Ubuntu

Having been an Ubuntu user for many years, a new OS is taking some getting used to. Although there is a nice quickstart guide for Linux users on the FreeBSD website, there are still some things that are muscle memory for me that is requiring some more time. They are mostly around shell differences. sh is definitely not bash. I understand why bash isn’t in the base system due to licensing and a preference for simple solutions, but sh has a few limitations that seem to bite me.

Another interesting problem cropped up in my quest to install BSD. The presence of a RAID adapter in my server that presents the disks as a virtual disk. Based on some research, it seems that ZFS doesn’t do well unless the adapter can use Initiator Target (IT) mode which presents each disk individually to the operating system. Since ZFS seems to be the way to go for a modern FreeBSD installation, I would like to use it.

I updated my desktop to Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS the other day. Although everything seemed fine, I was unable to get the system to suspend. Both from the command line (systemctl suspend) and the GUI, it would blank the screen and log me off but not suspend. Since it used to work, that was definitely something to do with the upgrade. After searching around a bit based on the logged messages, I found a somewhat related bug.

It was time to upgrade to the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on my desktop. I had thought about doing it six months ago, but I don’t need the leading edge functionality and there is always a chance something goes awry. The upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS from 20.04 was quick and uneventful. I haven’t fully tested everything, but the apps I consistently use (Firefox, Evolution and Joplin) were fine after re-entering my credentials.

I recently enabled Kernel Livepatch on my Ubuntu 22.04.3 desktop system. Livepatch is intended for systems that you don’t want to reboot. It’s completely overkill for a desktop that I can reboot whenever I need to but I wanted to understand it better. Kernel Livepatch is part of the Ubuntu Pro offering that is free for a limited number of systems - five systems currently. That seems like a pretty smart play by Ubuntu to differentiate their offering a little bit and get a premium service into the hands of more users who might then go on to buy a package later.

I haven’t used LXD much recently but it’s a very nice container and virtual machine management system. I’ve done a few things with it in the past and it works really well. I noticed the other day through some web browsing that Canonical was withdrawing LXD from the Linux Container project and would be developing it in-house. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. This piece in The Register outlines why that is.

I bought a cheap USB WiFi Adapter for my Ubuntu 22.04 system. I used to connect via a WiFi bridge running on DD-WRT but I’ve got this new Internet router from Cox cable that wasn’t being very cooperative with that, so I decided to replace it. I probably should have done a little bit more research. I just looked at the product descriptions for something that had Linux listed and figured that should be good enough.

I wanted to give Wireguard a try as a VPN solution so I spent a few minutes setting up a server on Hetzner and giving it a go. Long story short, it worked well and was straightforward but technical to set up and configure. First thing was to set up a server on Hetzner. For this, I used the hcloud cli tool. hcloud makes it really easy to set up servers and other stuff from the command line which IMHO is a just easier than clicking-and-clucking through a web GUI.