The well-structured onboarding process gave me the confidence to handle tasks independently by the end.
The entire team was welcoming and supportive, making me feel instantly included, despite being new to the role and organisation. Three months into my journey, I had the chance to meet my colleagues in Madrid during the Induction Sprint, which offered fantastic exposure and learning opportunities. From day one, I found myself excited about the work ahead, which kept me productive and engaged.
What was the induction sprint like?
The Induction Sprint was an incredible experience for me. It provided a fantastic opportunity to meet and connect with my colleagues shortly after joining. The event was thoughtfully organised, allowing us to learn, network, and enjoy ourselves simultaneously, which gave me a true sense of the positive work environment within the organisation. Beyond just learning and networking, the sprint offered a perfect balance of professional growth and memorable team dinners outside of work.
What aspect of your role excites you the most?
I believe the role of a CSM is about being creative and engaging with customers in a genuine, natural way. While there’s a structure to follow, the role offers the freedom to explore different approaches to building strong customer relationships and keeping them engaged. The variety that comes with the job keeps me motivated and excited to work. Additionally, it provides the opportunity to go above and beyond by contributing to other initiatives within the organisation.
Is this your first remote job? How do you feel about remote work?
In my previous role, I worked remotely for quite a while. Although I got comfortable with the setup, there were definitely times when I wished I could work from the office and interact with colleagues face-to-face. Being based in London, I’m lucky that the company headquarters are here too, giving me the flexibility to work in a hybrid setting. Plus, with two sprints every year, the remote experience feels easier since we get to meet up with colleagues from all over the world at least twice a year.
Whatis your advice for readers considering a career at Canonical?
If you believe there’s a role at Canonical that aligns with your skills and passions, don’t miss the opportunity. Canonical is more than a workplace, it’s a community where you can grow, collaborate with brilliant minds, and contribute to shaping the future of technology. Whether you’re starting your career or bringing years of experience, you’ll work on impactful projects, solve exciting challenges, and thrive in a culture that values innovation and continuous learning. If you’re passionate about open-source technology and making a difference, Canonical is the perfect place to do it.
Join the team
Canonical puts a great effort on employee onboarding to ensure new joiners like Akshara feel welcome and engaged. In the next article of this series, we’ll explore another story of a new joiner. In the meantime, we encourage you to browse current openings, find the most interesting role for you and apply. Canonical’s team will make sure you receive all that you need to excel at your new role!
The realm of information security is fraught with jargon, as anyone who has come across vulnerability-related terms can tell you. To complicate matters further, some of these terms are used interchangeably or in contexts outside of computing. This can muddy the waters for people looking to learn about vulnerability assessments – so in this blog we’ll begin by demystifying the language, before delving into how you can perform vulnerability assessments on Ubuntu installations.
What is a vulnerability?
A vulnerability is any kind of defect that can cause harm if either exploited by a malicious threat actor, or accidentally triggered by an unwitting well-intentioned user. In the context of risk management, a vulnerability will increase risk, by making a threat more likely, increasing the loss caused by a threat materializing, or both.
In cybersecurity, a vulnerability is most commonly understood to be one of two things:
a logic flaw in a system, most often software code, that could result in an adverse impact;
a misconfiguration or misuse of a system that similarly weakens overall security.
This distinction is somewhat arbitrary, but it’s important for you to know it due to its prevalence within cybersecurity. We’ll use this distinction to form the basis for the rest of our discussion.
To make things more tangible, here are two examples of well-known vulnerabilities:
Log4Shell – a critical flaw in the popular Apache Log4j software framework that, under certain circumstances, exposes an application using this component to remote exploitation via the execution of arbitrary attacker-controlled code;
The inadvertent exposure of an internal service to the Internet – a generic description that falls into the latter, misconfiguration category; such an instance does not affect a particular product, but rather any incorrectly set up system deployments.
The wider view
A vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying and reporting vulnerabilities found in a system at a particular moment in time. This is normally highly automated and performed on a frequent basis by using a service, or software application, known as a vulnerability scanner. It is a central part in an organization’s wider vulnerability management strategy, but it can also be performed as part of your regular risk assessments.
Government regulations and industry standards often mandate vulnerability assessments. As an example, certain compliance levels of the PCI DSS standard used by the major payment card companies require merchants that take online payments to implement vulnerability assessments using Approved Scanning Vendors (ASVs).
Even when there are no regulatory compliance requirements, best practice dictates that vulnerability scans should still be performed – after all, vulnerabilities increase risk and there are few things worse for one’s security posture than not knowing which vulnerabilities exist. Frankly, it would not be wise to leave yourself exposed to threats, just because you are not mandated to perform scans.
Preparation
The initial steps to putting together a regular or one-off vulnerability assessment are the following:
Identify and classify the systems that are to be scanned. These systems are often called “assets” and will form the targets of the scan. Determining the functions and criticality of the targets is going to be crucial to interpreting the results and prioritizing any necessary remediation.
Define what kind of vulnerabilities are in scope of the assessment. It may be the case that all publicly-known vulnerabilities affecting installed software need to be found; or that the scope should be limited to any issues that can be identified over the Internet by a threat actor, whether misconfiguration or outdated software.
Choose an appropriate scanner, according to the scope defined in the first two steps. Solutions from different vendors take different approaches and they may not all be appropriate for the requirements you’ve identified.
Performing the scan
This is the simplest step and, as previously mentioned, it is often automated. There are two main classes of scanner:
Network scanners reach out to the target over the Internet or a private network and perform a series of tests. There are two approaches that you can take here:
An unauthenticated scan will base its results exclusively on what can be determined from the outside, just as an attacker would. The scanner will not be given credentials to access the system, with the downside that all installed software and their versions are unlikely to be identified accurately.
An authenticated network scan, on the other hand, makes use of access to the target in order to derive more accurate information. It will provide more comprehensive results, but will fail to shed light on what an attacker can observe.
Either way, network elements such as firewalls or intrusion prevention systems (IPS) may interfere with the activity or raise operational alerts, as is their purpose.
Host scanners are fully-fledged applications or thin agents that run on the target system directly and collect data, such as installed software versions. Often with privileged access to the operating system, a host scanner is in a better position than a network scanner to provide a full list of known software vulnerabilities. The downside is that mitigating security controls, such as the aforementioned IPS, would not be taken into account. An alternative to utilizing a running system, but with a similar end result, is to run a host scanner against the target’s offline disk or root filesystem.
The scope of the vulnerability assessment will dictate the type of scanner and the approach used. Whatever your choice, it is important to remember that scanners can give out false positive or false negative results. False positives are vulnerabilities that are reported, but do not actually exist whereas false negatives are vulnerabilities which do exist, but are missed by the scanner.
Once a scan completes (which can take anywhere from seconds to hours), a report is produced. Along with data about the target, this report contains information concerning the identified vulnerabilities, such as whether there are CVE IDs assigned along with their CVSS scores, as well as in-depth descriptions and potential remediations or mitigations.
Interpreting results
Scanning tests are not infallible and it is important to remember that scanners rarely test for the vulnerabilities directly, especially when it comes to known software or hardware flaws (such as those that are assigned CVE identifiers). Instead, they rely on indirect cues, such as the version of an installed application.
This poses a problem with open source, when vulnerabilities are fixed without upgrading to the latest upstream software version. In Ubuntu, fixes are backported to provide stable security updates for LTS releases, a process designed to ensure compatibility and maintain stable behaviour. Therefore, packages do not get the same version that the upstream OSS project uses. Instead, the fix receives a version unique to the Ubuntu ecosystem, just as would happen with other stable-release Linux distributions. Many scanners correctly take this into account, but the full information may not always be available, as is the case with unauthenticated network scans (for which even the Linux distribution’s name may be concealed).
Notwithstanding the possibility of false positives, not all vulnerabilities are created equal. Some are more difficult to exploit than others. Similarly, the impact of a threat that does materialize can vary, affecting any combination of confidentiality, integrity and availability of systems (the CIA triad). Scoring schemes, such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) or the Ubuntu CVE Priority, help standardize the evaluation of the results.
The most important aspect is to put any true positive vulnerability into perspective, within the wider context of the target deployment. This is where it is important to classify the target assets. It may be the case that an existing compensating security control greatly diminishes exploitability, or that a vulnerability may simply not be applicable to your particular configuration. The bottom line is that interpretation must be performed by taking into account the characteristics of the affected system and prioritizing resolution within this personalized environment.
Next steps
You’ve identified the targets and the right scanner, completed the scan, interpreted the results and you now have a refined report with prioritized issues in front of you – the vulnerability assessment is now officially concluded. However, security operations do not end here: the wider vulnerability management process is a continuous cycle. A common adage in risk management is that risks can be reduced (mitigated), avoided, transferred or accepted – but should never be ignored. With vulnerabilities being a source of increased risk, addressing them ensures that good security hygiene is maintained.
For known software product vulnerabilities, security updates are the best course of action, which is why we recommend timely patching. Hardware vulnerabilities can generally be mitigated through firmware or microcode updates from the vendor. Misconfigurations need to be understood and corrected directly. The prioritization performed in the previous step ensures that a logical order is followed.
One thing to keep in mind is that vulnerabilities are a fact of life and their eventual discovery in a product is something to be expected, making preparations critical. These take the form of both mature security processes, as well as a defence-in-depth approach whereby not-yet-discovered vulnerabilities are mitigated through security features, such as application confinement.
How Ubuntu helps
At Canonical, we’re committed to ensuring that users of Ubuntu have the right tools at their disposal to conduct thorough and effective vulnerability assessments. Ubuntu takes a three-pronged approach to improving the security posture of any deployment:
Transparency and visibility – open source facilitates an open policy that puts all the information necessary for users to make informed choices in the public domain. The Ubuntu Security Team’s processes are described in documentation available to all. Similarly, Canonical publishes data feeds for all known vulnerabilities affecting Ubuntu packages in open standard formats (OVAL, OSV and VEX). This is particularly useful for learning the Ubuntu-specific package versions that fix vulnerabilities through backported patches, as mentioned earlier. Indeed, scanners often make use of these data feeds in order to produce accurate results.
Reactive – security updates are provided for software packages, with up to 12 years of Long Term Support with Ubuntu Pro (available for free on 5 devices). Notifications, in the form of Ubuntu Security Notices, provide information on available fixes. Standard installations enable unattended upgrades by default, ensuring timely automatic rollout of the patches.
Proactive – a multitude of security features offer mitigations and are available on default installations. New ones are added on a regular basis, as advancements take place. As an example, AppArmor is an application confinement technology that fulfils a Mandatory Access Control (MAC) function at the Linux kernel level and can greatly reduce the blast radius of an attack, not unlike SELinux.
Ubuntu Security Research Alliance Program
Towards the end of 2024, Canonical announced the introduction of the Ubuntu Security Research Alliance Program. The initiative is designed to help ensure that the vulnerability scanners mentioned in this article provide as few false positives or false negatives as possible, in addition to accurate remediation advice. This free partnership with scanning vendors will assist Ubuntu users in staying one step ahead of threat actors. You can learn more about the Ubuntu Security Research Alliance Program in our announcement. We’re excited to work with industry partners to make the open source landscape a more secure place for all our users.
