Release Notes

/releases/

The most recent release is first in this list:

  • 2025-03-14

    Release notes: UBOS Gears update 2025-03-14

    Release overview

    This release provides new functionality for UBOS Gears, and some bug fixes in UBOS Linux

    Highlights:

    • New package ubos-gears-lib-python is starting to implement ubos-admin functionality as a Python library. That makes it easier to integrate UBOS Gears functionality with other software. This is a very early release that covers only a small subset of ubos-admin functionality, but it’s a start.

    • Over time, we are planning to migrate ubos-admin (the command-line interface, still implemented in Perl) to Python in new package ubos-gears. This new package contains CLI commands that interact with ubos-gears-lib-python. Just like ubos-gears-lib-python, this release contains a very early version that is far from complete. While the core command will be ug (for UBOS Gears), rather than ubos-admin, the subcommands are expected to be largely the same, and a few are working already.

      For now, continue to use ubos-admin.

    • New packages ubos-gears-cloud, ubos-gears-cloud-lib-python and ubos-gears-cloud-aws implement new functionality that simplifies the provisioning and management of virtual Devices in the cloud.

      Similarly to ubos-gears and ubos-gears-lib-python, they are split into a library package and a CLI package. The CLI commands start with ugc (“UBOS Gears Cloud”). In addition, the actual connection between the library and the cloud provider API is factored out into separate “driver” packages that are discovered at run-time, making it easy to write code to support additional cloud providers. Our initial target is AWS via the boto3 library.

      Currently, we have only built these packages to run on UBOS Linux, but the intent is that they can be run on any Python platform, such as any developer/devops workstation without virtualization or such.

      These packages are also very early, but we have already used them quite successfully to simplify the creation and test of UBOS cloud images. For example:

      % ucg createimage <suitable options>
% ugc createinstance <suitable options>

      creates a new AMI, and then runs the AMI with extra swap and /ubos volumes.

    • Most notable fix in this release: automatic cloud-init setup when running UBOS Linux in the cloud.

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first check the status of your Device:

    • sudo ubos-admin status

    and make sure everything is in working order. Then create a backup of all your sites, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Depending on what apps you have installed and how much data they manage, and the speed of your disk and network, the upgrade can take a while.

    Need help?

    Find us in the Fediverse at @ubos@mastodon.social with an app such as Mastodon.

  • 2024-11-16

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2025-01-25

    Release overview

    This release mostly tracks package updates from our upstream distro: Arch Linux.

    Approximately 1000 packages have been updated.

    Platforms

    This release is available on x86_64 (Intel) and aarch64 (ARM) platforms, running on such physical and virtual devices such as:

    • Intel computers
    • Amazon EC2 instances
    • The ESPRESSOBIN
    • Virtual Machines on x86_64 and aarch64 including on Apple Silicon Macs.

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first check the status of your Device:

    • sudo ubos-admin status

    and make sure everything is in working order. Then create a backup of all your sites, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Depending on what apps you have installed and how much data they manage, and the speed of your disk and network, the upgrade can take a while.

    Need help?

    Find us in the Fediverse at @ubos@mastodon.social with an app such as Mastodon.

  • 2024-11-16

    Release notes: UBOS apps update 2024-11-16

    Release overview

    This release upgrades the default Nextcloud version to 28, and tracks recent WordPress updates.

    Major updated packages

    This release upgrades the following UBOS apps and accessories:

    • Nextcloud;
    • WordPress.

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first check the status of your Device:

    • sudo ubos-admin status

    and make sure everything is in working order. Then create a backup of all your sites, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Depending on what apps you have installed and how much data they manage, and the speed of your disk and network, the upgrade can take a while.

    Need help?

    Find us in the Fediverse at @ubos@mastodon.social with an app such as Mastodon.

  • 2024-11-07

    Release notes: UBOS update 2024-11-07

    Release overview

    This release is mostly a bug fix release to meet the needs of FediTest, which uses UBOS Linux and UBOS Gears to automate the provisioning and unprovisioning of Apps such as Mastodon and WordPress with ActivityPub plugins for Fediverse interoperability testing purposes.

    Major updated packages

    This release upgrades some of the UBOS apps, their accessories, and some UBOS Gears components, notably:

    • Mastodon;
    • Matomo;
    • Nextcloud;
    • WordPress.

    The WordPress plugin that adds support for the Mastodon API was added.

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first check the status of your Device:

    • sudo ubos-admin status

    and make sure everything is in working order. Then create a backup of all your sites, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Depending on what apps you have installed and how much data they manage, and the speed of your disk and network, the upgrade can take a while.

    Known issues

    • Nextcloud reports issues with its integrity check. This is ugly but benign, see this issue.

    Need help?

    Find us in the Fediverse at @ubos@mastodon.social with an app such as Mastodon.

