Coldbrew (formerly "iced") has been added to the Alpine package repos by @ and will now be included in #postmarketOS duranium immutable images, allowing you to install and use anything from the Alpine package repos without modifying your real rootfs!
It works on regular Alpine installs too of course, if you want to manage software per-user or without needing root access
#RIP my faithful old #Seagate 2 TB #HDD in my Tower. You dun did good... 2015 - 2025.
It's had failing sectors for many months, but til today my Tower has still run ok, with its #SSD holding my #ArchLinux#KDEPlasma + #SparkyLinux#Cinnamon#dualboot systems, + all my "important" data, & the HDD used for the #Timeshift OS snapshots for each penguin, + all my #QEMU#KVM VMs. It's the latter i shall miss, coz i really did like to play with myriad penguins there, via my plethora of VMs.
Today the next giveaway that the HDD was getting worse was an unexpected failure of #BackInTime to run [for my weekly Sparky data b/u], & upon investigation i realised that the HDD filesystem had gone "read-only", which is never happy news. I finagled BiT to run after all, by excluding the few HDD directories that were borking it, then ran updates for Sparky, then rebooted.
This time i booted into #Arch... or at least tried to, but after stalling for yonks trying to mount the HDD, it gave up & took me to the rescue screen. Ah, so the HDD really is now piston broke, pity. In this tty I edited Arch's /etc/fstab to comment-out the lines mounting the two partitions of the HDD, rebooted, & this time successfully into Arch. As i'd been in Sparky for a couple of weeks, i wanted to run Arch's overdue updates... oh nice; ~2.5 GB, zowie.
Rebooted again, this time choosing Sparky, but just like Arch, & this time as expected, the circus repeated re the rescue screen, where i then ofc also edited Sparky's fstab, rebooted, & Sparky now also ok. Wanna use Arch again for a while, so yet another reboot back to there... i've missed my fabbo #Plasma!!
Tangential Thoughts:
For a couple of years i have been getting increasingly interested in the #immutable#atomic Plasma distros, eg, #Kalpa, #Kinoite, & most recently of all, #KDELinux. In fact, a week ago i converted my Lappy from #LMDE6 to Kinoite, & have been planning/researching the eventual possibility of also bunging an atomic onto Tower.
If Tower had been already running one such, & today's scenario had unfolded, wouldn't i have been entirely stuffed? Is /etc/fstab also immutable in Kalpa, #Kinoite, & #KDELinux? How would i have been able to boot, today, if not for the comparatively trivial fstab edit?
@zbyszek, a #systemd developer and #Fedora maintainer, will explore the future of image-based, immutable, cryptographically verified #Linux installations, covering engineering challenges, secure updating/extending, and how tools like #mkosi build installation images, initrds, and extensions from distro packages.
Na grafice znajduje się zdjęcie Zbigniewa Jędrzejewskiego-Szmeka, systemowego dewelopera i maintenera Fedory. Obok jego zdjęcia widnieje napis "Image-based Linux with systemd". U dołu grafiki umieszczono informacje o konferencji "Jesień Linuksowa", która odbędzie się w dniach 24-26 października 2025 roku w Hotelu przy Młynie w Rybniku.
Photo of a pinebook pro running the GNOME desktop environment, booted on an experimental immutable install of postmarketOS. Firefox is running on the left, with postmarketos.org open. In the middle is the GNOME Settings About app, and on the right is GNOME software ready to install flatpaks.
@kdeKDE I wonder if an #immutable distro like
@vanillaos could be a great tool for beta testing #plasma . In theory you could easily test out a beta image on your existing system, and then if there is some bug that prevents you from working on your main computer or you simply need something more stable, it would be easy to move back to stable.
Although, #opensuse ’s Snapper is also a great candidate for this way of testing.