Depois de uma semana passada a explorar as entranhas de Matrix, passear na floresta com Unav, ver vídeos na Internet com o Freetube e ler as últimas novidades de Ubports, o nosso sossego acabou quando rebentou a polémica: um comunicado sobre o futuro do Ubuntu para os próximos 20 anos! Para ajudar à festa, o Diogo estragou o OBS para as transmissões em vídeo - como? Nem ele sabe, mas foi divertido vê-lo suar para (não) resolver o problema. Mais para o fim, discutimos a melhor maneira de aplicar uma motoserra à bruta em cima de linhas de código e especulámos em primeira mão sobre o país anfitrião da próxima Cimeira do Ubuntu.
Podem apoiar o podcast usando os links de afiliados do Humble Bundle, porque ao usarem esses links para fazer uma compra, uma parte do valor que pagam reverte a favor do Podcast Ubuntu Portugal.
E podem obter tudo isso com 15 dólares ou diferentes partes dependendo de pagarem 1, ou 8.
Achamos que isto vale bem mais do que 15 dólares, pelo que se puderem paguem mais um pouco mais visto que têm a opção de pagar o quanto quiserem.
Se estiverem interessados em outros bundles não listados nas notas usem o link https://www.humblebundle.com/?partner=PUP e vão estar também a apoiar-nos.
Gaming on Linux has come a long way, and with tools like Input-Remapper, you can finally unleash the full potential of your gaming mouse. This powerful application, considered by many to be the best solution for GNOME on Wayland, allows you to customize your mouse buttons and even create complex macros, giving you a competitive edge in your favorite games. This guide will walk you through installing and using Input-Remapper to bind your gaming mouse keys on your Linux desktop.
Why Remap Your Mouse Keys?
Before we dive into the how-to, let’s discuss why you might want to remap your mouse keys in the first place:
Enhanced Control: Many games don’t utilize all the buttons on modern gaming mice. Re-mapping allows you to assign in-game actions to these unused buttons for quicker access to crucial commands.
Macros and Combos: Execute complex sequences of keystrokes with a single button press. This is incredibly useful for MMOs or games with intricate combo systems.
Accessibility: Remapping can make gaming more accessible for users with disabilities, allowing them to customize controls to suit their needs.
Productivity Boost: Beyond gaming, remapping can streamline your workflow in other applications by assigning common tasks to your mouse buttons.
Consistency Across Games: Create a unified control scheme for all your games, reducing the learning curve when switching between titles.
Installing Input-Remapper
Input-Remapper is available on various Linux distributions. The recommended method is usually through your distribution’s package manager. Here’s a general overview:
Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions:
Bash
sudo apt update
sudo apt install input-remapper
Fedora/RPM-based distributions:
Bash
sudo dnf install input-remapper
Arch-based distributions:
Bash
sudo pacman -S input-remapper
If your distribution doesn’t have Input-Remapper in its repositories, you can usually build it from source. Refer to the official Input-Remapper GitHub page (https://github.com/sezanzeb/input-remapper) for detailed instructions.
Configuring Input-Remapper
Once installed, launch Input-Remapper. You’ll be greeted with a user-friendly interface. Here’s a breakdown of the key elements:
Device Selection: Choose your gaming mouse from the list of connected devices. Make sure it’s properly detected.
Button Mapping: This is where the magic happens. You’ll see a visual representation of your mouse with clickable buttons.
Action Assignment: When you click a button, you can assign various actions to it:
Keypresses: Simulate pressing any key on your keyboard, including combinations (e.g., Ctrl+Shift+T).
Macros: Record and playback sequences of keystrokes and mouse clicks.
Special Actions: Input-Remapper also offers some special actions, like adjusting volume or launching applications.
Step-by-Step Guide to Remapping a Mouse Button
Let’s walk through a simple example of remapping a side button on your mouse to simulate the “G” keypress:
Select Your Mouse: Open Input-Remapper and select your gaming mouse from the device list.
Identify the Button: Click on the visual representation of your mouse to identify the button you want to remap. Input-Remapper should highlight the corresponding button on your physical mouse.
Assign the Action: Click on the selected button in Input-Remapper. A dialog box will appear allowing you to choose the action.
Choose “Keypress”: Select the “Keypress” option.
Enter the Key: Type “G” into the key input field.
Save the Configuration: Click “Save” to apply your changes.
Now, when you press the remapped button on your mouse, it will be as if you pressed the “G” key on your keyboard.
Creating Macros
Macros are where Input-Remapper truly shines. Here’s how to create one:
Select the Button: Choose the button you want to assign the macro to.
Choose “Macro”: Select the “Macro” option.
Record the Sequence: Click “Start Recording” and perform the sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks you want to include in the macro.
Stop Recording: Click “Stop Recording” when you’re finished.
Save the Macro: Give your macro a name and save it.
Now, pressing the assigned button will execute the entire recorded sequence.
Tips and Tricks
Profiles: Create different profiles for different games or applications. This allows you to quickly switch between control schemes.
Modifiers: Use modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, Alt) in your key mappings and macros for even more complex actions.
Testing: Always test your remappings in-game to ensure they work as intended.
Troubleshooting: If a button isn’t working, double-check that you’ve selected the correct device and button in Input-Remapper. Also, make sure the application has the necessary permissions to access your input devices. Restarting Input-Remapper or even your computer can sometimes resolve issues.
Community Resources: The Input-Remapper GitHub page and community forums are excellent resources for finding help and sharing your configurations.
Beyond Gaming
While this guide focuses on gaming, remember that Input-Remapper can be used for a wide range of tasks. Think about how you can streamline your workflow in other applications by assigning common actions to your mouse buttons.
Conclusion
Input-Remapper is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance your gaming experience on Linux, especially on GNOME with Wayland. By following this guide, you can unlock the full potential of your gaming mouse and take your skills to the next level. So, go ahead, experiment, and customize your controls to dominate your favorite games!
Anarcat recently wrote about Qalculate, and I think I’m a convert, even though
I’ve only barely scratched the surface.
The thing I almost immediately started using it for is time calculations.
When I started tracking my time, I
quickly found that Timewarrior was good at
keeping all the data I needed, but I often found myself extracting bits of
it and reprocessing it in variously clumsy ways. For example, I often don’t
finish a task in one sitting; maybe I take breaks, or I switch back and
forth between a couple of different tasks. The raw output of timew
summary is a bit clumsy for this, as it shows each chunk of time spent as
a separate row:
$ timewsummary2025-02-18Debian
Wk Date Day Tags Start End Time TotalW8 2025-02-18 Tue CVE-2025-26465, Debian, 9:41:44 10:24:17 0:42:33 next, openssh Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, 10:24:17 10:27:12 0:02:55 icoutils Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, 11:50:05 11:57:25 0:07:20 kali Debian, Upgrade to 0.67, 11:58:21 12:12:41 0:14:20 python_holidays Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, 12:14:15 12:33:19 0:19:04 vigor Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, 12:39:02 12:39:38 0:00:36 python_setproctitle Debian, Upgrade to 1.3.4, 12:39:39 12:46:05 0:06:26 python_setproctitle Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, 12:48:28 12:49:42 0:01:14 python_setproctitle Debian, Upgrade to 3.4.1, 12:52:07 13:02:27 0:10:20 1:44:48 python_charset_normalizer 1:44:48
So I wrote this Python program to help me:
#! /usr/bin/python3"""Summarize timewarrior data, grouped and sorted by time spent."""importjsonimportsubprocessfromargparseimportArgumentParser,RawDescriptionHelpFormatterfromcollectionsimportdefaultdictfromdatetimeimportdatetime,timedelta,timezonefromoperatorimportitemgetterfromrichimportbox,printfromrich.tableimportTableparser=ArgumentParser(description=__doc__,formatter_class=RawDescriptionHelpFormatter)parser.add_argument("-t","--only-total",default=False,action="store_true")parser.add_argument("range",nargs="?",default=":today",help="Time range (usually a hint, e.g. :lastweek)",)parser.add_argument("tag",nargs="*",help="Tags to filter by")args=parser.parse_args()entries:defaultdict[str,timedelta]=defaultdict(timedelta)now=datetime.now(timezone.utc)forentryinjson.loads(subprocess.run(["timew","export",args.range,*args.tag],check=True,capture_output=True,text=True,).stdout):start=datetime.fromisoformat(entry["start"])if"end"inentry:end=datetime.fromisoformat(entry["end"])else:end=nowentries[", ".join(entry["tags"])]+=end-startifnotargs.only_total:table=Table(box=box.SIMPLE,highlight=True)table.add_column("Tags")table.add_column("Time",justify="right")fortags,timeinsorted(entries.items(),key=itemgetter(1),reverse=True):table.add_row(tags,str(time))print(table)total=sum(entries.values(),start=timedelta())hours,rest=divmod(total,timedelta(hours=1))minutes,rest=divmod(rest,timedelta(minutes=1))seconds=rest.secondsprint(f"Total time: {hours:02}:{minutes:02}:{seconds:02}")
$ summarize-time2025-02-18Debian
Tags Time ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── CVE-2025-26465, Debian, next, openssh 0:42:33 Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, vigor 0:19:04 Debian, Upgrade to 0.67, python_holidays 0:14:20 Debian, Upgrade to 3.4.1, python_charset_normalizer 0:10:20 Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, kali 0:07:20 Debian, Upgrade to 1.3.4, python_setproctitle 0:06:26 Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, icoutils 0:02:55 Debian, FTBFS with GCC-15, python_setproctitle 0:01:50Total time: 01:44:48
Much nicer. But that only helps with some of my reporting. At the end of a
month, I have to work out how much time to bill Freexian for and fill out a
timesheet, and for various reasons those queries don’t correspond to single
timew tags: they sometimes correspond to the sum of all time spent on
multiple tags, or to the time spent on one tag minus the time spent on
another tag, or similar. As a result I quite often have to do basic
arithmetic on time intervals; but that’s surprisingly annoying! I didn’t
previously have good tools for that, and was reduced to doing things like
str(timedelta(hours=..., minutes=..., seconds=...) + ...) in Python,
which gets old fast.
I also often want to work out how much of my time I’ve spent on Debian work
this month so far, since Freexian pays me for up to 20% of my work time on
Debian; if I’m
under that then I might want to prioritize more Debian projects, and if I’m
over then I should be prioritizing more Freexian projects as otherwise I’m
not going to get paid for that time.
$ summarize-time-t:monthFreexian
Total time: 69:19:42$ summarize-time-t:monthDebian
Total time: 24:05:30$ qalc'24:05:30 / (24:05:30 + 69:19:42) to %'(86730 / 3600)/ ((86730 / 3600) + (249582 / 3600)) ≈ 25.78855349%
The Open Source Initiative has two classes of board seats: Affiliate seats, and Individual Member seats.
In the upcoming election, each affiliate can nominate a candidate, and each affiliate can cast a vote for the Affiliate candidates, but there's only 1 Affiliate seat available. I initially expressed interest in being nominated as an Affiliate candidate via Debian. But since Bradley Kuhn is also running for an Affiliate seat with a similar platform to me, especially with regards to the OSAID, I decided to run as part of an aligned "ticket" as an Individual Member to avoid contention for the 1 Affiliate seat.
Bradley and I discussed running on a similar ticket around 8/9pm Pacific, and I submitted my candidacy around 9pm PT on 17 February.
I was dismayed when I received the following mail from Nick Vidal:
Dear Luke,
Thank you for your interest in the OSI Board of Directors election. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept your application as it was submitted after the official deadline of Monday Feb 17 at 11:59 pm UTC. To ensure a fair process, we must adhere to the deadline for all candidates.
We appreciate your enthusiasm and encourage you to stay engaged with OSI’s mission. We hope you’ll consider applying in the future or contributing in other meaningful ways.
