Desktop Team Updates - Monday 26th September 2022

Desktop Team Updates
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Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team from the last week. If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of Discourse .

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 19th September 2022

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Azure Active Directory

  • aad-auth CLI FFe passed, the package is now ready for kinetic; we have 4 binary packages: PAM module, NSS module, CLI, common package (including shared translations & config template)

Active Directory

  • improved adsys bug template report by instructing users to collect samba debug logs from the get-go, thus avoiding unnecessary back and forth between us and the bug reporters
  • worked on a specification for enforcing AppArmor rules with adsys: the plan is to be able to manage both system-wide rules, and user confinements (via pam-apparmor)
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Adsys

  • Researching and writing specification for implementing file sharing and drives mapping in adsys;
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  • GNOME 43.0 was released this week and I’ve packaged it so that is already available in Ubuntu 22.10 and, except for GNOME Shell, already in Debian Unstable.
  • Several components are stuck in Debian Unstable because webkit2gtk 2.38 hasn’t built on mipsel yet.
  • Worked with Debian’s freerdp2 maintainer to get that package updated in Debian so that we could package gnome-remote-desktop 43 there
     
  • Uploaded Nautilus 43 to Unstable with Debian Release Team approval for the transition
  • Pushed the harfbuzz and pulseaudio major upgrades from Debian Experimental to Debian Unstable. Joined the Debian pulseaudio packaging team.
  • Did some syncs from Debian and autopkgtest retries to fix some breakage from the Unicode 15 package updates.
     
  • Updated our team version trackers to track GNOME 43 and some other fixes.
  • Wrote a test plan that we’ll use to update the color emoji font included in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
  • Marked the glib2.0 update for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as verification-failed because of one regression that had been noticed and fixed upstream. We’ll prepare a new glib update for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS soon.
     
  • Fixed a couple desktop package build failures identified by the Archive Rebuild and forwarded them to Debian.
  • Noticed complaints of a critical bug with phased updates on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS so I filed the bug and alerted an Archive Admin to apply my recommended emergency fix.
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Chromium snap

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  • Working on a patch for snapd to refresh snaps that are running as soon as they are closed
  • Working on a patch for snap-store to close it automatically (if it is running in the background) during updates
  • Merged several patches for Desktop Icons
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firmware-updater

  • improved confirmation dialogs #54, #62, #65
  • added translations for device flags #57
  • updated the layout of the release page #60, #73
  • fixed a bug, where the UI doesn’t update after installing a release #68
  • added device checksum verification #74, #76
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Desktop Installer

Workshops

Firmware Updater

Other

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  • snapd: Settled with @mvo and @kenvandine on putting correct integration of the handling of the dependency of the cups snapd interface on the CUPS Snap (to auto-install the CUPS Snap when a Snap plugging the cups interface is installed) into the upcoming cycle’s roadmap and planning the design for this on the Engineering Sprint in Prague.
  • cups-filters: Further code clean-up work for the cups-filters 2.x release. Especially removed some unneeded portability code files commit. After separation, we will have upstream repositories/packages named libcupsfilters, libppd, cups-filters, and cups-browsed.
  • Ghostscript: Fixed a bug the CUPS/PWG/Apple Raster output device. If the user prints on a custom page size, the size was matched against the sizes defined in the PPD and adjusted to the closest one, or even rotated by 90 degrees. This is not what the custom page size support is designed for (commit, bug report)
  • Printer Applications under WSL: systemd support for WSL is out!! (Microsoft’s announcement and @local-optimum’s blog). This simplifies the Windows-printer-rescuing-HOWTO a lot! Now one does not need to compile any code any more, it works just in a Snap! Simply install avahi-daemon, the Printer Application Snap from the Snap Store, and USB IPD into WSL if the printer is on USB. Here is my announcement in the September News and the updated HOWTO from @cnihelton. I have also submitted my lightning talk for the Ubuntu Summit in Prague now.
  • Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin: Posted the outcome of the forth OpenPrinting micro-conference in my OpenPrinting September News Post.
  • Ubuntu Summit 2022: Submitted four session proposals: “Your app everywhere, just in a Snap!” (Intro session for Snap Tutorial Track), “Daemon Snapper’s Workshop” (Snap tutorial unit), “OpenPrinting - Join the team to make printing just work!” (Community), and “Save Legacy Printers under Windows with WSL and Printer Applications” (Lightning talk). Also started evaluating submitted session proposals. There are really awesome submissions, but we need many more, and especially the submissions for the Snap tutorial units. Also included my second teaser for the Summit in my September News Post, featuring the Snap Tutorial Track, calling for proposals, and our blogs (@kewisch, @hellsworth).
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Continued mentoring our 7 great contributors. Usual Telegram chats, video meetings, Pull Requests.
  • OpenPrinting: Posted the September News Post. Special features this month are: Printer Application Snaps under WSL, Ubuntu Summit 2022, Outcome of the OpenPrinting micro-conference on Linux Plumbers 2022, 3rd month of GSoC 2022, and something VERY special from Dublin!
  • Bugs.
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Adsys

