Ubuntu News Archives

The Ubuntu 24.04 codename has been revealed as "Noble Numbat" while kicking off this next development cycle that is all the more exciting due to being the next long-term support (LTS) release.

Given recent talk of upstream Linux Long-Term Support (LTS) kernels likely being reduced from six to two year support windows moving forward, Canonical today decided to re-affirm their support for ten years of support with Ubuntu Long Term Support versions.

Canonical continues investing in Mir as their Wayland compositor and set of platform abstraction interfaces to make it easier for IoT and other "smart" devices to run atop Ubuntu Core. Most recently the Mir developers have been working to partially re-architect their graphics platform handling to better handle multiple GPU/display devices.

Hours after Ubuntu 23.10 was released last Thursday it was discovered Ubuntu 23.10 ISOs contained malicious user translations for those using the Ukrainian translations within the Ubuntu Linux desktop installer. Canonical suspended the desktop ISOs until the translations could be fixed and ISOs re-spun. That's now happened and this afternoon Ubuntu 23.10 images are back online.

Hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10, Canonical has pulled the ISOs and is re-spinning them after user-submitted translations for the Ubuntu installer turned out to contain hate speech.

Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" is now officially available for download as the latest (non-LTS) Ubuntu Linux release with a wealth of updated packages, continued desktop installer improvements, and other refinements ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle.

Stemming from reports of several fake crypto apps appearing in Canonical's Snap Store that aimed to steal user funds, temporary restrictions have been put in place while Canonical investigates the security matter.

The beta images of the Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" release are now available for testing ahead of the planned official release in October.

Just as anticipated, the Linux 6.5 kernel has landed in the Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic archive as the default kernel powering this next Ubuntu distribution release due out in October.

While the Ubuntu desktop has been using the GNOME Wayland session by default, Ubuntu's default Firefox browser build within its Snap confinements has continued relying upon XWayland. But the Firefox Snap beginning with Ubuntu 23.10 is now enabling the native Wayland support by default.

It turns out that Ubuntu Linux installations of Ubuntu 23.04, 22.04.3 LTS, and installs done since April 2023 that accepted the Snap version update haven't been following Ubuntu's own recommended security best practices for their security pocket configuration for packages. A new Subiquity release was issued today to fix this problem while those on affected Ubuntu installs are recommended to manually edit their /etc/apt/sources.list file.

When Canonical rolled out their new Flutter-based Ubuntu Linux desktop installer it lacked support for ZFS root file-system installations. Canonical has been quiet about their (Open)ZFS intentions after years of offering it as an Ubuntu install option with their prior installer, but for Ubuntu 23.10 this support is being restored.

As an experimental feature for next month's Ubuntu 23.10 release, Canonical is introducing initial support for TPM-based full disk encryption to make use of your system's Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The downside though is this extra security relies on Snaps, including for the kernel and GRUB bootloader.

LXD 5.17 is now available as the system container and virtual machine manager, which since last month has been reigned into control by Canonical and maintainership being limited to Canonical engineers. With this new LXD release there is ZFS delegation support as found with the upcoming OpenZFS 2.2.

Oliver Smith at Canonical who serves as the Product Manager for Ubuntu Desktop published a post on "charting a course for the future" of the Ubuntu desktop.

Since 2021 among other Snap'ing efforts for converting formerly Ubuntu DEB packages to Canonical's Snap sandboxed app packaging format has been the CUPS print server. The plan was to replace the Debian-packaged CUPS with the Snap-based CUPS for Ubuntu 23.10 but now that is being pushed back to next year.

With Ubuntu 23.10 shipping next month one of the changes expected on the desktop side was using a GIMP 3.0 snapshot for this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative rather than sticking to the aging GIMP 2.10 series. But now it's been determined that this will not happen and GIMP 2.10 will continue to be used.

Mir 2.15 is out today as the newest version of this Ubuntu-focused Wayland compositor developed by Canonical that makes it easy for building out Wayland-based shells.

Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS is now available as the newest point release to this current long-term support series.

Canonical has aimed to ship Linux kernel stable release updates (SRU) for Ubuntu releases on a three week cycle. That has worked out well overall but has led to delays at times in getting down CVE security fixes and other urgent customer requests. Moving forward Canonical is aiming for a new "4/2" week cycle for kernel SRUs.

Back in March Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal finally released for this community-developed smartphone/tablet OS that finally migrated from an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This past weekend Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal was released as the first update this lineage of being based off the newer Ubuntu Long-Term Support state.

Earlier this month Canonical asserted control over the LXD project. As another step in tightening up control over this container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC) is now apparently limiting LXD maintainership rights to only Canonical employees.

For a few years now Canonical has partnered with Intel to offer Ubuntu images optimized for their hardware like with IoT initiatives while the latest now are new Ubuntu real-time images optimized for Intel Core usage.

A new version of Canonical's Mir display server was released today that these days serves as a library for building Wayland-based shells.

While GIMP 3.0 stable likely not set to debut in 2023 but rather at least release candidates are expected, Canonical is looking at shipping a GIMP 3.0 snapshot in Ubuntu 23.10 in hopes of GIMP 3.0 stable by the time of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or at least a near final v3.0 state.

This shouldn't be particularly surprising for those closely tracking release cycles and the Linux kernel release cadence, but now it's official: Ubuntu 23.10 is aiming to ship with the Linux 6.5 kernel.

