Recent experiences with Linux/Debian

As of late, I have been delving into smart home lightning. As I have an LG OLED TV, I have seen the possibility of installing Hyperion on the TV itself. Recently, I have bought Philips Light Bars and a Philips Hue Bridge after accidentally noticing that Hyperion has the possibility to connect to those via the Bridge. That made me realise that I might be able to connect those to my TV, which would become quite an intriguing experiment for January.

How does Hyperion not work on Debian?

However, I quickly ran into some issues. As a matter of fact, I don’t use Linux all that much in its truest sense. That is, it’s been a while since I ran pure Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora instance. To remember some of that, I decided to spin up a new CT with one of those. However, there arose an issue that Hyperion at the moment doesn’t really work / support the latest versions of Ubuntu / Debian / Fedora due to their apt repository migrations / issues. The exact issue was with the URL to the repository itself, which was in the line that has to be added to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hyperion.list file:

deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hyperion.pub.gpg] https://apt.hyperion-project.org/ VERSION_CODENAME main

As it seems according to a github post here, apparently apt.releases.hyperion-project.org is the URL that is used for the requests, but it doesn’t contain a valid / working release for (at the moment) latest Debian releases. That is why when you use the apt.hyperion-project.org URL, it doesn’t let you install Hyperion on Bookworm due to unmet dependencies:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
hyperion : Depends: libpython3.10 but it is not installable
Depends: libmbedtls12 but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

However, if you use apt.releases.hyperion-project.org, it installs, but sadly, refuses to work (exit-code: 127). Thus, I decided to roll out on an older version, Bullseye, as a test. As it turns out, it installs quite alright on Bullseye, but doesn’t work on Bookworm (Debian 12), which will be fixed “soon”.

How to install Cockpit when it is not available in the backports?

Marking my return to Linux, I noticed whilst scrolling Reddit that there was now a web-based Linux UI, called Cockpit-Project. Now, the documentation states that you need to add backports repository in order to install. However, that is incorrect when speaking of older releases sometimes. For example, on Bookworm, you had to add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list file:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian ${VERSION_CODENAME}-backports main

However, what the documentation has no mention of, and what is difficult to find on the internet, is the fact that on some versions by now, Cockpit is now part of the main branch. Thus, defining backports as a source could result in an error similar to this:

The repository 'http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-backports main' does no longer have a Release file.

As such, the best idea is to first use a command that determines where the package is available:

apt policy cockpit

Which should provide information, such as this:

cockpit:
  Installed: 239-1
  Candidate: 239-1
  Version table:
 *** 239-1 500
        500 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

As you can see, in Bullseye, it is now part of the main branch, so that means we can simply use apt install cockpit and be done with it.