The focus for work in the last week has been the desktop environment. Here are the notable details…

It’s now possible to install a simple Jammy desktop configuration. At this stage there are probably lots of minor issues (particularly package dependencies) which need resolving, bug reports and any other feedback from early adopters would be much appreciated.

Desktop Environments

The package lists have now been generated using lcfg-soy for the same selection of desktop environments as Focal. This means we now support the following graphical environments:

• LCFG_DESKTOP_STANDARD – Gnome
• LCFG_DESKTOP_MATE – MATE
• LCFG_DESKTOP_CINNAMON – from the makers of Linux Mint
• LCFG_DESKTOP_XFCE4 – XFCE4 lightweight desktop manager
• LCFG_DESKTOP_I3 – i3 tiling window manager
• LCFG_DESKTOP_DWM – minimalist tiling window manager
• LCFG_DESKTOP_MINIMAL – the bare essentials, mainly used as deps for the other options

Various postship package changes which caused dependency problems have been resolved (in particular, many upstream packages were rebuilt against libllvm15), there are probably more that we haven’t yet discovered…

firefox

In Jammy the firefox web browser is provided as a snap rather than a native package. This means that snapd must be installed and enabled for now. To avoid the need to have snapd enabled everywhere, it is likely that we will eventually switch to using a native package. This will probably be the packages provided by the Mozilla Team (who also support thunderbird).

Due to the dependency on snapd, the firefox packages are now marked as NOT being suitable for install or upgrade at boot time. There is the risk that snapd will not be started or fully functional at that point which could leave the system in an unbootable state.

snapd

The snapd configuration has been updated to enable all the standard Systemd services.

Installer

For simplicity and reliability the Jammy installroot and installbase profiles are using the standard kernel version for now. We are not currently testing the HWE (hardware enablement) kernel so using that version risks problems with the installer.

LaTeX

A first attempt has been made at adding support for the texlive environment. For Jammy the package list has been added in a different way – when the LCFG_LATEX package option is specified it will included via the base package list. The recommended way to enable that package list is to include the lcfg/options/latex.h header. The standard package list is fairly small, you will probably want to also specify either LCFG_LATEX_FULL (it’s a lot of big packages) or LCFG_LATEX_RECOMMENDED (what most people will want) in your profile.

For DICE profiles we replace the LCFG-level base package list (e.g. lcfg_ubu2204_base.pkgs) with a local equivalent. The advantage of moving the inclusion of package lists to the base is that we can more closely integrate them with our other local site package lists. In this case we actually include a DICE-level latex package list which in turn includes the LCFG-level file. We augment the standard options with some local packages and enable various extra package options that we want to have available for all LaTeX installations.

Ubuntu Jammy Progress 7 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0