UBOS Beta 11 released with support for Marvell ESPRESSObin

UBOS Beta 11 is here, and we are proud to add the Marvell ESPRESSObin to the list of supported devices.

Launched on Kickstarter earlier this year, the ESPRESSObin is an interesting board: it doesn’t have any graphics (which is fine with us because most UBOS devices are used as headless servers) but instead it has three Ethernet ports and a SATA connector. The currently available 1GB version costs only $49 on Amazon. So it’s perfect for running UBOS.

We have also verified that the Raspberry Pi Zero W (the $10 version that has WiFi) also works out of the box with UBOS.

As usual, there have also been many upgrades, bug fixes and new functionality has been added. Here are the highlights:

• The smartctld daemon is now running by default. You can use this to get e-mails when your disk is about to fail.

• Nextcloud has been upgraded to current version 12, and we have added a number of frequently-used Nextcloud “apps”: calendar, contacts, mail, news, notes, spreed and tasks. Not only can you now bring your calendar and contact info home, you can also start video conferences right from your UBOS home server.

• UBOS can now run Python/Django apps, just as easily as other types of apps.

• Hundreds of other package upgrades.

and more! More details are in the release notes here.

This time, upgrading a device that is running a previous UBOS version is a teensy bit more complicated. Due to some changes in Arch Linux (our upstream distro), the command sudo ubos-admin update may fail on the first try. To proceed, execute sudo rm /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt to delete that file, and then say sudo ubos-admin update again. The upgrade should work then.