Hello World,

It has been some time since our last post on this blog. We have been (and we are still ! ) quite busy on different projects, tasks and activities. This situation has left us with no time to blog and posts new information. Some projects or activities have been quite time consuming. Since there is a lot of new stuff that has been made available or about to come out, it’s might be the perfect moment to “try” to publish some new posts. This post will quickly provide an overview on what to expect in the coming weeks/months and topics… (if time permit !!!)

This post will be really a short one…Warming up… 🙂

Overview

Ubuntu 23.10

Ubuntu 23.10 will be released in October 2023 and there are some changes that are coming. We have not been working too much with Ubuntu 23.04, not because it’s a short term release but simply because when it was released, the OS was not really usable as virtual machine. We have published the following post about these issues

Because of these issues, we sticked to Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04. Ubuntu 23.10 is really at the corner and will be released soon and we have read and heard that there are again some important changes coming. Some of the changes are generating a lot of comments and reactions on the web. Some of these changes are the following

Canonical has decided that Ubuntu 23.10 will not ship with any pre-installed applications such as LibreOffice, Scanner,….
The New Software center has been released but allows you to install only snaps applications
enforcing snaps applications over traditional Deb applications

Canonical seems to take radical decisions lately and these decisions might not please some or a lot of users. At this stage, we cannot really say if these changes are welcome or if Canonical is making a mistake. What we can say and what we have noticed is that a lot of companies start to move away from Ubuntu and Red Hat solution to Debian based solution (but not only). The licensing terms changes introduced by Red Hat has made a lot of people unhappy and they are looking for some alternatives.

These short term releases are important since they will be used to build and define the strategy for the next LTS Version Ubuntu 24.04 which will be released next year. We will just wait and see what Canonical will decide to do with Ubuntu 24.04….

We will probably publish some posts around Ubuntu 23.10…

Debian 12 Released

Debian is one of the oldest distribution around and serve as base of a large number of other Linux Distributions (i.e. Ubuntu). The latest version of the popular open source and free version of Debian has been released a few months ago. The latest version available should be Debian 12.1. Since our famous xrdp-installer script is supposed to work on Debian Distribution, we will need to install Debian 12 and ensure that the xrdp-installer script is still working on Debian release as it should. An important change that has been introduced in Debian 12 is the replacement of Pulseaudio sound server. Like other Linux distribution, Pipewire seems to become the standard sound software solution.

As mentioned earlier, since there are some changes in Red Hat licensing terms and Ubuntu is making strong statements, more and more people (around us) are starting to look for alternatives. One of these alternatives is indeed Debian which is considered as stable. The stability comes at a certain costs. Debian will not ship all the latest versions of libraries, software and applications…

So, here again, expect to see some posts around Debian 12…..

xRDP & Xrdp Installer Script

xRDP-installer new release

By now, you should know what’s xRDP software is. As a reminder, xRDP is a piece of software that enable remote desktop services on Linux. This means that windows users can use their Remote desktop client (mstsc) and perform a remote connection to Ubuntu Computer. We are releasing on a regular base our xrdp-installer script. This script aim to ease the installation and post configuration actions of xRDP on top of Ubuntu Operating system.

Initially, the script was supporting only Ubuntu with Gnome Desktop interface. However, with each new releases, we have tried to include more Linux distributions. Recent version of the script also can run against Debian Operating system as well. Please note that supporting other Flavors is based on a Best effort approach. The script supports also multiple Distribution releases.

We will probably publish a maintenance release of the script to add support to Ubuntu 23.10. It takes us quite a bit of time to test the script on multiple distribution releases and distribution flavors.

xRDP & PipeWire Support

Ubuntu 22.10 and higher are shipping with Pipewire Sound Server by default and replaces the “old” Pulseaudio software package. In the past, xRDP was only supporting Pulseaudio software in order to enable Sound redirection. Since more and more operating systems are moving away from PulseAudio, xRDP team had to look into Pipewire module for sound redirection. It seems that a new repo has been created to tackle this specific issue.

We will definitely have a look into this repo and see if this can be added/integrated into the xrdp-installer script.

Microsoft Technologies

Since we have been heavily involved in Microsoft project where a lot of upgrade from End of Life (EOL) software to the latest version. We have upgraded/migrated from Windows 2012/R2 to Windows 2022 Servers. We have also touched software like Exchange, Lync, SQL, SharePoint… Through these projects, we have gained some experience and found out some tip and tricks that we try to share with you.

Final Notes

Voila ! This is it for this post…

This is the first post since a long time and we hope that we will have enough time to publish new posts. The focus will be probably the xrdp-installer script. We will need to update it to support Debian 12 and Ubuntu 23.10. The xrdp-installer script might need to be updated and change drastically in order to support newer Operating System.

Stay Tuned

Till next time

See ya

Griffon's IT Library

Simple IT Library for the rest of us

Some News – Catching up…slowly