Changes in IOI's 2023 system

[radl97]

I would like to contribute the changes of IOI 2023's contestant-"vm". I'll try to summarize the changes, and based on feedback, I am happy to cherry-pick the needed changes. (Maybe it's better this way, because the commits are not that nice how I wanted them to be.)

I do not know who handles this repository, I want to start a discussion on which changes would be useful for later years.

I also see that some contest organizers use these repositories as a base image for their own contests, so I wanted to add visibility to the changes listed below.

Some changes (at the end of the list) were not yet committed to this repo.

• Migration to Ubuntu 22.04 (which leaded to ability to bump G++ version)
  • netplan, new clang, gcc versions, etc.
  • X11 -> wayland
  • Fix up/bump Gnome extensions (and minimum-gnome-versions)
  • Fix ability to load documentation. Firefox became a snap package, which restricts access to the original file system.
• Certain must-do fixes (internet links dead)
  • Bump versions of clang packages
  • Fix accidental removal of packages. Ubuntu migration leads to package dependency graphs changing, so an apt-remove might remove a required package. Use apt-mark instead.
• Fix a security vulnerability
• Do not remove some packages
  • kernel headers, modules, etc. -> these were probably removed to save space, and these are big packages. But it made testing harder for us.
  • Do not remove some caches -> this made it harder to debug issues
• Remove some Java debuggers (VisualVM)
• Install clangd
• Also allow native run, not just VM -- IOI 2023 was deployed natively.
  • We needed snapshotting: We tried LVM, but that did not go well with CloneZilla... So we did a bad imitation of LVM with manual snapshotting :(
    • there is a fancy boot-up-time (initramfs) script handling the snapshot/restore mechanisms
  • Remove packages/blacklist Wifi and bluetooth modules
• UI fixes
  • Favorite apps
  • Some small changes to remove first-run prompts (Eclipse donate, some VSCode prompts too)
• Documentation
  • Add Python documentation
  • Remove STL-manual (it was really old C++)
  • Bump HTML book version
• IDEs
  • Install LSP servers and plugins for most editors.
  • (Eclipse was removed due to a misunderstanding, then adding back later :D )
  • Bump Eclipse version, VSCode extensions version.
  • Add xwayland compatible eclipse launcher -- Wayland version and X11 both seemed to have some annoyances
  • Remove OpenJDK, Eclipse bundles its own version.
  • IntelliJ Keybindings
  • Bumped VSCode Vim
  • Add VSCode clangd extension to use as a possible alternative for the Microsoft supported C++ extension
  • After request: install these plugins: geany-plugin-automark geany-plugin-lineoperations geany-plugin-overview
• gen_vpn_conf scripts moved to automation repo
  • Many other changes in VPN config. We were having trouble integrating our infrastructure with the VPN configs...
• Remove annoyances:
  • silently dropping outbound connections created many annoyances (30s-2m timeouts in several programs, e.g. VSCode): e7309fc

Continuous Integration / Reproducible build:

• Support for qemu
• Autoinstall + cloud-init setup
• Try making setup script reentrant (the ability to run the script again, to test out changes on the same VM)
• Split the big setup script to parts: 2766f39

There are several 2023-only changes:

• PySide6-Essentials was installed to enable a visualization for a specific task, as requested by 2023 HSC
• wallpaper

There has been some changes since this last revision. These were deployed through ansible, and not yet upstreamed here:

• Fix screenshot capability (Wayland support) -- and another fixup later
• VSCode GNU++17 support (auto-select)
• Gnome favorite apps-related change
  • remove udisks2
  • fix a typo
• Fix snapshot-rollback
• disable snap updates
• work on tinc configs (tinc vpn was changed to tunneling mode)
• Bump zabbix from 1.5.x to 1.6.4
  • Fill in zabbix_agent.conf
• Fixup firewall rules :/
• keyscan backup server (so as not to throw authorization errors)
• Add desktop icon for CMS

Known issues:

• First startups sometimes throw crash reports: there was one with take_screenshot script (I think it was fixed)
• There were several different crashes (gjs-console, somehow related to desktop entries -- this might have been fixed after a permission issue with Desktop)