Monthly Archives: December 2022

Linux EndeavourOS Cassini Review

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I have already blogged about EndeavourOS, which I use most of the time on all my computers (desktops and laptops). Since EndeavourOS, based on Arch, is a rolling release, I update it almost daily and don’t need to install it from scratch when a new release comes out, like Cassini, released a few days ago. However, I wanted to try this new release by installing it from scratch (of course, using BTRFS).

I’ll first go through the installation, but I can anticipate that, once again, I’m impressed by EndeavourOS. This installation is smooth, with some novelties: you can choose between “grub” and “systemd-boot” now. Moreover, they switched from “mkinitcpio” to “dracut” for the generation of initramfs (this requires a few adjustments if you want to enable hibernation). Most of all, EndeavourOS is pure Arch but with outstanding defaults. Indeed, the KDE and GNOME environments are vanilla ones, with only a few customizations.

This time, I’ll install GNOME (but I’ll briefly say something about the KDE version at the end of this article).

Installation

First, I’m using Ventoy to boot the installer because I keep several Linux ISOs on the USB stick. I first made sure to update Ventoy because I read that the old versions did not work correctly with the latest Arch-based ISOs. Moreover, once I selected the “Cassini” ISO:

I got another menu (that’s something new), where I selected GRUB:

As usual, the first thing to do, once booted into the live environment, XFCE, is set up the network connection. You might also want to change the keyboard layout (Disable system defaults and install your layout, in my case, it’s the Italian layout):

Then, let’s update the mirrors (typically by selecting your state and possibly another one near you) with the “Welcome” application:

Then, let’s start the installer.

I choose the “Online” method because I want to install GNOME instead of Xfce.

I always prefer to install any operating systems in English, so I select “American English”:

The location has been found successfully, and while the language is the one I chose, it proposes to use my Italian locale for dates and numbers:

After setting the keyboard layout, I select the GNOME desktop:

And then, I can select the single packages. Since you choose the packages after selecting the desktop, a few packages, in particular, the ones of the chosen desktop, have already been selected:

Then, I typically unselect “xf86-video-intel”, which is known to give a few problems:

And I select all the packages concerning “Printing Support” (including “HP”) and also the “LTS kernel in addition” (because if anything goes wrong with the latest kernel, I can switch to the LTS one).

Now there’s a big novelty: you can select the bootloader. The default is “systemd-boot”, but I prefer to stay with GRUB (since I know it works for my use cases like booting Timeshift snapshots and booting other distros):

It’s time for partitioning. Since I have another (EndeavourOS) Linux installation and Windows on this computer, I choose Manual partitioning:

First, I specify to mount the existing EFI partition (into “/boot/efi”) without formatting it and ensure the “boot” flag is selected. This way, the installer can properly install GRUB.

Then, I select the (existing) partition I’m going to replace with this installation; I specify to format it as BTRFS and mount it as the root partition:

There’s also an existing EXT4 partition that I use to share common data among my Linux installations, so I select that (without formatting it) and specify my desired mount point:

That’s the final layout of the primary SSD disk:

I also have another HD on this computer with some existing partitions I want to access from the installed system. So I select this other disk from the top drop-down list, and I specify the final mount points:

As usual, there’s the “Users” section, which I will not detail.

Finally, we can have a look at the summary, which looks good to me:

OK, let’s start the installation!

The installation went fine, and it took about 5 minutes. This is an old computer (6 years old), so it was pretty fast.

First impressions

Here we are in the installed system!

As usual, the GRUB menu is beautifully pink and purple:

And here’s GNOME:

You see that these are not the standard GNOME icons. In fact, EndeavourOS provides GNOME with the “Qogir” icons, which look great to me:

Besides that, I seem to understand that’s vanilla GNOME (it does not have “minimize” and “maximize” buttons enabled by default). It’s good that “GNOME Tweaks” is already installed. However, there’s no GNOME extension installed (the first one I installed was “AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support”). The terminal is the new “GNOME Console”, which I’ll soon replace with the old “GNOME Terminal” (I prefer that one). Standard GNOME applications like “Calendar” and “Contacts” are not installed either. At least, we have the new GNOME Text editor, which replaces the (IMHO) unusable “Gedit”.

There are no standard GNOME wallpapers, just the EndeavourOS one. Of course, you can install other wallpapers using the “Welcome” app. However, I’ll switch to Variety soon.

The Wayland session is enabled by default. It’s OK to me because GNOME and Wayland are usable nowadays.