The OSI's contact address is in California, so it seems arbitrary and capricious to retroactively define all of these processes as being governed by UTC.
I was not able to participate in the "potential board director" info sessions accordingly, but people who attended heard that the importance of accommodating differing TZ's was discussed during the info session, and that OSI representatives mentioned they try to accommodate TZ's of everyone. This seems in sharp contrast with the above policy.
I urge the OSI to reconsider this policy and allow me to stand for an Individual seat in the current cycle.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
As usual, this point release includes many updates and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-severity bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Kubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu Budgie 24.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu MATE 24.04.2 LTS, Lubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu Kylin 24.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu Studio 24.04.2 LTS, Xubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, Edubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04.2 LTS and Ubuntu Unity 24.04.2 LTS are also now available. More details can be found in their individual release notes (see ‘Official flavours’):
Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years from the initial 24.04 LTS release for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, and Ubuntu Core. All the remaining flavours will be supported for 3 years. Additional security support is available with ESM (Expanded Security Maintenance).
Users of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will be offered an automatic upgrade to 24.04.2 LTS via Update Manager.
We recommend that all users read the 24.04.2 LTS release notes, which document caveats and workarounds for known issues, as well as more in-depth notes on the release itself. They are available at:
Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, clouds 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:
The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 24.04.2 LTS. This is a minor release which wraps-up the security and bug fixes into one .iso image, available for download now.
Giving is down. We understand that some people may no longer be able to give financially to this project, and that’s OK. However, if you have never given to Ubuntu Studio for the hard work and dedication we put into this project, please consider a monetary contribution.
Additionally, we would love to see more monthly contributions to this project. You can do so via PayPal, Liberapay, or Patreon. We would love to see more contributions!
So don’t wait, and don’t wait for someone else to do it! Thank you in advance!
Donate using PayPal Donations are Monthly or One-Time
Donate using Liberapay Donations are Weekly, Monthly, or Annually
I can’t remember exactly the joke I was making at the time in my
work’s slack instance (I’m sure it wasn’t particularly
funny, though; and not even worth re-reading the thread to work out), but it
wound up with me writing a UEFI binary for the punchline. Not to spoil the
ending but it worked - no pesky kernel, no messing around with “userland”. I
guess the only part of this you really need to know for the setup here is that
it was a Severance joke,
which is some fantastic TV. If you haven’t seen it, this post will seem perhaps
weirder than it actually is. I promise I haven’t joined any new cults. For
those who have seen it, the payoff to my joke is that I wanted my machine to
boot directly to an image of
Kier Eagan.
As for how to do it – I figured I’d give the uefi
crate a shot, and see how it is to use,
since this is a low stakes way of trying it out. In general, this isn’t the
sort of thing I’d usually post about – except this wound up being easier and
way cleaner than I thought it would be. That alone is worth sharing, in the
hopes someome comes across this in the future and feels like they, too, can
write something fun targeting the UEFI.
First thing’s first – gotta create a rust project (I’ll leave that part to you
depending on your life choices), and to add the uefi crate to your
Cargo.toml. You can either use cargo add or add a line like this by hand:
uefi = { version = "0.33", features = ["panic_handler", "alloc", "global_allocator"] }
We also need to teach cargo about how to go about building for the UEFI target,
so we need to create a rust-toolchain.toml with one (or both) of the UEFI
targets we’re interested in:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to use the
image crate,
since it won’t build against the uefi target. This looks like it’s
because rustc had no way to compile the required floating point operations
within the image crate without hardware floating point instructions
specifically. Rust tends to punt a lot of that to libm usually, so this isnt
entirely shocking given we’re nostd for a non-hardfloat target.
So-called “softening” requires a software floating point implementation that
the compiler can use to “polyfill” (feels weird to use the term polyfill here,
but I guess it’s spiritually right?) the lack of hardware floating point
operations, which rust hasn’t implemented for this target yet. As a result, I
changed tactics, and figured I’d use ImageMagick to pre-compute the pixels
from a jpg, rather than doing it at runtime. A bit of a bummer, since I need
to do more out of band pre-processing and hardcoding, and updating the image
kinda sucks as a result – but it’s entirely manageable.
This will take our input file (kier.jpg), resize it to get as close to the
desired resolution as possible while maintaining aspect ration, then convert it
from a jpg to a flat array of 4 byte RGBA pixels. Critically, it’s also
important to remember that the size of the kier.full.jpg file may not actually
be the requested size – it will not change the aspect ratio, so be sure to
make a careful note of the resulting size of the kier.full.jpg file.
Last step with the image is to compile it into our Rust bianary, since we
don’t want to struggle with trying to read this off disk, which is thankfully
real easy to do.
Remember to use the width and height from the final kier.full.jpg file as the
values for KIER_WIDTH and KIER_HEIGHT. KIER_PIXEL_SIZE is 4, since we
have 4 byte wide values for each pixel as a result of our conversion step into
RGBA. We’ll only use RGB, and if we ever drop the alpha channel, we can drop
that down to 3. I don’t entirely know why I kept alpha around, but I figured it
was fine. My kier.full.jpg image winds up shorter than the requested height
(which is also qemu’s default resolution for me) – which means we’ll get a
semi-annoying black band under the image when we go to run it – but it’ll
work.
Anyway, now that we have our image as bytes, we can get down to work, and
write the rest of the code to handle moving bytes around from in-memory
as a flat block if pixels, and request that they be displayed using the
UEFI GOP. We’ll just need to hack up a container
for the image pixels and teach it how to blit to the display.
/// RGB Image to move around. This isn't the same as an
/// `image::RgbImage`, but we can associate the size of
/// the image along with the flat buffer of pixels.
structRgbImage {
/// Size of the image as a tuple, as the
/// (width, height)
size: (usize, usize),
/// raw pixels we'll send to the display.
inner: Vec<BltPixel>,
}
impl RgbImage {
/// Create a new `RgbImage`.
fnnew(width: usize, height: usize) -> Self {
RgbImage {
size: (width, height),
inner: vec![BltPixel::new(0, 0, 0); width * height],
}
}
/// Take our pixels and request that the UEFI GOP
/// display them for us.
fnwrite(&self, gop: &mut GraphicsOutput) -> Result {
gop.blt(BltOp::BufferToVideo {
buffer: &self.inner,
src: BltRegion::Full,
dest: (0, 0),
dims: self.size,
})
}
}
impl Index<(usize, usize)>for RgbImage {
typeOutput= BltPixel;
fnindex(&self, idx: (usize, usize)) -> &BltPixel {
let (x, y) = idx;
&self.inner[y * self.size.0+ x]
}
}
impl IndexMut<(usize, usize)>for RgbImage {
fnindex_mut(&mut self, idx: (usize, usize)) -> &mut BltPixel {
let (x, y) = idx;
&mut self.inner[y * self.size.0+ x]
}
}
We also need to do some basic setup to get a handle to the UEFI
GOP via the UEFI crate (using
uefi::boot::get_handle_for_protocol
and
uefi::boot::open_protocol_exclusive
for the GraphicsOutput
protocol), so that we have the object we need to pass to RgbImage in order
for it to write the pixels to the display. The only trick here is that the
display on the booted system can really be any resolution – so we need to do
some capping to ensure that we don’t write more pixels than the display can
handle. Writing fewer than the display’s maximum seems fine, though.
fnpraise() -> Result {
let gop_handle = boot::get_handle_for_protocol::<GraphicsOutput>()?;
letmut gop = boot::open_protocol_exclusive::<GraphicsOutput>(gop_handle)?;
// Get the (width, height) that is the minimum of
// our image and the display we're using.
let (width, height) = gop.current_mode_info().resolution();
let (width, height) = (width.min(KIER_WIDTH), height.min(KIER_HEIGHT));
letmut buffer = RgbImage::new(width, height);
for y in0..height {
for x in0..width {
let idx_r = ((y * KIER_WIDTH) + x) * KIER_PIXEL_SIZE;
let pixel =&mut buffer[(x, y)];
pixel.red = KIER[idx_r];
pixel.green = KIER[idx_r +1];
pixel.blue = KIER[idx_r +2];
}
}
buffer.write(&mut gop)?;
Ok(())
}
Not so bad! A bit tedious – we could solve some of this by turning
KIER into an RgbImage at compile-time using some clever Cow and
const tricks and implement blitting a sub-image of the image – but this
will do for now. This is a joke, after all, let’s not go nuts. All that’s
left with our code is for us to write our main function and try and boot
the thing!
#[entry]fnmain() -> Status {
uefi::helpers::init().unwrap();
praise().unwrap();
boot::stall(100_000_000);
Status::SUCCESS
}
If you’re following along at home and so interested, the final source is over at
gist.github.com.
We can go ahead and build it using cargo (as is our tradition) by targeting
the UEFI platform.
While I can definitely get my machine to boot these blobs to test, I figured
I’d save myself some time by using QEMU to test without a full boot.
If you’ve not done this sort of thing before, we’ll need two packages,
qemu and ovmf. It’s a bit different than most invocations of qemu you
may see out there – so I figured it’d be worth writing this down, too.
$ doas apt install qemu-system-x86 ovmf
qemu has a nice feature where it’ll create us an EFI partition as a drive and
attach it to the VM off a local directory – so let’s construct an EFI
partition file structure, and drop our binary into the conventional location.
If you haven’t done this before, and are only interested in running this in a
VM, don’t worry too much about it, a lot of it is convention and this layout
should work for you.
With all this in place, we can kick off qemu, booting it in UEFI mode using
the ovmf firmware, attaching our EFI partition directory as a drive to
our VM to boot off of.
If all goes well, soon you’ll be met with the all knowing gaze of
Chosen One, Kier Eagan. The thing that really impressed me about all
this is this program worked first try – it all went so boringly
normal. Truly, kudos to the uefi crate maintainers, it’s incredibly
well done.
Booting a live system
Sure, we could stop here, but anyone can open up an app window and see a
picture of Kier Eagan, so I knew I needed to finish the job and boot a real
machine up with this. In order to do that, we need to format a USB stick.
BE SURE /dev/sda IS CORRECT IF YOU’RE COPY AND PASTING. All my drives
are NVMe, so BE CAREFUL – if you use SATA, it may very well be your
hard drive! Please do not destroy your computer over this.
$ doas fdisk /dev/sda
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.40.4).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
p primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
e extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p): p
Partition number (1-4, default 1):
First sector (2048-4014079, default 2048):
Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size{K,M,G,T,P} (2048-4014079, default 4014079):
Created a new partition 1 of type 'Linux' and of size 1.9 GiB.
Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code or alias (type L to list all): ef
Changed type of partition 'Linux' to 'EFI (FAT-12/16/32)'.
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered.
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.
Once that looks good (depending on your flavor of udev you may or
may not need to unplug and replug your USB stick), we can go ahead
and format our new EFI partition (BE CAREFUL THAT /dev/sda IS YOUR
USB STICK) and write our EFI directory to it.
$ doas mkfs.fat /dev/sda1
$ doas mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
$ cp -r esp/efi /mnt
$ find /mnt
/mnt
/mnt/efi
/mnt/efi/boot
/mnt/efi/boot/bootx64.efi
Of course, naturally, devotion to Kier shouldn’t mean backdooring your system.