About a year ago Ubuntu changed its default compression level for its initramfs handling down to Zstd level one to deal with slow initramfs creation times on low-end systems / development boards. But since then that has resulted in larger initramfs sizes and yielding other bugs like more quickly filling up the /boot partition on Ubuntu systems. Thus the developers have gone back to the drawing board and are trying to figure out a path forward for better initramfs handling that works well for low-end single board computers while also maximizing space savings and working out well for all Ubuntu use-cases.

Ubuntu's NVIDIA Unified Device Architecture (UDA) driver package intended for GPU compute acceleration has enabled the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel driver support in their packages since the end of last year. Now with the new NVIDIA Enterprise Ready Driver "ERD" Ubuntu package hitting Ubuntu LTS users, they are also supporting the NVIDIA open GPU kernel driver option there.

LXD as the open-source container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC) has long been closely associated with Canonical due to its founding and pushed along by the Ubuntu maker as one of their software offerings. However, it has to this point been part of the Linux Containers project except moving forward Canonical has decided to pull it more into their direct control.

For next year's Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical is planning to offer an Ubuntu Core based immutable desktop OS flavor as an alternative to the traditional Ubuntu Desktop image. A new Ubuntu.com blog post today outlines Ubuntu Core usage for an immutable Linux desktop.

Announced on Thursday was the Ubuntu High Performance Computing (HPC) team to promote Ubuntu Linux for running AI/ML, energy, bioinformatics, meteorology, and other workloads on Ubuntu Linux.

While for an Ubuntu desktop user that is used to running Snap versions of Firefox and other desktop application sandboxing it may seem strange for Canonical to be comparing Snaps to Docker containers, the emphasis of their comparison is on the IoT/edge computing side where they are trying to better position Snaps as a superior alternative to using Docker containers.

One of the great longtime features of Ubuntu Linux has been Launchpad's Personal Package Archives (PPAs) for easily augmenting the official Ubuntu repositories with additional packages either to supply updated versions of select software or for software not yet found in the official Ubuntu archives. With Ubuntu 23.10 a change is being made in how PPAs are managed to enhance the security and reliability.

The ISC DHCP software was marked end-of-life at the end of 2022 and thus Ubuntu Linux developers have been deciding on a new isc-dhcp-client package replacement to use by default.

Following last month's release of Ubuntu 23.04, the "Lunar Lobster", Ubuntu 23.10 development is now officially opened under the "Mantic Minotaur" codename.

While distributions like Fedora Linux have been using Dbus-Broker for years already as their high performance D-Bus compatible implementation to, for Ubuntu 23.10 later this year is finally where it looks like Ubuntu will be transitioning to this better alternative to dbus-daemon.

Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release images are now available for download for those wanting to fetch the latest Ubuntu desktop or server builds or alternatively the various downstream flavors/spins.

It was just four years ago in Ubuntu 19.10 that Ubuntu's desktop installer added OpenZFS support for carrying out root file-system installations atop this ZFS file-system. Since then the Canonical/Ubuntu interest has waned. Ahead of the Ubuntu 23.04 release this week, I tried out the Ubuntu Lunar Lobster daily snapshot this weekend to find the OpenZFS install support with Ubuntu's new desktop installer to still be missing.

Canonical announced today that their kernel livepatching service will now be available for their hardware enablement "HWE" kernels on Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases.

Ubuntu 23.04 is being talked up for how it can aide developers that want to begin programming with Rust code for Linux kernel modules. It's possible to get started with Rust kernel development on Ubuntu 23.04 thanks to its generic kernel having the necessary kernel configuration, but ultimately it's still in an early state and there isn't much to do with the stock kernel.

The beta of Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" and its various spins/flavors were released overnight for testing.

Since 2019 there has been Ubuntu Cinnamon as an unofficial remix of Ubuntu paired with Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment. After the three years of progress, Ubuntu Cinnamon has now been granted an official status with next month's Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release.

Ubuntu Touch as the community maintained version of Ubuntu Linux for smartphones and tablets has for years been frustratingly limited to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as its base operating system for when Canonical had abandoned their smartphone ambitions. Today though that has finally changed with Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal having been released that moves things forward to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base.

Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS is available today as the newest point release for those continuing to employ this older long-term support releases.

Canonical is preparing to ship an updated set of Ubuntu Font files for the Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" release but is hoping to see more user testing ahead of the official release next month.

Canonical has been preparing to ship a Linux 6.2 based kernel for Ubuntu 23.04 and now it's in the process of rolling out over the coming days.

Ahead of next month's Ubuntu 23.04 release, Canonical has published Mir 2.13 as the latest version of their software project that in its current incarnation is focused on serving as a Wayland compositor and abstraction layer.

The Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" development builds recently transitioned from Linux 5.19 as in use by Ubuntu 22.10/22.04.2 to a Linux 6.1 based kernel. This led some -- including myself -- to wonder if Canonical changed course and shifted to Linux 6.1 LTS instead of the Linux 6.2 kernel that has been out as stable since last month. Fortunately, that's not the case and Ubuntu 23.04 is preparing to soon land Linux 6.2 across all kernel flavors.

Following work bringing Ubuntu Linux to the RISC-V boards like the StarFive VisionFive 2, LicheeRV, Nezha, and others, Canonical today announced they have published an optimized RISC-V image for the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA powered "Icicle Kit" development board.

Following a small delay, Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS has been released as the latest point release for this current Long Term Support series for Ubuntu Linux.