2024-04-09

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

/releases/2024-04-09/release-notes/

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.