Disabling Secure Boot runs counter to the Core Principals, such as Probity, and
not doing this would surely run counter to Verve, Wit and Vision. This bit does
require that you’ve taken the step to enroll a
MOK and know how
to use it, right about now is when we can use sbsign to sign our UEFI binary
we want to boot from to continue enforcing Secure Boot. The details for how
this command should be run specifically is likely something you’ll need to work
out depending on how you’ve decided to manage your MOK.
I figured I’d leave a signed copy of boot2kier at
/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/KIER.efi on my Dell XPS 13, with Secure Boot enabled
and enforcing, just took a matter of going into my BIOS to add the right
boot option, which was no sweat. I’m sure there is a way to do it using
efibootmgr, but I wasn’t smart enough to do that quickly. I let ‘er rip,
and it booted up and worked great!
It was a bit hard to get a video of my laptop, though – but lucky for me, I
have a Minisforum Z83-F sitting around (which, until a few weeks ago was running
the annual http server to control my christmas tree
) – so I grabbed it out of the christmas bin, wired it up to a video capture
card I have sitting around, and figured I’d grab a video of me booting a
physical device off the boot2kier USB stick.
Attentive readers will notice the image of Kier is smaller then the qemu booted
system – which just means our real machine has a larger GOP display
resolution than qemu, which makes sense! We could write some fancy resize code
(sounds annoying), center the image (can’t be assed but should be the easy way
out here) or resize the original image (pretty hardware specific workaround).
Additionally, you can make out the image being written to the display before us
(the Minisforum logo) behind Kier, which is really cool stuff. If we were real
fancy we could write blank pixels to the display before blitting Kier, but,
again, I don’t think I care to do that much work.
But now I must away
If I wanted to keep this joke going, I’d likely try and find a copy of the
original
video when Helly 100%s her file
and boot into that – or maybe play a terrible midi PC speaker rendition of
Kier, Chosen One, Kier after
rendering the image. I, unfortunately, don’t have any friends involved with
production (yet?), so I reckon all that’s out for now. I’ll likely stop playing
with this – the joke was done and I’m only writing this post because of how
great everything was along the way.
All in all, this reminds me so much of building a homebrew kernel to boot a
system into – but like, good, though, and it’s a nice reminder of both how
fun this stuff can be, and how far we’ve come. UEFI protocols are light-years
better than how we did it in the dark ages, and the tooling for this is SO
much more mature. Booting a custom UEFI binary is miles ahead of trying to
boot your own kernel, and I can’t believe how good the uefi crate is
specifically.
Praise Kier! Kudos, to everyone involved in making this so delightful ❤️.
ELES ANDEM AÍ! Depois de uma semana de grandes abalos, ouçam este podcast censurado e aprendam tudo o que há para saber sobre discos encriptados, comunicações seguras, alternativas às grandes tecnológicas e até…livros! Como sobreviver num mundo digital virado do avesso? Falámos de comunicações(in)seguras, alternativas às tecnológicas norte-americanas, paranóias várias e como o software livre nos pode ajudar a sobreviver na clandestinidade e ainda, intelijumência artificial, experiências com emissões no Twitch e a nobre causa de compilar aplicações do KDE para Snap.
Podem apoiar o podcast usando os links de afiliados do Humble Bundle, porque ao usarem esses links para fazer uma compra, uma parte do valor que pagam reverte a favor do Podcast Ubuntu Portugal.
E podem obter tudo isso com 15 dólares ou diferentes partes dependendo de pagarem 1, ou 8.
Achamos que isto vale bem mais do que 15 dólares, pelo que se puderem paguem mais um pouco mais visto que têm a opção de pagar o quanto quiserem.
Se estiverem interessados em outros bundles não listados nas notas usem o link https://www.humblebundle.com/?partner=PUP e vão estar também a apoiar-nos.
All core22 KDE snaps are broken. There is not an easy fix. We have used kde-neon repos since inception and haven’t had issues until now.
libEGL fatal: DRI driver not from this Mesa build (‘23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.3’ vs ‘23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.2’)
Apparently Jammy had a mesa update?
Option 1: Rebuild our entire stack without neon repos ( fails due to dependencies not in Jammy, would require tracking down all of these and build from source )
Option 2: Finish the transition to core24 ( This is an enormous task and will take some time still )
Either option will take more time and effort than I have. I need to be job hunting as I have run out of resources to pay my bills. My internet/phone will be cut off in days. I am beyond stressed out and getting snippy with folks, for that I apologize. If someone wants to sponsor the above work then please donate to https://gofund.me/fe30793b otherwise I am stepping away to rethink life and my defunct career.
Wireshark is an essential tool for network analysis, and staying up to date with the latest releases ensures access to new features, security updates, and bug fixes. While Ubuntu’s official repositories provide stable versions, they are often not the most recent.
Wearing both WiresharkCore Developer and Debian/Ubuntu package maintainer hats, I’m happy to help the Wireshark team in providing updated packages for all supported Ubuntu versions through dedicated PPAs. This post outlines how you can install the latest stable and nightly Wireshark builds on Ubuntu.
Latest Stable Releases
For users who want the most up-to-date stable Wireshark version, we maintain a PPA with backports of the latest releases:
For those who want to test new features before they are officially released, nightly builds are also available. These builds track the latest development code and you can watch them cooking on their Launchpad recipe page.
Note: Nightly builds may contain experimental features and are not guaranteed to be as stable as the official releases. Also it targets only Ubuntu 24.04 and later including the current development release.
If you need to revert to the stable version later, remove the nightly PPA and reinstall Wireshark:
Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with organizations that create widely-used open source tools. The popularity of these tools is evident through their impressive download statistics, strong community presence, and engagement both online and at events.
At Influxdata, I was part of the Telegraf team, where we witnessed substantial adoption through downloads and active usage, reflected in our vibrant bug tracker.
What makes Syft and Grype particularly exciting, beyond their permissive licensing, consistent release cycle, dedicated developer team, and distinctivemascots, is how they serve as building blocks for other tools and services.
Syft isn’t just a standalone SBOM generator - it’s a library that developers can integrate into their own tools. Some organizations even build their own SBOM generators and vulnerability tools directly from our open source foundation!
(I find it delightfully meta to discover syft inside other tools using syft itself)
This collaborative building upon existing tools mirrors how Linux distributions often build upon other Linux distributions. Like Ubuntu and Telegraf, we see countless individuals and organizations creating innovative solutions that extend beyond the core capabilities of Syft and Grype. It’s the essence of open source - a multiplier effect that comes from creating accessible, powerful tools.
While we may not always know exactly how and where these tools are being used (and sometimes, rightfully so, it’s not our business), there are many cases where developers and companies want to share their innovative implementations.
I’m particularly interested in these stories because they deserve to be shared. I’ve been exploring public repositories like the GitHub network dependents for syft, grype, sbom-action, and scan-action to discover where our tools are making an impact.
The adoption has been remarkable!
I reached out to several open source projects to learn about their implementations, and Nicolas Vuilamy from MegaLinter was the first to respond - which brings us full circle.
Tired of waiting for apt to finish installing packages? Wish there were a way to make your installations blazingly fast without caring about minor things like, oh, data integrity? Well, today is your lucky day!
I’m thrilled to introduce apt-eatmydata, now available for Debian and all supported Ubuntu releases!
What Is apt-eatmydata?
If you’ve ever used libeatmydata, you know it’s a nifty little hack that disables fsync() and friends, making package installations way faster by skipping unnecessary disk writes. Normally, you’d have to remember to wrap apt commands manually, like this:
eatmydata apt install texlive-full
But who has time for that? apt-eatmydata takes care of this automagically by integrating eatmydata seamlessly into apt itself! That means every package install is now turbocharged—no extra typing required.
How to Get It
Debian
If you’re on Debian unstable/testing (or possibly soon in stable-backports), you can install it directly with:
sudo apt install apt-eatmydata
Ubuntu
Ubuntu users already enjoy faster package installation thanks to zstd-compressed packages and to switch to even higher gear I’ve backported apt-eatmydata to all supported Ubuntu releases. Just add this PPA and install:
And boom! Your apt install times are getting serious upgrade. Let’s run some tests…
# pre-download package to measure only the installation $ sudo apt install -d linux-headers-6.8.0-53-lowlatency ... # installation time is 9.35s without apt-eatmydata: $ sudo time apt install linux-headers-6.8.0-53-lowlatency ... 2.30user 2.12system 0:09.35elapsed 47%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 174680maxresident)k 32inputs+1495216outputs (0major+196945minor)pagefaults 0swaps $ sudo apt install apt-eatmydata ... $ sudo apt purge linux-headers-6.8.0-53-lowlatency # installation time is 3.17s with apt-eatmydata: $ sudo time eatmydata apt install linux-headers-6.8.0-53-lowlatency 2.30user 0.88system 0:03.17elapsed 100%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 174692maxresident)k 0inputs+205664outputs (0major+198099minor)pagefaults 0swaps
apt-eatmydata just made installing Linux headers 3x faster!
But Wait, There’s More!
If you’re automating CI builds, there’s even a GitHub Action to make your workflows faster essentially doing what apt-eatmydata does, just setting it up in less than a second! Check it out here: GitHub Marketplace: apt-eatmydata
Should You Use It?
Warning:apt-eatmydatais not for all production environments. If your system crashes mid-install, you might end up with a broken package database. But for throwaway VMs, containers, and CI pipelines? It’s an absolute game-changer. I use it on my laptop, too.
So go forth and install recklessly fast!
If you run into any issues, feel free to file a bug or drop a comment. Happy hacking!
Everyone's got a newsletter these days (like everyone's got a podcast). In general, I think this is OK: instead of going through a middleman publisher, have a direct connection from you to the people who want to read what you say, so that that audience can't be taken away from you.
On the other hand, I don't actually like newsletters. I don't really like giving my email address to random people1, and frankly an email app is not a great way to read long-form text! There are many apps which are a lot better at this.
There is a solution to this and the solution is called RSS. Andy Bell explains RSS and this is exactly how I read newsletters. If I want to read someone's newsletter and it's on Substack, or ghost.io, or buttondown.email, what I actually do is subscribe to their newsletter but what I'm actually subscribing to is their RSS feed. This sections off newsletter stuff into a completely separate app that I can catch up on when I've got the time, it means that the newsletter owner (or the site they're using) can't decide to "upsell" me on other stuff they do that I'm not interested in, and it's a better, nicer reading experience than my mail app.2
I use NetNewsWire on my iOS phone, but there are a bunch of other newsreader apps for every platform and you should choose whichever one you want. Andy lists a bunch, above.
The question, of course, then becomes: how do you find the RSS feed for a thing you want to read?3 Well, it turns out... you don't have to.
When you want to subscribe to a newsletter, you literally just put the web address of the newsletter itself into your RSS reader, and that reader will take care of finding the feed and subscribing to it, for you. It's magic. Hooray! I've tested this with substack, with ghost.io, with buttondown.email, and it works with all of them. You don't need to do anything.
If that doesn't work, then there is one neat alternative you can try, though. Kill The Newsletter will give you an email address for any site you name, and provide the incoming emails to that as an RSS feed. So, if you've found a newsletter which doesn't exist on the web (boo hiss!) and doesn't provide an RSS feed, then you go to KTN, it gives you some randomly-generated email address, you subscribe to the intransigent newsletter with that email address, and then you can subscribe to the resultant feed in your RSS reader. It's dead handy.
