Cockpit 184

Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 184.

Machines: Dialog and tab layout is now responsive

These UI elements now adjust their layout to small and mobile browser windows. This improvement will come to all dialogs in the near future.

Responsive layout

Storage: Filesystem labels are validated upfront

The names one can give to filesystems have some limits put on them, and Cockpit now knows about them and tells you if you violate them.

Filesystem label validation

This prevents possibly confusing error messages from the underlying tools, and it also prevents silent truncation.

Storage: Some mount options are prefilled when needed

When configuring a filesystem to be mounted at boot, one has to give it the special “_netdev” option if the block device only becomes available when the network is up. Cockpit will now prefill this option when it detects this case.

This is also used to deploy the recommended workaround for the VDO boot problems.

Integration of Cockpit pages on the desktop

For some use cases it may be desirable to use a particular Cockpit page on a desktop, if a native application does not exist. This can be done with the new “cockpit-desktop” tool, which runs a Cockpit web server and a web browser (Webkit, Firefox, or Chromium/Chrome) in an isolated network namespace. This avoids having to enable Cockpit system-wide and having to log into it through the web browser again.

The cockpit-desktop tool may be used by system integrators or local administrators through a standard desktop launcher. Cockpit ships no pre-defined launchers by itself.

Try it out

Cockpit 184 is available now: