Ubuntu News Archives

Ubuntu 18.04, the Bionic Beaver release, is now available as Canonical's latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release.

Released yesterday was version 0.11 of the XDG Desktop Portal and with this release comes initial support for Snap packages.

In addition to Purism working on their GNOME-based interface with their PureOS GNU/Linux on their upcoming Librem 5 smartphone as well as supporting KDE Plasma Mobile as another option, they will also be supporting the UBPorts community Ubuntu Touch work on this privacy-minded Linux smartphone.

The proposal for replacing early Ubuntu derivatives' early alpha/beta releases with "testing weeks" in its place is moving forward with no objections having been raised but flavors like Kubuntu and Xubuntu being in favor of the change.

At the end of March longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths of Canonical announced EGMDE, the Mir Desktop Environment as a desktop example implementing Mir/MirAL APIs and supporting Wayland clients. Griffiths has now put out his latest article in guiding interested developers in working with the code.

Prominent Ubuntu community developer Simon Quigley has sparked a discussion about Ubuntu's release milestones and the possibility of moving away with their alpha and beta one milestones moving forward.

The final beta release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is now ready for testing ahead of the official launch expected at the end of April.

After being at Canonical for a decade (aside from a brief stint at Gazzang), Dustin Kirkland who most recently served as the company's VP of Product, is joining Google.

Last month I wrote how Ubuntu 18.04 began enabling "automatic suspend" by default on new installations where after 20 minutes systems were suspending without notice and in some cases still causing issues trying to resume with modern x86 hardware in 2018... Fortunately, Ubuntu developers are reverting that behavior when on AC power.

We've known that Mir developers have been trying to get a Mir example desktop session going in time for Ubuntu 18.04. More details on that are now coming to light as we meet the EGMDE desktop environment.

Another minor update to Mir has arrived ahead of next month's Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" release.

One of the subtle changes that seemed to have been made during the Ubuntu 18.04 development cycle is automatic suspend now being enabled by default on desktop systems.

There were various calls by independent end-users voicing their two cents that Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" should ship with Linux 4.16 instead of Linux 4.15, but that isn't going to happen.

Mir 0.31 is now available as the latest version of the Canonical-developed display stack that continues implementing support for Wayland's protocols.

With Ubuntu 18.10 being the release after an LTS cycle, it's shaping up to be another big feature period. They have already been discussing Zstd-compressed Debian packages for Ubuntu 18.10 while the latest proposal for this next cycle is on switching from Gzip to LZ4 for the default kernel initramfs image.

For those still holding out the dream for Ubuntu on phones/tablets, the UBports community continues their work in updating their Ubuntu Touch fork to riding off a 16.04 Xenial base rather than the existing Ubuntu 15.04.

Ahead of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS next month the Mir developers are working to release Mir version 0.31.

While Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is just one month away from release, the developers working on the Mir display server code are still working to get an example desktop session into this release.

Support for Zstd-compressed Debian packages was worked on last week by some Canonical/Ubuntu developers and already by the end of the year they are looking at potentially using it by default.

There is just one month to go until the official debut of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" release and Canonical's Mir team is busy as ever on the home stretch of final changes for this next release.

Today marks the first beta release of opt-in flavors participating for the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" development cycle.

Besides the Ubuntu 18.04 minimal spin that is around to 30MB compressed, the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" installer recently added an option for a "minimal installation" from the desktop Live DVD/USB environment. Here's a look at what that means for desktop users.

The UBPorts community continues pushing Unity 8 for their mobile/convergence vision in the absence of Canonical as well as making other improvements. Besides offering Unity 8 to Ubuntu users, they are also working on Debian support.

The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is now under its feature freeze. This marks the period now by which Ubuntu developers should be focusing on bug fixes rather than new features.

After being delayed due to Spectre and Meltdown with the Canonical developers busy mitigating those CPU security vulnerabilities, the Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS release was rolled out a few minutes ago.

After sitting in Bionic-Proposed the past week, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has officially moved from the Artful Aardvark's Linux 4.13 kernel to now running on Linux 4.15.

I was surprised to learn that up until this week, Mir's initial Wayland support didn't allow for windows of Wayland clients to be moved around the screen.

