LXD - Container Manager
Posted on Thu, Jul 8, 2021
| Alan Pope
Preamble I recently started working for InfluxData as a Developer Advocate on Telegraf, an open source server agent to collect metrics. Telegraf builds from source to ship as a single Go binary. The latest - 1.19.1 was released just yesterday.
Part of my job involves helping users by reproducing reported issues, and assisting developers by testing their pull requests. It’s fun stuff, I love it. Telegraf has an extensive set of plugins which supports gathering, aggregating & processing metrics, and sending the results to other systems.
[Read More]My Least Used Favourite App
Posted on Mon, Jul 5, 2021
| Alan Pope
I have so many applications on my Android Phone, I’ve lost count. Too many chat apps, multiple web browsers, tons of games, and other garbage.
However, there’s one app, which is one of my favourites while probably being the least used application. It doesn’t technically benefit me at all, but is useful to others, when I use it.
The app in question is “Be My Eyes”. It’s available for Android and iOS, and is very easy to setup.
[Read More]Adrift
Posted on Mon, Jun 14, 2021
| Alan Pope
Over the weekend I participated in FOSS Talk Live. Before The Event this would have been an in-person shindig at a pub in London. A bunch of (mostly) UK-based podcasters get together and record live versions of their shows in front of a “studio audience”. It’s mostly an opportunity for a bunch of us middle-aged farts who speak into microphones to get together, have a few beers and chat.
Due to The Event, this year it was a virtual affair, done online via YouTube.
[Read More]Disabling snap Autorefresh
Posted on Wed, May 26, 2021
(Last modified on Sat, May 29, 2021)
| Alan Pope
Preamble Until recently, I worked for Canonical on the Snap Advocacy Team. Some of the things in this blog post may have changed or been fixed since I left. It’s quite a long post, but I feel it’s neccessary to explain fully the status-quo. This isn’t intended to be a “hit piece” on my previous employer, but merely information sharing for those looking to control their own systems.
I’ve previously provided feedback in my previous role as Snap Advocate, to enable them to better control updates.
[Read More]New Pastures
Posted on Mon, May 17, 2021
| Alan Pope
I tweeted back at the start of April that I’m moving on from Canonical/Ubuntu.
Well, I left on April 30th, have had two weeks of ‘funemployment’, and today I start my new gig.
I’m now Developer Advocate for Telegraf at InfluxData, and I couldn’t be more excited! 🎉
Telegraf is an Open Source “agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics.”. I’ll be working with the Telegraf team and wider community of contributors.
[Read More]Diamond Rio PMP300
Posted on Tue, Mar 30, 2021
(Last modified on Mon, Apr 5, 2021)
| Alan Pope
My loft is a treasure trove of old crap. For some reason I keep a bunch of aged useless junk up there. That includes the very first MP3 player I owned.
Behold, the Diamond Rio PMP 300. Well, the box, in all its ’90s artwork glory.
Here’s the player. It’s powered by a single AA battery for somewhere around 8 hours of playback. It’s got 32MB (yes, MegaBytes) of on-board storage.
[Read More]Ubuntu 21.04 Testing Week
Posted on Thu, Mar 25, 2021
| Alan Pope
“Hirsute Hippo” is the project code-name for what will become Ubuntu 21.04 when it releases on April 22nd 2021.
On April 1st, the Beta of Ubuntu Hirsute will be released, but we’re no fools! This is a great time to do some testing!
So, starting on April 1st, we’re doing another Ubuntu Testing Week.
As always, everyone is welcome to test Ubuntu at any point in the year. But during the beta is a good time to focus on testing.
[Read More]GNOME OS 40 without GNOME Boxes
Posted on Wed, Mar 24, 2021
(Last modified on Tue, Aug 22, 2023)
| Alan Pope
The GNOME team have announced GNOME 40. Along with this there’s a GNOME OS image to play with. You can grab that from here with the release notes.
The release announcement firmly (in bold) suggests “Do not use any other version including the distro version. Only GNOME Boxes 3.38.0 from flathub is known to work.”.
Personally I’ve never managed to have much success with GNOME Boxes, so I thought I’d test using something I already have installed, QEMU!
[Read More]Actually Upgrading Ubuntu Server
Posted on Wed, Mar 17, 2021
(Last modified on Tue, Aug 22, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Yesterday I wrote about my attempt to upgrade one of my HP Microservers, running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Well, today I had another go. Here’s what happened.
I followed the recommendation from yesterday, to compress the initrd.img using xz compression rather than the previous default gzip. Previously the upgrade failed because it needed 140M disk space in /boot. With the change to the compression scheme, I now have 154M, which should be enough to start the upgrade.
[Read More]Upgrading Ubuntu Server
Posted on Tue, Mar 16, 2021
(Last modified on Tue, Aug 22, 2023)
| Alan Pope
I have a few old and crusty HP MicroServers in the loft at home. I started out with one when HP did a cashback offer, making them very affordable. Over time I’ve acquired a couple more. One, named colossus is running rsnapshot to provide backups of my other machines. Another, called shirka is a Plex Media Server and the last, robby is a general purpose box running various jobs and reports.
[Read More]Ubuntu Wiki Reboot
Posted on Mon, Mar 15, 2021
| Alan Pope
It’s time to replace the Ubuntu Wiki. In fact it was probably time to replace it a few years ago, but we are where we are. It should be a reliable and useful resource for the Ubuntu community. It’s failing at that. We have failed here.
Aside: There are actually multiple wikis in use in the Ubuntu project. The primary one is wiki.ubuntu.com, which has been in use since forever (in Ubuntu terms).
[Read More]Linux Application Summit: Call For Papers
Posted on Sun, Mar 14, 2021
| Alan Pope
The last event I went to before The Event was Linux Application Summit (LAS) in Barcelona, Spain back in November 2019! Time flies.
LAS is a community organised event, sponsored and supported by the GNOME and KDE projects. The conference is “designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem by bringing together everyone involved in creating a great Linux application user experience.”.
In November 2020, the LAS team organised a virtual version of the event.
[Read More]Book Review: We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Posted on Sat, Mar 13, 2021
(Last modified on Sun, Mar 14, 2021)
| Alan Pope
I recently reviewed Split Second (Split Second Book 1) (affiliate link) by Douglas E. Richards. I’d not read any Douglas E. Richards books before, so it was very helpful to me for readers of my humble blog to recommend that and further titles from other authors.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (affiliate link) by Dennis E. Taylor was highly recommended, and delivered. We Are Legion (We Are Bob) was published back in 2016, so as usual I’m very late to the party.
[Read More]The Old Desktop Switcheroo
Posted on Fri, Mar 12, 2021
| Alan Pope
In August 2019, I tweeted about how I’d been running KDE Neon for eighteen months, since February 2018, and how I was switching back to GNOME Shell on my primary laptop. In that thread I also suggested I might switch back!
Today I've in-place upgraded from that 18.04 KDE Neon install to @ubuntu 19.04 with @gnome. I still love KDE of course, and will likely switch back at some point, or may install it on another machine - maybe my Thinkpad X220.
[Read More]Back In The Studio
Posted on Thu, Mar 11, 2021
| Alan Pope
Last month I mentioned that myself, Mark and Martin have decided to come back for Season 14 of the Ubuntu Podcast. Well, we’re back today with S14E01, titled “Navy Chefs Remit”.
Over the thirteen years, the episode titles have had a theme in each season. We don’t reveal the theme, but let our listeners figure that out, for fun. Sometimes it has a bearing on the content of the episode, but often not.
[Read More]Perfect Poached Eggs
Posted on Wed, Mar 10, 2021
| Alan Pope
It’s late in the day and I didn’t have an idea for a blog post. To the rescue comes my good friend Stuart Langridge with this request for advice…
Reading about poached eggs for breakfast, and there appear to be many holy wars over whether the water should be spinning in a whirlpool, whether there should be vinegar, whether to put the eggs in ramekins first. Are these things superstitions or real?
[Read More]Desktop Webapps
Posted on Tue, Mar 9, 2021
(Last modified on Fri, Mar 12, 2021)
| Alan Pope
I appreciate many people already know how to do this, but I’m surprised how many don’t, or don’t realise what it does. Forgive me if you know about this feature of Google Chrome.
A little while back I managed to win two separate eBay auctions for 16GiB DDR3 SODIMMs to install in my ThinkPad T450. This took it from the previously installed 16GiB to the expansive 32GiB.
Then I opened Google Chrome.
[Read More]Learning Dart & Flutter
Posted on Mon, Mar 8, 2021
| Alan Pope
I’ve said many times, I don’t consider myself a software developer. Much like I don’t consider myself a professional chef. I can write code, just as I can cook. What I make isn’t ground breaking, but it won’t poison anyone either, and I enjoy doing it.
Coding for me started on the ZX81 in BASIC then on to the Spectrum and other 8-bit microcomputers. I dabbled with Z80 and 6502 assembly language.
[Read More]Finding Ubuntu Crash Reports
Posted on Sun, Mar 7, 2021
| Alan Pope
This post is more an aide-mémoire for myself, but may be useful to others.
I recently wrote a little story about bugs, the crash reporter and errors website in Ubuntu. Sometimes a user will want to look for their crash reports, and in fact that question came up today on the Ubuntu Discourse.
Back when we shipped Unity desktop as the default desktop environment in Ubuntu, there was a simple button to take a user to their previously uploaded crash reports.
[Read More]Hirsute Yaru Call for Testing
Posted on Sat, Mar 6, 2021
| Alan Pope
Ubuntu Hirsute - the development release which will become 21.04 enters User Interface Freeze on March 18th! That’s less than a fortnight away!
However, with two weekends and plenty of evenings between now and then, its a great time to start testing the Yaru theme we ship in Ubuntu by default. The Yaru team have been busy and provided this short list of some of the main changes since the last release.
[Read More]