Ubuntu

Ubuntu - the Linux distribution - has been around for 17 years. Over that time many projects and initiatives have been started, some successful, others less so. Not everything we try can work out, but as a group, we should feel empowered to try.

The Ubuntu community isn’t quite the same as it was back in 2004-2010, and nobody I know argues that it is. People who were keen and active contributors may have had circumstantial changes which meant they moved on. Some took on new responsibilities, work, or started family. Some, sadly, have passed away.

Helping your users stay up to date on their workstation is something I believe OS vendors should endeavour to do, to the best of their ability. Some users aren’t able to find time to install updates, or are irritated by update dialogs. Others are skeptical of their contents, some even block updates completely.

No OS vendor wants to be “That Guy” featuring in the news as millions of their customers are found to be vulnerable on their watch. Equally, respecting the user, given it’s their computing device, is vital too. It’s a difficult balance to strike. Somewhere in between “That Linux distro which nags me constantly to do updates” and “That distro which is outdated and insecure” erring towards the former, is probably the sweet spot.

Nearly thirteen years ago, on 11th March 2008, a few members of the Ubuntu UK Local Community Team released S01E01 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast. Ciemon Dunville, Dave Walker, Tony Whitmore and I had recorded it on the previous Saturday in my cramped, messy home office.

In the following seven years we recorded 187 episodes as “Ubuntu UK Podcast” - affectionately known as “uupc”. A re-brand in season eight to just “Ubuntu Podcast” led to another six years comprising another 251 episodes.

Well, things have escalated in Ubuntu-land since the posts I made on Monday and Tuesday! The Ubuntu archive for Hirsute (the in-development version which will become 21.04) has been temporarily frozen.

It seems there’s a rather knarly bug in the tools used to build packages, which is causing them to be “mis-built” - i.e. broken. I (and others) noticed this over the weekend, via a breakage in snapd - the daemon which mediates the installation and running of snaps.

Yesterday I wrote about how I made a mistake by updating my primary Ubuntu computer to include the proposed pocket. I shouldn’t have done this. So today I quickly hacked together a script to take any packages which came from proposed and “downgrade” them back to the release pocket. It’s not pretty, but it worked, for me.

#!/bin/bash

TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
PACKAGES=$TMPDIR/packages
DOWNGRADE=$TMPDIR/downgrade

# Get list of all installed packages
dpkg -l | grep ^ii | awk -F ' ' '{ print $2}' > $PACKAGES

# Start the downgrade script
echo  "sudo apt install \\" > $DOWNGRADE

# For each package in the list of installed packages
while read p; do
  # Get the summary of where the package came from
  apt-cache policy $p > $TMPDIR/$p
  # Get the line after (grep -A 1 and tail -n 1) the highlighted one with 3 stars
  SOURCE=$(grep -A 1 "^\ *\*\*" $TMPDIR/$p | tail -n 1 | awk -F ' ' '{ print $3}' )
  # If that line suggests we got the package from proposed, add it to the script
  if [[ "$SOURCE" == *"hirsute-proposed"* ]]; then
    echo "$p/hirsute \\" >> $DOWNGRADE
  fi
done <$PACKAGES
# Tell the user what to run to actually do the downgrade
echo "Run sh $DOWNGRADE"

Don’t use this. As they say on YouTube, this script is for educational purposes only. There’s probably a thousand ways to make this more elegantly. Indeed I tried a suggestion on AskUbuntu which didn’t work at all.

This is a short and sweet post to remind future me (and anyone else reading) not to use the “proposed” pocket of the Ubuntu Archive, if you want a bug-free and safe experience.

For those not “in the know”, each Ubuntu release has a bunch of pockets. If you’ve ever fiddled with your sources.list you may have seen the names updates, backports, security and proposed. These are usually prefixed with the codename of the release, such as hirsute-updates and hirsute-proposed for the current in-development version of Ubuntu, to become the interim release 21.04.

Today, I’m following along from an earlier article “The Allure of The Terminal” where I talked about how I love the terminal aesthetic. How much, well, one of my computers is a command-line only install. I thought I’d talk a bit about that setup. Firstly, it’s not command-line only because it can’t run a graphical environment, although it isn’t a super modern system. It is certainly capable of running Ubuntu MATE, for example, I just choose not to.

I am not a fan of rebooting my computers. As you can see:

alan@robot:~$ for host in $(cat computers.txt); do ssh "$host" "uptime"; done
 20:24:53 up 117 days,  5:06, 10 users,  load average: 5.85, 6.07, 5.48
 20:24:55 up 113 days,  4:56,  7 users,  load average: 0.95, 0.68, 0.72
 20:24:56 up 66 days,  9:05,  5 users,  load average: 1.06, 0.58, 0.51
 20:24:57 up 2 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.60, 1.09, 0.51
 20:24:58 up 4 days,  7:05,  3 users,  load average: 1.83, 1.22, 0.77
 20:24:58 up 18 days, 21:31,  9 users,  load average: 1.86, 1.86, 2.00
 20:25:35 up 374 days,  1:18,  6 users,  load average: 1.01, 1.01, 1.11

One is a desktop, two are laptops and the others are headless servers. The servers tend to be left up mostly because I don’t see any need to reboot them. However I’m also a little scared to, in case they don’t come back and I end up having to faff about to fix them.

I’ve mentioned before that I ‘suffer’ from xkcd 386. I’m trying to improve, and maybe writing this post will help me. If it helps you, that’s awesome too. Let’s work on this together. 🤝

There’s a strong prevalence among some in the Linux community for people correcting others. Specifically correcting pronunciation. I have been guilty of this in the past, but I’m trying to be the change I want to be. It’s a struggle!

Well, this is embarrassing! I recently filed a bug against an open source project because I genuinely thought it was broken. It was (almost, probably, entirely) my fault. I thought I’d fess up and explain what happened. It might be useful for others.

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently upgraded my Ubuntu machines, including my main desktop. It’s a funky Skull Canyon NUC with a weird hybrid Intel / AMD GPU setup and an external nVidia card in an enclosure.