UBOS Beta 14: support for data disks and more

Just in time for the Let’s Self-host Installathon at Linuxfest NorthWest in Bellingham, WA, UBOS beta 14 is out!

As usual, we have a mix of new features that make users’ lives easier, new features that make developers’ lives easier, bug fixes and package upgrades. Here are the highlights:

• It’s now easy to use a separate “big data disk” (like an external USB disk on a Raspberry Pi, or an extra big volume on Amazon EC2). This makes it much simpler for UBOS users that have a lot of data on their device.

• Perform backup and system upgrade in a single step for even less work and worry when upgrading everything from OS to apps.

• Create sites from templates files, and only fill in the information that wasn’t provided already in the template.

• There’s a new command for concisely displaying the networking configuration.

• Developers can now write installation scriptlets in any language; there is no more need to write Perl wrappers.

• … plus the usual hundreds of package upgrades, feature improvements and bug fixes.

To upgrade:

• If you always wished to have an extra disk on which to store your data, don’t upgrade yet, but set that up first. Here is how to. You can also set this disk up after the upgrade, but it’s less work if you do it first.

• To be safe, create a backup of all your data first, then update and reboot:

  % sudo ubos-admin backup --out ~/XXX.ubos-backup
  % sudo ubos-admin update --noreboot
  % sudo systemctl reboot</pre>
  

For more info, read the detailed release notes here.

Known problems

• A few Nextcloud accessories initially were not rebuilt with the new paths. We have fixed this.

• On the Raspberry Pi, the gpio executable is missing its required suid root bit. We have submitted a pull request to the Arch Linux ARM project. In the meantime, to fix, become root and execute chmod 4755 /usr/bin/gpio.