Updating the SILICA Virtual Machine

We have been asked a few times if the SILICA virtual machine can be updated. While this is mainly a general Ubuntu Linux question it can affect the usability of SILICA. Before getting into any details it is important to understand how the updating mechanism of Ubuntu works, more specifically how the updating process can affect the operational part of SILICA.

SILICA leverages Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64bit and is supplied as a virtual machine.

The core operating system consists of a few components such as:

• Applications
• Kernel
• Drivers
• Firmware

A lot of sub-categorizing could be done in the above list but this simplified for the purpose of this post. The components we care about are the kernel, drivers and firmware. If any of those are updated this could result into an unexpected behavior of the software. Having said that a lot of users may wish to update their applications which is a big portion of the operating system and that includes packages such as the web-browser, editors and the X-environment.

Before explaining how a user may want to proceed into updating the operating system, I would like to mention that it is a good idea at this point to use the snapshot feature of VMware. This will keep a good state of the virtual machine and you will allow reverting back to the original easy, if something goes wrong. In free versions of VMware such as player this feature may not be available so you can just copy the entire virtual machine in a separate folder in your drive as a backup.

Since we have a safe way to recover our original image it is now safe to go ahead and explain how one may want to update the operating system. As mentioned above some of the packages which are of importance are the firmware, kernel and drivers. In this case we will utilize an Ubuntu tool called apt-mark which will help us prevent accidental updates of the system.

In particular we can issue the command:

apt-mark hold linux-firmware

This will mark the package linux-firmware as hold which means it will not be updated in the next system upgrade. This package may have other dependencies so this may prevent other packages of being updated, the good news is that you do not have to worry about this since Ubuntu handles it for you.

Next we need to verify that the command succeeded by executing:

dpkg --get-selections linux-firmware

That should return something like 'hold' next to the package name, which means it has successfully completed. A similar process should be followed for the rest of the packages such as the kernel files, the drivers and any other packages the user wishes to preserve. Using dpkg -l |grep 'package-name' may help identify anything of interest. For example finding the kernel package the user can issue: dpkg -l |grep -i kernel and that will return a list of kernel packages that can be preserved. One does not have to mark them all as hold. Ubuntu will protect the rest of the packages because of the dependency checking mechanism.

Finally performing a system upgrade is as simple as running apt-get upgrade. The user can also specifically update a package such as a web browser using apt-get install package-name.

The reason we do not update the kernel, driver and firmware is beyond the scope of this post but I will be glad to get into more details if someone is interested.