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Comment by splatzone | Hacker News Reader

I might have missed something obvious, but I had trouble getting this installed on Ubuntu 20.04 - maybe the installation instructions need updated.

The instructions[0] say it's included in Ubuntu 17.04 and later, but I couldn't see any way of enabling it.

I tried installing with apt using the command they listed:

  . /etc/os-release
  sudo apt install -t ${VERSION_CODENAME}-backports cockpit

But this didn't work. Eventually I read on another website that this is the correct way to install it:

  sudo apt install cockpit -y

This probably would be obvious for most people - but since this software is all about improving server UX, I thought it was worth mentioning!

[0]: https://cockpit-project.org/running.html#ubuntu

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I wouldn't recommend Cockpit on Ubuntu.

Yes, you can get it installed and running pretty easy - however because Ubuntu does networking differently it wasn't able to do a bunch of things. Cockpit kept thinking the machine was offline, so wouldn't do software updates. It wouldn't do network management, because networking wasn't done in the way that Cockpit wanted.

Yes, I could manually screw around and move from one type of network manager to another to make it work - but it wasn't easy, and easily broke networking on the machines.

I ended up installing Fedora instead to get Cockpit working nicely.

I had no trouble at all running cockpit on ubuntu, but the Fedora experience is definitely super polished. I was blown away at how easy and useful it was.

"I tried installing:"

The first command you ran "sourced" a file - it basically read a file and set some environment variables - because that is what was in that file. The second one ran a command to install stuff and it referenced a variable - that variable was not mentioned in the sourced file.

In general, when you install a package in Ubuntu or Debian you should not do anything more fancy than:

$ sudo apt install <package>

Don't put -y - you can then read any messages and make up your own mind what to do. If you know what you are doing then obviously use -y.

You may find this handy:

$ apt-cache search cockpit

There are loads of web site scrapes these days relating to Linux stuff, just as Windows pioneered them years ago.

Sign up to the forums for say Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and Gentoo and Mint, Fedora too. Don't rely on a general search unless you really know what you are looking for.

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