If you run a newsletter and it doesn't have an RSS feed and you want it to have, then have a look at whatever newsletter software you use; it will almost certainly provide a way to create one, and you might have to tick a box. (You might also want to complain to the software creators that that box wasn't ticked by default.) If you've got an RSS feed for the newsletter that you write, but putting your site's address into an RSS reader doesn't find that RSS feed, then what you need is RSS autodiscovery, which is the "magic" alluded to above; you add a line to your site's HTML in the <head> section which reads <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://URL/of/your/feed"> and then it'll work.
I like this. Read newsletters at my pace, in my choice of app, on my terms. More of that sort of thing.
despite how it's my business to do so and it's right there on the front page of the website, I know, I know ↩
Is all of this doable in my mail client? Sure. I could set up filters, put newsletters into their own folders/labels, etc. But that's working around a problem rather than solving it ↩
I suggested to Andy that he ought to write this post explaining how to do this and then realised that I should do it myself and stop being such a lazy snipe, so here it is ↩
Lubuntu Plucky Puffin is the current development branch of Lubuntu, which will become 25.04. Since the release of 24.10, we have been hard at work polishing the experience and fixing bugs in the upcoming release. Below, we detail some of the changes you can look forward to in 25.04. Two Minute Minimal Install When installing […]
Following a bug in ubuntu-release-upgrader which was causing Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS to fail to upgrade to 24.04 LTS, we are pleased to announce that this bug has been fixed, and upgrades now work.
As of this writing, this update is being propagated to the various Ubuntu mirrors throughout the world. The version of ubuntu-release-upgrader needed is 24.04.26 or higher, and is automatically pulled from the 24.04 repositories upon upgrade.
Unfortunately, while testing this fix, we noticed that, due to the time_t64 transition which prevents the 2038 problem, some packages get removed. We have noticed that, if upgrading from 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS, the following applications get removed (this list is not exhaustive):
Blender
Kdenlive
digiKam
GIMP
Krita (doesn’t get upgraded)
To fix this, immediately after upgrade, open a Konsole terminal (ctrl-alt-t) and enter the following:
If you do intend to upgrade, remember to purge any PPAs you may have enabled via ppa-purge so that your upgrade will go as smooth as possible.
We apologize for the inconvenience that may have been caused by this bug, and we hope your upgrade process goes as smooth as possible. There may be edge cases where this goes badly as we cannot account for every installation and whatever third-party repositories may be enabled, in which case the best method is to back-up your /home directory and do a clean installation.
Remember to upgrade soon, as Ubuntu Studio 22.04 goes End Of Life (EOL) in April!
The latest thing circulating around people still blogging is the Blog Questions Challenge; Jon did it (and asked if I was) and so have Jeremy and Ethan and a bunch of others, so clearly it is time I should get on board, fractionally late as ever.1
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Some other people I admired were doing it. I think the person I was most influenced by to start doing it was Simon Willison, who is also still at it2, but a whole bunch of people got on board at around that same time, back in the early days when you be a medium-sized fish in a small pool just by participating. Mark Pilgrim springs to mind as well -- that's a good example of having influence, when the "standard format" of permalinks got sort of hashed out collectively to be /2025/02/03/blog-questions-challenge, which a lot of places still adhere to (although it feels faintly quaint, these days).
Interestingly, a lot of the early posts on this site are short two-sentence half-paragraph things, throwaway thoughts, and that all got sucked up by social media... but social media hadn't been invented, back in 2002.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Cor. When it started, this site was being run by Castalian, which was basically "classic ASP but Python instead of VBScript", a thing I built. This is because I was using ASP at work on Windows machines, so that was the model for "dynamic web pages" that I understood, but I wasn't on Windows5 and so I built it myself. No idea if it still works and I very much doubt it since it's old enough to buy all the drinks these days.
After that it was Movable Type for a bit and then, because I'd discovered the idea of funky caching6 it was Vellum, that model (a) in Python and (b) written by me. Then for a while it was "Thort", which was based on CouchDB7, and then it was WordPress, and then in 2014 I switched from WP to a static build based on Pelican, which it still is to this day. Crikey, that was over ten years ago!8 I like static site generators: I even wrote 10 Popular Static Site Generators a few years ago for WebsiteSetup which I think is still pretty good.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
In my text editor, which is Sublime Text. The static setup is here on my machine; I write a post, I type make kryogenix, and it runs a whole little series of scripts which invoke Pelican to build the static HTML for the blog, do a few things that I've added (such as add footnote handling9, make og:image links and images10, and sort of handle webmentions but that's broken at the moment) and then copy it up to my actual website (via git) to be published.
It's all a bit lashed together, to be honest, but this whole website is like that. It is something like an ancient city, such as London or Rome; what this site is mostly built on is the ruins of the previous history of the city. Sometimes the older bits poke through because they're still actually OK, or they never got updated; sometimes they've been replaced with the new shiny. You should see the .htaccess file, which operates a bewildering set of redirects through about six different generations of URLs so all the old links still work.11
When do you feel most inspired to write?
When the muse seizes me. Sometimes that's a lot; sometimes not. I do quite a lot of paid writing as part of my various day jobs for others, and quite a lot of creative writing as part of running a play-by-post D&D campaign, and that sucks up a reasonable amount of the writing energy, but there are things which just demand going on the website. Normally these days it's things where I want them to be a reference of some kind -- maybe of a useful tech thing, or some important thought, or something interesting -- for myself or for others.
Alternatively you might think the answer is "while in the pub, which leads to making random notes in an email to myself from my phone and then writing a blog post when I get home" and while this is not true, it's not not true either. I do not want to do a histogram of posting times from this site because I am worried that I will find that the majority are at, like, 11.15pm.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Always post immediately. I have discovered about myself that, for semi-ephemeral stuff like posts here or projects that I do for fun, that I need to get them done as part of that initial burst of inspiration and energy. If I don't get it done, then my enthusiasm will fade and they will linger half-finished for ever and never get completed. I don't necessarily like this, but I've learned to live with it. If I think of an idea for a post and write a note about it and then don't do it, when I rediscover the note a week later it will not seem anything like as compelling. So posts are mostly written as one long stream-of-consciousness to capitalise on the burning of the creative fire before it gets doused by time or work or everything going on in the world. Carpe diem, I guess.12
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
Not really at the moment, but, as above, these things tend to arrive in a blizzard of excitement and implementation and then linger forever once done. But right now... it all seems to work OK. Ask me when I get back from the pub.
Next?
Well, I should probably point back at some of the people who inspired me to do this or other things and keep doing so to this day. So Simon, Remy, and Bruce, perhaps!
although no longer at simon.incutio.com -- what even was Incutio? ↩
I resisted the word "blog" for a long time, calling it a "weblog", and the activity being "weblogging", because "blog" is such an ugly word. Like most of the fights I was picking in the mid 2000s, this also seems faintly antiquated and passé now. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that. ↩
or "nihil sub sole novum", since we're doing Latin quotes today ↩
and Windows's relationship with Python has always been a bit unsteady, although it's better these days now that Microsoft are prepared to acknowledge that other people can have ideas ↩
you write the pages in an online form, but then a server process builds a static HTML version of them; the advanced version of this where pages were only built on request was called "funky caching" back then ↩
if a disinterested observer were to consider this progression, they might unfairly but accurately conclude that whatever this site runs on is basically a half-arsed system I built based on the latest thing I'm interested in, mightn't they? ↩
Some of the Incus maintainers will be present at FOSDEM 2025, helping run both the containers and kernel devrooms. For those arriving in town early, there will be a “Friends of Incus” gathering sponsored by FuturFusion on Thursday evening (January 30th), you can find the details of that here.
And as always, my company is offering commercial support on Incus, ranging from by-the-hour support contracts to one-off services on things like initial migration from LXD, review of your deployment to squeeze the most out of Incus or even feature sponsorship. You’ll find all details of that here: https://zabbly.com/incus
Donations towards my work on this and other open source projects is also always appreciated, you can find me on Github Sponsors, Patreon and Ko-fi.
For several years, DigitalOcean has been an important sponsor of Ubuntu Budgie. They provide the infrastructure we need to host our website at https://ubuntubudgie.org and our Discourse community forum at https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org. Maybe you are familiar with them. Maybe you use them in your personal or professional life. Or maybe, like me, you didn’t really see how they would benefit you.
Whenever something touches the red cap, the system wakes up from suspend/s2idle.
I’ve used ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 AMD for 2 years, and I recently purchased T14 Gen 5 AMD. The previous system as Gen 3 annoyed me so much because the laptop randomly woke up from suspend even inside a backpack on its own, heated up the confined air in it, and drained the battery pretty fast as a consequence. Basically it’s too sensitive to any events. For example, whenever a USB Type-C cable is plugged in as a power source or whenever something touches the TrackPoint even if a display on a closed lid slightly makes contact with the red cap, the system wakes up from suspend. It was uncontrollable.
I was hoping that Gen 5 would make a difference, and it did when it comes to the power source event. However, frequent wakeups due to the TrackPoint event remained the same so I started to dig in.
Disabling touchpad as a wakeup source on T14 Gen 5 AMD
Disabling touchpad events as a wakeup source is straightforward. The touchpad device, ELAN0676:00 04F3:3195 Touchpad, can be found in the udev device tree as follows.
And you can get all attributes including parent devices like the following.
$ udevadm info --attribute-walk -p /devices/platform/AMDI0010:01/i2c-1/i2c-ELAN0676:00/0018:04F3:3195.0001/input/input12
...
looking at device '/devices/platform/AMDI0010:01/i2c-1/i2c-ELAN0676:00/0018:04F3:3195.0001/input/input12':
KERNEL=="input12"SUBSYSTEM=="input"DRIVER=="" ...
ATTR{name}=="ELAN0676:00 04F3:3195 Touchpad" ATTR{phys}=="i2c-ELAN0676:00"...
looking at parent device '/devices/platform/AMDI0010:01/i2c-1/i2c-ELAN0676:00':
KERNELS=="i2c-ELAN0676:00"SUBSYSTEMS=="i2c"DRIVERS=="i2c_hid_acpi" ATTRS{name}=="ELAN0676:00" ...
ATTRS{power/wakeup}=="enabled"
The line I’m looking for is ATTRS{power/wakeup}=="enabled". By using the identifiers of the parent device that has ATTRS{power/wakeup}, I can make sure that /sys/devices/platform/AMDI0010:01/i2c-1/i2c-ELAN0676:00/power/wakeup is always disabled with the custom udev rule as follows.
Disabling TrackPoint as a wakeup source on T14 Gen 5 AMD
I’ve seen a pattern already as above so I should be able to apply the same method. The TrackPoint device, TPPS/2 Elan TrackPoint, can be found in the udev device tree.
$ udevadm info --attribute-walk -p /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input5
...
looking at device '/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input5':
KERNEL=="input5"SUBSYSTEM=="input"DRIVER=="" ...
ATTR{name}=="TPPS/2 Elan TrackPoint" ATTR{phys}=="isa0060/serio1/input0"...
looking at parent device '/devices/platform/i8042/serio1':
KERNELS=="serio1"SUBSYSTEMS=="serio"DRIVERS=="psmouse" ATTRS{bind_mode}=="auto" ATTRS{description}=="i8042 AUX port" ATTRS{drvctl}=="(not readable)" ATTRS{firmware_id}=="PNP: LEN0321 PNP0f13" ...
ATTRS{power/wakeup}=="disabled"
I hit the wall here. ATTRS{power/wakeup}=="disabled" for the i8042 AUX port is already there but the TrackPoint still wakes up the system from suspend. I had to do bisecting for all remaining wakeup sources.
