Planet Ubuntu

A couple weeks ago I was playing around with a multiple architecture CI setup with another team, and that led me to pull out my StarFive VisionFive 2 SBC again to see where I could make it this time with an install.

I left off about a year ago when I succeeded in getting an older version of Debian on it, but attempts to get the tooling to install a more broadly supported version of U-Boot to the SPI flash were unsuccessful. Then I got pulled away to other things, effectively just bringing my VF2 around to events as a prop for my multiarch talks – which it did beautifully! I even had one conference attendee buy one to play with while sitting in the audience of my talk. Cool.

I was delighted to learn how much progress had been made since I last looked. Canonical has published more formalized documentation: Install Ubuntu on the StarFive VisionFive 2 in the place of what had been a rather cluttered wiki page. So I got all hooked up and began my latest attempt.

My first step was to grab the pre-installed server image. I got that installed, but struggled a little with persistence once I unplugged the USB UART adapter and rebooted. I then decided just to move forward with the Install U-Boot to the SPI flash instructions. I struggled a bit here for two reasons:

1. The documentation today leads off with having you download the livecd, but you actually want the pre-installed server image to flash U-Boot, the livecd step doesn’t come until later. Admittedly, the instructions do say this, but I wasn’t reading carefully enough and was more focused on the steps.
2. I couldn’t get the 24.10 pre-installed image to work for flashing U-Boot, but once I went back to the 24.04 pre-installed image it worked.

And then I had to fly across the country. We’re spending a couple weeks around spring break here at our vacation house in Philadelphia, but the good thing about SBCs is that they’re incredibly portable and I just tossed my gear into my backpack and brought it along.

Thanks to Emil Renner Berthing (esmil) on the Ubuntu Matrix server for providing me with enough guidance to figure out where I had gone wrong above, and got me on my way just a few days after we arrived in Philly.

With the newer U-Boot installed, I was able to use the Ubuntu 24.04 livecd image on a micro SD Card to install Ubuntu 24.04 on an NVMe drive! That’s another new change since I last looked at installation, using my little NVMe drive as a target was a lot simpler than it would have been a year ago. In fact, it was rather anticlimactic, hah!

And with that, I was fully logged in to my new system.

elizabeth@r2kt:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
hart : 2
isa : rv64imafdc_zicntr_zicsr_zifencei_zihpm_zba_zbb
mmu : sv39
uarch : sifive,u74-mc
mvendorid : 0x489
marchid : 0x8000000000000007
mimpid : 0x4210427
hart isa : rv64imafdc_zicntr_zicsr_zifencei_zihpm_zba_zbb

It has 4 cores, so here’s the full output: vf2-cpus.txt

What will I do with this little single board computer? I don’t know yet. I joked with my husband that I’d “install Debian on it and forget about it like everything else” but I really would like to get past that. I have my little multiarch demo CI project in the wings, and I’ll probably loop it into that.

Since we were in Philly, I had a look over at my long-neglected Raspberry Pi 1B that I have here. When we first moved in, I used it as an ssh tunnel to get to this network from California. It was great for that! But now we have a more sophisticated network setup between the houses with a VLAN that connects them, so the ssh tunnel is unnecessary. In fact, my poor Raspberry Pi fell off the WiFi network when we switched to 802.1X just over a year ago and I never got around to getting it back on the network. I connected it to a keyboard and monitor and started some investigation. Honestly, I’m surprised the little guy was still running, but it’s doing fine!

And it had been chugging along running Rasbian based on Debian 9. Well, that’s worth an upgrade. But not just an upgrade, I didn’t want to stress the device and SD card, so I figured flashing it with the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS was the right way to go. It turns out, it’s been a long time since I’ve done a Raspberry Pi install.

I grabbed the Raspberry Pi Imager and went on my way. It’s really nice. I went with the Raspberry Pi OS Lite install since it’s the RP1, I didn’t want a GUI. The imager asked the usual installation questions, loaded up my SSH key, and I was ready to load it up in my Pi.

The only thing I need to finish sorting out is networking. The old USB WiFi adapter I have it in doesn’t initialize until after it’s booted up, so wpa_supplicant on boot can’t negotiate with the access point. I’ll have to play around with it. And what will I use this for once I do, now that it’s not an SSH tunnel? I’m not sure yet.

I realize this blog post isn’t very deep or technical, but I guess that’s the point. We’ve come a long way in recent years in support for non-x86 architectures, so installation has gotten a lot easier across several of them. If you’re new to playing around with architectures, I’d say it’s a really good time to start. You can hit the ground running with some wins, and then play around as you go with various things you want to help get working. It’s a lot of fun, and the years I spent playing around with Debian on Sparc back in the day definitely laid the groundwork for the job I have at IBM working on mainframes. You never know where a bit of technical curiosity will get you.

Thanks to the hard work of our contributors, we are happy to announce the release of Lubuntu's Plucky Beta, which will become Lubuntu 25.04. This is a snapshot of the daily images. Approximately two months ago, we posted an Alpha-level update. While some information is duplicated below, that contains an accurate, concise technical summary of […]

The Open Source Initiative has two classes of board seats: Affiliate seats, and Individual Member seats. 

In the upcoming election, each affiliate can nominate a candidate, and each affiliate can cast a vote for the Affiliate candidates, but there's only 1 Affiliate seat available. I initially expressed interest in being nominated as an Affiliate candidate via Debian. But since Bradley Kuhn is also running for an Affiliate seat with a similar platform to me, especially with regards to the OSAID, I decided to run as part of an aligned "ticket" as an Individual Member to avoid contention for the 1 Affiliate seat.

Bradley and I discussed running on a similar ticket around 8/9pm Pacific, and I submitted my candidacy around 9pm PT on 17 February. 

