This week’s release includes various improvements for the Ubuntu server environment, primarily for Jammy support. It also sees the introduction of snapd-less firefox packages which brings the Jammy desktop project close to completion. Here are the details of all the notable changes…

firefox

On Ubuntu Jammy the standard firefox package requires snapd. In Informatics we prefer to avoid snapd where possible so there is a new lcfg/options/firefox_packages.h available which can be used to include standard Debian packages instead. By default this only includes the firefox and firefox-locale-en (English language pack) packages but any others you include will automatically use the correct version.

The lcfg/options/ffox.h and lcfg/options/desktop.h headers have also been modified so that if either of the NO_SNAPD or LCFG_OPTIONS_FFOX_NO_SNAPD macros are enabled then the new header is automatically included.

ISO tools

The header for the LCFG ISO tools, which are used for building the installer images, has gained some extra Python package dependencies on SL7. This should make it fully usable on SL7 machines outside of Informatics.

libvirt

The Systemd configuration for libvirt has been moved from the lcfg/options/kvm-server.h header into lcfg/options/libvirt.h so that it is associated with the LCFG libvirt component. There are no functional changes to the configuration.

Kernel

The INF_TEST series kernel for both Ubuntu Focal and Jammy has been updated to 5.15.0-72.79

kvmtool

When removing a VM, the DICE kvmtool utility now zeroes all data in associated LVM volumes before they are deleted. This protects against old data being accessible when the underlying disk space is subsequently reused for another new VM. This was spotted recently when we encountered some problems with new Ubuntu installs where old LVM volumes for system partitions seem to magically reappear half-way through the partitioning of the disk. Note that for large VMs this results in it taking a much longer time to delete a VM.

storcli

The storcli packages have been removed from the lcfg/options/raid_megaraid_sas header as they were never used. Depending on the hardware model you should use either megacli (for older machines) or perccli.

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 – 05/06/2023 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0