Ubuntu News Archives

ASRock Industrial, the independent company spun out of ASRock that is focused on industrial computers, edge systems, hardware for retail environments, has now partnered with Canonical to begin offering certified devices for Ubuntu Linux.

Last year with the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS there was a beta real-time kernel offering from Canonical.

A new version of Mir has been released, which in recent years has been serving as a Wayland compositor and used for various niche use-cases like smart exercise mirrors and other IoT and kiosk-type deployments.

A new Ubuntu desktop installer has been talked about going back many years and over the past two years has been focused on providing a rewritten installer making use of Subiquity and Flutter. With Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" in April that new desktop installer is poised to finally be used by default.

One of the early alternative spins of Ubuntu back in the day was Edubuntu as an education-focused flavor of Ubuntu shipping with various educational packages pre-installed and an optimized workflow for students. Edubuntu gradually faded away but in 2023 is looking to re-establish itself and become an official flavor under new leadership.

As a long awaited gift for those using UBports' Ubuntu Touch, for Christmas the open-source, community-driven crew published a beta/RC build of Ubuntu Touch re-based atop Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The UBports community continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for running this Linux distribution on smartphones and tablets is out with OTA-24 as their newest over-the-air update.

This summer saw official Ubuntu Linux images released for the StarFive VisionFive RISC-V board while now Canonical engineers are working to ensure their Linux distribution is all squared away for the upcoming VisionFive 2.

Canonical announced today they have collaborated with Intel to provide new enterprise-grade Ubuntu images designed for next-gen Intel IoT platforms.

With Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" having shipped last week, Canonical engineers are moving ahead and beginning to get things going for the Ubuntu 23.04 development cycle now under the "Lunar Lobster" codename.

A new version of Canonical's Mir open-source display server is now available for what serves as a Wayland compositor for various Ubuntu use-cases around IoT and other niche purposes.

In addition to supporting the SiFive HiFive Unmatched, Allwinner D1 Nezha, and VisionFive RISC-V board support, Canonical has formally announced Ubuntu 22.10 for the LicheeRV as a $16~19+ RISC-V board.

Canonical has formally released Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" as the latest six-month, non-LTS update to Ubuntu Linux.

Among the new applications becoming available with Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" later this month is GNOME-Network-Displays for dealing with Miracast wireless displays.

Canonical announced today the launch of free personal Ubuntu Pro subscriptions for up to five systems.

On Thursday night Canonical released the beta of next month's Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" Linux distribution update.

In addition to Ubuntu supporting the StarFive VisionFive and Nezha RISC-V boards, Canonical engineers are also working on supporting the Sipeed LicheeRV board too for next month's 22.10 release. The Sipeed LicheeRV is notable in being one of the cheapest RISC-V boards out there: pricing starts at $16.90 USD.

Canonical announced this morning that they have partnered with ASUS IoT, the division of ASUS focused on providing "Internet of Things" hardware, to certify Ubuntu Linux for their devices.

One of many changes to find with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release is Debuginfod integration.

Canonical used to host a stellar in-person event each Ubuntu Linux development cycle with the Ubuntu Developer Summit. That was over a decade ago and then it became largely a virtual event and then faded away in favor of Canonical's internal road-map planning and other developer sprints among their employees. Coming up in November in Prague is the return of an in-person official event with the Ubuntu Summit.

Originally carried as a patch against Ubuntu 22.04 for its GNOME 42 desktop and continued to be maintained against GNOME 43 for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10 is supporting dynamic triple buffering with the Mutter compositor. This has allowed Ubuntu's GNOME desktop environment to perform better for some systems albeit not upstream in GNOME.

While it's been years since Canonical dropped Unity as the official desktop environment of Ubuntu, some within the open-source community have still been maintaining it and running an unofficial Ubuntu Unity flavor of the distribution. Now with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release, Ubuntu Unity will be an official flavor/spin.

As expected, Ubuntu 22.10 will be powered by the Linux 5.19 kernel.

For those planning to stick to the Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" Long-Term Support series still for some time before moving to the newer Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series, Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS is available today as the newest point release in that older series.