I was dismayed when I received the following mail from Nick Vidal:

Dear Luke,

Thank you for your interest in the OSI Board of Directors election. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept your application as it was submitted after the official deadline of Monday Feb 17 at 11:59 pm UTC. To ensure a fair process, we must adhere to the deadline for all candidates.

We appreciate your enthusiasm and encourage you to stay engaged with OSI’s mission. We hope you’ll consider applying in the future or contributing in other meaningful ways.

Best regards,
OSI Election Teams

Nowhere on the "OSI’s board of directors in 2025: details about the elections" page do they list a timezone for closure of nominations; they simply list Monday 17 February. 

The OSI's contact address is in California, so it seems arbitrary and capricious to retroactively define all of these processes as being governed by UTC.

I was not able to participate in the "potential board director" info sessions accordingly, but people who attended heard that the importance of accommodating differing TZ's was discussed during the info session, and that OSI representatives mentioned they try to accommodate TZ's of everyone. This seems in sharp contrast with the above policy. 

I urge the OSI to reconsider this policy and allow me to stand for an Individual seat in the current cycle. 

Upd, N.B.: to people writing about this, I use they/them pronouns

Better late than never, here&aposs your Xubuntu February 2025 update! This month, Xubuntu 24.04.2 was released with a new Linux kernel and bug fixes in tow. 25.04 Feature Freeze is now in effect, with many package updates arriving just before the deadline. Xubuntu&aposs first RISC-V package support has landed. And so much more!

February Schedule

The Plucky Puffin Release Schedule for February includes Feature Freeze on the 20th and an optional testing week at the end of the month. It also features the next point release for Xubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat".

Date Milestones February 06 February 13 24.04.2 Point Release (delayed to 2/20) February 20 Feature Freeze, Debian Import Freeze February 27 Ubuntu Testing Week (optional) Major Package Updates in Xubuntu 24.04.2

Xubuntu 24.04.2 was released on Thursday, February 20, 2025. It features a modest set of changes in addition to the 6.11 Linux kernel and updated graphics stack. xfce4-panel 4.18.4-1ubuntu0.1 features a fix for the crash-on-exit bug that plagued users with unexplainable error notifications (LP: #2064846).

Changes from Xubuntu 24.04.1 to 24.04.2

Package 24.04.1 24.04.2 firefox 134 135 libdrm 2.4.120 2.4.122 libreoffice 24.2.5 24.2.7 Linux kernel 6.8.0 6.11.0 Mesa 24.0.9 24.2.8 xfce4-panel 4.18.4-1build2 4.18.4-1ubuntu0.1 Major Package Updates in Xubuntu 25.04

There was a flurry of upload activity in the lead up to the 25.04 Feature Freeze. GIMP 3.0.0 was bumped from RC2 to RC3. The Linux kernel was updated from 6.11.0 to 6.12.0. A handful of Xfce components also saw new releases to further stabilize Xubuntu&aposs base. For more information on the progress of Xubuntu 25.04, check out the following links:

• Changes from January 1 to February 22
• December Update
• January Update

Package January 1, 2025 February 22, 2025 blueman 2.4.3 2.4.4 gigolo 0.5.3 0.5.4 gimp 3.0.0 RC2 3.0.0 RC3 gnome-mines 40.1 48 Alpha libgtk-3 3.24.43 3.24.48 libgtk-4 4.17.1 4.17.4 libreoffice 24.8.4 25.2.1 libxfce4windowing 4.20.0 4.20.2 lightdm 1.30.0 1.32.0 Linux kernel 6.11.0 6.12.0 Mesa 24.2.8 24.3.4 parole 4.18.1 4.18.2 python 3.12.8 3.13.1 rhythmbox 3.4.7 3.4.8 snapd 2.66.1 2.67.1 synaptic 0.91.3 0.91.5 thunar 4.20.0 4.20.2 xfce4-notifyd 0.9.6 0.9.7 xfce4-panel 4.20.0 4.20.3 xfce4-panel-profiles 1.0.14 1.0.15 xfce4-screensaver 4.18.3 4.18.4 xfce4-taskmanager 1.5.7 1.5.8 xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin 2.8.3 2.9.1 xfce4-xkb-plugin 0.8.3 0.8.5 xfwm4 4.18.0 4.20.0 xubuntu-default-settings 25.04.0 25.04.1 xubuntu-meta 2.265 2.266

In the interest of keeping this post short, I&aposm only going to dive into Xubuntu&aposs package updates...

xubuntu-default-settings 25.04.1

xubuntu-default-settings 25.04.1 includes a minor improvement: The gtk-print-preview-command setting has been correctly associated with Atril (LP: #2025332). Will Thompson&aposs Evince, Flatpak, and GTK print previews provides more context on this feature:

GTK provides API for applications to print documents. This presents the user with a print dialog, with many knobs to control how your document will be printed. That dialog has a Preview button; when you press it, the dialog vanishes and another one appears, showing a preview of your document. You can press Print on that dialog to print the document, or close it to cancel.

xubuntu-meta 2.266

xubuntu-meta 2.266 adds support for the riscv64 architecture (LP: #2092942)! Similar to the arm achitectures, this isn&apost supported by the Xubuntu team and you won&apost find downloadable ISOs. Instead, this enables package builds so the xubuntu-desktop metapackage will be found on the riscv64 archives. If you put in the effort, you should now be able to get Xubuntu up and running on your riscv hardware. Let me know if you do!

The 25.04 To-Do List

The Xubuntu 25.04 project board lists many outstanding tasks that we&aposd like to review this cycle. If you&aposd like to contribute to Xubuntu, pick a task and get to work. :) There are many other ways to contribute to Xubuntu listed on our website.

Xubuntu development marches steadily onward!