Ubuntu, ROS, and More
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Ubuntu Blog: How we designed the new Ubuntu Desktop installer
Back in 2021, Ubuntu Desktop engineering manager Ken VanDine talked about Canonical’s investment in Flutter support for Linux. To demonstrate the versatility of the Flutter toolkit, we committed to redesigning the Ubuntu installer experience as part of a larger overhaul of the underlying technology behind the Ubuntu installer.
Up until now, the Ubuntu Server and Desktop installers had two separate underlying code-bases. By unifying these experiences we reduce the maintenance overhead and enable additional Desktop functionality that Ubuntu Server already benefits from.
As part of this transition, we improved the user experience to reflect the new functionality of the installer and the values of Ubuntu Desktop. By using Flutter we benefit from the ability to rapidly iterate and polish the user experience, meaning we can continue to evolve the experience more easily over time.
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Ubuntu Blog: Optimise your ROS snap – Part 4
Welcome to Part 4 of our “optimise your ROS snap” blog series. Make sure to check Part 3 before. This fourth part is going to explain what dynamic library caching is. We will present how to use it to optimise ROS snaps, along with the different points to be careful about. Finally, we will apply it to our gazebo snap and measure the performance impact.
Snaps are immutable. This means that every time we launch it, the snap is going to execute the exact same instructions and strategies. A Linux system is meant to evolve over time, thus, it uses mechanisms to support these evolutions and modularities. While such mechanisms bring reliability to a system, they can also slow down our processes during launch.
Dynamic library caching with ld-cache
Here we are addressing a more advanced optimisation topic. The topic of dynamic library caching for snap has been discussed and explored in the forum. We are going to summarise what it is, apply it to our ROS snap and measure the results.
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Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand — the simple way
It began with what seemed like a final mundane touch to my home server setup for hosting Time Machine backups: I wanted it to automatically sleep when idle and wake up again when needed. You know, sleep on idle — hasn't Windows had that built in since like Windows 98? How hard could it be to configure on a modern Ubuntu install?
To be fair, I wanted more than just sleep on idle, I also wanted wake on request — and that second bit turns out to be the hard part. There were a bunch of dead ends, but I stuck out it to find something that "just works" without the need to manually turn on the server for every backup. Join me on the full adventure further down, or cut to the chase with the setup instructions below.