ubuntu

Generally speaking, I'm against performing major OS upgrades on my Linux servers; there are often little things that get broken, or configurations gone awry, when you attempt an upgrade... and part of the point of automation (or striving towards a 12-factor app) is that you don't 'upgrade'—you destroy and rebuild with a newer version.

But, there are still cases where you have legacy servers running one little task that you haven't yet automated entirely, or that have data on them that is not yet stored in a way where you can tear down the server and build a new replacement. In these cases, assuming you've already done a canary upgrade on a similar but disposable server (to make sure there are no major gotchas), it may be the lesser of two evils to use something like Ubuntu's do-release-upgrade.

Recently, as I've been building more and more servers running Ubuntu 16.04, I've hit the following errors:

or:

The former error seems to happen when you're running a playbook on an Ubuntu 16.04 host (with gather_facts: yes), while the latter happens if you're using a minimal distribution that doesn't include Python at all. The problem, in both cases, is that Python 2.x is not installed on the server, and there are two different fixes:

When Microsoft announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux, now seemingly rebranded as Bash on ubuntu on Windows, I was excited at the possibility of having Drupal VM (and other similarly command-line-friendly open source projects) work better in a Windows environment. But unfortunately, the Anniversary update's version of WSL/Ubuntu Bash was half-baked, and there were a lot of little issues trying to get anything cohesive done between the Windows and Ubuntu Bash environments (even with cbwin).

Then, a year or so later, Microsoft finally announced that tons of improvements (including upgrading Ubuntu in the WSL from 14.04 to 16.04!) would be included in the 'Creators Update' to Windows 10, dropping tomorrow, April 11.

Quite often, I get inquiries from developers about how to get Drupal VM working on Windows 10—and this is often after encountering error after error due to many different factors. Just for starters, I'll give a few tips for success when using Drupal VM (or most any Linux-centric dev tooling or programming languages) on Windows 10:

Ever since I heard about the new 'Beta' Windows Subsystem for Linux, which basically installs an Ubuntu LTS release inside of Windows 10 (currently 14.04), I've been meaning to give it a spin, and see if it can be a worthy replacement for Cygwin, Git shell, Cmder, etc. And what I was most interested in was whether I could finally point people to a more stable and friendly way of using Ansible on a Windows workstation.

In the past, there was the option of running Ansible inside Cygwin (and this is still the best way to try getting Ansible working in an older Windows environment), but this always felt kludgy to me, and I hated having to recommend either that or forcing Windows users to do a full Linux VM installation just to run Ansible commands. I finally updated my PC laptop to the latest Windows 10 Anniversary Update, and installed the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and lo and behold, Ansible works!

For some time, I was having trouble getting the arrow keys to function correctly in my terminal sessions when logging into one of my remote Linode servers running Ubuntu 10.04. Whenever I pressed an arrow key, instead of moving the cursor or going up and down the command history, I would get a string of gibberish like [[A^[[B^[[D^[[C. Not very helpful!

So, after some searching, I found that the cause for this is an incorrect shell environment being set in the passwd file. To fix this problem, simply edit the /etc/passwd file and change the final string (after the last :) to /bin/bash (it is set to /bin/sh if you create a user via the command line/useradd):

$ sudo nano /etc/passwd

Change this:
<username>:x:1000:1000::/home/<username>/:/bin/sh

to this:
<username>:x:1000:1000::/home/<username>/:/bin/bash

...and then save the file, log out, and log back in. Problem solved!