Wakeup sources:
│ [/sys/devices/platform/USBC000:00/power_supply/ucsi-source-psy-USBC000:001/wakeup66]: enabled
│ [/sys/devices/platform/USBC000:00/power_supply/ucsi-source-psy-USBC000:002/wakeup67]: enabled
│ ACPI Battery [PNP0C0A:00]: enabled
│ ACPI Lid Switch [PNP0C0D:00]: enabled
│ ACPI Power Button [PNP0C0C:00]: enabled
│ ACPI Sleep Button [PNP0C0E:00]: enabled
│ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard [serio0]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] ISA bridge [0000:00:14.3]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Multimedia controller [0000:c4:00.5]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] PCI bridge [0000:00:02.1]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] PCI bridge [0000:00:02.2]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] PCI bridge [0000:00:03.1]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] PCI bridge [0000:00:04.1]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:c4:00.3]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:c4:00.4]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:c6:00.3]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:c6:00.4]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:c6:00.5]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:c6:00.6]: enabled
│ Mobile Broadband host interface [mhi0]: enabled
│ Plug-n-play Real Time Clock [00:01]: enabled
│ Real Time Clock alarm timer [rtc0]: enabled
│ Thunderbolt domain [domain0]: enabled
│ Thunderbolt domain [domain1]: enabled
│ USB4 host controller [0-0]: enabled
└─USB4 host controller [1-0]: enabled
Somehow, disabling SLPB “ACPI Sleep Button” stopped undesired wakeups by the TrackPoint.
looking at parent device '/devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0C0E:00':
KERNELS=="PNP0C0E:00"SUBSYSTEMS=="acpi"DRIVERS=="button" ATTRS{hid}=="PNP0C0E" ATTRS{path}=="\_SB_.SLPB" ...
ATTRS{power/wakeup}=="enabled"
The final udev rule is the following. It also disables wakeup events from the keyboard as a side effect, but opening the lid or pressing the power button can still wake up the system so it works for me.
After solving the headache of frequent wakeups for T14 Gen5 AMD. I was curious if I could apply the same to Gen 3 AMD retrospectively. Gen 3 has the following wakeup sources active out of the box.
Wakeup sources:
│ ACPI Battery [PNP0C0A:00]: enabled
│ ACPI Lid Switch [PNP0C0D:00]: enabled
│ ACPI Power Button [LNXPWRBN:00]: enabled
│ ACPI Power Button [PNP0C0C:00]: enabled
│ ACPI Sleep Button [PNP0C0E:00]: enabled
│ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard [serio0]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] ISA bridge [0000:00:14.3]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] PCI bridge [0000:00:02.1]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] PCI bridge [0000:00:02.2]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:04:00.3]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:04:00.4]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:05:00.0]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:05:00.3]: enabled
│ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] USB controller [0000:05:00.4]: enabled
│ ELAN0678:00 04F3:3195 Mouse [i2c-ELAN0678:00]: enabled
│ Mobile Broadband host interface [mhi0]: enabled
│ Plug-n-play Real Time Clock [00:01]: enabled
└─Real Time Clock alarm timer [rtc0]: enabled
Disabling the touchpad event was straightforward. The only difference from Gen 5 was the ID of the device.
When it comes to the TrackPoint or power source event, nothing was able to stop it from waking up the system even after disabling all wakeup sources. I came across a hidden gem named amd_s2idle.py. The “S0i3/s2idle analysis script for AMD systems” is full with the domain knowledge of s2idle like where to look in /proc or /sys or how to enable debug and what part of the logs is important.
By running the script, I got the following output around the unexpected wakeup.
$ sudo python3 ./amd_s2idle.py --debug-ec --duration 30
Debugging script for s2idle on AMD systems
💻 LENOVO 21CF21CFT1 (ThinkPad T14 Gen 3) running BIOS 1.56 (R23ET80W (1.56 )) released 10/28/2024 and EC 1.32
🐧 Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
🐧 Kernel 6.11.0-12-generic
🔋 Battery BAT0 (Sunwoda ) is operating at 90.91% of design
Checking prerequisites for s2idle
✅ Logs are provided via systemd
✅ AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with Radeon Graphics (family 19 model 44)
...
Suspending system in 0:00:02
Suspending system in 0:00:01
Started at 2025-01-04 00:46:53.063495 (cycle finish expected @ 2025-01-04 00:47:27.063532)
Collecting data in 0:00:02
Collecting data in 0:00:01
Results from last s2idle cycle
💤 Suspend count: 1
💤 Hardware sleep cycle count: 1
○ GPIOs active: ['0']
🥱 Wakeup triggered from IRQ 9: ACPI SCI
🥱 Wakeup triggered from IRQ 7: GPIO Controller
🥱 Woke up from IRQ 7: GPIO Controller
❌ Userspace suspended for 0:00:14.031448 (< minimum expected 0:00:27)
💤 In a hardware sleep state for 0:00:10.566894 (75.31%)
🔋 Battery BAT0 lost 10000 µWh (0.02%) [Average rate 2.57W]
Explanations for your system
🚦 Userspace wasn't asleep at least 0:00:30
The system was programmed to sleep for 0:00:30, but woke up prematurely.
This typically happens when the system was woken up from a non-timer based source.
If you didn't intentionally wake it up, then there may be a kernel or firmware bug
I compared all the logs generated between the events of power button, power source, TrackPoint, and touchpad. But except for the touchpad event, everything else was coming from GPIO pin #0 and there was no more information of how to distinguish those wakeup triggers. I ended up with a drastic approach of ignoring wakeup triggers from the GPIO pin #0 completely with the following kernel option.
gpiolib_acpi.ignore_wake=AMDI0030:00@0
And I get the line on each boot.
kernel: amd_gpio AMDI0030:00: Ignoring wakeup on pin 0
That comes with obvious downsides. The system doesn’t wake up frequently any longer, that is good. However, nothing can wake it up after getting into suspend. Opening the lid, pressing the power button or any key is simply ignored since all are going to GPIO pin #0. In the end, I had to enable the touchpad back as a wakeup source explicitly so the system can wakeup by tapping the touchpad. It’s far from ideal, but the touchpad is less sensitive than the TrackPoint so I will keep it that way.
A lot has happened in 2024 for the Incus project, so I thought it’d be interesting to see where we started, what we did and where we ended up after that very busy year, then look forward to what’s next in 2025!
Where we started
We began 2024 right on the heels of the Incus 0.4 release at the end of December 2023.
This means that effectively everything that made it into Incus in 2024 originated directly from the Incus community. There is one small exception to that as LXD 5.0 LTS still saw some activity and as that’s still under Apache 2.0, we were able to import a few commits (83 to be exact) from that branch.
Incus 6.0 LTS was released at the beginning of April, alongside LXC and LXCFS 6.0 LTS. All of which get 5 years of security support.
That was a huge milestone for Incus as it now allowed production users who don’t feel like going through an update cycle every month to switch over to Incus 6.0 LTS and have a stable production release for the years to come.
It also provides a much easier packaging target for Linux distributions as the monthly releases can be tricky to follow, especially when they introduce new dependencies.
Today, Incus 6.0 LTS represents around 50% of the Incus user base.
Notable feature additions
It’s difficult to come up with a list of the most notable new features because so much happened all over the place and deciding what’s notable ends up being very personal and subjective, depending on one’s usage of Incus, but here are a few!
Application container support (OCI), gives us the ability to natively run Docker containers on Incus
Clustered LVM storage backend, adds support for iSCSI/NVMEoTCP/FC storage in clusters
Network integrations (OVN inter-connect), allows for cross-cluster overlay networking
Automatic cluster re-balancing, simplifies operation of large clusters
Performance improvements
As more and more users run very large Incus systems, a number of performance issues were noticed and have been fixed.
An early one was related to how Incus handled OVN. The old implementation relied on the OVN command line tools to drive OVN database changes. This is incredibly inefficient as each call to those tools would require new TLS handshakes with all database servers, tracking down the leader, fetching a new copy of the database, performing a trivial operation and exiting. The new implementation uses a native database client directly in Incus which maintains a constant connection with the database, gets notified of changes and can instantly perform any needed configuration changes.
Then there were 2-3 different cases of database performance issues. Two of them were caused by our auto-generated database helpers which weren’t very smart about handling of profiles, effectively causing a situation where performance would get exponentially worse as more profiles would be present in the database. Addressing this issue resulted in dramatic performance improvement for users operating with hundreds or even thousands of profiles.
Another was related to loading of instances on Incus startup, specifically loading the device definitions to check whether anything needed to be done on startup. This logic was always hitting configuration validation which can be costly, in this case, so costly that Incus would fail to startup during the allotted time by the init system (10 minutes). After some fixes to that logic, the affected system, running over 2000 virtual machines (on a single server) at the time, is now able to process all running VMs in just 10-15s.
On top of those issues, special attention was also put in optimizing resource usage on large systems, especially systems with multiple NUMA nodes, supporting basic NUMA balancing of virtual machines as well as selecting the best GPU devices based on NUMA cost.
Distribution integration
Back at the beginning of 2024, Incus was only available through my own packages for Debian or Ubuntu, or through native packages on Gentoo and NixOS.
This has changed considerably through 2024 with Incus now being readily available on:
Alpine Linux
Arch Linux
Chimera Linux
Debian
Fedora
Gentoo
NixOS
openSUSE
Rocky Linux
Ubuntu
Void Linux
Additionally, it’s also available as a Docker container to run on most any other platforms as well as available on MacOS through Colima. The client tool itself is available everywhere that Go supports.
Deployment tooling
Terraform/OpenTofu provider
The Incus Terraform/OpenTofu provider has seen quite a lot of activity this year.
We’re slowly headed towards a 1.0 release for it, basically ensuring that it can drive every single Incus feature and that its resources are defined in a clear and consistent way.
There is only one issue left in the 1.0 release milestone and there is an open pull request for it, so we are very close to where we want as far as feature coverage and with a few more bugfixes here and there, we should have that 1.0 release out in the coming weeks/month!
incus-deploy
incus-deploy was introduced in February and is basically a collection of Ansible and Terraform that allows for easy deployment of Incus, whether standalone or clustered and whether for testing/development or production.
This is commonly used by the Incus team to quickly deploy test clusters, complete with Ceph, OVN, clustered LVM, … all in a very reproducible way.
Incus OS
While incus-deploy provides an automated way to deploy Incus on top of traditional Linux servers, Incus OS is working on providing a solution for those who don’t want to have to deal with maintaining traditional Linux servers.
This is a fully immutable OS image, kept as minimal as possible and solely focused on running Incus.
It heavily relies on systemd tooling to provide a secure environment, starting from SecureBoot signing, to having every step of the boot be TPM measured, to having storage encrypted using that TPM state and the entire read-only disk image being verified through dm-verity.
The end result is an extremely secure and locked down environment which is designed for just one thing, running Incus!
We’re getting close to having something ready for early adopters with automated builds and update logic now working, but it will be a few more weeks before it’s safe/useful to install on a server.
Where we ended up
Over that year, Incus really turned into a full fledged Open Source project and community.
We have kept on with our release cadence, pushing out a new feature release every month while very actively backporting bugfixes and smaller improvements to our LTS release.
Distributions have done a great job at getting Incus packaged, making it natively available just about everywhere (we’re still waiting on solid EPEL packaging).
Our supporting projects like terraform-provider-incus, incus-deploy and incus-os are making it easier than ever to deploy and operate large scale Incus clusters as well as providing a simpler, more repeatable way of running Incus.
2024 was a very very good year for Incus!