  • 2024-08-17

    Release notes: UBOS update 2024-08-17

    Release overview

    • The Mastodon package has been upgraded and improved:

      • The automatically provisioned Mastodon account now has role “owner”.
      • The Mastodon media cache is skipped during backup: in a typical installation, its size dwarfs other data sets, and the content can be re-fetched if a backup needs to be restored. This makes backups with ubos-admin backup faster and much smaller.
      • One of the Mastodon systemd services now starts later so it avoids an unnecessary restart due to errors upon installation.
      • The updated Mastodon configuration now makes it more likely that if it is installed in a Linux container, it can be accessed from the host without running into some server-side request forgery prevention code implemented by Mastodon.
      • Mastodon is now available on the “green” (production) Release Channel.

    • The Nextcloud package has been upgraded and the redirect from a Nextcloud installed in a subdirectory, when accessed without the trailing slash, is back.

    • The WordPress package now automatically sets a permalink structure that is compatible with the ActivityPub plugin; no manual activation is required any more.

    • There are newly created Developer VMs. This makes things easier for developers as they don’t need to make systemd configuration changes to track recent systemd updates (changed keyword). The VM names have become a bit more consistent, too.

    • The default networking configuration has changed so that entries in /etc/hosts are also served via DNS, as dnsmasq does, for example. This makes certain development tasks much simpler as developers do not need to configure a separate name server.

    • ubos-admin showsite has become more flexible and usable.

    • systemd is less likely to time out certbot (random delay removed).

    • Tor support has been removed due to little use.

    • Support for apps Selfoss, River, PhpBB, Mediawiki, Mattermost, and Known has been removed due to little use.

    • Various other smaller fixes. You find the list of issues fixed in this release here.

    • Further website updates.

    • We also have completed our code migration from GitHub to GitLab, and from hosting the Depot on Amazon S3 to Digital Ocean.

    Updated and added packages

    This release upgrades some of the UBOS apps, their accessories, and some UBOS Gears components, notably:

    • Mastodon;
    • Matomo;
    • Nextcloud;
    • WordPress.

    The WordPress plugin that adds support for the Mastodon API was added.

    To upgrade

    If you have Mastodon running on your Device, make a backup with ubos-admin backup. Then, after the upgrade, you must manually restore the content of the directory /ubos/lib/mastodon/<appconfigid>/mastodon/public/system/. This is a one-time activity we did not automate in this release.

    To be safe, first check the status of your Device:

    • sudo ubos-admin status

    and make sure everything is in working order. Then create a backup of all your sites, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Depending on what apps you have installed and how much data they manage, and the speed of your disk and network, the upgrade can take a while.

    Known issues

    • Nextcloud reports issues with its integrity check. This is ugly but benign, see this issue.

    Need help?

    Find us in the Fediverse at @ubos@mastodon.social with an app such as Mastodon.

  • 2024-06-09

    Update now: ssh vulnerability 2024-07-01

    Release overview

    Earlier today, the OpenSSH project issued a patch that addresses a critical security issue that may allow a remote attacker to fully take over systems.

    The affected openssh package in the UBOS repositories has been updated.

    You are advised to upgrade immediately if your UBOS Device is in any way exposed to the internet.

    You can read more about the issue in the OpenSSH release notes.

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first check the status of your Device:

    • sudo ubos-admin status

    and make sure everything is in working order. Then create a backup of all your sites, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Depending on what apps you have installed and how much data they manage, and the speed of your disk and network, the upgrade can take a while.

    Then restart your device:

    • sudo systemctl restart

    Need help?

    Find us in the Fediverse at @ubos@mastodon.social with an app such as Mastodon.

  • 2024-06-09

    Release notes: UBOS apps update 2024-06-09

    Release overview

    Update 2024-06-13: Some issues including fixed today, including a missing dependency (libsodium) for some Nextcloud configurations.

    Updated packages

    This release upgrades some of the UBOS apps and their accessories, notably:

    • Matomo;
    • Nextcloud, and many of its accessories;
    • WebTrees;
    • WordPress, and many of its accessories.

    Nextcloud 28 and 29 packages were also added.

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first check the status of your Device:

    • sudo ubos-admin status

    and make sure everything is in working order. Then create a backup of all your sites, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Depending on what apps you have installed and how much data they manage, and the speed of your disk and network, the upgrade can take a while.

    Known issues

    • Nextcloud reports issues with its integrity check. This is ugly but benign, see this issue.

    • tor support is currently broken.

    Need help?

    Find us in the Fediverse at @ubos@mastodon.social with an app such as Mastodon.

  • 2024-04-09

    Release notes: UBOS Linux, Gears and apps update 2024-04-09

    Important changes – MUST READ

    The armv7h processor architecture is end-of-life

    Starting with this release, we will release on x86_64 and aarch64 only. Hardware moves on, and resources are better spend on current CPU architectures.

    UBOS Docker containers are end-of-file

    Running UBOS in a Docker container has never worked very well. That’s because Docker wants to containerize a single process, and any UBOS system runs many processes. We cannot recommend that anybody run UBOS in Docker, and so there is no point in continuing to build UBOS Docker containers.

    However, running Docker containers to bring Apps to be managed by UBOS Gears continues to work and can be very advantageous for certain Apps.

