Cockpit 159 release

[Martin Pitt]

http://cockpit-project.org/blog/cockpit-159.html

Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here
are the release notes from version 159.

Configure data deduplication with VDO devices
---------------------------------------------

The "Virtual Data Optimizer" is a new feature to eliminate duplication and add
compression to block devices. This is mostly aimed at providing storage for
virtual machines or object storage systems like Ceph.

This is being developed upstream by the dm-vdo GitHub project
(https://github.com/dm-vdo). It is currently available in RHEL 7.5 alpha
(https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/htm...)
and expected to land in other distributions eventually.

Cockpit's Storage page can now create and configure VDO devices.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iOYN4Y24aY

Add serial console to virtual Machines page and redesign the Consoles tab
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Machines page has offered in-browser and external VNC console access to
virtual machines for some time. However, this does not work on "headless"
virtual machines that don't provide a (virtual) graphics card and VNC libvirt
device.  The Consoles tab now offers a serial console for these kind of VMs to
be able to administer them from Cockpit as well.

This went along with a redesign of the Consoles tab to better fit the various
types of consoles.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT2EA6wYkKI

Thanks to Marek Libra for this feature!

Show more error message details for VM failures on virtual Machines page
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Errors from virtual machine operations on the Storage page can now be expanded
to show more details:

Screenshot: http://cockpit-project.org/images/machines-error-expander.png

Thanks to Marek Libra for this improvement!

Get it
------

You can get Cockpit here:

http://cockpit-project.org/running.html

Cockpit 159 is available in Fedora 27:

https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/cockpit-159-1.fc27

Or download the tarball here:

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/releases/tag/159

Take care,

Martin Pitt