Release Notes

/releases/

The most recent release is first in this list:

  • 2020-09-26

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2020-09-26

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first 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

    What’s new

    New features

    • ubos-install has largely been rewritten, for more options and easier extensibility in the future. It is now also able to handle a larger variety of external flash disks and controllers and won’t fail if the disk controller reports a “strange” geometry.
    • ubos-install now will refuse to start if it does not appear an internet connection is available, and downloading of UBOS packages would fail.
    • The device class odroid-xu3 enables UBOS to run on ODROID devices XU3, XU4, as well as HC1 and HC2.
    • On a Raspberry Pi 4, UBOS can now boot directly from an external USB disk. This means SD cards are not needed any more for UBOS on the Pi 4, which translates into faster speeds and higher reliability. (Depending on the version of the boot loader that your Pi 4 has, you may need to temporarily use an SD card to upgrade the bootloader, but that is a one-time operation.)
    • Logging on as the root user now requires a password. More details.

    Notable new packages:

    • Package rpi-eeprom lets you update your Raspberry Pi 4’s bootloader, so you can boot entirely without SD card from a USB stick or disk. More details.
    • Package pi-bluetooth are Bluetooth drivers for the Raspberry Pi 3.
    • Package ntfs-3g for mounting NTFS disks

    Package upgrades:

    Over 700 packages were upgraded.

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-23.

    Known problems

    Note: You may receive a message that says “Failed to refresh some expired keys”. This is harmless and you can ignore it. As part of this update, we have switched to different key servers that are less likely to have this problem.

  • 2020-08-16

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2020-08-16

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

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

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Note: You may receive a message that says “Failed to refresh some expired keys”. This is harmless and you can ignore it.

    What’s new

    New platforms

    • The Raspberry Pi 4 is now supported, and the documentation has been updated with instructions for how to install UBOS on it.

    New features

    • App Nextcloud can now use ftp servers and SMB network drives as external storage.
    • App Nextcloud’s maximum memory and maximum upload size can now be easily configured. By default, each are 512MB, but you can set different values right in your Site JSON file. For an existing Site, export the Site JSON file with sudo ubos-admin showsite --json, look for the new customization points, change the values there, and redeploy with sudo ubos-admin deploy --file ....
    • Accessories required by other Accessories deployed at the same AppConfiguration are now deployed automatically. This often makes life easier when running commands such as ubos-admin createsite because UBOS will automatically figure out what other Accessories are required and deploy them without further ado.
    • ubos-admin status can now be run while other commands are running. This is useful for troubleshooting.
    • Easier to copy-paste site administrator passwords from the UBOS Staff: there is a new icon, and it can be used without displaying the password on screen.
    • ubos-admin listsites --with-installable allows you to just list those sites on a device that have a certain App or Accessory installed.
    • ubos-admin status now can also show snapper snapshot information

    Other improvements

    • If there is only one Site on a device, ubos-admin showsite does not require you to specify its identifier or hostname.
    • sudo ubos-admin setup-shepherd, when invoked without arguments, sets up a shepherd account with a newly generated SSH key pair.
    • Letsencrypt has gained a logrotate file, to avoid endless log files
    • ubos-admin status now has exit code 1 if there are problems, for easier scripting.
    • The HTML saved to the UBOS Staff now has a note if it was saved when no network was available. In this case, no hyperlinks will be generated either.
    • Processes on the UBOS device can now connect to localhost via IPv6.
    • ubos-admin showsite no longer shows internal customizationpoints. They are also not displayed in the HTML generated on the UBOS Staff any more.
    • Webfinger support now always uses utf-8.
    • Restoring sites from backup, and during upgrades, has become faster when there are many files to restore.
    • Values for new customizationpoints are automatically added during upgrades.
    • ubos-admin createsite does not exit any more when a package is specified as an App or Accessory that isn’t actually one.
    • ubos-install performs more checking for potential issues before attempting to install.
    • Better error messages, progress messages and sanity checks.

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-22.

  • 2020-08-04

    Release notes: apps update 2020-08-04

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first 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

    Note: You may receive a message that says “Failed to refresh some expired keys”. This is harmless and you can ignore it.

    New packages in this version

    • The Collabora Online “app” is now available for Nextcloud. When creating the Site, you need to add nextcloud-richdocuments and nextcloud-richdocumentscode as Accessories.

    • The Nextcloud forms app is now available. Add nextcloud-forms to your list of Accessories.

    Major package upgrades in this version

    • Matomo now at 3.14.0

    • MediaWiki now at 1.34.2

    • Nextcloud and many Nextcloud accessories. Nextcloud is now at version 19.0.1.

    • Webtrees now at 2.0.7

    • WordPress and many WordPress accessories. WordPress is now at version 5.4.2.

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-apps-23.

