Ubuntu News Archives

Some big Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" updates will be coming down the pipe next week.

Alan Griffiths of Canonical has announced the release of MirAL 1.3, Mir's abstraction layer to ease bringing up new environments under Mir while providing a stable ABI.

Now that Google has proven SHA1 as unsafe, Ubuntu's Mir display server developers were quick to abandon its usage in favor of SHA256.

Ubuntu derivatives opting to do so have issued their 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" Beta 1 releases tonight.

Last Thursday Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS was delayed by a few more days with thinking it would be released this past Monday while now it's been officially released. Ubuntu 17.04 meanwhile is entering a feature freeze.

Alan Griffiths of Canonical has announced the release of MirAL 1.2 for Ubuntu 17.04 and the Ubuntu Stable Phone Overlay.

Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS was already twice delayed for different technical reasons. Approaching one month late from the original time table, 16.04.2 was supposed to ship today but that will no longer happen.

While the Ubuntu Phone efforts are basically on-hold until migrating to a Snap-based Ubuntu Phone/Touch image, OTA-15 was released today.

For developers packaging their software in Snaps for Ubuntu and other supported operating systems, Snapcraft 2.26 is now available.

Canonical's Mir developers are working to get Mir 1.0 released in 2017 and in preparation for that stable milestone they have just landed a number of API changes.

While Mir 1.0 is expected this year, the next upcoming release of the Mir display server is version 0.26. Here's a look at the new features.

Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS was supposed to ship in mid-January and then up until today was expected to be released on Thursday. But now it's being delayed at least one more week.

Canonical developer Alan Griffiths who has long been involved in the development of the Mir display server for Ubuntu has now announced Mircade.

After last month's planned Ubuntu 17.04 Alpha 1 release for opt-in flavors didn't happen, the Zesty Alpha 2 debut happened today as what is now the only alpha release for the upcoming Zesty Zapus.

Ubuntu 17.04, the Zesty Zapus, is still planning to ship Linux 4.10 for its kernel when the OS ships in April.

Alan Griffiths of Canonical today posted a year-in-review for Mir during 2016 and a look ahead to this year.

For those that shared your hopes for Ubuntu Phones in 2017, some of you were right: those that guessed nothing or very little. There isn't going to be any new Ubuntu Phone releases or major OTA updates until there is a Snap-based image down the road.

With just a few days left to 2016 and no major announcements expected out of Canonical to end the year, what are you hoping out of Ubuntu Phone and their mobile/convergence efforts in 2017?

With the end of 2016 in sight, here's a look back at the most popular Ubuntu news for the year.

For anyone hoping this year that Canonical would have decided to abandon their Mir display server efforts and shift focus back to Wayland, that did not happen, but in the stockings this holiday for Ubuntu users is an updated Mir display server release, version 0.25.

With the latest "Zesty" development packages for Ubuntu 17.04, there is initial support for driver-less network printer support.

With Debian Stretch dropping 32-bit PowerPC as a release architecture, Ubuntu is following a similar maneuver and will not be making 32-bit PPC images of future releases.

Ubuntu is going to begin making use of swapfiles in place of swap partitions on new (non-LVM) based installations.

Well, this is a bit strange and hopefully just developers looking to recharge and find new endeavors for 2017 as opposed to any exodus, but just hours after writing about Martin Pitt leaving Canonical to join Red Hat, another longtime Ubuntu developer is leaving the company too.

Ubuntu developer Martin Pitt who has been with Canonical for the past twelve and a half years as one of the original Ubuntu developers has decided to leave the organization and join Red Hat.

It is arriving a few weeks late, but the latest over-the-air update to Ubuntu Touch is now available for the select Ubuntu phones and tablets this holiday season.

Ubuntu is preparing Mesa 12.0.4 for Ubuntu Xenial and Yakkety users. It's not as great as Mesa 13, but at least there are some important fixes back-ported.

A new version of MirAL is now available, the Ubuntu project for making it easier to develop new Mir servers by offering a stable ABI and other shared/common components.

Mark Shuttleworth has written a new blog post where he's outlining a dispute Canonical is having with a European cloud provider over a breach of contract and "publishing insecure, broken images of Ubuntu" for its cloud customers.

Ubuntu's kernel team will likely be targeting the Linux 4.10 kernel for April's release of Ubuntu 17.04.

Similar to past Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) releases, Ubuntu 16.04.2 and beyond will feature hardware enablement kernels back-ported from newer Ubuntu releases in order to allow new hardware to work on these older LTS releases, but now the Xenial Xerus is switching to a concept of a "rolling HWE kernel."

Most talk these days of Ubuntu's Unity 8 next-gen desktop experience and their Mir display server goes hand-in-hand since the change-over is planned in-step before Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, but there's a new Ubuntu Insights blog post up working to promote Mir as more than just tech for the Unity 8 desktop.

Discussed today during the Ubuntu 17.04 Online Summit was the dwindling state of PowerPC (32-bit PPC) and i386 (x86 32-bit) support for Ubuntu and overall Linux for that matter. Images are still being produced but likely for not much longer although the package archives are anticipated to remain.

Earlier this year Ubuntu developers announced Netplan as a new, consolidated network configuration tool. Netplan was added to Ubuntu 16.10 and more improvements are on the way for Ubuntu 17.04.

Today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 17.04 was a convergence Q/A talk where Unity 8 and delivering a all-Snaps image (no Debian packages) were talked about for nearly one hour.

Today and tomorrow is a very basic Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) where the developers are plotting their work for Ubuntu 17.04, the Zesty Zapus.

For those wondering the current benefits of switching over to Mesa Git (13.1-devel) on Ubuntu 16.10 compared to the stock Mesa 12 drivers, here are some benchmark comparisons for RadeonSI Gallium3D using an R9 Fury. There are also tests when moving to Linux 4.9 from the Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" Linux 4,8 kernel.

While Mythbuntu is out, Ubuntu Budgie is in as the newest official Ubuntu Linux flavor for the spin previously known as Budgie Remix.

The Mythbuntu Linux OS that paired the MythTV HTPC software with an Ubuntu Linux base is being disbanded.

Pardon for being a bit late with this news due to being busy testing Deus Ex on a wide range of GPUs, but Canonical this morning announced the release of Ubuntu Core 16.

Canonical has formally moved forward with its enterprise kernel livepatching service, which it's making free to the Ubuntu community -- assuming you have three Ubuntu installations or less. Like the other approaches, this is about applying in real-time critical security fixes to the kernel without rebooting.

Ending out the alphabet, Ubuntu 17.04 is...

With today's Ubuntu 16.10 release one of the exciting spins we've been looking forward to is Ubuntu GNOME 16.10, which has an experimental Wayland session available but is not the default. I spent a few minutes trying out Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 this morning.

Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" is now officially available as the latest version of this popular Linux distribution.

Ubuntu/Canonical developers have been discussing plans and requirements for Mir Version 1 including stable ABIs and licenses.

The final Ubuntu 16.10 Beta for "Yakkety Yak" was released this week and we found its performance doesn't differ much from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (with the exception of the newer graphics stack) while here are some results comparing it to other modern Linux distributions.

With Ubuntu 16.10 being right around the corner you may be wondering about its support for Vulkan. Here's my experience when trying out today's Ubuntu 16.10 "beta 2" release and looking for Vulkan support.

It feels like so soon - we are just two weeks out from seeing the official Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" release. Today the final beta is available.

Yesterday saw some infrequent updates to the SDL2 library's Mir back-end for Ubuntu users.

Ubuntu OTA-13 has been released this Monday morning for Ubuntu phone/tablet users.