ubuntu

Recently Joshua Riek posted he's dropping off from GitHub. If you haven't heard of him, he's one of the few reasons working with Linux on Rockchip SBCs is so much easier today than it was just a few years ago.

His Ubuntu Rockchip distribution is built for Ubuntu 22 and 24, and they've been maybe the most popular and stable way to run Ubuntu on Rockchip devices.

So popular, in fact, that manufacturers who use Rockchip, like Turing Pi, build their own official images on top of Joshua's.

Now, if you're reminded of XKCD #2347, yeah, I am too.

Recently I was doing some benchmarking on my Ubuntu 22.04 PC, and as part of that benchmarking, I tried setting the CPU performance profile to performance. In the old days, this was not an issue, but it seems that modern Ubuntu only 'knows' about balanced and power-saver. Apparently performance is forbidden these days!

$ powerprofilesctl list
* balanced:
    Driver:     placeholder

  power-saver:
    Driver:     placeholder

The problem was, I had set the profile to performance:

$ powerprofilesctl set performance

But suddenly the 'Settings' GUI app would no longer open (at least not after I had opened it and clicked into the 'power' section). A reboot didn't work, and even reinstalling control center (sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome-control-center) didn't help!

When I tried opening the settings GUI from the command line, I got the following critical error:

2023 Update: Ansible now has the ansible.builtin.deb822_repository module, which can add keys and repositories in one task. It's a little more complex than the old way, and requires Ansible 2.15 or later. See some common deb822_repository examples here, for example, the Jenkins tasks below can be consolidated (though the structure of the templated vars would need reworking):

- name: Add Jenkins repo using key from URL.
  ansible.builtin.deb822_repository:
    name: jenkins
    types: [deb]
    uris: "https://pkg.jenkins.io/debian-stable"
    components: [binary]
    signed_by: https://pkg.jenkins.io/debian-stable/jenkins.io-2023.key
    state: present
    enabled: true

For many packages, like Elasticsearch, Docker, or Jenkins, you need to install a trusted GPG key on your system before you can install from the official package repository.

Last year, due to some extreme luck and help from a viewer, I picked up an AMD RX 6700 XT for MSRP (around $500).

My initial goal was to see if I could get the card working on a Raspberry Pi. Though my initial effort was fruitless, I've since hacked the driver to work through at least a few 'rings' of AMD's doorbell init process.

I realized I've never posted this playbook to my blog... I needed to grab it for a project I'm working on, so I figured I'd post it here for future reference.

Basically, I need a playbook I can run whenever, that will ensure all packages are upgraded, then checks if a reboot is required, and if so, reboots the server. Afterwards, it removes any dependencies no longer required.

---
- hosts: all
  gather_facts: yes
  become: yes

  tasks:
    - name: Perform a dist-upgrade.
      ansible.builtin.apt:
        upgrade: dist
        update_cache: yes

    - name: Check if a reboot is required.
      ansible.builtin.stat:
        path: /var/run/reboot-required
        get_checksum: no
      register: reboot_required_file

    - name: Reboot the server (if required).
      ansible.builtin.reboot:
      when: reboot_required_file.stat.exists == true

    - name: Remove dependencies that are no longer required.
      ansible.builtin.apt:
        autoremove: yes

I needed a very basic 'Internet sharing' router setup with one of my Raspberry Pis, and I thought I'd document the setup process here in case I need to do it again.

I should note that for more complex use cases, or where you really need to worry about security and performance, you should use something like OpenWRT, pfSense, or VyOS—or just buy a decent out-of-the-box router!

But I needed a super-simple router setup for some testing (seriously... look at the picture—the thing's about to fall off my desk!), and I had two network interfaces on a Raspberry Pi running the 64-bit build of Raspberry Pi OS. These instructions work on that OS, as well as Debian, Ubuntu, and derivative distros.

Since this is the third time I've burned more than a few hours on this particular problem, I thought I'd finally write up a blog post. Hopefully I find this post in the future, the fourth time I run into the problem.

What problem is that? Well, when I build a new Kubernetes cluster with multiple nodes in VirtualBox (usually orchestrated with Vagrant and Ansible, using my geerlingguy.kubernetes role), I get everything running. kubectl works fine, all pods (including CoreDNS, Flannel or Calico, kube-apiserver, the scheduler) report Running, and everything in the cluster seems right. But there are lots of strange networking issues.

Sometimes internal DNS queries work. Most of the time not. I can't ping other pods by their IP address. Some of the debugging I do includes:

Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 (and likely future versions) often don't have Python 2 installed by default. Sometimes Python 3 is installed, available at /usr/bin/python3, but for many minimal images I've used, there's no preinstalled Python at all.

Therefore, when you run Ansible playbooks against new VMs running Ubuntu, you might be greeted with the following error:

Note: If you want to install and use PHP 7 and Composer within Windows 10 natively, I wrote a guide for that, too!

.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

Since Windows 10 introduced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), it has become far easier to work on Linux-centric software, like most PHP projects, within Windows.

To get the WSL, and in our case, Ubuntu, running in Windows 10, follow the directions in Microsoft's documentation: Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10, and download and launch the Ubuntu installer from the Windows Store.

From time to time, there's a security patch or other update that's critical to apply ASAP to all your servers. If you use Ansible to automate infrastructure work, then updates are painless—even across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of instances! I've written about this a little bit in the past, in relation to protecting against the shellshock vulnerability, but that was specific to one package.

I have an inventory script that pulls together all the servers I manage for personal projects (including the server running this website), and organizes them by OS, so I can run commands like ansible [os] command. Then that enables me to run commands like: