It’s Episode Eighteen of Season Nine of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson, Laura Cowen and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
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We’re here again!
In this week’s show:
- We discuss the snap packaging format.
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We also discuss going to Download Festival and discovering Open Store.
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We share a Command Line Lurve
Clonezilla, which is an amazing way to copy bits from one harddisk to another. -
And we go over all your amazing feedback – thanks for sending it – please keep sending it!
- Andy Smith at the brilliant Bitfolk upgraded our VPS data transfer allowance without us even asking! Go buy your VPS from them!
- Entroware have released another beast of a Laptop, worth looking into
- David Wolski told us how to monitor progress using
dditself. Here are the three examples he gave in the show:
sudo dd if=raspbian.img of=/dev/sdb bs=512 status=progress
conv=noerror,sync
pv bigfile.iso | md5sum - Asa similarly emailed. Here are those examples too:
killall -USR1 dd
watch -n 5 "killall -USR1 dd"
- This weeks cover image is taken from Wikimedia.
That’s all for this week! If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, or you have any feedback on previous shows, please send your comments and suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet us or Comment on our Facebook page or comment on our Google+ page or comment on our sub-Reddit.
- Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-podcast on Freenode
Regarding the discussion of appimage, the comparison given wasnt accurate as an appimage is a self-contained, not-sandboxed, portable linux app that isnt installed and that can be run on any linux distro, old or new. It is attempting to fullfil the dream of a linux developer packaging it once and it runs on all distros, which is one of the reasons Linus doesnt package his subsurface app on linux and one of the reasons Linus gives that the year of the linux desktop hasnt arrived ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mg5_gxNXTo&t=5m38s ). Apps like krita ( https://krita.org/en/item/first-krita-3-0-pre-alpha/ ) and openshot ( http://www.openshotvideo.com/2016/03/openshot-20-beta-4-released.html ) have decided to use appimage rather than making debs and rpms that only work on the latest version of distros because of library dependencies. I would compare it to apps found at portableapps.com for the Windows world, which i regularly copy to a usb and can run them on any version of Windows i’m using. Hundreds of appimages are available in one location, the appimage website (appimage.org), and it is possible to have multiple versions of an appimage app running on the same machine, at the same time. Might be useful to check out this video from the creator of appimage on what it is ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVVP77jC8Fc ).
See https://github.com/probonopd/AppImageKit/blob/master/AppImageUpdate.AppDir/README.md for AppImageUpdate.
You asked for more snap questions:
To save disk space, can the snap system deduplicate libraries when the same library version is bundled into multiple snaps? I hadn’t realized that snaps let you build against stripped down, smaller versions of libraries compared to what a traditional packaging system uses, so maybe this doesn’t help too much.
Related question: is there any answer to the OpenSSL problem where many snaps are built against one library that often has security updates. Will users need to wait for each snap to be updated individually (compared to just updating OpenSSL in a traditional packaging system)?
I had heard about snaps being able to update via binary diffs to reduce bandwidth usage for updates. Is that supported now or planned for the future?