Tag Archives: linux

flaticron: Send mail notifications for pending Flatpak updates

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Some software packages on a typical Linux desktop setup are no longer installed by the package manager of the distribution, but instead are managed with Flatpak. This approach has become more popular over the last years and allows for shorter release cycles in which updates reach users.

My problem with Flatpak was that I regularly did not benefit from these shorter release cycles, because I was not even aware of an available update. Users of desktop environments such as GNOME have Flatpak integrated into the usual graphical software updater. However, as a user of Xfce and strictly using the terminal for managing packages on my desktop systems, I never received any hint on available Flatpak updates.

For pending updates of distribution packages, I use apticron to receive such notifications automatically via mail. As I couldn’t find any existing solution to receive notifications about pending Flatpak updates via mail as well, I wrote flaticron.

GitHub: https://github.com/raimue/flaticron/

An example report sent by flaticron looks like this:

flaticron report [Thu, 28 Mar 2024 18:36:36 +0100]
========================================================================

flaticron has detected that some flatpaks need updating on:

  ferret

The following flatpaks are currently pending an update:

  org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default              22.08        flathub
  org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default              22.08-extra  flathub
  org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default              23.08        flathub
  org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default              23.08-extra  flathub
  org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel             22.08        flathub
  org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel             23.08        flathub
  org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full             23.08        flathub
  org.freedesktop.Platform                         23.08        flathub
  org.gnome.Platform                               44           flathub
  org.gnome.Platform                               45           flathub

========================================================================

You can perform the update by issuing the command:

  flatpak update

as raimue on ferret

-- 
flaticron

The format of the report is very similar to what is generated by apticron, so it should feel familiar for existing users. The prerequisite for mail notifications is that you have a working MTA on your system.

flaticron is available as a Debian package and can be downloaded and installed from the latest GitHub release. If flaticron gains at least some popularity, I might look into getting this into the official Debian repositories. Let me know if you would be interested.

If you are a Flatpak user, I hope flaticron will be a useful tool for you to get notified about pending updates via mail.

A story of Docker, QEMU, and memfd_create()

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Last year I stumbled across a problem with the execution of a Docker container in a CI environment. The interesting case was that this is a container for a foreign architecture, which is supported by the --platform option and there are even official images on Docker Hub for this.

Initially, the problem presented itself like this:

$ docker run -it --rm --platform linux/arm64 [...] arm64v8/ubuntu:jammy
root@d6fb5c478cb6:/# ps
Error, do this: mount -t proc proc /proc

This means the ps(1) command could not run in this Docker container. At first I trusted the error message and thought that /proc might really not be mounted. However, that is usually taken care of by Docker and this following check confirmed that it is in fact mounted:

root@d6fb5c478cb6:/# mount | grep proc | head -n1
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)

Well, now what is actually the problem here with running a Docker container for a foreign architecture?

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openbox-passmenu

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I recently started to manage my passwords with the pass(1) password store. I integrated access into Firefox via passff and also found a nice GUI with QtPass. While this works nicely, in places outside the browser, it was still quite cumbersome for me to enter passwords. I was still required to open a terminal window to run pass or use the QtPass GUI to copy and paste the password.

I had seen others using passmenu together with dmenu to copy or insert a password anywhere. That seemed very elegant, as it could be used everywhere.

However, I prefer to use tools that are less minimalistic. For years, my Linux desktop has been LXDE with the Openbox window manager. I discovered that it is possible to write dynamic menu for Openbox, which seemed like a perfect fit for this task.

The result is now openbox-passmenu, a script that provides a menu for Openbox to access the passwords inside the pass(1) password store.

If you also want to use this, please head over to the GitHub project for instructions on how to install and where it has to be integrated with the Openbox configuration.

Goodbye Sailfish OS and Jolla

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Already in September 2017 I migrated away from Sailfish OS and I am now using an Android phone. For me, this is the first time I left the niche market of alternative phone operating systems to go mainstream. Originally I used a Nokia dumb phone and then in 2009 got the Nokia N900 as my first smartphone with Maemo as OS, which was so much joy, easily extensible due to the open platform, and had a sliding keyboard. After a few years I continued with the Nokia N9 with the now abandoned Meego. The N9 was released shortly before the Nokia phone department was switched to produce Windows phones for Microsoft. However, a group of former Nokia developers formed Jolla, a company producing an alternative phone operating system called SailfishOS.

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The mysterious stalled scp connections

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Lately, I had some problems with stalling transfers when using scp, the file transfer tool for the SSH protocol and part of the OpenSSH suite. Here is a report on what happened, how I found the cause and how I applied the solution. Actually, this is a pretty lame story, but I just wanted to write it down anyway.

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