This week the focus has moved on to organising all the software requirements for the Informatics DICE environment. This provides a good opportunity to make improvements to the lcfg-level support and do some much needed tidying.

firefox

There is now support for mirroring the Mozilla Team package repository using aptly. This may be enabled by defining the APTLY_MIRROR_MOZTEAM macro in the profile for your mirror server. That repository provides non-snapd builds of the latest firefox and thunderbird releases. The associated apt configuration for this local mirror can be added to profiles by defining the ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_MOZTEAM macro. Currently there is no support for installing the latest firefox and thunderbird packages, this will be added soon.

Python

Various standard options have been created for commonly required Python modules that have a lot of dependencies. Previously many of these were manually added to the DICE package lists, they are now better managed using the lcfg-soy utility.

• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_IDLE – Python IDE
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_PANDAS – Python pandas module
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_PIP – Python package installer
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_SETUPTOOLS – Python distribution tools
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_VIRTUALENV – Python virtual environment creator
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_VIRTUALENVWRAPPER – Manage multiple Python virtual environments
• LCFG_OPTIONS_SPYDER – Python IDE for scientist

Java

The lcfg/options/java.h header has been updated to provide Jammy support for OpenJDK 18 and 19. They can be enabled using these macros:

• LCFG_OPTIONS_JRE_OPENJDK_18
• LCFG_OPTIONS_JAVA_OPENJDK_18
• LCFG_OPTIONS_JRE_OPENJDK_19
• LCFG_OPTIONS_JAVA_OPENJDK_19

Note that these are not available for Focal, attempting to enable them for a Focal profile will cause an error.

nodejs

The support for nodejs is now complete. There is a new lcfg/options/nodejs.h header to make it easier to include the packages. The following package options are available:

• LCFG_NODE_BASE – Packages included by default
• LCFG_NODE_DEVEL – Code development packages
• LCFG_NODE_NPM – Package manager
• LCFG_NODE_YARN – Alternative to npm

LaTeX

The kile editor can now be enabled by defining the LCFG_LATEX_KILE package option.

Software

To simplify the upgrade process various other standard package options have been added for Ubuntu, these include:

• LCFG_OPTIONS_REPORTBUG – Debian bug reporting tool
• LCFG_OPTIONS_MPICH – Message Passing Interface
• LCFG_OPTIONS_VALGRIND – Code analysis tool
• LCFG_OPTIONS_HWLOC_NOX – Hierarchical view of the machine – non-X version
• LCFG_OPTIONS_GDB – Gnu debugger

Ubuntu Jammy Progress 8 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0