In the following article a comparison between two LTS version of Ubuntu is presented – Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) versus Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal). The latest version of Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 (17.06.2020) is used to generate the software versions below.
In the Desktop world upgrading to the new and latest version of a Linux distribution is almost mandatory, but in the server world, upgrading is more complicated. The first step in updating a server is to check what software versions come with the new distribution version and then check whether the running custom (application) software supports the software versions. For example, updating to a new distribution version, which comes with PHP 7.4, but the current application supports only 7.2 is not very wise and in addition, the current version may have years with support in the future.
Having a head to head version comparison to check is the main target of this article – a fast check what version the user could expect from the new (aka latest) Linux distribution.
Ubuntu team has its own vision for the snap (https://snapcraft.io/) service and that’s why they have moved the really big and difficult to maintain Chromium browser package in the snap package. Unfortunately, the snap has many issues with docker containers and in short, it is way difficult to run snap in a docker container. The user may just want not to mess with snap packages (despite this is the future according to the Ubuntu team) or like most developers they all need a browser for their tests executed in a container.
Whether you are a developer or an ordinary user this article is for you, who wants Chromium browser installed not from the snap service under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS!
There are multiple options, which could end up with a Chromium browser installed on the system, not from the snap service:
Using Google Chrome – https://www.google.com/chrome/?platform=linux. It is just a single Debian package, which provides Chromium-like browser and all dependencies requesting the Chromium browser package are fulfilled.
Using Chromium team dev or beta PPA (https://launchpad.net/~chromium-team) for the nearest version if still missing Ubuntu packages for Focal (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS).
more options available?
This article will show how to use Ubuntu 18 (Bionic) Chromium browser package from Chromium team beta PPA under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal). Bionic package from the very same repository of Ubuntu Chromium team may be used, too.
All dependencies will be downloaded from the Ubuntu 20.04 and just several Chromium-* packages will be downloaded from the Chromium team PPA Ubuntu 19 repository. The chances to break something are really small compared to the options 1 above, which uses the Debian packages and repositories. Hope, soon we are going to have focal (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) packages in the Ubuntu Chromium team PPA!
Dockerfile
An example of a Dockerfile installing Chromium (and python3 selenium for automating web browser interactions)
RUN apt-key adv --fetch-keys "https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xea6e302dc78cc4b087cfc3570ebea9b02842f111" \
&& echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-team/beta/ubuntu bionic main ' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chromium-team-beta.list \
&& apt update
RUN export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
&& export DEBCONF_NONINTERACTIVE_SEEN=true \
&& apt-get -y install chromium-browser
RUN apt-get -y install python3-selenium
First command adds the repository key and the repository to the Ubuntu source lists. Note we are adding the “bionic main”, not “focal main”.
From the all dependencies of the Bionic chromium-browser only three packages are pulled from the Bionic repository and all other are from the Ubuntu 20 (Focal):
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server edition offers the following software and versions:
Software
linux kernel – 5.4.0 – 5.4.0-29-generic
System
linux-firmware – 1.187
libc – 2.31 – 2.31-0ubuntu9
GNU GCC – multiple versions available – 7.5.0, 8.4.0, 9.3.0 and 10-20200411. The exact versions – 7.5.0-6ubuntu2, 8.4.0-3ubuntu2, 9.3.0-10ubuntu2 and 10-20200411-0ubuntu1
OpenSSL – 1.1.1f – 1.1.1f-1ubuntu2
coreutils – 8.308.30-3ubuntu2
apt – 2.0.2ubuntu0.1
rsyslog – 8.2001.0 – 8.2001.0-1ubuntu1
Servers
Apache – 2.4.41 – 2.4.41-4ubuntu3
Nginx – 1.17.10 – 1.17.10-0ubuntu1
MySQL server – 8.0.208.0.20-0ubuntu0.20.04.1
MariaDB server – 10.3.22 – 10.3.22-1ubuntu1
PostgreSQL – 12.2-4
Programming
LTS the user may install
PHP – 7.4 – 7.4.3-4ubuntu1.1
python – 3.8.2 (3.8.2-0ubuntu2) and also includes 2.7.17 (2.7.17-2ubuntu4)
perl – 5.30.0 and also includes perl 6 6.d-2
ruby – 2.7 – 2.7+1
OpenJDK – includes multiple versions – 8, 11, 13 and 14. The exact versions are 8u252-b09-1ubuntu1, 11.0.7+10-3ubuntu1, 13.0.3+3-1ubuntu2 and 14.0.1+7-1ubuntu1
Go lang – multiple versions – 1.13.8 and 1.14.2. The exact versions – 1.13.8-1ubuntu1 and 1.14.2-1ubuntu1
Rust – 1.41.0 – 1.41.0+dfsg1+llvm-0ubuntu2
Subversion – 1.13.0 – 1.13.0-3
Git – 2.25.1 – 2.25.1-1ubuntu3
llvm – multiple versions – 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. The exact versions – 6.0.1-14, 7.0.1-12, 8.0.1-9, 9.0.1-12, 10.0-50~exp1
Graphical User Interface
Xorg X server – 1.20.8 – 1.20.8-2ubuntu2
GNOME (the GUI) – 3.36.x – Gnome Shell – 3.36.1
Note: Not all of the above software comes installed by default. The versions above are valid for the intial release so in fact, these are the minimal versions you get with Ubuntu 20 LTS and installing and updating it after the initial date may update some of the above packages with new versions. Installed packages are 582 occupying 11G space.
