WirelessMoves – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

Ubuntu 26.04 and Eduroam – Finally a Secure GUI Config

Another year, another Ubuntu version or certificate to be used with Eduroam Wifi. Keeping an Eduroam configuration secure, safe and private is a bit of a challenge on Ubuntu, because so far, the certificate check could not be configured on the GUI and had to be done manually in the configuration file. But Ubuntu 26.04 finally configures the certificate check on its own… if a certificate is configured rather than the option being disabled completely by ticking the ‘No CA certificate is required’ box. This works as well, but then everybody can impersonate ‘eduroam’ and steal your credentials.

Ubuntu 26.04 Fixes – 4 – Flameshot on Wayland

Ubuntu’s built-in screenshot utility has come a long way and is quite good in the meantime. Unfortunately, there are two features that are missing: I can’t blur parts of the screenshot during the process and I can’t mark a certain part of the image or put an arrow onto the image to draw attention. Sure, I could do it later with another program, but that’s just overhead that keeps me from doing it. Thus, I’ve been using Flameshot for many years. When I moved over to Ubuntu 26.04, however, it looked like it wouldn’t work anymore. Wayland, you know… But that’s not true and there is even a way to make it work without modifying configuration files!

Ubuntu 26.04 Fixes – 3 – Remote GUI Sessions and Suspend/Resume Crashes

I was hoping that waiting 4 months after the release of Ubuntu 26.04 would mean that most stability issues were out of the system. But it seems there are still quite some irritating things left as this is already part 3 in this series.

Today’s issue: When I’m logged into a remote Ubuntu 26.04 notebook via Remmina on my side and the default Remote Desktop feature of Ubuntu 26.04 on the notebook’s side and leave the RDP connection running while I suspend, I only get a white screen after a resume when establishing a new RDP session. Even worse, the notebook’s audio subsystem doesn’t re-initialize properly anymore after resume, and no sound is played anymore. The syslog is then continuously spammed with a lot of error messages including this one:

sof-audio-pci-intel-mtl 0000:00:1f.3: snd_sof_boot_dsp_firmware: failed to boot DSP firmware: -110

The only way to get out of this is to reboot. Another fun fact: It doesn’t happen always, but I can frequently reproduce it one notebook. On another notebook it doesn’t happen at all. After 5 hours of trial and error, I finally found the reason and a fix for it.

Ubuntu 26.04 Fixes – 2 – Frameless and Flat Qt Windows

One of the small quirks I noticed after installing Ubuntu 26.04 was that some apps like Wireshark, LuckyBackup and KeePassXC look strange. The reason: There is no window decoration so they appear flat, which looks especially strange against a white background. What they all have in common: They are Qt based applications. And it seems there is a dispute between Wayland, to which I had to switch from X-Windows on the one hand, and Qt on the other. Wayland insists that apps themselves should be responsible for drawing their window frames. Qt on the other hand thinks this should be done by the the compositor. So in Ubuntu 26.04, neither side draws the window frames for Qt apps, which makes them look flat and ugly on the system. But there is a fix 🙂

Ubuntu 26.04 Fixes – 1 – Virtualbox and Suspend/Resume VM crashes

From the credible – to the unlikely – to success. A quick war story today: When I recently created a new Ubuntu 26.04 system from scratch for use as my primary OS on my notebook, I waited with one thing until the end: Installing Virtualbox. Not that I was of the complexity, it is actually straight forward. However, I did most of the apps and tools installation and the configuration for it in a virtual machine, and only moved the installation to a real notebook once I was almost done. Much more comfortable to do it this way. So one of the last tasks was to install Virtualbox, since that is, of course, best run on physical hardware. While things looked good at first and all my virtual machines ran as they should, including the USB mapping into the VMs for some special tasks, I soon noticed I had a big problem: In 80% of the cases where I suspended and resumed the notebook by closing the lid, my virtual machines would crash after resume. Totally reproducible. What a nice surprise at the end of a week long process.

Euro-Office in Nextcloud AIO: Adding Fonts

One advantage of having a Euro-Office container that is running on a server that is separate from my Nextcloud installation was that I could map the fonts directory to a directory on the host to have extra fonts I require. In the Nextcloud AIO setup with Euro-Office I described in an earlier post, this doesn’t work because Nextcloud AIO controls the containers directly, so I can’t map the font directory. So I had to find a different solution to get those fonts and my own special fonts into the Euro-Office environment.

Moving to Euro-Office – Part 2 – With a Traditional Nextcloud Setup

In the previous post I had a look at how to get Euro-Office running in a Nextcloud AIO setup, which turned out to be straight forward, as the necessary Euro-Office Docker container and plug-in was already installed by a recent update. Thus, I only had to disable the plug-in for the previously used Onlyoffice to get it working. The next step: I have another Nextcloud setup that is based on a traditional setup without containers. This instance was so far connected to an Onlyoffice instance running on a different VM in a docker-compose setup with 3 separate containers for Onlyoffice, a Postgres database and Rabbitmq. My logic: Since Euro-Office is a straight fork so far, I might only have to change the image parameter from Onlyoffice to Euro-Office in my docker-compose.yml file to get my desired setup. Well, what are the chances that it would be that simple? Well, not good and of course it didn’t work at first. However, it made me discover that things can be made even more simple. A rare occurrence…

Moving to Euro-Office – Part 1 – Nextcloud AIO

About two years ago, I changed from Collabora Online Office in my Nextcloud setup to OnlyOffice, as the advantages for my use case were overwhelming. It wasn’t an easy decision and I was always a bit uneasy about the move from a political and open source point of view. It looks like I’ve not been the only one, and a new industry initiative was founded a few months ago to fork OnlyOffice into Euro-Office for a fully open source and sovereign cloud productivity stack. Have a look here for the reasons behind the fork.

When I first heard the announcement I thought it would take quite a bit of time before Euro-Office would be production ready. Fortunately, it became available much sooner than I thought and there’s a ready to work with Docker image available to be integrated with Nextcloud. Perfect I thought and gave it a try with one of my Nextcloud instances that is based on Nextcloud AIO (All-in-One).

Moving from Virtual to Physical is even Easier – DD does the Magic

A few weeks ago I had a post on a process I’ve put together to move an Ubuntu installation from a virtual machine to a physical notebook. The core of the procedure was to use Clonezilla in the VM to create a backup and then to restore the backup on an empty SSD in a notebook. While this works well, I’ve now discovered another option that is even simpler: Create a raw disk image of the VM’s disk and write that to a USB attached SSD. And that’s it! In practice, that’s done with 4 shell commands:

Shrinking the System Partition and a VM Disk Image

In the previous posts on the topic I’ve been looking at how disk images can be downloaded and uploaded to virtual machines in data centers. Depending on the data center owner, this is more or less straight forward. There is one tricky thing however, independently of the data center provider: What if the VM in the new data center has less disk space than the size of the disk image downloaded from another data center? The solution: If less space is used on the disk image than what is available in the new data center, one can shrink the system partition in the disk image. Once that is done, the size of the virtual disk image itself can be reduced. While expanding partitions and disk images is easy, shrinking them is a bit tricky. After a bit of trial and error I’ve put together the following procedure: