Ubuntu

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.

It’s time to replace the Ubuntu Wiki. In fact it was probably time to replace it a few years ago, but we are where we are. It should be a reliable and useful resource for the Ubuntu community. It’s failing at that. We have failed here.

Aside: There are actually multiple wikis in use in the Ubuntu project. The primary one is wiki.ubuntu.com, which has been in use since forever (in Ubuntu terms). It’s the main topic of this post, but the others are certainly in need of some love too.

In August 2019, I tweeted about how I’d been running KDE Neon for eighteen months, since February 2018, and how I was switching back to GNOME Shell on my primary laptop. In that thread I also suggested I might switch back!

Today I've in-place upgraded from that 18.04 KDE Neon install to @ubuntu 19.04 with @gnome. I still love KDE of course, and will likely switch back at some point, or may install it on another machine - maybe my Thinkpad X220. But for now, I've decided to have a play with GNOME.

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Last month I mentioned that myself, Mark and Martin have decided to come back for Season 14 of the Ubuntu Podcast. Well, we’re back today with S14E01, titled “Navy Chefs Remit”.

Over the thirteen years, the episode titles have had a theme in each season. We don’t reveal the theme, but let our listeners figure that out, for fun. Sometimes it has a bearing on the content of the episode, but often not.

Season One used Elvis Presley singles as titles, which I think was a nod to the fact that people used to tell me I look like Elvis. In Season Two we used Tony’s love of Doctor Who to give us episode titles.

I appreciate many people already know how to do this, but I’m surprised how many don’t, or don’t realise what it does. Forgive me if you know about this feature of Google Chrome.

A little while back I managed to win two separate eBay auctions for 16GiB DDR3 SODIMMs to install in my ThinkPad T450. This took it from the previously installed 16GiB to the expansive 32GiB.

Then I opened Google Chrome.

I’ve said many times, I don’t consider myself a software developer. Much like I don’t consider myself a professional chef. I can write code, just as I can cook. What I make isn’t ground breaking, but it won’t poison anyone either, and I enjoy doing it.

Coding for me started on the ZX81 in BASIC then on to the Spectrum and other 8-bit microcomputers. I dabbled with Z80 and 6502 assembly language. At college I did COBOL, InfoBASIC and more Z80. When I eventually got a PC in 1990 I taught myself Pascal, via a free compiler for MS-DOS I got on a floppy disk in the post.

This post is more an aide-mémoire for myself, but may be useful to others.

I recently wrote a little story about bugs, the crash reporter and errors website in Ubuntu. Sometimes a user will want to look for their crash reports, and in fact that question came up today on the Ubuntu Discourse.

Back when we shipped Unity desktop as the default desktop environment in Ubuntu, there was a simple button to take a user to their previously uploaded crash reports. There was also an easy, graphical way to disable crash reporting.

Ubuntu Hirsute - the development release which will become 21.04 enters User Interface Freeze on March 18th! That’s less than a fortnight away!

However, with two weekends and plenty of evenings between now and then, its a great time to start testing the Yaru theme we ship in Ubuntu by default. The Yaru team have been busy and provided this short list of some of the main changes since the last release.

I run Ubuntu Hirsute - the development release which will become 21.04 - on a bunch of systems. It’s a trade-off though, getting the latest crack each and every day. Being at the bleeding edge of new packages landing means I can experience brand new shiny bugs on my systems. Bugs like 1915579 which rendered my system unbootable. Nobody wants to see this on boot:

I had updated yesterday and clearly something went wrong. A colleague filed a bug as they’d seen the same thing recently. For them it was their primary machine so they nuked it from orbit. As I experienced the bug on my laptop, a secondary machine, I was fine with leaving it alone, in case I could get some debug information from it, or repair it. I confirmed the bug and went to bed, as it was getting late.