The BTRFS subvolumes were created as expected, that is, with a separate “@home” and separate subvolumes for “/var/log” and “/var/cache”. Unfortunately, we also have nested subvolumes for “/var/lib/machines” and “portables”, which are known to give headaches if you restore a Timeshift snapshot:

Thus, since I’m not planning to use them, I removed them (this will make the two nested subvolumes disappear), and I recreated them as standard directories (I seem to understand that those two directories must exist; otherwise systemd will recreate them anyway):

So it’s time to start installing my applications and tweak a few GNOME settings.

In particular, since I have both the “linux” and “linux-lts” kernel, the GRUB configuration sets the LTS version as the default. To change that, I edit “/etc/default/grub” and specify

And regenerate the GRUB configuration:

Concerning KDE

I have also tried EndeavourOS KDE on a virtual machine. With Cassini, you get a new custom (and beautiful) Plasma theme, dark and purple (as usual in EndeavourOS).

To summarize

To summarize, EndeavourOS once again proved to be a fantastic Arch-based Linux distribution:

  • Easy to install
  • Arch-based (e.g., not like Manjaro)
  • not bloated with too much software
  • close to the vanilla DEs (at least for the ones I tried, GNOME and KDE)
  • with a wonderful and warm community, by the way 🙂

Happy new Linux year! 🙂

Enabling Hibernation in EndeavourOS (with dracut)

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EndeavourOS is an Arch-based Linux distro, so the technique for enabling hibernation for an Arch-based distro should work out of the box. That was true until the new ISO released this December, “Cassini”, where they switched from “mkinitcpio” to “dracut”.

Now, a few things must be adapted to make hibernation work in EndeavourOS, and the automatic tool described in my previous post can no longer be used. However, don’t worry; it’s not hard to enable hibernation. In this post, I’ll describe the steps to enable it.

IMPORTANT: my instructions assume that you have a SWAP partition; for a SWAP file, you’ll have to adapt a few things, but I can’t help since I never use SWAP files.

First, you need to have a swap partition already set up. For example, in /etc/fstab, you should have something like

The UUID is essential, and you should take note of it.

Then, we must tell “dracut” about hibernation so that it generates initramfs accordingly. It is enough to create the file “/etc/dracut.conf.d/resume.conf” with this line:

By the way, a quick way to do that is by running this command:

Then, we regenerate initramfs:

Now, edit your /etc/default/grub and specify resume in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, with the UUID of your swap partition. So it should be something like (remember that <UUID of your swap partition> must be replaced with the UUID; the “…” refer to existing options):

Save the file and update the grub configuration:

Now, reboot and hibernate should work. You can try that with the following:

You may also want to refer to the older post enabling hibernation in Linux, particularly in Ubuntu, for other mechanisms related to hibernation, like suspend and then hibernate.

Acer Aspire Vero, Unboxing and First Impressions

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During the last “Black Friday,” I bought this laptop:

Acer Aspire AV15-51-58J2 39,6 cm (15.6″) Full HD Intel® Core™ i5 16 GB DDR4-SDRAM 512 GB SSD Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) Windows 11 Home. (Intel Evo certified, by the way)

I paid 599 instead of 899 euros, that’s a significant discount (especially for its features, mentioned above and detailed in the post)!

This laptop caught my attention a few months ago due to its “eco” and “green” construction choices. You might want to look at https://www.acer.com/us-en/laptops/aspire/aspire-vero to know more about the recycled materials used for its construction. Besides these “green” appealing characteristics, I immediately found the laptop “beautiful” and pleasant at the touch.

In this blog post, I’ll describe my first impressions.

Here’s the unpacking. As you can see, the packaging is made of recycled paper:

The charger is not USB-C, unfortunately. However, it is pretty light. And the only USB-C port CAN NOT be used for charging, but only for data transfer:

And look: one of the containers can be used as a stand for the laptop (excellent!):

Besides the standard papers and a very minimal getting started guide (pretty useless), there are also some ecological stickers 🙂

Also, the inverted “R” and “E” (for the three words “Reduce”, “Reuse”, and “Recycle”) are a slight distinguishing touch (they’re on the keyboard cover as well):

 

And there are lots of ports (right side: USB 2 and headphone Jack; left: one HDMI, two USB 3, one USB-C – only data, no recharging, and an ethernet port, besides the recharging port). To be honest, I did not find the ethernet very comfortable to use, but maybe I need to get used to it.

This means there’s no SD card reader… Too bad!

