Software

Back in December 2020 I wrote up my personal Must-Have GNOME extensions. It’s been nearly three years, two job changes, and a few Ubuntu upgrades, so I thought I’d take another look.

tl;dr:

What changed

Out

I no longer have these installed.

Sound Switcher Indicator

This used to crash a lot for me, to the point I’d go and look for it in the panel and it was missing. I figured if I don’t realise it’s gone, I probably don’t need it that much. Also, GNOME shell volume control has changed a bit over the last few years. It’s pretty easy to switch device now in the menu.

Preamble

I recently started working for InfluxData as a Developer Advocate on Telegraf, an open source server agent to collect metrics. Telegraf builds from source to ship as a single Go binary. The latest - 1.19.1 was released just yesterday.

Part of my job involves helping users by reproducing reported issues, and assisting developers by testing their pull requests. It’s fun stuff, I love it. Telegraf has an extensive set of plugins which supports gathering, aggregating & processing metrics, and sending the results to other systems.

I have so many applications on my Android Phone, I’ve lost count. Too many chat apps, multiple web browsers, tons of games, and other garbage.

However, there’s one app, which is one of my favourites while probably being the least used application. It doesn’t technically benefit me at all, but is useful to others, when I use it.

The app in question is “Be My Eyes”. It’s available for Android and iOS, and is very easy to setup. The service is aimed at blind and partially sighted people, a group of people I am (currently) not in.

Over the weekend I participated in FOSS Talk Live. Before The Event this would have been an in-person shindig at a pub in London. A bunch of (mostly) UK-based podcasters get together and record live versions of their shows in front of a “studio audience”. It’s mostly an opportunity for a bunch of us middle-aged farts who speak into microphones to get together, have a few beers and chat.

Due to The Event, this year it was a virtual affair, done online via YouTube. Joe Ressington typically organised the in-person events, but with a lack of skills in video streaming, Martin Wimpress and Marius Quabeck stepped in to run the show behind-the-scenes.

Preamble

Until recently, I worked for Canonical on the Snap Advocacy Team. Some of the things in this blog post may have changed or been fixed since I left. It’s quite a long post, but I feel it’s neccessary to explain fully the status-quo. This isn’t intended to be a “hit piece” on my previous employer, but merely information sharing for those looking to control their own systems.

I’ve previously provided feedback in my previous role as Snap Advocate, to enable them to better control updates. However, a lot of this feedback was spread over forum threads and other online conversations. So I thought I’d put together some mitigations and the steps I take in one place.

I tweeted back at the start of April that I’m moving on from Canonical/Ubuntu.

Well, I left on April 30th, have had two weeks of ‘funemployment’, and today I start my new gig.

I’m now Developer Advocate for Telegraf at InfluxData, and I couldn’t be more excited! 🎉

Telegraf is an Open Source “agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics.”. I’ll be working with the Telegraf team and wider community of contributors. You’ll likely find me in the Telegraf GitHub and on the InfluxData Community Slack!

“Hirsute Hippo” is the project code-name for what will become Ubuntu 21.04 when it releases on April 22nd 2021.

On April 1st, the Beta of Ubuntu Hirsute will be released, but we’re no fools! This is a great time to do some testing!

So, starting on April 1st, we’re doing another Ubuntu Testing Week.

As always, everyone is welcome to test Ubuntu at any point in the year. But during the beta is a good time to focus on testing.

The GNOME team have announced GNOME 40. Along with this there’s a GNOME OS image to play with. You can grab that from here with the release notes.

The release announcement firmly (in bold) suggests “Do not use any other version including the distro version. Only GNOME Boxes 3.38.0 from flathub is known to work.”.

Personally I’ve never managed to have much success with GNOME Boxes, so I thought I’d test using something I already have installed, QEMU! I have used QEMU for many years.

Yesterday I wrote about my attempt to upgrade one of my HP Microservers, running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Well, today I had another go. Here’s what happened.

I followed the recommendation from yesterday, to compress the initrd.img using xz compression rather than the previous default gzip. Previously the upgrade failed because it needed 140M disk space in /boot. With the change to the compression scheme, I now have 154M, which should be enough to start the upgrade.

I have a few old and crusty HP MicroServers in the loft at home. I started out with one when HP did a cashback offer, making them very affordable. Over time I’ve acquired a couple more. One, named colossus is running rsnapshot to provide backups of my other machines. Another, called shirka is a Plex Media Server and the last, robby is a general purpose box running various jobs and reports. All run Ubuntu Server as the OS.