Ubuntu Core is what we’ve been working on this past time, it has been an interesting ride. It was developed completely in the open, there was just no real promotion about it until we were ready.

If you had noticed, we use ubuntu-device-flash to create this core image, and for development we used it across the board with the core subcommand. We did learn a couple of things from the phone and decided to just provide a static image that we could make sure would work for everyone giving it a try (aka more QA). In essence you can still upgrade and if something is not to your like, just rollback, it’s that neat. So in summary, ubuntu-device-flash today is just a step in the release process to get to the final image.

Yesterday I played around with creating a snap for camlistore and it was a breeze, To get it just snap install camlistore, all the command line tools are in there provided by the binary stanza from package.yaml. The camlistored daemon is created in the services list where I just needed to provide a start, which in the background creates a systemd unit.

The beauty here is that I don’t really need to know much of the underlying technology, and that is awesome for just quickly creating a snap.

What is missing here though, is an easy way to configure the package that was just intalled, for now, it should be as easy to look at the file system layout and going to /var/lib/apps/<app-name>/<version>/ which would be /var/lib/apps/camlistore/0.8 and within we’d have .config/camlistore/server-config.json, in most cases you’d want to setup your authentication in there.

And here’s the mandatory screenshot of this running on my kvm instance: