Actually Upgrading Ubuntu Server
Posted on Wed, Mar 17, 2021
(Last modified on Thu, Mar 18, 2021)
| 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.
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Upgrading Ubuntu Server
Posted on Tue, Mar 16, 2021
| 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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Unbreaking Unbootable Ubuntu
Posted on Thu, Mar 4, 2021
| Alan Pope
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. Nobody wants to see this on boot:
I had updated yesterday and clearly something went wrong.
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