The changes this week are mostly focussed on the Noble desktop platform which is now stabilising nicely. Here are the details of all the notable changes…

Audio on Noble

Audio for a standard Ubuntu Noble installation is handled by pipewire. In Informatics we’ve encountered some problems with running pipewire in combination with using AFS for home directories. We plan to investigate the problem in more depth but in the meantime we have reverted to pulseaudio which works fine. For anyone else with similar problems you can switch systems by defining the USE_PULSEAUDIO macro before including the lcfg/options/desktop.h header or by including the new lcfg/options/pulseaudio.h header.

Management of /etc/hosts

The /etc/hosts file is managed by the LCFG network component. Typically, this will just contain entries for localhost and any automatically managed interfaces. It’s possible, via the extrahosts resource, to add extra entries which are appended to the bottom of the file. We have found that sometimes it is necessary to instead add them to the top of the file. It seems some libraries select the first entry found so the only way to override an automatic entry is to add something higher. With that in mind, there is new hosts_tmpl resource which can be used to specify an alternate template. There is also a new hosts2.tt template that can be used to include extra entries ahead of automatic entries.

Resource Limiting

The lcfg/options/systemd-user-slice.h header can be used to limit CPU and memory resources for users. This header can now also be used to limit swap size using the LCFG_OPTIONS_SYSTEMD_USER_SLICE_MEMORYSWAPMAX macro.

PostgreSQL

The postgresql packages for Ubuntu Noble now require libllvm19.

XRDP

There are 0.10 series packages available for xrdp and xorgxrdp on Noble which can be enabled using the LCFG_OPTIONS_XRDP_10 macro. Initial testing shows that this doesn’t “just work” using the existing configuration so for now we’re just using the 0.9 series packages provided in the distro. If anyone is keen they could give the newer version a try and work through the changes required.

Xscreensaver

The version of Xscreensaver for Noble has been rebuilt to support user authorization in the account section of the PAM configuration in the same way as we have for Focal and Jammy.

Software

There is a new LCFG_OPTIONS_PHP_CLI which can be used when you need to install PHP but don’t need the whole web environment as well. A number of other options have been refactored to depend on this new option to reduce what needs to be installed.

There are also some new options for Perl modules:

• LCFG_OPTIONS_PERL_EXCEL – support for reading and writing Excel spreadsheets
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PERL_EMAIL_VALID – Email::Valid
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PERL_MAILTOOLS – tools for sending email

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 – 31/03/2025 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0