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:
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.