Su Debian stable; ma anche sulla mia macchina “da combattimento”, è bastato un sudo apt update; sudo apt -t testing install xz-utils

The following packages will be REMOVED:
tabby-terminal*
After this operation, 399 MB disk space will be freed.

I’ll keep using Debian, thanks…

Fedora Silverblue is a new variant of Fedora Workstation with rpm-ostree at its core to provide fully atomic upgrades.  Furthermore, Fedora Silverblue is immutable and upgrades as a whole, providing easy rollbacks from updates if something goes wrong.

Just wondering is there anything Debian based. And of course someone else already asked this (on Reddit) and other people curated a list of immutable distributions. So the answer is EndlessOS and Vanilla OS.

Silly me, I bought a laptop for my father-in-law with EndlessOS, finding it very solid!

In daily use of computers it often happens that you need a stable base and at the same time use recent, very recent or even ‘beta/alpha/experimental’ versions of some specific programs.

Debian users are no less, indeed! It also apply to all its derivatives, starting from Ubuntu.

Matteo Galacci suggest (in an italian article) – like many others – to use Debian’s “pinning” capability.

In reality, if the need is to have ‘almost all’ stable programs, some more recent and a few ‘very recent’ it is possible to obtain this behavior by exploiting the basic algorithm of the Debian package manager apt. Consulting the man-pages that tells us how to set up our sources (man sources.list) we read:

The source list /etc/apt/sources.list and the files contained in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ are designed to support any number of active sources and a variety of source media. The files list one source per line (one-line style) or contain multiline stanzas defining one or more sources per stanza (deb822 style), with the most preferred source listed first (in case a single version is available from more than one source). The information available from the configured sources is acquired by apt-get update (or by an equivalent command from another APT front-end).

The ‘trick’ is in the part in bold. Matteo first proposes testing, then unstable and finally stable. So apt will almost never choose stable releases. I use a /etc/apt/sources.list like this:

deb http://ftp.it.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
# stable-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://ftp.it.debian.org/debian/ stable-updates main contrib non-free
# if something is not in stable look in testing
deb http://ftp.it.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
# then search for it in unstable 
deb http://ftp.it.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
# as an extrema ration look in experimental
deb http://ftp.it.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free

Putting stable first, and then testing, unstable and also experimental in this order

So when we don’t need particular versions, just ask for ‘apt install package‘ and the most stable version possible will be chosen: if it’s in stable, otherwise it will take the one in testing, therefore it will search into unstable and finally experimental.

Easy, fast, practical. And above all it works, and it works well. With this APT setup, I’ve been using the Radeon card drivers from experimental for years without any other programs being upgraded to experimental versions.

Then if we wanted a particular version just run ‘apt install package unstable‘ and the unstable one will be installed.

In the case of updates, APT will remember our choice and continue to update the ‘package’ from the source indicated by us. If over time the version we wanted should (as we all hope) enter testing and then stable, just re-launch ‘apt install package/stable‘ to go back to updating from stable.

If we then wanted to ‘go down’ in version just add an --allow-downgrade.

The Debian project has taken the decision in 2022-10 to create a new repository component non-free-firmware, and include its content on installation media for the upcoming Debian release bookworm to make things easier for our users.

So people like me that installed Debian several years ago keeping it updated  shall add to their /etc/apt/sources.list a non-free-firmware component, like this:

deb <a href="http://deb.debian.org/debian/">http://deb.debian.org/debian/</a> bookworm main non-free contrib non-free-firmware<br>deb-src <a href="http://deb.debian.org/debian/">http://deb.debian.org/debian/</a> bookworm main non-free contrib non-free-firmware<br><br>deb <a href="http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/">http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/</a> bookworm-security main non-free contrib non-free-firmware<br>deb-src <a href="http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/">http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/</a> bookworm-security main non-free contrib non-free-firmware

You might see a missing public GPG key error (“NO_PUBKEY”) on Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint when running apt update / apt-get update. This can happen when you add a repository, and you forget to add its public key, or maybe there was a temporary key server error when trying to import the GPG key.

Source: Fix Missing GPG Key Apt Repository Errors (NO_PUBKEY) – Linux Uprising Blog

Quick’n’dirty solution:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys THE_MISSING_KEY_HERE

sudo
apt update 2>&1 1>/dev/null | sed -ne 's/.<em>NO_PUBKEY //p' |
while read key; do if ! [[ ${keys[</em>]} =~ "$key" ]]; then sudo apt-key
adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys "$key"; keys+=("$key");
fi; done

Yes, I know apt-key is being deprecated…

FAI – Fully Automatic Installation

FAI is a tool for unattended mass deployment of Linux. It’s a system to install and configure Linux systems and software packages on computers as well as virtual machines, from small labs to large-scale infrastructures like clusters and virtual environments. You can take one or more virgin PC’s, turn on the power, and after a few minutes, the systems are installed, and completely configured to your exact needs, without any interaction necessary.

Warpinator is a free, open-source tool for sending and receiving files between computers that are on the same network.

Source: Warpinator – Send and Receive Files Across a Network