    New location of the UBOS Depot

    We distribute UBOS code through the Depot. The location of the Depot has moved from Amazon S3 to Digital Ocean, mostly because Amazon S3 now fails to serve files over HTTP that contain certain entirely valid characters, such as +, which are part of certain file names we get from our upstream distro, Arch Linux. This has unfortunately prevented some users from upgrading their Devices and we can’t have that. Digital Ocean Spaces doesn’t have that problem.

    The Depot’s domain name is also changing from depot.ubos.net to depot.ubosfiles.net. We have set up a redirect, so the old URLs should continue to work. However, it is recommended that you:

    • become root;
    • edit all files in directory /etc/pacman.d/repositories.d/ and change all occurrences of http://depot.ubos.net/ to https://depot.ubosfiles.net/. Note also the change from http to https (Due to package signing, this does not actually do much for additional security, but we might as well.)

    A new name: UBOS Gears

    Starting in this release, we introduce a new name: UBOS Gears. UBOS Gears refers to the management functionality that has been developed as part of UBOS Project, while from now on, UBOS Linux only refers to the Linux distribution that is comparable to other Linux distributions.

    There are several reasons for this change. An important one is that now we have a name for the extremely time-saving management features that UBOS Project brings to the table, instead of people simply thinking of UBOS Linux as another Linux distro like so many others.

    ubos.net website is work in progress

    You probably noticed the new layout and color scheme. We are also changing the way we talk about the UBOS Project, because the need and opportunities have grown, and our ambitions have grown, too! This is currently work in progress. Pardon our mess.

    Release overview

    New packages

    This update contains hundreds of updated and new packages, focused on UBOS Linux. There are some minor app updates as well.

    UBOS Gears has seen significant work but which will mostly only be visible in the future.

    There are new virtual machines for developers on VirtualBox, UTM, Parallels and for those developers who like to work with systemd-nspawn directly.

    To upgrade

    Warning

    If you are running UBOS on an Amazon Web Services EC2 “t2” instance, do not run this upgrade. The now fairly old t2 instances do not support the newer Linux kernel we are using, and will fail to reboot. Instead, migrate your sites to a newer instance type (e.g. “t3”), such as by creating a backup of your sites to Amazon S3 with ubos-admin backup, and then restoring them to the new instance with ubos-admin restore.

    To be safe, first check the status of your Device:

    • sudo ubos-admin status

    and make sure everything is in working order. Then create a backup of all your sites, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    As as so many packages are new, the upgrade can take a while.

    Note

    This upgrade can take a long time (hours), because some cryptographic keys need to be updated, and the key server we depend on can be very slow. If you don’t like this, first update your keys:

    • log on as root, and run pacman-key --refresh-keys, and then
    • run ubos-admin update --nokeyrefresh

    This will take about the same amount of time, but your Sites will continue to be working while pacman-key is running. The actual update then can be much faster.

    Networking changes

    If you do not have network connectivity after you upgrade, and you are running the client netconfig, re-set your network configuration:

    % sudo ubos-admin setnetconfig client

    Known issues

    • Nextcloud reports issues with its integrity check. This is ugly but benign, see this issue.

    • tor support is currently broken.

    Need help?

    Find us in the Fediverse at @ubos@mastodon.social with an app such as Mastodon.

  • 2023-06-13

    Release notes: UBOS Linux OS and apps update 2023-06-13

    Release overview

    This update contains hundreds of updated and new packages, both on an operating system level and applications. There are a few bug fixes, but mostly this update consists of updated packages.

    Both the “yellow” and the “green” release channel have been updated.

    Notable app upgrades:

    • Nextcloud is now at version 26.
    • Mediawiki is now at version 1.39.3.
    • Decko is now at version 0.15.6.
    • Mastodon is now at version 4.1.2 (yellow channel only)

    To upgrade

    Warning

    If you are running UBOS on an Amazon Web Services EC2 “t2” instance, do not run this upgrade. The now fairly old t2 instances do not support the newer Linux kernel we are using, and will fail to reboot. Instead, migrate your sites to a newer instance type (e.g. “t3”), such as by creating a backup of your sites to Amazon S3 with ubos-admin backup, and then restoring them to the new instance with ubos-admin restore.

    To be safe, first check the status of your Device:

    • sudo ubos-admin status

    and make sure everything is in working order. Then create a backup of all your sites, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    As as so many packages are new, the upgrade can take a while.

    Note

    This upgrade can take a long time (hours), because some cryptographic keys need to be updated, and the key server we depend on can be very slow. If you don’t like this, first update your keys:

    • log on as root, and run pacman-key --refresh-keys, and then
    • run ubos-admin update --nokeyrefresh

    This will take about the same amount of time, but your Sites will continue to be working while pacman-key is running. The actual update then can be much faster.

    Need help?

    Find us in the Fediverse at @ubos@mastodon.social with an app such as Mastodon.

  • 2023-05-15

    Discontinuing armv6 support

    Starting with today’s release, we are discontinuing support for armv6 devices, such as the original Raspberry Pi and Pi Zero.

    They were sweet devices for their time, but times have moved on, and few people are stilling using them. Most of the app on UBOS need more computing power anyway than those devices provided.

    Instead, that lets us focus on newer hardware platforms and innovative code. Onwards!