  • 2020-06-03

    Release notes: apps update 2020-06-03

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first 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

    Major package upgrades in this version

    • Matomo

    • Nextcloud and many Nextcloud accessories

    • MediaWiki

    • Webtrees

    • WordPress and many WordPress accessories

    Documentation

    Common use cases for modifying deployed Sites are now described here.

    Known issues

    If you are running Wordpress with a theme that is not bundled by default any more in recent releases, Wordpress may come up blank after the upgrade. To fix, log into Wordpress from the browser (at relative URL /wp-admin) and select a different theme. Or add your old theme into your Site JSON as an explicit accessory.

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-apps-22.

  • 2020-03-09

    Release notes: apps update 2020-03-09

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first 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

    What’s new

    Nextcloud Hub is now available natively on UBOS

    Like the collaboration features of Google Docs? But not the (lack of) privacy? The new Nextcloud Hub now provides features very similar to Google Docs through an integration with OnlyOffice, and you can run them on your UBOS device that you control. So you, and only you, decide who gets to see your data.

    Our friends at Nextcloud have more details about Nextcloud Hub. And on UBOS, you can install it with just a single command:

    sudo ubos-admin createsite

    Specify nextcloud as the app, and your selection of accessories, such as: nextcloud-cache-redis, nextcloud-calendar, nextcloud-contacts, nextcloud-documentserver-community, nextcloud-onlyoffice, nextcloud-spreed, nextcloud-text.

    Available on x86_64 only, not ARM (an OnlyOffice limitation).

    Significant new functionality:

    • Nextcloud full-text search. Install accessories nextcloud-fulltextsearch, nextcloud-files-fulltextsearch and nextcloud-fulltextsearch-elasticsearch.

    • Nextcloud real-time document editing (see above).

    Package upgrades:

    • Mastodon

    • Matomo

    • Mattermost

    • Mediawiki, and accessories

    • Nextcloud, and accessories, have a major new version

    • phpBB

    • Webtrees has a major new version

    • Wordpress

    Known issues

    If you run the Nextcloud OnlyOffice integration (accessory nextcloud-documentserver-community), you may receive message “ONLYOFFICE cannot be reached. Please contact admin”. This is because you accessed your Nextcloud through a hostname or IP address different from what the Nextcloud installation expected.

    To set the address at which the document server is available, go to the OnlyOffice Settings in the Nextcloud user interface (as administrator, go to Settings, section Administration, select ONLYOFFICE), and edit the Document Editing Service address. The URL there must start with the same protocol, hostname and path as the URL you are using to access Nextcloud.

    You may also need to set this the first time you access Nextcloud after initial deployment.

    This has been filed as an issue with the Nextcloud project here.

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-apps-21.

  • 2020-02-17

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2020-02-17

    ##To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

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

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    What’s new

    New features

    • System logs are now written onto the UBOS Staff when booted while it is present. This makes troubleshooting of issues on devices that don’t have an associated keyboard or monitor much simpler.

    • UBOS now knows how to handle major Postgres updates automatically.

    • The Storj decentralized storage platform is now available on the UBOS “yellow” release channel. Storj provides functionality similar to Amazon Web Services’ S3, but instead of sending your data to somebody else’s cloud, Storj breaks it down into small, encrypted pieces and stores them on computers owned by users like you. You can also offer part of your own disk to other users, all at prices that are lower than S3.

    Notable new packages:

    • Arduino command-line tools
    • Platform.io command-line tools

    Package upgrades:

    Over 600 packages were upgraded.

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-21.

    Known problems

    If you receive a message about “unknown trust” when installing a package or updating your system, see Installing a new Package or upgrading fails with a message about “unknown trust”.

  • 2019-11-12

    Release notes: apps update 2019-11-12

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    What’s new

    Package upgrades:

    • Matomo has been upgraded to 3.12.0

    • Mattermost has been upgraded to 5.15.2

    • Mediawiki has been upgraded to 1.33.1

    • Nextcloud has been upgraded to 17.0.1. Also, the following accessories were upgraded or newly added:

      • nextcloud-audioplayer
      • nextcloud-bookmarks
      • nextcloud-cache-redis
      • nextcloud-calendar
      • nextcloud-contacts
      • nextcloud-deck
      • nextcloud-files-rightclick
      • nextcloud-group-everyone
      • nextcloud-groupfolders
      • nextcloud-mail
      • nextcloud-markdown
      • nextcloud-news
      • nextcloud-notes
      • nextcloud-onlyoffice
      • nextcloud-passwords
      • nextcloud-social
      • nextcloud-socialsharing-email
      • nextcloud-socialsharing-facebook
      • nextcloud-socialsharing-twitter
      • nextcloud-spreed
      • nextcloud-tasks
      • nextcloud-text
      • nextcloud-twofactor-totp

    • The package nextcloud16 was added. nextcloud15 was upgraded.

