The Linux kernel has recently introduced the Rust programming language as an alternative to C for creating kernel modules. Rust is a strongly, statically typed programming language with a focus on memory safety features which produces extremely compact executable code. These properties, paired with its good tooling, make Rust a natural ch ...
‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This base is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Is software processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s ...
Welcome to the second article in the Craft team saga. Previously, on Craft Team, we gave you a brief introduction into the team’s function, we announced our desire to share the ins and outs of our day-to-day work with the community, and gave you an overview of roughly two weeks of coding and fun. Today, ...
Snapcraft, Charmcraft, Rockcraft … you may have heard of these tools, but have you ever wondered how – and by who – they are developed? These tools are the intellectual and keyboard-driven product of Canonical’s Craft team. Officially, the team’s name is *Craft, and the asterisk symbol can easily be seen as a “star” (The ...
Multipass 1.11 is here! This release has some particularly interesting features that we’ve been wanting to ship for a while now. We’re excited to share them with you! For those who aren’t familiar with Multipass, it’s software that streamlines every aspect of managing and working with virtual machines. We’ve found that development, partic ...
With over 100 applications available in the Snap Store, KDE is by far the biggest publisher of snaps around. What unifies this impressive portfolio is the fact that all of these snaps are made for the x86 platform. Not anymore. Now, don’t panic! The x86 snaps are not going anywhere. But ARM-supported KDE snaps are ...
As part of their fundamental, security-driven design, snaps are meant to run isolated from the underlying system. In most cases, the idea works well, and granular access to system resources using the mechanism of interfaces allows snap developers to ship their applications packaged with strict confinement. However, there are some scenario ...
This article was written by Alan Watson, with only small cosmetic changes from me. Having stumbled upon PhotoNoteBook, I asked Alan to write a guest blog post and share his project with the wider snap developer community. ===== The idea for PhotoNoteBook was seeded in 2018 after watching a Double-Glazing salesman measure my windows. He ...
At first glance, the title of this article may sound like an oxymoron. However, what it highlights is the introduction of a rather useful feature that will enable a far more robust and elegant handling of the /dev/shm implementation inside the snap sandbox. This will make snap development easier, more secure, and reduce potential bugs ...
Software comes in many shapes and forms. One of the popular cross-platform, cross-architecture frameworks for building and distributing applications in Electron, which combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js runtime. This makes Electron-based applications relatively easy to create. If you want to deploy Electron apps in Lin ...
One of the core concepts of snaps is cross-distro compatibility. Developers can build their snaps once, and they should run well on more than 40 different Linux distros. But how does one take care of all the required runtime dependencies? By providing them inside the snap, as part of the bundle. In the snap ecosystem, ...
