2025-03-14

Release notes: UBOS Gears update 2025-03-14

/releases/2025-03-14/release-notes/

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?

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