What’s coming in 2025
Looking ahead, 2025 has the potential to be and even better year for us!
On the Incus front, there are no single huge feature to be looking forward to, but just the continual improvement, whether it be for containers, VMs, networking or clustering. We have a lot of small new features and polishing in mind which will help fill in some of the current gaps and provide a nice and consistent experience.
But it’s on the supporting projects that a lot of the potential now rests.
This will hopefully be the year of Incus OS, making installing Incus as easy as writing a file to a USB stick, booting a machine from it and accessing it over the network. Want to make a cluster, no problem, just boot a few more machines onto Incus OS and join them together as a cluster!
But we’re also going to be expanding incus-deploy. It’s currently doing a good job at deploying Incus on Ubuntu servers with Ansible but we want to expand that to also cover Debian and some of the RHEL derivatives so we can cover the majority of our current production users with it. On top of that, we want to also have incus-deploy handle setting up the common support services used by Incus clusters, typically OpenFGA, Keycloak, Grafana, Prometheus and Loki.
We also want to improve our testing and development lab, add more systems, add the ability to test on more architectures and easily test more complex features, whether it’s 100Gb/s+ networking with full hardware offload or confidential computing features like AMD SEV.
Sovereign Tech Fund
Thankfully a lot of that is going to be made a whole lot easier thanks to funding by the Sovereign Tech Fund who’s going to be supporting a variety of Incus related projects, especially focusing on the kind of work that’s not particularly exciting but is very much critical to the proper running of a project like ours.
This includes a big refresh of our testing and development lab, work on our LTS releases, new security features through the stack, improved support for other Linux distributions and OSes across our projects and more!
So often I come across the need to avoid my system to block forever, or until a process finishes, I can’t recall how did I came across systemd inhibit, but
here’s my approach and a bit of motivation
After some fiddling (not much really), it starts directly once I login and I will be using it instead of a fully fledged plex or the like, I just want to stream some videos from time to time from my home pc over my ipad :D using VLC.
The Hack
systemd-inhibit --who=foursixnine --why="maybe there be dragons" --mode block \
bash -c 'while $(systemctl --user is-active -q rygel.service); do sleep 1h; done'
Last week I was bitten by a interesting C feature. The following terminate function was expected to exit if okay was zero (false) however it exited when zero was passed to it. The reason is the missing semicolon after the return function.
The interesting part this that is compiles fine because the void function terminate is allowed to return the void return value, in this case the void return from exit().
OCI (open container initiative) images are the standard format based on the original docker format. Each container image is represented as an array of ‘layers’, each of which is a .tar.gz. To unpack the container image, untar the first, then untar the second on top of the first, etc.
Several years ago, while we were working on a product which ships its root filesystem (and of course containers) as OCI layers, Tycho Andersen (https://tycho.pizza/) came up with the idea of ‘atomfs’ as a way to avoid some of the deficiencies of tar (https://www.cyphar.com/blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar). In ‘atomfs’, the .tar.gz layers are replaced by squashfs (now optionally erofs) filesystems with dm-verity root hashes specified. Mounting an image now consists of mounting each squashfs, then merging them with overlay. Since we have the dmverity root hash, we can ensure that the filesystem has not been corrupted without having to checksum the files before mounting, and there is no tar unpacking step.
This past week, Ram Chinchani presented atomfs at the OCI weekly discussion, which you can see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUyH319O9hM starting at about 28 minutes. He showed a full use cycle, starting with a Dockerfile, building atomfs images using stacker, mounting them using atomfs, and then executing a container with lxc. Ram mentioned his goal is to have a containerd snapshotter for atomfs soon. I’m excited to hear that, as it will make it far easier to integrate into e.g. kubernetes.
I’m pleased to introduce uCareSystem 24.12.11, the latest version of the all-in-one system maintenance tool for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian and its derivatives. This release brings some major changes in UI, fixes and improvements under the hood. Continuing on the path of the earlier release, in this release after many many … many … did […]
The new feature bug templates in Launchpad aims to streamline the bug reporting process, making it more efficient for both users and project maintainers.
In the past, Launchpad provided only a basic description field for filling bug reports. This often led to incomplete or vague submissions, as users may not include essential details or steps to reproduce an issue. This could slow down the debugging process when fixing bugs.
To improve this, we are introducing bug templates. These allow project maintainers to guide users when reporting bugs. By offering a structured template, users are prompted to provide all the necessary information, which helps to speed up the development process.
To start using bug templates in your project, simply follow these steps:
Access your project’s bug page view.
Select ‘Configure bugs’.
A field showing the bug template will prompt you to fill in your desired template.
Save the changes. The template will now be available to users when they report a new bug for your project.
For now, only a default bug template can be set per project. Looking ahead, the idea is to expand this by introducing multiple bug templates per project, as well as templates for other content types such as merge proposals or answers. This will allow project maintainers to define various templates for different purposes, making the open-source collaboration process even more efficient.
Additionally, we will introduce Markdown support, allowing maintainers to create structured and visually clear templates using features such as headings, lists, or code blocks.
I’m pleased to introduce uCareSystem 24.11.17, the latest version of the all-in-one system maintenance tool. This release brings some minor fixes and improvements with visual changes that you will love. I’m excited to share the details of the latest update to uCareSystem! With this release, the focus is on refining the user experience and modernizing […]
In basically every engineering organization I’ve ever regarded as particularly
high functioning, I’ve sat through one specific recurring conversation which is
not – a conversation about “complexity”. Things are good or bad because they
are or aren’t complex, architectures needs to be redone because it’s too
complex – some refactor of whatever it is won’t work because it’s too complex.
You may have even been a part of some of these conversations – or even been
the one advocating for simple light-weight solutions. I’ve done it. Many times.
Rarely, if ever, do we talk about complexity within its rightful context –
complexity for whom. Is a solution complex because it’s complex for the
end user? Is it complex if it’s complex for an API consumer? Is it complex if
it’s complex for the person maintaining the API service? Is it complex if it’s
complex for someone outside the team maintaining it to understand?
Complexity within a problem domain I’ve come to believe, is fairly zero-sum –
there’s a fixed amount of complexity in the problem to be solved, and you can
choose to either solve it, or leave it for those downstream of you
to solve that problem on their own.
That being said, while I believe there is a lower bound in complexity to
contend with for a problem, I do not believe there is an upper bound to the
complexity of solutions possible. It is always possible, and in fact, very
likely that teams create problems for themselves while trying to solve a
problem. The rest of this post is talking to the lower bound. When getting
feedback on an early draft of this blog post, I’ve been informed that Fred
Brooks coined a term for what I call “lower bound complexity” – “Essential
Complexity”, in the paper
“No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering”,
which is a better term and can be used interchangeably.
Complexity Culture
In a large enough organization, where the team is high functioning enough to
have and maintain trust amongst peers, members of the team will specialize.
People will begin to engage with subsets of the work to be done, and begin to
have their efficacy measured against that part of the organization’s problems.
Incentives shift, and over time it becomes increasingly likely that two
engineers may have two very different priorities when working on the same
system together. Someone accountable for uptime and tasked with responding to
outages will begin to resist changes. Someone accountable for rapidly
delivering features will resist gates between them and their users. Companies
(either wittingly or unwittingly) will deal with this by tasking engineers with
both production (feature development) and operational tasks (maintenance), so
the difference in incentives isn’t usually as bad as it could be.
When we get a bunch of folks from far-flung corners of an organization in a
room, fire up a slide deck and throw up some aspirational to-be architecture
diagram in order to get a sign-off to solve some problem (be it someone needs a
credible promotion packet, new feature needs to get delivered, or the system
has begun to fail and needs fixing), the initial reaction will, more often than
I’d like, start to devolve into a discussion of how this is going to introduce
a bunch of complexity, going to be hard to maintain, why can’t you make it
less complex?
Right around here is when I start to try and contextualize the conversation
happening around me – understand what complexity is that being discussed, and
understand who is taking on that burden. Think about who should be owning
that problem, and work through the tradeoffs involved. Is it best solved here,
or left to consumers (be them other systems, developers, or users). Should
something become an API call’s optional param, taking on all the edge-cases and
on, or should users have to implement the logic using the data you
return (leaving everyone else to take on all the edge-cases and maintenance)?
Should you process the data, or require the user to preprocess it for you?
Frequently it’s right to make an active and explicit decision to simplify and
leave problems to be solved downstream, since they may not actually need to be
solved – or perhaps you expect consumers will want to own the specifics of
how the problem is solved, in which case you leave lots of documentation and
examples. Many other times, especially when it’s something downstream consumers
are likely to hit, it’s best solved internal to the system, since the only
thing that can come of leaving it unsolved are bugs, frustration and
half-correct solutions. This is a grey-space of tradeoffs, not a clear decision
tree. No one wants the software manifestation of a katamari ball or a junk
drawer, nor does anyone want a half-baked service unable to handle the simplest
use-case.
Head-in-sand as a Service
Popoffs about how complex something is, are, to a first approximation, best
understood as meaning “complicated for the person making comments”. A lot of
the #thoughtleadership believe that an AWS hosted EKS k8s cluster running
images built by CI talking to an AWS hosted PostgreSQL RDS is not complex.
They’re right. Mostly right. This is less complex – less complex for them.
It’s not, however, without complexity and its own tradeoffs – it’s just
complexity that they do not have to deal with. Now they don’t have to
maintain machines that have pesky operating systems or hard drive failures.
They don’t have to deal with updating the version of k8s, nor ensuring the
backups work. No one has to push some artifact to prod manually. Deployments
happen unattended. You click a button and get a cluster.
On the other hand, developers outside the ops function need to deal with
troubleshooting CI, debugging access control rules encoded in turing complete
YAML, permissions issues inside the cluster due to whatever the fuck a service
mesh is, everyone needs to learn how to use some k8s tools they only actually
use during a bad day, likely while doing some x.509 troubleshooting to
connect to the cluster (an internal only endpoint; just port forward it) – not
to mention all sorts of rules to route packets to their project (a single
repo’s binary being run in 3 containers on a single vm host).
Beyond that, there’s the invisible complexity – complexity on the interior of
a service you depend on. I think about the dozens of teams maintaining the EKS
service (which is either run on EC2 instances, or alternately, EC2 instances in
a trench coat, moustache and even more shell scripts), the RDS service (also
EC2 and shell scripts, but this time accounting for redundancy, backups,
availability zones), scores of hypervisors pulled off the shelf (xen, kvm)
smashed together with the ones built in-house (firecracker, nitro, etc)
running on hardware that has to be refreshed and maintained continuously. Every
request processed by network ACL rules, AWS IAM rules, security group rules,
using IP space announced to the internet wired through IXPs directly into ISPs.
I don’t even want to begin to think about the complexity inherent in how those
switches are designed. Shitloads of complexity to solve problems you may or
may not have, or even know you had.
What’s more complex? An app running in an in-house 4u server racked in the
office’s telco closet in the back running off the office Verizon line, or an
app running four hypervisors deep in an AWS datacenter? Which is more complex
to you? What about to your organization? In total? Which is more prone to
failure? Which is more secure? Is the complexity good or bad? What type of
Complexity can you manage effectively? Which threaten the system? Which
threaten your users?
COMPLEXIVIBES
This extends beyond Engineering. Decisions regarding “what tools are we able to
use” – be them existing contracts with cloud providers, CIO mandated SaaS
products, a list of the only permissible open source projects – will incur
costs in terms of expressed “complexity”. Pinning open source projects to a
fixed set makes SBOM production “less complex”. Using only one SaaS provider’s
product suite (even if its terrible, because it has all the types of tools you
need) makes accreditation “less complex”. If all you have is a contract with
Pauly T’s lowest price technically acceptable artisinal cloudary and
haberdashery, the way you pay for your compute is “less complex” for the CIO
shop, though you will find yourself building your own hosted database template,
mechanism to spin up a k8s cluster, and all the operational and technical
burden that comes with it. Or you won’t and make it everyone else’s problem in
the organization. Nothing you can do will solve for the fact that you must
now deal with this problem somewhere because it was less complicated for the
business to put the workloads on the existing contract with a cut-rate vendor.
Suddenly, the decision to “reduce complexity” because of an existing contract
vehicle has resulted in a huge amount of technical risk and maintenance burden
being onboarded. Complexity you would otherwise externalize has now been taken
on internally. With large enough organizations (specifically, in this case,
I’m talking about you, bureaucracies), this is largely ignored or accepted as
normal since the personnel cost is understood to be free to everyone involved.
Doing it this way is more expensive, more work, less reliable and less
maintainable, and yet, somehow, is, in a lot of ways, “less complex” to the
organization. It’s particularly bad with bureaucracies, since screwing up a
contract will get you into much more trouble than delivering a broken product,
leaving basically no reason for anyone to care to fix this.
I can’t shake the feeling that for every story of technical mandates gone
awry, somewhere just
out of sight there’s a decisionmaker optimizing for what they believe to be the
least amount of complexity – least hassle, fewest unique cases, most
consistency – as they can. They freely offload complexity from their
accreditation and risk acceptance functions through mandates. They will never
have to deal with it. That does not change the fact that someone does.
TC;DR (TOO COMPLEX; DIDN’T REVIEW)
We wish to rid ourselves of systemic Complexity – after all, complexity is
bad, simplicity is good. Removing upper-bound own-goal complexity (“accidental
complexity” in Brooks’s terms) is important, but once you hit the lower bound
complexity, the tradeoffs become zero-sum. Removing complexity from one part of
the system means that somewhere else - maybe outside your organization or in a
non-engineering function - must grow it back. Sometimes, the opposite is the
case, such as when a previously manual business processes is automated. Maybe that’s a
good idea. Maybe it’s not. All I know is that what doesn’t help the situation
is conflating complexity with everything we don’t like – legacy code,
maintenance burden or toil, cost, delivery velocity.
Complexity is not the same as proclivity to failure. The most reliable
systems I’ve interacted with are unimaginably complex, with layers of internal
protection to prevent complete failure. This has its own set of costs which
other people have written about extensively.
Complexity is not cost. Sometimes the cost of taking all the complexity
in-house is less, for whatever value of cost you choose to use.
Complexity is not absolute. Something simple from one perspective may
be wildly complex from another. The impulse to burn down complex sections of
code is helpful to have generally, but
sometimes things are complicated for a reason,
even if that reason exists outside your codebase or organization.
Complexity is not something you can remove without introducing complexity
elsewhere. Just as not making a decision is a decision itself; choosing to
require someone else to deal with a problem rather than dealing with it
internally is a choice that needs to be considered in its full context.
Next time you’re sitting through a discussion and someone starts to talk about
all the complexity about to be introduced, I want to pop up in the back of your
head, politely asking what does complex mean in this context? Is it lower
bound complexity? Is this complexity desirable? Is what they’re saying mean
something along the lines of I don’t understand the problems being solved, or
does it mean something along the lines of this problem should be solved
elsewhere? Do they believe this will result in more work for them in a way that
you don’t see? Should this not solved at all by changing the bounds of what we
should accept or redefine the understood limits of this system? Is the perceived
complexity a result of a decision elsewhere? Who’s taking this complexity on,
or more to the point, is failing to address complexity required by the problem
leaving it to others? Does it impact others? How specifically? What are you
not seeing?
I decided to be more selective and remove those that did very porly at 1.5G, which was most.
Ubuntu - booted but desktop not stable, took 1.5 minutes to load Firefox
Xubuntu-minimal - does not include a web browser so can't further test. Snap is preinstaled even though no apps are - but trying to install a web browser worked but couldn't start.
Manjaro KDE - Desktop loads, but browser doesn't
Xubuntu - laggy when Firefox is opened, can't load sites
Ubuntu Mate -laggy when Firefox is opened, can't load sites
Kubuntu - laggy when Firefox is opened, can't load sites
Linux Mint 22 - desktop loads, browsers isn't responsive
Fedora video is a bit laggy, but watchable.. EndlessOS with Chromium is the most smooth and resonsive watching YouTube.
For fun let's look at startup time with 2GB (with me hitting buttons as needed to open a folder)
Conclusion
Lubuntu lowered it's memory usage from 2020 for loading a desktop 585M to 450M! Kudos to Lubuntu team!
Both Fedora and Endless desktops worked in lower memory then 2020 too!
Lubuntu, Fedora and Endless all used Zram.
Chromium has definitely improved it's memory usage as last time Endless got dinged for using it. Now it appears to work better then Firefox.
Networking is a complex topic, and there is lots of confusion around the definition of an “online” system. Sometimes the boot process gets delayed up to two minutes, because the system still waits for one or more network interfaces to be ready. Systemd provides the network-online.target that other service units can rely on, if they are deemed to require network connectivity. But what does “online” actually mean in this context, is a link-local IP address enough, do we need a routable gateway and how about DNS name resolution?
The requirements for an “online” network interface depend very much on the services using an interface. For some services it might be good enough to reach their local network segment (e.g. to announce Zeroconf services), while others need to reach domain names (e.g. to mount a NFS share) or reach the global internet to run a web server. On the other hand, the implementation of network-online.target varies, depending on which networking daemon is in use, e.g. systemd-networkd-wait-online.service or NetworkManager-wait-online.service. For Ubuntu, we created a specification that describes what we as a distro expect an “online” system to be. Having a definition in place, we are able to tackle the network-online-ordering issues that got reported over the years and can work out solutions to avoid delayed boot times on Ubuntu systems.
In essence, we want systems to reach the following networking state to be considered online:
Do not wait for “optional” interfaces to receive network configuration
Have IPv6 and/or IPv4 “link-local” addresses on every network interface
Have at least one interface with a globally routable connection
Have functional domain name resolution on any routable interface
A common implementation
NetworkManager and systemd-networkd are two very common networking daemons used on modern Linux systems. But they originate from different contexts and therefore show different behaviours in certain scenarios, such as wait-online. Luckily, on Ubuntu we already have Netplan as a unification layer on top of those networking daemons, that allows for common network configuration, and can also be used to tweak the wait-online logic.
With the recent release of Netplan v1.1 we introduced initial functionality to tweak the behaviour of the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service, as used on Ubuntu Server systems. When Netplan is used to drive the systemd-networkd backend, it will emit an override configuration file in /run/systemd/system/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service.d/10-netplan.conf, listing the specific non-optional interfaces that should receive link-local IP configuration. In parallel to that, it defines a list of network interfaces that Netplan detected to be potential global connections, and waits for any of those interfaces to reach a globally routable state.
In addition to the new features implemented in Netplan, we reached out to upstream systemd, proposing an enhancement to the systemd-networkd-wait-online service, integrating it with systemd-resolved to check for the availability of DNS name resolution. Once this is implemented upstream, we’re able to fully control the systemd-networkd backend on Ubuntu Server systems, to behave consistently and according to the definition of an “online” system that was lined out above.
Future work
The story doesn’t end there, because Ubuntu Desktop systems are using NetworkManager as their networking backend. This daemon provides its very own nm-online utility, utilized by the NetworkManager-wait-online systemd service. It implements a much higher-level approach, looking at the networking daemon in general instead of the individual network interfaces. By default, it considers a system to be online once every “autoconnect” profile got activated (or failed to activate), meaning that either a IPv4 or IPv6 address got assigned.
There are considerable enhancements to be implemented to this tool, for it to be controllable in a fine-granular way similar to systemd-networkd-wait-online, so that it can be instructed to wait for specific networking states on selected interfaces.
A note of caution
Making a service depend on network-online.target is considered an antipattern in most cases. This is because networking on Linux systems is very dynamic and the systemd target can only ever reflect the networking state at a single point in time. It cannot guarantee this state to be remained over the uptime of your system and has the potentially to delay the boot process considerably. Cables can be unplugged, wireless connectivity can drop, or remote routers can go down at any time, affecting the connectivity state of your local system. Therefore, “instead of wondering what to do about network.target, please just fix your program to be friendly to dynamically changing network configuration.” [source].
The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 24.10.
Xubuntu 24.10, codenamed Oracular Oriole, is a regular release and will be supported for 9 months, until July 2025.
Xubuntu 24.10, featuring the latest updates from Xfce 4.19 and GNOME 47.
Xubuntu 24.10 features the latest updates from Xfce 4.19, GNOME 47, and MATE 1.26. For Xfce enthusiasts, you’ll appreciate the new features and improved hardware support found in Xfce 4.19. Xfce 4.19 is the development series for the next release, Xfce 4.20, due later this year. As pre-release software, you may encounter more bugs than usual. Users seeking a stable, well-supported environment should opt for Xubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat” instead.
The final release images for Xubuntu Desktop and Xubuntu Minimal are available as torrents and direct downloads from xubuntu.org/download/.
As the main server might be busy in the first few days after the release, we recommend using the torrents if possible.
We’d like to thank everybody who contributed to this release of Xubuntu!
Highlights and Known Issues
Highlights
Xfce 4.19 is included as a development preview of the upcoming Xfce 4.20. Among several new features, it features early Wayland support and improved scaling.
GNOME 47 apps, including Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab) and Sudoku (gnome-sudoku), include a refreshed appearance and usability improvements
Known Issues
The shutdown prompt may not be displayed at the end of the installation. Instead you might just see a Xubuntu logo, a black screen with an underscore in the upper left hand corner, or just a black screen. Press Enter and the system will reboot into the installed environment. (LP: #1944519)
Xorg crashes and the user is logged out after logging in or switching users on some virtual machines, including GNOME Boxes. (LP: #1861609)
You may experience choppy audio or poor system performance while playing audio, but only in some virtual machines (observed in VMware and VirtualBox)
OEM installation options are not currently supported or available, but will be included for Xubuntu 24.04.1
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 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.
The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 24.10 has been released, featuring the new and beautiful KDE Plasma 6.1 simple by default, powerful when needed.
Codenamed “Oracular Oriole”, Kubuntu 24.10 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 6.11 based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.116 and 6.6.0, KDE Plasma 6.1 and many updated KDE gear applications.
Kubuntu 24.10 with Plasma 6.1
Kubuntu has seen many updates for other applications, both in our default install, and installable from the Ubuntu archive.
Applications for core day-to-day usage are included and updated, such as Firefox, and LibreOffice.
For a list of other application updates, and known bugs be sure to read our release notes.
Wayland as default Plasma session.
The Plasma wayland session is now the default option in sddm (display manager login screen). An X11 session can be selected instead if desired. The last used session type will be remembered, so you do not have to switch type on each login.
Note: For upgrades from 24.04, there may a delay of a few hours to days between the official release announcements and the Ubuntu Release Team enabling upgrades.
Stable Wireshark PPA:
Warning: 
Xubuntu 24.10, featuring the latest updates from Xfce 4.19 and GNOME 47.
Kubuntu 24.10 with Plasma 6.1
