Bluefin Administration Guide

Bluefin
1

Moved here:

6 Likes
2

FYI, the command sudo rpm-ostree rebase ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:39 didn’t work for me, starting from a ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin-dx-nvidia:38 base… it produced the error Invalid refspec ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:39. But running sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:39 did work.

1 Like
3

If updates aren’t handled through Gnome Software, is there another graphical way of installing updates?

If I do rpm-ostree upgrade, will that also update my flatpaks?

4

No, rpm-ostree doesn’t know a thing about flatpaks.

5

Just to make sure I’m not missing anything: The Updates tab is no longer present in the software center, right? And the screenshot is therefore outdated?

1 Like
6

I haven’t gotten in a while but I think it only shows up for fwupd notifications. I’ll try to catch the next one.

7

Hi, does not show any fwupd notifications in bluefin-latest compared to ujust upgrade

8

Hi Jorge,

I’ve started using ublue’s main image and then jumped ship to the startingpoint once I’ve felt that I needed my custom ISO’s for my future installations. But I quickly realized that it’s really hard to keep up with changes to startingpoint and that I wanted a more stable approach where defaults are usually fine but I want to automate my customizations on top of the base.

Here are things I used to do on top startingpoint:

  • Layer some packages
    • some system76 packages (system76-keyboard-configurator, …)
    • langpacks-tr
    • some dependencies (libgda for pano, etc.)
    • moby-engine
    • simple-scan
    • gnome-boxes (flatpak doesn’t have usb passthrough)
  • Remove some packages
    • firefox + lang packs
    • gnome-tour
    • toolbx
  • Install 1Password via bling
  • Disable pcscd.socket since it causes issues when I want to use my e-signature inside Boxes (requires Windows)
  • Install custom flatpacks
  • Added my own selection of packages to yafti
  • Added my own additions to just files

I used to customize GNOME desktop via Ansible by setting up dconf locally. I like some of the defaults in bluefin but want to add my customizations as well.

So I was wondering what the recommended approach is for customizing bluefin. Do you recommend to have a Containerfile (like we do for classic image overrides) and add my customizations on top of bluefin image? If this is the recommended approach, should I include my dconf changes in /usr/etc/dconf/db/local.d/ or /etc/dconf/db/local.d/ like you mentioned above? (afaik, I should use /usr/etc instead of /etc if I want to overwrite the defaults when building a custom image)

1 Like
9

Yeah you would do a Containerfile with FROM ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin as yourthing

Here’s an example of what @dogphilosopher is doing, but he’s using Bazzite:

We keep it in /usr/etc so the machine always has a pristine copy of the files in case the user mangles their config in /etc and wants to start over. The one gotcha is to search for dconf in the bluefin repo and you’ll have to copy over a systemd service unit to do a dconf update on first boot.

Some other things real quick: bluefin removes the firefox and gnome-tour already so no need to do that. -dx has Docker if you want to snag that config instead of moby engine, and then you’ll find system and user flatpak install/remove service units there too that you might want to snag. Then for ISOs you’ll want to use this github action: GitHub - ublue-os/isogenerator: Creates an ISO for installing a container image as an OS

That should be it!

10

Per this guide, I was trying to switch from gts to latest. I tried:

% sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin-dx-nvidia:latest

But received:
ERROR Switching: Reading manifest data from commit: Missing ostree.manifest-digest metadata on merge commit

After some troubleshooting/reading, I changed to:
rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin-dx-nvidia:latest

That worked, fortunately. Hope this helps someone else…

11

Good call, I’ve fixed the docs, thanks!

2 Likes
12

Will there be any side effects if I remove some layers/packages using rpm-ostree override? These packages are -

  • solaar: so that it doesn’t show in tray
  • plasma-thunderbolt: so that it doesn’t show in settings
13

Should be fine, you won’t save any space, doing this to the .desktop files will be cleaner.

You’d want to do it the other way around and add NoDisplay=true

1 Like
14

typo here?
Correction: The gts and stable tags feature a gated kernel…

1 Like