The back shows that it should be easy to open the laptop (standard screws), though I still haven’t tried that:

Oh, and there are no painted elements on the laptop: there are engraved symbols and writings:

You see that the surface is anything but smooth, but that makes the laptop very pleasant to touch. Probably the best laptop surface I have ever had! Yes, that part is mostly recycled too, which is ecologically good! 🙂

The two lights on the right will tell you when the battery is charging (“red”: charging, “blue”: fully charged) and when the computer is on:

Unfortunately, these are the only LEDs provided by this laptop. This means that unless the operating system tells you something, you cannot know whether the num lock or the capslock is selected.

When you open the laptop (you can also open it with one hand), the screen slightly lifts the back of the laptop so that the ventilation works better.

Let’s turn it on and enjoy the nice booting logo:

The keyboard is backlit, and the light is good enough to use the keyboard comfortably. Unfortunately, after the backlight turns off because you haven’t used it for a while, just using the touchpad will not turn the backlit back on: you have to press a key.

The keyboard is lovely! At least, that’s the best keyboard I’ve used. Yes, better than Mac air, DELL XPS, and LG GRAM. It’s a great pleasure to type on this keyboard. The only bad part of this keyboard is that the “ENTER” key (“Invio” in Italian) is large enough but too close (actually, attached) to the other key (“ù” in the Italian version). But that’s a problem only for the first minutes of usage. I got used to it.

On the contrary, the touchpad is only “OK”. My other above-mentioned laptops have a much better touchpad. Having said that, this touchpad is usable anyway, though a bit tougher in some external points. If you click on the center, you have no problem. The touchpad is probably too smooth, and if your fingers are wet, you will experience some friction.

Another mechanism I had to change immediately was the function keys. As it happens in several modern laptops, by default, a function key does not behave like a function key but as the other functionality provided by the key (e.g., volume adjustment, light adjustment, etc.). Luckily, I almost immediately found the procedure to achieve that (once and for all) on the Acer website:

  1. Enter the BIOS (you must press F2 while the laptop is booting when you see the “Acer” logo; in the BIOS, you can press Ctrl+S to enable hidden and advanced features; that’s not required for what I need to do in this specific case).
  2. Then, in the main tab, you must change the “Function key behavior” to “Function Key”. Save and restart.

The laptop comes with Windows 11 Home installed. If you read my blog, you know that I’m not a Windows fan 😉 (I have already installed a few Linux distros in multi-boot, and I’ll blog about that in the future). However, Windows 11 is not that bad (well… it’s still Windows 😉 The theme provided by Acer is, of course, “green,” and I like it:

Of course, there were already several updates to apply, which took about an hour! The Windows installation already comes with Firefox installed and several other software. Unfortunately, this includes Norton security, which I had to uninstall immediately (too heavyweight).

The screen resolution is 1920×1080 60,05 Hz and by default Windows already configures 125% scaling. I had to turn it to 150%. Otherwise, it was too fainting for my eyes to using it.

Power consumption is good. I’m used to LG GRAM, Dell XPS, and Mac air, which provide much better battery time. However, this Acer is not impaired in that respect: they say it should provide about 9 hours of battery time. Of course, it’s less, but I found that by using it pretty intensively, you get 5 hours. In that respect, Acer provides its own application (just search for “Vero” in Windows) for choosing a battery profile:

Note that between the usual “Powersave” and “Balanced,” you have an additional “Eco Mode”.

This program also allows you to set the battery charge limit (to increase battery life):

Moreover, there’s also the program “Acer Aspire Center” with other valuable utilities:

To summarize, my first impressions are great! I like this laptop, and for the price I paid, it has excellent features. Moreover, as I said above, I also find it very beautiful. I appreciate the “green” and “eco” ideas and design choices behind this laptop!

Concerning portability, my Dell XPS 13, LG GRAM 16, and Mac air are, of course, better, but in the end, this laptop weighs less than 2 Kg, so it’s heavier than the others mentioned, but still portable enough.

Stay tuned for more blog posts on this laptop, especially concerning Linux on this laptop 🙂

Installing Arch Linux on a PineBook Pro (external storage)

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This post will describe my experience installing Arch Linux on a PineBook Pro on external storage (USB stick in this example). Thus, the Manjaro default installation on the eMMC will not be touched. You should use a fast USB Stick, or the overall experience will be extremely slow. I’m using a SanDisk Extreme PRO, which is fast and feels like an SSD. This USB stick will be erased entirely, so don’t use a USB stick with essential data on it.