Besides bringing Ubuntu Touch to new mobile devices, the UBports team has also managed to continue their community-driven work on advancing the Unity 8 convergence desktop after Canonical abandoned work on it last year. They now have Unity 8 working on top of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

If you happen to have laying around a Moto G Gen 2 (Moto G 2014) device, it can have a second-life now running UBPorts' Ubuntu Touch software stack.

Last year Canonical announced work on a new text-based server installer for Ubuntu. It's come a long way over the past year and will be the default server installer with 18.04 LTS.

While Canonical is no longer involved in Unity 8 development, the community-driven UBports team continues working on their "Unity 8" and "Ubuntu Touch" efforts with a hope to deliver a developer ISO soon.

Besides Mir 0.30 being released this week, other Mir progress was also made by these Canonical developers working on forging Mir into a viable Wayland compositor.

Canonical's Mir team has released Mir v0.30 as the latest version of this display server that for the past year has been retooling itself with Wayland protocol support.

The delayed Ubuntu 16.04.4 point release is now expected to become available at the start of March.

Will Cooke, Canonical's Director of Ubuntu Desktop, has announced plans to collect more diagnostics data from Ubuntu installations. This would involve collecting system hardware/software details during the installation process and be uploaded to Ubuntu servers, but users could opt-out of said survey.

Ubuntu developers are in the process of landing Mesa 18.0 within the "Bionic Beaver" archive for the upcoming 18.04 LTS distribution release. In the process they are also enabling GLVND for allowing the Mesa and NVIDIA proprietary drivers more happily co-exist on the same system.

With the feature-packed X.Org Server 1.20 going to be too late to make it into the April release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, a new X.Org Server point release is being prepared by an Ubuntu developer that does include some basic new functionality.

Canonical's Mir developers are working on getting Mir 0.30 release out the door. There has been no public communication whether they will attempt a Mir 1.0 release this cycle after deciding against it the last minute for Ubuntu 17.10 due to their shift in focus.

Steve Langasek of Canonical has laid out a draft proposal about allowing Snaps to be shipping by default with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release.

For those using Ubuntu Minimal images for containers/Docker, assembling your own base distribution, setting up an embedded Linux environment, or related use-cases, the minimal images for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release will be even smaller.

Canonical's Tiago Daitx has laid out a proposal today for having an OpenJDK stable release update exception for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" to reduce their long-term maintenance burden.

Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS had been scheduled to ship mid-February as the latest point release for this Long Term Support release, but unfortunately that is not going to happen as planned due to the Canonical kernel developers being overloaded by Spectre and Meltdown mitigation work.

While Ubuntu 17.10 defaults to using the Wayland session on supported GPUs/drivers when using the default GNOME Shell based session, Canonical has decided for Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" LTS that it will use the X.Org Server by default.

Nearly a decade ago Canonical/Ubuntu developers had a goal of a 10 second boot time. They made good on that for their netbook focus at the time, but in the years since their boot time has slowed down and we haven't seen any concerted effort on improving their boot speed again.

Mir's Wayland support continues being hacked on and now being tackled is support for the XDG-Shell protocol.

Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISOs are now available as well as for most of the *buntu derivatives. The Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISO re-spin is for disabling the SPI kernel driver to avoid messing up select laptops.

Over the past week I have posted many KPTI and Retpoline benchmarks for showing the performance impact of these patches to combat the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. But with my testing so far I haven't done any showing the combined impact of KPTI+Retpoline on Ubuntu versus a completely unpatched system. Here are some of those results.

While it's approaching one year since Canonical decided to divest from Unity 8 and mobile/convergence, the UBports community continues making some progress in getting their forked desktop environment ready for their forked Ubuntu Touch environment as well as the desktop.

Last month Ubuntu 17.10 ISOs were pulled due to a BIOS/UEFI corrupting problem. They got the problem under control by the end of December and there is a software fix available for affected laptops, particularly a number of Lenovo laptops and those from a few other vendors. Next week a fixed Ubuntu 17.10 release is now expected.

2017 was easily the most pivotal year for the Ubuntu Linux distribution in years with Canonical having decided to end Unity 8 development in favor of moving to a GNOME Shell Wayland session. There was also the decision to develop a new server installer that is still under development, Snaps and its underlying tech continues to be worked on as an alternative to Flatpak, and Ubuntu continues to dominate the cloud landscape.