Introducing the Ubuntu Touch image based upgrader

Posted on 2013/07/20 by Stéphane Graber

Some of you may be aware that I along with Barry Warsaw and Ondrej Kubik have been working on image based upgrades for Ubuntu Touch.
This is going to be the official method to update any Ubuntu Touch devices. When using this system, the system will effectively be read-only with updates being downloaded over the air from a central server and applied in a consistent way across all devices.
Design details may be found at: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/ImageBasedUpgrades

After several months of careful design and implementation, we are now ready to get more testers. We are producing daily images for our 4 usual devices, Galaxy Nexus (maguro), Nexus 4 (mako), Nexus 7 (grouper) and Nexus 10 (manta).
At this point, only those devices are supported. We’ll soon be working with the various ports to see how to get them running on the new system.

So what’s working at this point?

  • Daily delta images are generated and published to
    http://system-image.ubuntu.com
  • We have a command line client tool (system-image-cli), an update server and an upgrader sitting in the recovery partition
  • The images usually boot and work

What doesn’t work?

  • Installing apps as the system partition is read-only and we’re waiting for click packages to be fully implemented in our images
  • Data migration. We haven’t implemented any migration script from the current images to the new ones, so switching will wipe everything from your device
  • Possibly quite some more features I haven’t tested yet

So how can I help?

You can help us if:

  • You have one of the 4 supported devices
  • You don’t use that device for your everyday work
  • You don’t need to install any extra apps
  • You don’t care about losing all your existing data
  • You’re usually able to use adb/fastboot to recover from any problems that might happen

If you don’t fit all of the above criteria, please stick to the current flipped images.
If you think you’re able to help us and want to test those new images, then here’s how to switch to them:

  1. Get the latest version of phablet-tools (>= 0.15+13.10.20130720.1-0ubuntu1)
  2. Boot your device
  3. Backup anything you may want to keep as it’ll be wiped clean!!!
  4. Run: phablet-flash --ubuntu-bootstrap
  5. Wait for it to finish downloading and installing
  6. You’re done!
  7. To apply any further update, use: adb shell system-image-cli
    (never use phablet-flash after the initial flash, updates can only be applied through system-image-cli!)

Reverting to standard flipped images:

  • Boot your device
  • Backup anything you may want to keep as it’ll be wiped clean!!!
  • Run: phablet-flash –bootstrap
  • Wait for it to finish downloading and installing
  • You’re back to standard flipped images!

To report bugs, the easiest is to go to:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-image-image/+filebug

We also all hangout in #ubuntu-touch on irc.freenode.net

 

Posted in Canonical voices, Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu Touch | Tagged | 11 Comments

NorthSec 2013

Posted on 2013/02/05 by Stéphane Graber

NorthSec logo

So, when I’m not busy working on Ubuntu, or on LXC, or on Edubuntu, or … I also spend some of my spare time preparing the upcoming NorthSec 2013 security contest which will be held from Friday the 5th of April to Sunday the 7th of April at ETS in downtown Montreal.

NorthSec can be seen as the successor of HackUS 2010 and HackUS 2011 which both were held where I currently live, in Sherbrooke, QC. This year, we’re moving to Montreal, in the hope of attracting more people, especially from other Canadian provinces and from abroad.

I’m personally mostly involved with the internal infrastructure side of things, building the Ubuntu based infrastructure required to simulate the hundreds of servers and services used for the contest. All of that while making sure everything is rock solid and copes extremely well under pressure (considering what our contestants tend to throw at us).

I also usually get involved with some of the tracks, mostly the networking one, trying to think of really twisted setups ranging from taking over an active IPv6 network to hijacking IPs by messing with a badly configured BGP router (taken from past editions).

Outside of our twisted network challenges, we have quite a few more things to offer, here’s the current list of tracks for this year:

  • Trivias (they seem easy but people are known to have wasted hours on them)
  • Web (sql injection, xss anyone?)
  • Binaries (because we know you love those)
  • Networking (my track of choice)
  • Reverse Java

And if anyone manages to finish everything, don’t worry, we’ll come up with more.
As far as I know, we never had a single team get bored in the past two editions 😉

So if you’re interested in computer security, want to try to prove how good you are at finding security flaws and exploiting them or just want to see what that thing is all about, well you should consider a trip to Montreal in early April.
All the details you need are at: http://www.nsec.io/en

If you are a company interested in helping us with sponsorship, I hear that we’re always looking for more sponsors. So if that’s something you can help with, feel free to contact me directly at: stgraber at nsec dot io

Posted in Canonical voices, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | Leave a comment

Running Steam in a LXC container

Posted on 2012/11/16 by Stéphane Graber

Anyone who met me probably knows that I like to run everything in containers.

