martinandersson / box-ubuntu-budgie-17-x64 Goto Github PK

The taskbar is a bit boring. In particular, I use workspaces a lot even inside a VM. So, maybe we want something like this:

Note in particular a few details/changes:

1. Stupid nightlight icon is gone (the settings are still available natively).
2. Added:
   1. Workspace Switcher
   2. Screenshot Widget
   3. Quick & easy notes
   4. Calendar

Not sure I want to keep the notes' widget. It's a new thing I am trying out as of this writing. Hopefully, it will replace a constant opening and closing of empty text editors lol.

Evaluate if these instructions make a positive difference without screwing things up.

It's funny to note that the Ubuntu Budgie team didn't follow their own instructions lol.

The login keyring is manually unlocked during box setup but was missed this time around, with the implication that Chrome is asking for the user password. Only affects version 10.0.2.

With VirtualBox's 3D acceleration enabled, the machine performance will come down to a painfully slow crawl never to return again.

This only happens after a window is maximized or snapped to one of the sides of the desktop.

But, leave 3D acceleration off and the VM should be performant and "snappy" - yes, even
after maximizing a window.

This is an upstream issue, but I should find Oracle docs/forum threads discussing this topic and mark this issue as resolved as soon as the Guest Additions installed in this box has fixed the issue.

To clarify; actions that are needed by the end user is absolutely none. Simply don't turn on 3D acceleration.

The packaging process will transfer 2D- and 3D acceleration settings from the VirtualBox box to the Vagrant box and ultimately to the VM instance the end user creates. This project will ensure those correct acceleration settings has been applied before packaging and distribution. Currently, 3D acceleration is off [and 2D is off as it applies only to Windows guests]. 3D acceleration will be enabled by the box once this feature starts working correctly, which is probably never.

How do I know the settings are transferred you ask?? Basically through a hands-on experiment.

vagrant package generates a box file, which is an archive of some sort. Inside this guy, we find another file: box.ovf. This file is mostly concerned with describing the hardware of the future VM. Inside this file, we find a display element which would look like this if acceleration is not enabled prior to packaging:

<Display VRAMSize="256"/>

..with acceleration turned on it would look like this:

<Display VRAMSize="256" accelerate3D="true" accelerate2DVideo="true"/>

I empirically established these settings also came into effect when instantiating a new VM off of the box.

Each apt-get (also apt and aptitude?) process instance lock a lock file to make sure it never runs concurrently (because otherwise, shit happens?).

Recent Ubuntu/Debian releases have an "apt daily" timer setup which fires off on boot (I believe this comes as part of the unattended-upgrades package). This will cause the lock file to be locked and subsequent provisioning done by Vagrant that uses apt-get will fail. It has also been reported that it makes the machine startup slow.

Actually, /lib/systemd/system/apt-daily.timer is configured to fire the timer each day at a random time. But it also has Persistent=true set which makes the machine catch up a missed event immediately on boot.

Setting Persistent=false (default value) should "fix the problem". But I don't consider this an optimal solution for two reasons.

Firstly, this reduces the likelihood of the collision to happen but does not definitively get rid of the problem, the chance is still there if that random event time happened to be right at boot. Secondly, I agree with this comment that the update process shouldn't run at a random time at all. It should be deterministic (at least to some degree) and occur some short time after boot.

Solution: Configure the apt daily timer such that it elapses 15-45 minutes after boot. It may also be delayed up to one hour at the discretion of the system (to minimize CPU wake-ups). Repeat every day the machine stays awake.

Some good-to-have links:

• geerlingguy/packer-boxes#3
• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=844453
• https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.timer.html
• https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.service.html
• https://askubuntu.com/a/659268
• https://askubuntu.com/a/831206
• https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/shorten-boot-time-apt-daily-service/
• https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2017-April/038772.html