Weekly Changes – 13/01/2025
Another busy week mostly focussed on the Ubuntu Noble platform, it’s all coming together nicely and we now encourage everyone to begin testing. Here are the details of all the notable changes…
apteryx
The LCFG package manager for Ubuntu has been getting some love recently, see the separate blog article for full details of the changes. These changes are intended to make it more robust and reliable, there are still more improvements that could be made but this is a big step in the right direction. The latest version is already being used on Ubuntu Noble, once we’re satisfied that no new bugs have been introduced it will also be rolled out to Focal and Jammy.
LCFG Client
In preparation for an update to the LCFG client some new Perl module dependencies have been added to the core package lists. These provide support for making dbus queries that will allow the client to check with Systemd how a component was started. The latest version of the LCFG client is already being used on Ubuntu Noble.
Keyboard and locale configuration
Due to an 8 years old bug it is not possible to configure the locale on Debian and Ubuntu systems using the standard localectl command. Previously we were hacking around this issue in the LCFG hardware component but a change in output on Noble has triggered a rethink of how the various keyboard and locale configuration files should be managed.
The new version of the hardware component directly manages the contents of these files: /etc/locale.conf
, /etc/default/locale
, /etc/locale.gen
, /etc/default/keyboard
and /etc/vconsole.conf
. Some of these have been previously managed using the LCFG file component with resources specified in the lcfg/defaults/l10n.h
header. This requires some schema changes so we do not currently plan to update the hardware component on Focal and Jammy.
Java
The LCFG java header has been updated to provide support for all available versions on each supported Ubuntu platform.
There is also a new LCFG_OPTIONS_JDK_DEFAULT
package option to go with the existing LCFG_OPTIONS_JRE_DEFAULT
. Some of the dependencies on the default JRE option were previously wrong and have now been corrected. On Focal and Jammy the default version is 11, on Noble it has been updated to 21.
Available versions of Java for each Ubuntu platform, if a version is not mentioned then it is not supported on any of these platforms. Note that some versions may no longer be supported by Ubuntu so will not receive further security updates.
Version | Focal | Jammy | Noble |
---|---|---|---|
11 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
13 | Yes | No | No |
14 | Yes | No | No |
16 | Yes | No | No |
17 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
18 | No | Yes | No |
19 | No | Yes | No |
21 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
SNMP
The LCFG snmp component which is used to manage the snmpd service has been completely overhauled and now supports Ubuntu. It now uses Systemd to manage the service rather than starting it directly. Improvements include the ability to restrict which addresses the service listens on and better control of the logging.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL versions 14 and 16 are now available for Ubuntu Noble. The default for this new platform is version 16.
Robot Operating System
The ROS2 package repository is now available for Ubuntu Noble. Note that the release which supports Noble is Jazzy.
Software Options
There are more new software options this week:
LCFG_OPTIONS_LLVM_DEV
– Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), libraries and headersLCFG_OPTIONS_JDK_DEFAULT
– Standard Java or Java compatible Development KitLCFG_OPTIONS_CLANG17
– C, C++ and Objective-C compiler (version 17)LCFG_OPTIONS_LLVM17
– Modular compiler and toolchain (version 17)
On Ubuntu Noble there are also now options for all available versions of the llvm library (14 through to 18). For example, LCFG_OPTIONS_LIBLLVM17
.
Changes to headers and package lists
Members of the Informatics Computing team can browse all the changes to the headers and package lists.
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