A couple of weeks ago, I was attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen, DK where I demoed how to run OpenGL code from within an LXC container. At that same UDS, all attendees also received a beta key for Steam on Linux.

Yesterday I finally received said key by e-mail and I’ve been experimenting with Steam a bit. Now, my laptop is running the development version of Ubuntu 13.04 and only has 64bit binaries. Steam is 32bit-only and Valve recommends running it on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

So I just spent a couple of hours writing a tool called steam-lxc which uses LXC’s new python API and a bunch more python magic to generate an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit container, install everything that’s needed to run Steam, then install Steam itself and configures some tricks to get direct GPU access and access to pulseaudio for sound.

All in all, it only takes 3 minutes for the script to setup everything I need to run Steam and then start it.

Here’s a (pretty boring) screencast of the script in action:

This script has only been tested with Intel hardware on Ubuntu 13.04 64bit at this point, but the PPA contains builds for Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10 too.

To get it on your machine just do:

  • sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/stable
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install steam-lxc
  • sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/lxc /var/cache/lxc

Then once that’s all installed, set it up with sudo steam-lxc create. This can take somewhere from 5 minutes to an hour depending on your internet connection.

And once the environment is all setup, you can start steam with sudo steam-lxc run.

The code can be found at: https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-lxc/lxc/steam-lxc

You can leave your feedback as comment here and if you want to improve the script, merge proposals are more than welcome.
I don’t have any hardware requiring proprietary drivers but I’d expect steam to fail on such hardware as the drivers won’t get properly installed in the container. Adding code to deal with those is pretty easy and I’d love to get some patches for that!

Have fun!

Posted in Canonical voices, Conferences, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 37 Comments

Edubuntu: The path to 14.04 LTS

Posted on 2012/10/21 by Stéphane Graber

(tl;dr: Edubuntu 14.04 will include a new Edubuntu Server and Edubuntu tablet edition with a lot of cool new features including a full feature Active Directory compatible domain.)

Now that Edubuntu 12.10 is out the door and the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen is just a week away, I thought it’d be an appropriate time to share our vision for Edubuntu 14.04.

This was so far only discussed in person with Jonathan Carter and a bit on IRC with other Edubuntu developers but I think it’s time to make our plans a bit more visible so we can get more feedback and hopefully get interested people together next week at UDS.

There are three big topics I’d like to talk about. Edubuntu desktop, Edubuntu server and Edubuntu tablet.

Edubuntu desktop

Edubuntu desktop is what we’ve been offering since the first Edubuntu release and what we’ll obviously continue to offer pretty much as it’s today.
It’s not an area I plan on spending much time working on personally but I expect Jonathan to drive most of the work around this.

Basically what the Edubuntu desktop needs nowadays is a better application selection, better testing, better documentation, making sure our application selection works on all our supported platforms and is properly translated.

We’ll also have to refocus some of our efforts and will likely drop some things like our KDE desktop package that hasn’t been updated in years and was essentially doubling our maintenance work which is why we stopped supporting it officially in 12.04.

There are a lot of cool new tools we’ve heard of recently and that really should be packaged and integrated in Edubuntu.

Edubuntu Server

Edubuntu Server will be a new addition to the Edubuntu project, expected to ship in its final form in 14.04 and will be supported for 5 years as part of the LTS.

This is the area I’ll be spending most of my Edubuntu time on as it’s going to be using a lot of technologies I’ve been involved with over the years to offer what I hope will be an amazing server experience.

Edubuntu Server will essentially let you manage a network of Edubuntu, Ubuntu or Windows clients by creating a full featured domain (using samba4).

From the same install DVD as Edubuntu Desktop, you’ll be able to simply choose to install a new Edubuntu Server and create a new domain, or if you already have an Edubuntu domain or even an Active Directory domain, you’ll be able to join an extra server to add extra scalibility or high-availability.

On top of that core domain feature, you’ll be able to add extra roles to your Edubuntu Server, the initial list is:

  • Web hosting platform – Will let you deploy new web services using JuJu so schools in your district or individual teachers can easily get their own website.
  • File server – A standard samba3 file server so all your domain members can easily store and retrieve files.
  • Backup server – Will automatically backup the important data from your servers and if you wish, from your clients too.
  • Schooltool – A school management web service, taking care of all the day to day school administration.

LTSP will also be part of that system as part of Edubuntu Terminal Server which will let you, still from our single install media, install as many new terminal servers as you want, automatically joining the domain, using the centralized authentication, file storage and backup capabilities of your Edubuntu Server.

As I mentioned, the Edubuntu DVD will let you install Edubuntu Desktop, Edubuntu Server and Edubuntu Terminal Server. You’ll simply be asked at installation time whether you want to join an Edubuntu Server or Active Directory domain or if you want your machine to be standalone.