During the installation wizard you may want to install the following snap software environments. Of course, this software is available after the installation setup, too.
microk8s from Canonical – Kubernetes for workstations and appliances. https://microk8s.io/
nextcloud from Nextcloud – Nextcloud Server – safe home for all your data. https://nextcloud.com/
keepalived from keepalived-project – High availability VRRP/BFD and load-balancing for Linux. https://www.keepalived.org/
prometheus from canonical-is-snaps – The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database. https://prometheus.io/
juju from Canonical – Simple, secure and stable devops. Juju keeps complexity low and productivity high. Manage applications wherever they are run. https://jaas.ai/
This tutorial will show you the simple steps of installing a modern Linux Distribution – Ubuntu server 20.04 LTS edition. Following most of the default options during the setup configuration for simplicity.
Here are some basic data from the default installation setup settings:
Installed packages – ~582 occupying 11G of space.
3 partitions when using automatic patition layout – boot efi, swap and root.
ext4 used for the root parition.
We used the following ISO for the installation process – Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa):
It is a LIVE image so you can try it before installing it. The easiest way is just to download the image and burn it to a DVD disk and then follow the installation below:
SCREENSHOT 1) Boot from the disk or USB – whatever you made after downloading the ISO file from Ubuntu official source.
On the image here the DVD is used to boot in UEFI mode installation. boot uefi dvd Keep on reading!
This is a simple example of how to mirror a PPA repository to a local server. The Ubuntu PPA to mirror is ppa:ondrej/php, which offers the user different PHP version generally not available in the Ubuntu installation. Of course, the user should be very careful about adding PPA repositories, because they are exactly what the abbreviation stands for Personal Package Archives.
What we are going to do – this is what you need to have a mirror of an external application repository:
Install aptly in Ubuntu 18 LTS
Create a mirror in aptly
Create a snapshot of the mirror created before
Publish the snapshot to be used in other servers.
and at the last step there is an example how to use the mirror in your local machines.
STEP 1) Install aptly in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
As mentioned already you may follow our article on the subject – Install aptly under Ubuntu 18 LTS with Nginx serving the packages and the first steps. The following steps are based on this installation!
The aptly home directory is in “/srv/aptly”. We use the “aptly” user and change to it to manipulate the aptly installation.
Change the user to aptly, because under this user the mirror process will happen.
root@srv ~ # su - aptly
aptly@srv:~$
STEP 2) Create a mirror in aptly.
Prepare the keys (aptly needs to have the Ubuntu keys in its trustedkeys keyring):
aptly@srv:~$ gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring trustedkeys.gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys 4F4EA0AAE5267A6C
gpg: requesting key E5267A6C from hkp server pool.sks-keyservers.net
gpg: key E5267A6C: public key "Launchpad PPA for Ond\xc5\x99ej Sur�" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1)
Here we’ve used the method to obtain the key from a GPG KEY server, but the key can be downloaded directrly from the original repository as suggested in the error message below.
If you are not sure where to download the key you could always just try to create the mirror ( in fact, this is in STEP 3) ) and get the error for missing key and how to obtain the key: Keep on reading!
Preparing the preseed for unattended installation sometimes could be challenging. This article presents the right way to analyze an installation failure in one of the main steps – “select and install software”.
There is a ubuntu installation preseed file for our Bionic unattended installation, which uses the “pkgsel” to install first packages in the new system:
When an installation step in the preseed of a unattended installation fails the setup stops with a “Continue” confirmation.
“select and install software” – step failed
Here is what you can do to check what exactly fails in step “select and install software”:
Start a shell in the current installation boot. Press “Ctrl+Alt+F2” to start the shell. You may use “Ctrl+Alt+F3” and “Ctrl+Alt+F4” for two more consoles and “Ctrl+Alt+F1” to return to the installation wizard.
Check the /var/log/syslog, in which file the debconf writes the logging information.