    • Shaarli has been upgraded to 0.11.1

    • Wordpress has been upgraded to 5.2.4. Also, the following accessories were upgraded or newly added:

      • wordpress-plugin-classic-editor
      • wordpress-plugin-google-analytics-for-wordpress
      • wordpress-plugin-indieauth
      • wordpress-plugin-indieweb-post-kinds
      • wordpress-plugin-semantic-linkbacks
      • wordpress-plugin-seo
      • wordpress-plugin-simple-location
      • wordpress-plugin-social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g
      • wordpress-plugin-webmention
      • wordpress-plugin-wp-mail-smtp
      • wordpress-theme-responsive

    New features

    Those apps that may send e-mail now automatically activate a local, outgoing e-mail server (postfix). However, you may need to work around your internet service provider to actually get mail out from your home network: see /docs/gears/apps/amazonses.md.

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-apps-20.

    Known problems

    In one instance, a Matomo upgrade failed with Error in Matomo: Mysqli prepare error: Access denied for user ... to database .... This problem goes away if the Goals plugin is disabled (go to Administration / System / Plugins).

    Note on skipped Nextcloud major version upgrades

    If you have not upgraded your UBOS device running Nextcloud for a while, the Nextcloud upgrader may not be able to upgrade your installation in one go. As a workaround, we have introduced packages nextcloud16 and nextcloud15, which contain Nextcloud version 16 and 15, respectively. You can use these packages as an intermediate step to upgrade from an earlier Nextcloud to the current version. This is described in more detail in :doc:/users/apps/nextcloud.

  • 2019-10-10

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2019-10-10

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

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

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Please refer to the main documentation for details.

    Notable changes

    This is mostly a package upgrade release with some small bug fixes and additions to the documentation.

    • More than 500 packages have been upgraded or newly added.

    • The Arch installation instructions for developers have been updated to cover UEFI-only PCs.

    Note

    On the ESPRESSObin, you need to update your boot loader, otherwise booting your system will fail. This is newly documented at /docs/gears/installation/espressobin.md.

  • 2019-09-01

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2019-09-01

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptodirectory ~

    (Note that after this update, you also need to specify --all; see below.)

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Please refer to the main documentation for details.

    New and improved functionality for users:

    • Command ubos-admin status has become much more useful, for users to determine the health of their device, and to make customer support simpler. Specifically:

      • by default, it shows a summary of all there is to know about the device, such as the type of the device, which disks are attached, how much space is used on those disks, when the device was last updated, and whether there are any known problems with the device.

      • optional flags (such as --problems) allow to easily zoom into specific areas.

    • Backups have become faster, as UBOS now applies a heuristic on which files to compress and which to use as-is in the backup file, as some file formats are compressed already.

    • Integration with the LetsEncrypt certificate authority has been significantly improved, and various bugs have been fixed:

      • When we tested a LetsEncrypt-protected site running on UBOS with the tools provided by SSL Labs, we obtained an “A” rating. All other LetsEncrypt-protected sites running on UBOS should, too, after this upgrade.

      • When backing up a LetsEncrypt-protected site, it can be easily restored to a different hostname: UBOS will automatically obtain a certificate for the new hostname.

      • When undeploying LetsEncrypt-protected sites, UBOS now stashes still-valid certificates, and reuses them when such a Site is redeployed on the same device. This avoids running into rate-limiting features by LetsEncrypt that you may encounter when performing many systems administration tasks in a rapid sequence, for example.

      • UBOS will not use an expired LetsEncrypt certificate to deploy a Site, or to restore a Site from backup; instead it will provision a new one.

      • Renewal of expiring certificates is now in-place, requiring no more manual steps.

      • UBOS now also automatically serves intermediate LetsEncrypt certs.

    • Integration with Pagekite for accessing a UBOS device behind a firewall has been further improved:

      • Pagekite secrets can now be specified interactively.

      • Wildcard sites are now supported.

    • Backing up with ubos-admin backup has been improved:

      • Either the Site(s) or --all must be specified when backing up. This avoids the frequent user mistake of accidentally backing up all Sites on a multi-Site device by forgetting to specify which Site (only) was supposed to be backed up.

      • The new --resolve flag, inherited from curl, makes backing up over the network without official DNS entries (e.g. on a home LAN) much simpler.

      • The upload to a network destination phase of ubos-admin backup (after the backup to a local file stage is complete) no longer prevents the invocation of other ubos-admin commands.

    • ubos-admin showsite has learned new tricks:

      • with argument --adminuser, information about the Site administrator is shown. This makes it easy to find out, for example, what the administrator username and password is for a deployed app like Nextcloud.

      • Credentials and private customizationpoint values are not shown any more default. To see them, you need to explicitly specify argument --credentials or --privatecustomizationpoints.

