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2019-11-12
Apps have been updated on all release channels. This includes upgrades to:
Matomo
Mattermost
Mediawiki
Nextcloud
Shaarli
Wordpress
and apps to many accessories that go with these apps.
More details are in the release notes.
2019-10-10
A new UBOS update is available on all release channels and all platforms.
The focus of this release was tracking upstream package upgrades. There were also some minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.
As usual, the details are in the release notes.
2019-09-01
Lots of new functionality in this UBOS update, which is now available on all release channels and on all platforms.
As usual, the details are in the release notes, so here are the highlights:
Every wondered whether your UBOS device is working as it should, or whether you are
overlooking something? ubos-admin status has lots of new functionality to help you
out.
For example ubos-admin status --problems will tell you which problems UBOS
is aware of, such as a daemon that failed, or a disk that is getting too full. And it
keeps its answer short and sweet if everything seems fine. (You are get the full details
with various other command-line options; see documentation.)
This makes ongoing systems administration much simpler for professionals and novices alike.
Extensions to ubos-admin showsite make some common tasks much simpler, such as
determining what the Site administrator account is. While we were at it, we also
removed from clutter from the output that isn’t usually needed.
ubos-admin createsite can now use a template Site JSON, and will only ask you for
values not already provided. This has some intriguing possibilities for shipping
templates for complex Sites with multiple Apps. We’ll have more to say about that in
the future.
Backups have become faster, as UBOS now applies a heuristic on which files to compress and which not.
Also, UBOS now lets you invoke certain ubos-admin subcommands concurrently with
each other, which makes it easier to, say, look at the configuration on a site already
running on your device, while creating another.
Our LetsEncrypt integration wasn’t as flexible (and had more issues) than we wanted, so we basically did a rewrite. Here are some tricks UBOS as learned:
Backing up a LetsEncrypt-protected Site and restoring it to a different hostname, or on a different device is now supported. UBOS will transparently get new certificates if it needs to.
UBOS will smartly reuse LetsEncrypt certificates it has already and avoid getting new ones if possible.
When we tested a LetsEncrypt-protected site running this new version of UBOS with the tools provided by SSL Labs, we obtained an “A” rating. Your LetsEncrypt-protected sites running on UBOS should, too, after this upgrade.
ubos-install will refuse to install to a mounted disk.
The UBOS Staff now lists the devices first that were most recently updated.
Logging in via ssh now presents the UBOS banner.
The VirtualBox image is now larger.
Improved progress messages.
Various documentation improvements and bug fixes.
Apps can now require TLS by saying so in the UBOS Manifest. This makes it impossible to deploy the App to a Site not protected by (official, or self-signed) TLS.
A defined conflict resolution strategy has been implemented for when two apps deployed
to the same Site request the same entries in the Site’s .well-known directory;
depending on the entry, one takes preference over another, or the entries are merged.
Post to the UBOS forum.
More details are in the release notes.
2019-07-23
Apps have been updated on all release channels. This includes upgrades to:
Nextcloud
Nextcloud accessories (aka “Nextcloud apps”)
Mediawiki
Wordpress
Wordpress accessories (aka “Wordpress plugins and themes”)
Plus a few bug fixes.
More details are in the release notes.
2019-05-09
Apps have been updated on all release channels.
Nextcloud 16 is now available. It introduces machine learning to detect suspicious logins and offering clever recommendations. Group Folders now sport access control lists so system administrators can easily manage who has access to what in organization-wide shares. There are also Projects, a way to easily relate and find related information like files, chats or tasks.
Mediawiki has been upgraded
Wordpress has been upgraded
Many accessories for the above apps have been upgraded as well.
Plus a few bug fixes.
More details are in the release notes.
2019-03-29
This updated, on the “green” (“production”) release channel, aggregates several of the previously made updates on the “yellow” channel. It includes changes and extensions both an UBOS operating system level, and for applications.
If you run UBOS, we recommend you subscribe to one of our new release notification lists so you are notified when UBOS updates are available:
yellow and the
green channel) that you can subscribe to, to be notified when there are updates
on the respective channel.The details of the release are in the release notes.
2019-03-29
This update has new packages both on the UBOS operating system level, and for applications. Sometimes, we have to do both at the same time!
As indicated in the last update, This is also the first update in which we use a new numbering scheme based on the date of the announcement.
For now, updates have been published to the yellow channel only. We will promote it
to green in a few days, assuming things go well. If you like to be notified when UBOS
updates have been published, or for any other notifications, here is the first news for you:
yellow and the
green channel) that you can subscribe to, to be notified when there are updates
on the respective channel.![[Matomo]](/images/matomo-144x144.png)
Matomo, a privacy-preserving alternative to cloud-based web analytics tools such as Google Analytics (formerly named Piwik) is now available for single-command installation and upgrades.
