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Ubuntu: Unbreaking Unbootable Ubuntu, Snaps Shrunk and More

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 4th of March 2021 02:19:10 PM Filed under
Ubuntu

  • 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.

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    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...

»

Stephen Michael Kellat's take

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 4th of March 2021 03:08:42 PM.

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