The post is based on the instructions found at https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro_Software_Release#Arch_Linux_ARM.

The installation process consists of two steps:

  • First, install the official Arch Linux ARM distribution; this will not be enough to have many hardware parts working (e.g., WiFi, battery management, and sound).
  • Then, add the repositories with kernels and drivers for the PineBook Pro.

The first part must be performed from an existing Linux installation on the PineBook Pro. I will use the Manjaro installation that comes with the PineBook Pro. The second part will be performed on the installed Arch Linux system on an external drive (a USB stick in this example). Since after the Arch Linux installation, the WiFi is not working, for this part, you need to connect to the wired network, e.g., with an ethernet USB adapter.

Finally, I’ll also show how to install Gnome.

First part

This is based on https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Installing_Arch_Linux_ARM_On_The_Pinebook_Pro.

I insert my USB stick, which is /dev/sda. (Use “lsblk” to detect that.) From now on, I’m using this device. In your case, the device name might be different.

From now on, all the instructions are executed as “root” from a terminal window; thus, I first run:

I will do the following steps in a directory of the root’s home:

We need to download and extract the latest release of Tow-Boot for the Pinebook Pro from https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/releases. At the time of writing, the latest one is “2021.10-005”:

Now we flash Tow-Boot to /dev/sda (replace this with the device you are using).

Remember: this will wipe all the contents of the USB stick. Moreover, make sure you specify the right device, or you might overwrite the eMMC of the computer.

This process creates the partition table for the device, with the first partition for Tow-Boot. This created first partition must not be modified further. In fact, as you see in a minute, when we further partition the disk, we make sure to skip the first partition.

The output should be something like this:

Now, we must create the partitions on the USB stick. The process is documented step-by-step here https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Installing_Arch_Linux_ARM_On_The_Pinebook_Pro#Creating_the_partitions, and must be followed strictly:

These are the contents of my terminal where I follow the above-mentioned instructions (since I had already used this USB stick for some experiments before writing this blog post, fdisk detects the existing ext4 signature):

Now we must format the boot and the root partitions. I’m going to use EXT4 for both:

Note that although the second command returns immediately, the EXT4 partition will be formatted in the background and will take some time (even with a fast USB stick).

Now we mount the two partitions:

  1. mount the root partition (the 3rd partition) on “/mnt”
  2. create the boot directory at the root of the mounted system
  3. mount the boot partition (the 2nd partition) on “/mnt/boot”

Now, we download the tarball for the rootfs of our USB stick installation. The instructions are once again taken from the link mentioned above, and they also include the verification of the contents of the downloaded archive:

And we extract the root filesystem onto the mounted root partition of our USB stick:

This is another operation that takes time.

Now, we must create the “/etc/fstab” on the mounted partition. To do that, we need to know the UUID of the two partitions by using “blkid”. You need to take note of the UUID from the output (which will be completely different according to the used external device):

We create the file “/etc/fstab” in “/mnt” accordingly (remember, the UUIDs and the partition types must be specified accordingly). I run “nano /mnt/etc/fstab,” and I append the following contents (I use “noatime” to reduce the number of writes on the external USB stick when used to run the installed OS):

Finally, we need to create the file “/mnt/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf” (the directory must be created first, with:

Once again, the contents depend on the UUID we discovered above for the root filesystem, so the contents must be adapted accordingly:

We can now unmount the filesystems

And we can reboot into the (hopefully) installed Arch Linux on the USB stick to finish a few operations. Remember that we need a wired connection for the next steps.

Upon rebooting, you should see the two entries (if you let the timeout expire, it will automatically boot the first entry):

After we get to the prompt, we can log in with “root” and password “root” (needless to say: change the password immediately).

Let’s connect a network cable (you need a USB adapter for that), and after a few seconds, we should be online. We verify that with “ifconfig”, which should show the assigned IP address for “eth0”.

Since there’s no DE yet, I suggest you keep following the official web pages (and this blog post) by connecting to the PineBook Pro via SSH so that it will be easy to copy and paste commands into the terminal window of another computer. Moreover, when logged into the PineBook Pro directly, you will see lots of logging information directly on the console (I guess this could be prevented by passing specific options to the kernel, but we’ll install a DE later, so I don’t care about that much). The SSH server is already up and running in the PineBook Pro installed system, so once we know the IP address from the output of “ifconfig”, we can connect via SSH. However, root access via SSH is disabled, so we must connect with the other predefined account “alarm” and password “alarm” (again, you might want to change this password right away):

Once we’re logged in since “sudo” is not yet configured, we switch to root:

We have to initialize the pacman keyring:

The guide https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Installing_Arch_Linux_ARM_On_The_Pinebook_Pro ends at this point.

