Ubuntu: Unbreaking Unbootable Ubuntu, Snaps Shrunk and More

• Unbreaking Unbootable Ubuntu

  I run Ubuntu Hirsute - the development release which will become 21.04 - on a bunch of systems. It’s a trade-off though, getting the latest crack each and every day. Being at the bleeding edge of new packages landing means I can experience brand new shiny bugs on my systems. Bugs like 1915579 which rendered my system unbootable.

• Honey, I Shrunk the Snap! | Ubuntu

  The year is 1989. I bought a computer game called F-16: Combat Pilot, a flight simulator featuring free-flight, five types of single-player missions, a full campaign mode, serial-port multiplayer, and then some. Gloriously wrapped in four colors and magnetized on two single-density 5.25-inch floppy disks. Total size: 680 KB. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for individual applications to weigh dozens if not hundreds of megabytes. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In Linux, you can save some space by using libraries that are shared across multiple applications (hence their name, shared libraries). When it comes to self-contained application formats like snaps, the tables are turned once again, as snaps bundle all the necessary dependencies inside, and thus take more disk space. If you want to make your snapped applications as small and lean as possible, we have a few neat suggestions. [...] The final artifact of the snap build process is a compressed squashFS file, with the .snap suffix. Originally, snaps were compressed using the xz algorithm, for highest compatibility with the widest range of devices. More recently, in order to help speed us snap launch times, we also introduced the use of the lzo algorithm, which results in 2-3x application startup times improvements. The main reason for this is the lesser compression used in lzo compared to xz, meaning the system needs fewer CPU cycles, and thus less time, to uncompress the snap on the system. However, it also introduces size inflation. [...] Disk utilization matters less now than it did a decade or two ago, but you can still try to make your applications small and tidy. This also helps reduce bandwidth usage, improves portability, and if you’re using system backups, reduces the time needed to copy all the relevant data. With snaps, there are many ways you can trim down on the digital excess, including the use of extensions, sparing use of necessary runtime dependencies, and pruning the extras from the prime directory. Not only will your snaps be smaller in size, you will also ensure higher consistency, better system integration and improve the application startup time. All these are important, highly noticeable elements of the user experience. If you have any other suggestions or ideas on how to conserve space or optimize snap creation, please join our forum and share your thoughts.

• Canonical keynote at Embedded World 2021: Bosch Rexroth achieves complete IoT automation with Ubuntu Core

  series that’s already being used in the current stable release, Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla). But that good news I want to share with you today is the fact that Ubuntu 21.04 will also offer several apps from the GNOME 40 stack.

• Bad Voltage 3×24: Weaponised Rooster

  Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest star Alan Pope present Bad Voltage, in which we are large and in charge, there is ancient history about electricians and phones...

IBM/Red Hat: Kafka Monthly Digest, Red Hat Upselling, and Cockpit 239

• Kafka Monthly Digest – February 2021

  This is the 37th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest! In this edition, I’ll cover what happened in the Apache Kafka community in February 2021.

• 5 ways Red Hat Insights can improve your sysadmin Life

  The way we do things is changing fast. This has become a necessity as our systems get more complex, our workloads evolve, and our deployments rapidly grow in size. Thanks to the innovations brought about by openness and collaboration, we can develop tools and services to cope with these quickly evolving times. For us to reap the benefits of these advancements, we should open ourselves to carefully exploring how various tools suit our requirements and fit into or change our norms. By doing so, we may simplify a lot of our mundane tasks, reduce overhead, and address the major pain points in our operations. Having worked as a sysadmin in the past, I've discovered many automation tools and services that have made my life easier. One of the most recent is Red Hat Insights. In this article, I share five ways this service that is included with your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscription can improve your life as an admin.

• Cockpit Project: Cockpit 239

  Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from Cockpit version 239.

LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community available for download

LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.1 includes over 90 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility. For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/. LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud. Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

croc Is A Tool For Resumable, Encrypted File And Folder Transfers Between Computers (Command Line)

croc is a free and open source command line tool for secure file transfers between computers. It uses relay-assisted peer-to-peer transactions and end-to-end encryption via password-authenticated key exchange. The program is written in Go and is available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux and *BSD. The idea behind croc is being able to transfer files and folders between cross-platform computers securely, fast and easy. With support for resumable, peer-to-peer transfers. As a bonus feature, croc is also able to securely transfer a short text or URL directly. The data transfer is done using a relay, either using raw TCP sockets or websockets. When the sender and the receiver are on the same LAN, croc uses a local relay, otherwise a public relay is used. Thanks to this, croc can send files between computers in the same LAN, or over the Internet, without having port-forwarding enabled. The data going through the relay is encrypted using a PAKE-generated session key. For this, croc uses code phrases, a combination of three random words. By default, a code phrase can only be used once between two parties, so an attacker would have a chance of less than 1 in 4 billion to guess the code phrase correctly to steal the data.