To install, run ubos-admin createsite and specify app matomo.
More details are in the release notes.
2019-03-29
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has asked us to make certain changes to the text of the Personal Public License that we are using for some parts of UBOS, in order to avoid confusion around trademarks and copyrights held by the FSF.
We have no intention to create or perpetuate such confusion, so we are happy to oblige. Here’s what we changed as part of the most recent UBOS update.
The Personal Public License has been republished as version 3a, without the GPL preamble and without the “how to use” section that the FSF claims copyright to.
We also have removed all references to the term GNU, and to the FSF in the license, as we do not intend to imply that the FSF is the source, has approved, or has an affiliation with the Personal Public License.
The updated version is here.
While the document itself has changed, the substance of the Personal Public License remains the same:
You have all the same rights and responsibilities as the FSF’s General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) gives to you, but only if you are an individual, not if you are an organization. We explained the rationale for that in a previous post here.
If you are an organization, we are happy to license to you, too, but with different terms. Please get in touch.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
2019-02-27
There is lots of new stuff in this update. But before we get there:
This is the last of the increasingly inaccurately named “beta XXX updates”. UBOS has been fairly stable for some time, and our “beta” labels are a throw-back to the past when that wasn’t necessarily true. So going forward, we will stop using the term “beta”. Instead, we will focus on the distinction between the different release channels, and at what version they are at. If you check UBOS on GitHub, you’ll see that the milestone labels have already been renamed.
Here are some of the highlights on what is new in beta (ahem!) 17, currently available
on the yellow release channel only:
ubos-admin is now in color! (On terminals that support it.) That makes entering
the correct information in commands such as ubos-admin createsite visually much
simpler. It also makes it easier to distinguish between informational messages and
errors.
ubos-admin backup is now the unified command for all backups in UBOS.
Extra commands like ubos-admin backup-to-amazon-s3 are gone. ubos-admin backup
can do it all, and more! It has learned not only to back up to local files, and
to Amazon S3, but also to remote hosts with protocols such as ftp, sftp,
scp, rsync, http and https. All that’s needed is to specify
a backup destination with the protocol prefix, such as s3://mybucket/myfile.
ubos-admin backup can also encrypt backups automatically, and the key management
for that has become much simpler.
Upgrades have become faster, and require less storage.
The UBOS documentation now exists in two places:
at ubos.net/docs, as before, you find the documentation
for the green (“production”) release channel.
at ubos.net/docs-yellow, which is new, you find
the documentation for the
(Updated: merged back together)yellow (“beta”) release channel.
As UBOS gets promoted through the release channels, new features will first
show up on yellow, and its documentation section, and later make it into
green. That clears up some confusion where sometimes the documentation seemed
to say one thing, but the software did something else: now you can refer to the
documentation that goes with your release channel.
As usual, lots of other smaller improvements and fixes of bugs and annoyances.
The more detailed release notes are here.
As always, we love your feedback.
2018-12-13
Nextcloud 15 was released this week, and tutorials are appearing on the web how to install it on various operating systems. As a UBOS user, I can only marvel how complicated it is … compared to UBOS. Let’s compare:
on Ubuntu: Nextcloud auf Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS mit nginx, MariaDB, PHP, Let’s Encrypt, Redis und Fail2ban. States that the required amount of work is about 3 hours.
on Ubuntu: How to install Nextcloud 15 on Ubuntu with php7.3-fpm Apache2 and HTTP/2. Admittedly UBOS currently does not do fpm or HTTP/2, but those only add minimally to the length of the instructions. About 1400+ words of instructions to follow.
on OpenBSD: NextCloud on OpenBSD - updated. Says: “coffee is needed”. About 1800 words of instructions to follow.
on Synology: How to fix PHP 7 bash error to update Nextcloud on Synology? Only deals with one possible error. Approx 460 words of instructions to follow.
(Words counted by copy-pasting the “meat” of the instructions from Firefox “reader view” into BBEdit, and using their word count)
In comparison, here are the instructions for UBOS. Enter the following commands, and answer the questions:
% sudo ubos-admin update
% sudo ubos-admin createsite
If you’d like the Redis cache, enter nextcloud-cache-redis in the question about accessories.
And if you want a letsencrypt certificate for your site, append --tls --letsencrypt to the
second (createsite) command. This would make the setup similar to the above tutorials.
Either way, it takes, well, about 2 minutes, most of which is waiting for the computer to do its thing. Why should you have to bother with an operating system that makes installing Nextcloud more complicated?
Upgrades are even simpler:
% sudo ubos-admin update
Strike a solid win for UBOS I would think. #ubosrocks
P.S. UBOS runs on PCs, cloud, and ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi, and if you like to get it pre-installed, consider buying a UBOSbox.