What follows are my own instructions I usually run when installing Arch.

In particular, I configure time, network time synchronization, and timezone (Italy, in my case):

The next step is required for doing gnome-terminal work (and it’s also part of the Arch standard installation instructions):

Edit “/etc/locale.gen” and uncomment “en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8” and other needed locales.

Generate the locales by running:

Edit the “/etc/locale.conf” file, and set the LANG variable accordingly, for example, for the UTF-8 local above:

We could run a first system upgrade

I don’t know if that’s strictly required because we’ll add the additional repository for the PineBook Pro in a minute. However, just in case, it might be better to update the system.

Let’s reboot and verify that everything still works.

The kernel at the time of writing is

NOTE: By the way, I noted that if I want to boot from the USB stick, it’s better to use the right-hand side USB port (which is USB 2) instead of the left-hand side port (USB 3). Otherwise, the system seems to ignore the system on the USB stick and boots directly to the installed Manjaro system.

Second part

As mentioned above, I suggest connecting to the PineBook Pro via SSH. In any case, what follows must be executed as “root” (“su -“).

Let’s now add the additional repositories with kernels and drivers specific to PineBook Pro.

The project is documented here: https://github.com/SvenKiljan/archlinuxarm-pbp, and these are the contents of the additional repository that we’ll add in a minute https://pacman.kiljan.org/archlinuxarm-pbp/os/aarch64/.

Note that this project also provides a way to install Arch Linux directly with these repositories, with a procedure that is similar to the one in the first part. I prefer to install official Arch Linux first and then add the additional repositories, though.

The addition of the PineBook Pro repository to an existing Arch Linux installation and the installation of specific kernel and drivers is documented as a FAQ: https://github.com/SvenKiljan/archlinuxarm-pbp/blob/main/FAQ.md#how-do-i-migrate-from-other-arch-linux-arm-releases-for-the-pinebook-pro.

The addition of the PGP key and the repositories to “/etc/pacman.conf” is done by pasting the following commands (remember, as the user “root”):

Let’s now synchronize the repositories

And let’s install the packages specific to the PineBook Pro (note that we’re going to install the Linux kernel patched by Manjaro for the PineBook Pro):

Of course, we’ll have to answer “y” to the following question:

Let’s reboot and verify that everything still works (again, by connecting via SSH).

Now, we should be using the new kernel:

Before installing a DE, I prefer creating a user for myself (“bettini”) and configuring it as a “sudoer”. (We must install “sudo” first).

Then (by simply running “visudo”), we enable the users of the group “wheel” in “/etc/sudoers”; that is, we uncomment this line:

Then, I try to re-connect with my user and verify that I can run commands with “sudo” (e.g., “sudo pacman -Syu”).

Before going on, I prefer to set up a SWAP file (of 8 Gb). The PineBook Pro has only 4 Gb of RAM, and it is likely to exhaust it. Using ZRAM did not work in my experience with Manjaro, so it’s better to have a SWAP file to avoid system hangs.

I run as root (“sudo su -“):

This takes some time. Then, I add the following line at the end of “/etc/fstab”:

Install GNOME

As usual, I’m still doing these steps via SSH.

I’m going to install GNOME with some fonts, pipewire media session, firefox, and the NetworkManager (I’ll ignore dependencies that cannot be installed, e.g., “gnome-boxes” since I’m not going to use virtual machines on this machine):

It’s more than 500 Mb of packages to install, so please be patient.

Now, I enable the primary services (the login manager for GNOME, the NetworkManager to select a network from GNOME, and the profile daemon for switching between power profiles, e.g., “Balanced” and “Powersave”):

OK, time to reboot.

This time the graphical GDM login manager should greet us, allowing us to get into GNOME and select a WiFi connection.

NOTE: when GDM starts, I always hear a strange noise. It also happens with the pre-installed Manjaro. It must be the sound card that gets activated…

IMPORTANT NOTE: Upon rebooting, the WiFi does not always work (it looks like the WiFi card is not seen at all); that also happens with Manjaro. The only solution is to shut down the computer (i.e., NOT simply rebooting it) and boot it again.