Find the lines where the step “select and install software” starts and look for errors after that. In this file, you can see all the step titles during, which the setup passes and they are named the same way the windows’ titles during the installation wizard.
Here is the real world output
Presing the “CTRL+ALT+F2” to start the BusyBox built-in shell, which is ash not bash!
Be careful there are some difference between ash and bash. Installation wizard – BusyBox built-in shell (ash)
Last 20 lines shows the problem – pkgsel failed to install packages in step “select and install software”.
The installation wizard stops. debconf logging using syslog – pkgsel
The problem is in the package “ntp”, the setup cannot install the “ntp” package because of unmet dependencies.
Because it is not so important to install ntp at this stage we added the package to the script executed in “preseed/late_command” and removed the package from the pkgsel line in the preseed file. In general, our problem was because we set local repositories for the bionic packages, but the setup cannot update list of available packages when the you set Bionic mirror to be unofficial local repository.
Moving towards the firewalld software and especially the systemd some good old init scripts got missing! For example, one of those good scripts is the init script for iptables firewall, which allows saving iptables rules and during boot, it loads them again. With the init iptables script we have persistence of the iptables rules. Meanwhile, we can always call the init script with “save” argument to update the currently saved rules. Many different Linux distributions have this init script – “/etc/init.d/iptables”, but in systemd world, it has been removed and replaced with nothing (probably, because you are encouraged to use firewalld, which is not a bad thing!).
There are two packages “iptables-persistent” and “netfilter-persistent”, which work together to have iptables persistence over reboots. The rules are saved and restored automatically during system startup.
First, install “iptables-persistent” and “netfilter-persistent” with
During the iptables–persistent installation the setup asks the user to save the current iptables rules. Hit “Yes” if you want to save the current iptables rules, which will be automatically loaded the next time the system starts up. Configuring iptables-persistent setup
So it is safe to install it on a live system – the current iptables rules won’t be deleted.
Second, ensure the boot script to restore the iptables rules is enabled
sudo systemctl enable netfilter-persistent
Additional information
Saving the current state of the iptables rules:
myuser@myubuntupc:~$ sudo /usr/sbin/netfilter-persistent save
run-parts: executing /usr/share/netfilter-persistent/plugins.d/15-ip4tables save
run-parts: executing /usr/share/netfilter-persistent/plugins.d/25-ip6tables save
Restore the original state of the iptables rules:
sudo systemctl restart netfilter-persistent
And all commands you can do – start, stop, restart, reload, flush, save. You can use the script directly (it is not mandatory to use systemctl to restart, i.e. restore rules and etc.)
The iptables rules are saved respectively in files
/etc/iptables/rules.v4
/etc/iptables/rules.v6
And you can always edit them manually or save/restore with iptables-save and iptables-restore redirecting the output to the above files.
It’s normal the state of the “active (exited)”. The service is “enabled” as you can see (by default the setup automatically enables the service on Ubuntu, but always check it to be sure, it’s the firewall!).
myuser@myubuntupc:~$ sudo systemctl status netfilter-persistent
● netfilter-persistent.service - netfilter persistent configuration
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/netfilter-persistent.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (exited) since Thu 2019-01-17 20:44:08 EST; 14min ago
Main PID: 666 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CGroup: /system.slice/netfilter-persistent.service
Jan 17 20:44:08 myubuntupc systemd[1]: Starting netfilter persistent configuration...
Jan 17 20:44:08 myubuntupc netfilter-persistent[666]: run-parts: executing /usr/share/netfilter-persistent/plugins.d/15-ip4tables start
Jan 17 20:44:08 myubuntupc netfilter-persistent[666]: run-parts: executing /usr/share/netfilter-persistent/plugins.d/25-ip6tables start
Jan 17 20:44:08 myubuntupc systemd[1]: Started netfilter persistent configuration.
As mentioned in our previous article PHP 7.2 or PHP 7.3 with mcrypt – manual build the PHP versions 7.2 and 7.3 do not include PHP mcrypt module. The mcrypt module was part of PHP 5 till 7.1, in which it was deprecated and removed in 7.2.
In this article we show how to build mcrypt module for Ubuntu based on our previous article showed above. Because of the great popularity of Ubuntu and it has no PHP mcrypt package in Ubuntu package system unlike other Linux distributions (like Gentoo, which created a package) we decided to make this article.