    • ubos-admin showappconfig now also shows which Site the AppConfiguration belongs to.

    • ubos-admin deploy --template can now automatically generate self-signed certificates if an empty "tls" : {} is provided in the Site JSON template.

    • ubos-admin listsites --html emits HTML.

    • ubos-admin createsite can now use a Site JSON template file as a template, and will ask the user only about those values that aren’t already provided.

    • ubos-install will refuse to install to a mounted disk. However, it will now install to the target of a symbolic link. This makes installations more predictable by supporting destinations such as below /dev/disk/by-path.

    • 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.

    • UBOS boots without the quiet kernel option. For the UBOS use cases, seeing more information during boot is better rather than less.

    • The output of some ubos-admin commands, such as ubos-admin showsite has become more concise; additional flags make it more verbose.

    • Improved progress messages.

    • Various documentation improvements.

    New and improved functionality for developers:

    • 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.

    • Customizationpoints can now be of type float in addition to the previously available types.

    • Customizationpoints can be marked as internal, and if so, will not be shown to the user by default. That reduces user confusion and improves security related to customizationpoints such as password salts, or Redis credentials.

    • Systemd service smtp-server@<appconfigid>.service is now available so that apps that require a local SMTP service can say so without interfering with each other.

    • 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.

    • The generic Role in the UBOS manifest may now specify depends entries.

    • By default, PHP allows access to both /tmp and /ubos/tmp.

    • The default Mariadb encoding is now utf8mb4.

    • The webapptest testing framework has new abilities:

      • Flag --tlsselfsigned runs the test over TLS with an automatically-generated, self-signed TLS certificate.

      • webapptest can now use Site JSON templates.

    • pacsane now accepts relative path names.

    Notable fixes:

    • Some networks have slow DNS servers, and that has caused some iptables restarts to fail. This has been made more robust.

    • Upgrades of deployed sites, or restores from backup now install new role dependencies declared in the manifest. They were previously ignored.

    • Pagekite now works with wildcard Sites.

    • WPA supplicant files are generated more defensively for higher user success with specifying WiFi credentials with the UBOS Staff.

    Changes in shipped packages:

    • The Apache webserver was upgraded.

    • We only ship Node LTS, no other Node versions.

    • Monero was removed.

    • We removed the ruby-rails-blog example application for Ruby on Rails; decko is better, real-world example.

    • Each device class supported by UBOS has a pre-installed specific package, such as ubos-deviceclass-pc.

    • A patched version of LetsEncrypt test Certificate Authority pebble ships in os-experimental. It issues certificates with a very short expiration time, to help with testing.

    Application updates:

    There were minor updates to the following apps:

    • Decko
    • Matomo
    • Mediawiki
    • Nextcloud
    • phpBB
    • Wordpress

  • 2019-07-23

    Release notes: apps update 2019-07-23

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    What’s new

    New functionality:

    • If you have not upgraded your UBOS device running Nextcloud for a while, the Nextcloud upgrader may not be able to upgrade your installation in one go. As a workaround, we have introduced package nextcloud15, which contains Nextcloud version 15. You can use this package as an intermediate step to upgrade from an earlier Nextcloud to the current version. This is described in more detail in /docs/gears/apps/nextcloud.md.

    • If you redeploy your Site running Nextcloud with a different administrator password than originally, the Nextcloud installation will be updated with the new admin password. This makes for an effective admin password reset.

    Package upgrades:

    • Mediawiki has been upgraded to 1.33.0

    • Nextcloud has been upgraded to 16.0.3. Also, the following accessories were upgraded or newly added:

      • nextcloud-audioplayer
      • nextcloud-auto-mail-accounts
      • nextcloud-bookmarks
      • nextcloud-bruteforcesettings
      • nextcloud-contacts
      • nextcloud-deck
      • nextcloud-groupfolders
      • nextcloud-mail
      • nextcloud-notes
      • nextcloud-onlyoffice
      • nextcloud-passwords
      • nextcloud-social
      • nextcloud-spreed
      • nextcloud-tasks
      • nextcloud-twofactor-totp

    • Wordpress has been upgraded to 5.2.2. Also, the following accessories were upgraded or newly added:

      • wordpress-plugin-google-analytics-for-wordpress
      • wordpress-plugin-indieauth
      • wordpress-plugin-indieweb-post-kinds
      • wordpress-plugin-micropub
      • wordpress-plugin-semantic-linkbacks
      • wordpress-plugin-seo
      • wordpress-plugin-social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g
      • wordpress-plugin-syndication-links
      • wordpress-plugin-webmention
      • wordpress-plugin-wp-mail-smtp
      • wordpress-theme-responsive
      • wordpress-theme-twentyfifteen
      • wordpress-theme-twentyfourteen
      • wordpress-theme-twentythirteen
      • wordpress-theme-twentytwelve

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-apps-19.