And here’s the GNOME 43 setting on the right top corner showing the connected WiFi and the currently selected power profile “Balanced”:

By default, GNOME starts with the Wayland session. Everything seems to work; touchpad gestures work out of the box (3 finger swipes). Something does not look right in the Wayland session, though. For example, if you run Firefox, you cannot switch to it with Alt+Tab. I prefer to go for the X11 session for the time being (that’s selectable from the GDM’s gear icon on the bottom right corner once you select your user).

Here are a few screenshots of the GNOME activities and the currently installed applications:

The GNOME About dialog:

And of course, once installed, let’s run “neofetch”:

That’s all for now!

In another blog post, I described my customizations to GNOME (installed programs and configurations).

Stay tuned! 🙂

UI Tests in Another Display in Linux

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UI tests are delicate since when you run them, you must not interact with the computer, or you will disturb the tests, which will likely fail.

In Linux, you can use Xvfb, but windows will not have a title, which might break UI tests that rely on that. For example, Eclipse SWTBot tests work best if windows have titles.

The solution (I’m still talking about Linux) is to use Xephyr:

  • you start Xephyr by specifying a DISPLAY number
  • you start a Window manager on the same display
  • you run your UI tests on the same display

Now, you can interact with your computer without disturbing the UI tests. That’s very important if you need to debug the UI tests: if they don’t run in another display, the UI tests will likely fail if you switch to the debugger.

IMPORTANT: this works only when you’re on an X11 session (not Wayland).

The name of the package for Xephyr depends on your distribution. For example, in Arch Linux, you install it like that:

Now, from a terminal window, you can start Xephyr (in this example, using the DISPLAY 50) and run a Window manager inside, specifying that it must run with X11.

If you’re on Gnome, you use mutter:

If you’re on KDE, you use kwin:

This is an example in Gnome: I ran the above commands, and then, from the same terminal (where DISPLAY is set to “:50”), I started the Gnome Text Editor, which appears in the Xephyr window:

In the following screenshot, I’m running the Maven build of one of the examples of my TDD Book, which uses AssertJ Swing for the UI tests of a simple Java Swing application (I started another terminal, where I exported the DISPLAY environment variable set to “:50”):

The UI tests (see the “MyAppWindow”) are undisturbed in the Xephyr window, and I can interact with my computer without breaking them.

From Eclipse, e.g., for a SWTBot test, you have to tweak the run configuration in the “Environment” tab:

And these are a few SWTBot tests for my Eclipse project EMF Parsley, which started from Eclipse but running in the Xephyr window:

Happy UI testing! 🙂

Maven profiles that are really active by default

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While working on my TDD book, I played with Maven profiles to write the chapter.

If you use Maven profiles, you might want to use an activation strategy to enable the profile under certain circumstances automatically. There’s also a particular option, “<activeByDefault>”, which seems self-explanatory. This must mean that that profile will be constantly active by default unless you explicitly disable it, e.g., with “-P!profileid”.

Here’s a possible minimal example:

By using the maven-help-plugin‘s goal “active-profiles,” we can verify that:

Unfortunately, this will probably never work as we expect. For example, let’s add another profile (without any activation strategy in this example):

If we explicitly enable such a profile, we’d expect the previous one is still “active by default”, but we have a terrible surprise:

As it is documented (https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-profiles.html):

This profile will automatically be active for all builds unless another profile in the same POM is activated using one of the previously described methods. All profiles that are active by default are automatically deactivated when a profile in the POM is activated on the command line or through its activation config.

Counterintuitive, but it’s like that, like it or not.

However, the documentation also tells you how to achieve the “really active by default”; it’s a matter of activating the profile when a property is NOT defined. Let’s create another profile following this approach:

And verify that:

The profile we’ve just added will be activated when the system property “skipMe” is not defined. So, it’s really active by default unless you pass to the command line “-DskipMe”.

Note also that the “<activeByDefault>” property is really misleading. In fact, as long as another profile is automatically activated (i.e., not explicitly), the “<activeByDefault>” is useless. In fact, with the profile we’ve just active since it’s really active by default, it also disables, by default, “notReallyActiveByDefault”:

Let’s do some further experiments and add another profile, which is activated when the property “activateMe” is defined:

Let’s define the property on the command line, and we get the expected result:

We can also refine the activation:

If we define that property, the profile will be activated, and if we define that property with another value, it will not be activated (in any case, “reallyActiveByDefault” is still activated):

REMEMBER: You CANNOT activate that profile by defining a property in the POM, though:

If you want, you can temporarily switch the activation with a negated property, similar to what we’ve done before:

And verify the expected result:

That’s the complete example of POM:

However, please remember not to abuse profiles, or the build will easily become hard to maintain.