  • Scaffold/first draft and review “Drive share” specification
  • Scaffold/first draft and review “Apparmor” specification

Misc

  • System-wide proxy support exploration and spec writing
  • Help review and test automated live server-desktop installation
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firefox24 firefox

snapcraft24 snaps

  • released an update to the 0ad snap for the new upstream version, Alpha 26 “Zhuangzi”
  • started rebasing the 0ad snap on core22 and the gnome extension, but this is breaking the map editor so it requires more work
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systemd on WSL!

  • Celebrated that it released!
  • Investigated possible solution to failing systemd-user@0.service. Concluded that too much kernel magic is going on for a simple workaround, and nothing seems to break.

snapd

  • Added wsl flag to userAgent so the Snap Store knows it is WSL. Github PR.
  • Worked on fixing a bug where WSL2 is not detected as such by snapd (thus rendering the previous point moot) Github PR.
  • Worked on enabling snapd on WSL2 (funily enough, it accidentally already worked thanks to the previous bug). Github PR.

Other

  • Worked on a demo to show how to use WSL to develop cross-platform numerical computing applications with MPI.
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  • Worked on SRUing ubuntu-advantage-desktop-daemon to older series
  • investigated iwd not connecting properly to some APs
  • uploaded the new wallpapers to Kinetic
  • tested the software-properties-gtk updates from Robert
  • investigated the desktop iso not having being promoted to current for a while, the testing instance needed a disk increase which Paride did, thanks!
  • reviewed the kinetic archive rebuild desktop section and investigated some of the issues
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Steam Snap

OpenRGB

  • Tested OpenRGB Snap with my hardware
  • Tried a few variations of snapcraft.yml to no success

Created list of potential future tasks for the gaming team.

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WSL

  • Enabled systemd by default on the Ubuntu-Preview app. Thanks @edugomez for doing the heavy lifting. #274
  • Completed the two-stage bootstrapping for subiquity’s snap inside WSL. Subiquity #1427
  • Released wl-setup 0.3 with the required changes for running subiquity as its own snap inside WSL. Release 0.3 · ubuntu/wsl-setup
  • Updated its Debian package. Thanks @didrocks for sponsoring that work. LP #1990426
  • Updated the Ubuntu WSL seed to replace the UDI and GTK themes snaps by subiquity. Many thanks to @sil2100 and @jbicha for the support. LP #1990526

That completed porting the WSL OOBE to Windows, which allowed reducing the Ubuntu Preview rootfs size from > 670MB to 424 MB. I look forward to port that work to Jammy once it gets mature enough.

UDI

  • Debugged a subiquity crash caused by UDI sending UTF-16 strings. Thanks @edugomez for catching that bug and @jpnurmi for fixing that quicker than I could even open the issue on GitHub! :tada:

Other

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