Once installed, Edubuntu Server will be managed through a web interface driving LXC behind the scene to deploy new services, upgrade individual services or deploy new web services using JuJu.
Our goal is to have Edubuntu Server offer an appliance-like experience, never requiring any command line access to the system and easily supporting upgrades from a version to another.

For those wondering what the installation process will look like, I have some notes of the changes available at: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1289041/
I’m expecting to have the installer changes implemented by the time we start building our first 13.04 images.

The rest of Edubuntu Server will be progressively landing during the 13.04 cycle with an early version of the system being released with Edubuntu 13.04, possibly with only a limited selection of roles and without initial support for multiple servers and Active Directory integration.

While initially Edubuntu branded, our hope is that this work will be re-usable by Ubuntu and may one day find its way into Ubuntu Server.
Doing this as part of Edubuntu will give us more time and more flexibility to get it right, build a community around it and get user feedback before we try to get the rest of the world to use it too.

Edubuntu Tablet

During the Edubuntu 12.10 development cycle, the Edubuntu Council approved the sponsorship of 5 tablets by Revolution Linux which were distributed to some of our developers.

We’ve been doing daily armhf builds of Edubuntu, refined our package selections to properly work on ARM and spent countless hours fighting to get our tablet to boot (a ZaTab from ZaReason).
Even though it’s been quite a painful experience so far, we’re still planning on offering a supported armhf tablet image for 14.04, running something very close to our standard Edubuntu Desktop and also featuring integration with Edubuntu Server.

With all the recent news about Ubuntu on the Nexus 7, we’ll certainly be re-discussing what our main supported platform will be during next week’s UDS but we’re certainly planning on releasing 13.04 with experimental tablet support.

LTS vs non-LTS

For those who read our release announcement or visited our website lately, you certainly noticed the emphasis on using the LTS releases.
We really think that most Edubuntu users want something that’s stable, very well tested with regular updates and a long support time, so we’re now always recommending the use of the latest LTS release.

That doesn’t mean we’ll stop doing non-LTS release like the Mythbuntu folks recently decided to do, pretty far from that. What it means however is that we’ll more freely experiment in non-LTS releases so we can easily iterate through our ideas and make sure we release something well polished and rock solid for our LTS releases.

Conclusion

I’m really really looking forward to Edubuntu 14.04. I think the changes we’re planning will help our users a lot and will make it easier than ever to get school districts and individual schools to switch to Edubuntu for both their backend infrastructure with Edubuntu Server and their clients with Edubuntu Desktop and Edubuntu Tablet.

Now all we need is your ideas and if you have some, your time to make it all happen. We usually hang out in on freenode and can also be contacted on the edubuntu-devel mailing-list.

For those of you going to UDS, we’ll try to get an informational session on Edubuntu Server scheduled on top of our usual Edubuntu session. If you’re there and want to know more or want to help, please feel free to grab Jonathan or I in the hallway, at the bar or at one of the evening activities.

Posted in Canonical voices, Conferences, Edubuntu, LTSP, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | 10 Comments

Introducing the python LXC API

Posted on 2012/09/28 by Stéphane Graber

One of our top goals for LXC upstream work during the Ubuntu 12.10 development cycle was reworking the LXC library and turn it from a private library mostly used by the other lxc-* commands into something that’s easy for developers to work with and is accessible from other languages with some bindings.

Although the current implementation isn’t complete enough to consider the API stable and some changes will still happen to it over the months to come, we have pushed the initial implementation to the LXC staging branch on github and put it into the lxc package of Ubuntu 12.10.

The initial version comes with a python3 binding packaged as python3-lxc, that’s what I’ll use now to give you an idea of what’s possible with the API. Note that as we don’t have full user namespaces support at the moment, any code using the LXC API needs to run as root.

First, let’s start with the basics, creating a container, starting it, getting its IP and stopping it:

#!/usr/bin/python3
import lxc
container = lxc.Container("my_container")
container.create("ubuntu", {"release": "precise", "architecture": "amd64"})
container.start()
print(container.get_ips(timeout=10))
container.shutdown(timeout=10)
container.destroy()

So, pretty simple.
It’s also possible to modify the container’s configuration using the .get_config_item(key) and .set_config_item(key, value) functions. For those keys supporting multiple values, a list will be returned and a list will be accepted as a value by .set_config_item.

Network configuration can be accessed through the .network property which is essentially a list of all network interfaces of the container, properties can be changed that way or through .set_config_item and saved to the config file with .save_config().

The API isn’t terribly well documented at this point, help messages are present for all functions but there’s no generated html help yet.

To get a better idea of the functions exported by the API, you may want to look at the API test script. This script uses all the functions and properties exported by the python module so it should be a reasonable reference.

Posted in Canonical voices, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 11 Comments