UBOS Beta 5: single-command firewall configuration, Linux containers etc.

It’s been longer since beta 4 than we would have liked, but if you work on a big chunk of new functionality, that’s sometimes what happens!

Now we proudly present: UBOS beta 5. Here are the highlights:

• In addition to being the primary operating system on a device, UBOS can alternatively now run in Linux containers. Not just on x86_64 PCs, but also on Raspberry Pi’s! So if you already run Linux and don’t want to remove your distro, you can simply run UBOS in addition! To make this easy, we are providing pre-configured images. Here are the instructions for how to run UBOS is a container.

• Nobody likes setting up networks, particularly complex ones. To make this much simpler, ubos-admin setnetconfig got even more powerful in this release. Using just a single command, it now knows how to setup a home gateway (with masquerading/network address translation, local DNS server, local DHCP server and selective port openings) and a standalone network. It also automatically configures a firewall with what we believe are reasonable, and reasonably secure defaults. For more details, go here.

• UBOS developer tools have been much improved. They can now be cleanly added to an Arch Linux installation that acts as a development machine. And given that UBOS can run in containers now, development does not need a “target” device in many circumstances. Developer documentation is here.

• In total, this release contains over 400 package upgrades!

The more detailed release notes are here.