For our purpose we use Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS and here is what the steps to have the mcrypt PHP module:
STEP 1) Update and install mcrypt library and header development packet
STEP 3) Download the PHP mcrypt module and build it.
cd
mkdir mcrypt-php-module-manual
cd mcrypt-php-module-manual
wget https://pecl.php.net/get/mcrypt-1.0.2.tgz
tar xzf mcrypt-1.0.2.tgz
cd mcrypt-1.0.2
phpize
aclocal
libtoolize --force
autoheader
autoconf
./configure
make
sudo make install
STEP 4) Load the module in the PHP configuration (we use PHP-FPM and PHP-CLI) and block future PHP versions to be installed when apt update is used.
Because we compile the PHP mcrypt module for the specific currently installed PHP we do not want to upgrade our PHP when there is an update and the mcrypt module to fail to load. Each change of the PHP version (upgrade) would require a recompile against the current PHP version. To see more for holding and unholding Ubuntu packages – apt-mark – upgrade with the exception of certain packages Of course, if there is an update for PHP you must install it just recompile the mcrypt package, too!
Invalid time could cause your server (or probably your virtual server or docker instance) to be unable to use Ubuntu’s packaging system apt. It is a typical thing if your virtual or docker instance does not use automatic time synchronization.
It is really important even small installation and virtualized environments to have automatic time synchronization or the service they provide could become error prone with time!
The “apt” just reports the repositories are not valid yet:
myuser@my-server-pc:~$ sudo su
root@my-server-pc:/home/myuser# apt update
Hit:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease [88.7 kB]
Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelease [74.6 kB]
Get:4 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security InRelease [88.7 kB]
Reading package lists... Done
E: Release file for http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/bionic-updates/InRelease is not valid yet (invalid for another 151d 18h 5min 59s). Updates for this repository will not be applied.
E: Release file for http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/bionic-backports/InRelease is not valid yet (invalid for another 151d 17h 16min 26s). Updates for this repository will not be applied.
E: Release file for http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/bionic-security/InRelease is not valid yet (invalid for another 151d 17h 15min 3s). Updates for this repository will not be applied.
root@my-server-pc:/home/myuser# date
Thu Jan 17 15:11:56 UTC 2019
The clock shows 17 January 2019, but now is 18 June 2019! This is a Ubuntu virtual server with the minimal installation.
The solution is to synchronize your clock manually or use a service (the better way)!
If you encounter this error trying to install a pip module or compile a program under the console you surely miss OpenSSL development packages! pip also may build a packages in your system and it could depend on generic library headers like in this case OpenSSL, which the installer (pip) won’t bring them and it will output an error as you can see
myuser@srv # sudo pip install pycurl pygeoip psutil
Collecting pycurl
Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/e8/e4/0dbb8735407189f00b33d84122b9be52c790c7c3b25286826f4e1bdb7bde/pycurl-7.43.0.2.tar.gz
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): pygeoip in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): psutil in /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
Building wheels for collected packages: pycurl
Running setup.py bdist_wheel for pycurl ... error
Complete output from command /usr/bin/python -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip-build-AbCshS/pycurl/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" bdist_wheel -d /tmp/tmpqVNq1upip-wheel- --python-tag cp27:
Using curl-config (libcurl 7.47.0)
running bdist_wheel
running build
running build_py
creating build
creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7
creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7/curl
copying python/curl/__init__.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7/curl
running build_ext
building 'pycurl' extension
creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7
creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/src
x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fno-strict-aliasing -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fPIC -DPYCURL_VERSION="7.43.0.2" -DHAVE_CURL_SSL=1 -DHAVE_CURL_OPENSSL=1 -DHAVE_CURL_SSL=1 -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c src/docstrings.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/src/docstrings.o
In file included from src/docstrings.c:4:0:
src/pycurl.h:164:28: fatal error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1
----------------------------------------
Failed building wheel for pycurl
Running setup.py clean for pycurl
Failed to build pycurl
Installing collected packages: pycurl
Running setup.py install for pycurl ... error
Complete output from command /usr/bin/python -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip-build-AbCshS/pycurl/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-oea_jq-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile:
Using curl-config (libcurl 7.47.0)
running install
running build
running build_py
creating build
creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7
creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7/curl
copying python/curl/__init__.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7/curl
running build_ext
building 'pycurl' extension
creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7
creating build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/src
x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fno-strict-aliasing -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fPIC -DPYCURL_VERSION="7.43.0.2" -DHAVE_CURL_SSL=1 -DHAVE_CURL_OPENSSL=1 -DHAVE_CURL_SSL=1 -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c src/docstrings.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/src/docstrings.o
In file included from src/docstrings.c:4:0:
src/pycurl.h:164:28: fatal error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1
----------------------------------------
Command "/usr/bin/python -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip-build-AbCshS/pycurl/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-oea_jq-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-AbCshS/pycurl/
You are using pip version 8.1.1, however version 18.1 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command
