Most of the changes for this week are again related to the integration work for the new Ubuntu installer. Hopefully within the next few weeks the installer will be ready for wider testing. Here are all the details…

Localisation

All Ubuntu profiles now include the new localisation header – lcfg/defaults/l10n.h – which controls various files that configure the locale for a system. Previously most of those files were only configured during the initial install phase. The header currently assumes that an en_GB environment is required, this could be parameterised in the future if alternatives are desired.

fstab management

The LCFG fstab component, and dependencies, are now included by default on the Ubuntu platform. At this stage, this is mainly to facilitate wider testing, currently the component is not started at boot-time. Once testing is completed it will be enabled and will assume control over the contents of the /etc/fstab file.

boot mode

It is now possible to detect the desired boot-mode through the LCFG sysinfo features system. You can test for it like this:

my $sysinfo = LCFG::SysInfo->new();

if ( $sysinfo->has_feature('boot_uefi') ) {
   ...
}

Or alternatively test for the boot_legacy feature.

Installbase profile

As flagged up in a recent message the installbase profiles for Ubuntu are changing, with new ones being required for systems which use UEFI.

To make this easier for other sites there is a new site defaults macro which can be set – LCFG_INSTALLBASE_STUB – the default is installbase. This is combined like this:

#if defined(USE_NEW_INSTALLER) && !defined(USE_LEGACY_BOOT)
install.installbase         LCFG_INSTALLBASE_STUB-efi-<%sysinfo.platform_full%>-<%profile.release%>.<%profile.domain%>
#else
install.installbase         LCFG_INSTALLBASE_STUB-<%sysinfo.platform_full%>-<%profile.release%>.<%profile.domain%>
#endif

For example, in Informatics our local installbase profiles are all named with a diceinstallbase stub, which gives something like diceinstallbase-ubu2004-stable.inf.ed.ac.uk.

Installer

Further work has been done to integrate the configuration for the new Ubuntu installer, in particular for the LCFG gaiconf component and the wallet openssh key restoration process.

Package Building Support

Support has been added for building packages for the Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) and Debian 11 (bullseye) platforms using pbuilder.

For Informatics, there is also support for submitting packages for those platforms into the local repositories but care must be taken to not cause conflicts with source packages that were already submitted for the 20.04 (Focal Fossa) platform.

Changes to headers and package lists

Members of the Informatics Computing team can browse all the changes to the headers and package lists.

Weekly Changes – 07/11/2022 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0