Earlier this month Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS was delayed by one week due to an OEM install bug leading to broken Snaps support. Now with Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS the Canonical developers are racing down to a last-minute rebuild of images over a NVIDIA proprietary driver issue.

In addition to continued improvements to its Steam Snap for running that gaming client within Canonical's sandboxed confines, the latest Linux gaming component to receive similar treatment is now Feral Interactive's GameMode.

Coming with GNOME 43 is a "Device Security" panel within the GNOME Control Center. While intended to help ensure their system is protected, Ubuntu isn't onboard with this Device Security functionality yet and has stripped it out from their GNOME build for Ubuntu 22.10.

Prior to this past week's Ubuntu 22.10 feature freeze, webp-pixbuf-loader was promoted to the main archive for allowing WebP images to have thumbnail support within the GNOME desktop on this next Ubuntu release and being able to open up WebP image files within the GNOME image viewer and the like.

As part of a broader effort to reduce system memory use on Ubuntu Linux particularly for server and container/cloud use-cases, Ubuntu 22.10's OpenSSH server has switched to using socket-based activation.

Canonical has released a new version of Mir, their display server that now focuses on making it easy adapting new environments to use Wayland by being an adaptable Wayland compositor.

Last month Dell announced their new Alder Lake powered XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop was certified by Canonical for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. At the time though it was still shipping to customers with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while now Dell has moved to preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS directly from the factory.

Last week Canonical announced official Ubuntu RISC-V images for the StarFive VisionFive board while this week they are expanding their supported RISC-V line-up to also include the Nezha single board computer powered by the Allwinner D1 SoC.

Earlier this summer I wrote about Canonical working to provide good support for StarFive's VisionFive low-cost RISC-V board. That work has now culminated with an Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS image for use on this Chinese RISC-V single board computer.

The latest partnership between Microsoft and Canonical is an announcement today of native .NET availability for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS hosts as well as containers.

Being prepared for Ubuntu 22.10 and presumably will be back-ported in future Ubuntu 22.04 LTS point releases is the systemd-hwe package to more easily deal with updated hardware rules as part of new device enablement.

Following a one week delay due to a last minute blocker bug being discovered, Canonical today has shipped Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS as the first point release to this current long-term support series.

Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS had been due for release today but has now been pushed back by one week after discovering an installer issue that led to Snaps like the default Mozilla Firefox browser failing to launch once installed.

Canonical is putting the finishing touches on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS that is due for release tomorrow as the first collection of stable release updates in re-spun ISO form for this "Jammy Jellyfish" long-term support series.

Back in May was a proposal by Canonical desktop software engineer Jeremy Bicha to use the new GNOME Console as the default terminal application in Ubuntu 22.10, replacing the GNOME Terminal. That default change hasn't happened yet but some necessary improvements have now been made to Ubuntu Kinetic's gnome-console package ahead of that possible shift.

Canonical and Dell are jointly announcing that the new Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop has been officially certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Recently on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS I've noticed that after installing dependencies for a number of benchmarks that the Ubuntu Linux installation is simply broken... I can start off with a clean install of Ubuntu 22.04 desktop but then after installing the dependencies for a number of tests, the Ubuntu installation is effectively unusable until going back and reinstalling numerous default packages. The desktop is no longer installed, networking support was dropped, and many other packages went missing. It turns out it's due to problematic and unintentional APT package management behavior that is now being fixed.

Canonical engineers have been continuing their quest to improve the start-up time for the Snap version of Mozilla Firefox that is used by default on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. With the latest improvements now pushed to the Firefox Snap, they are seeing around a 50% reduction in start-time for the web browser.

Those making use of Ubuntu's Chromium Snap for running the Google open-source web browser have been without VA-API support for GPU-based video acceleration within this sandboxed app. Fortunately, it looks like that will soon be crossed off the list for ensuring Ubuntu users can enjoy VA-API acceleration for lowering CPU resources and better power efficiency on Intel graphics and other Mesa Gallium3D drivers supporting VA-API.

This month Ubuntu developers have been trying to figure out how to best deal with systemd-oomd on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS killing applications like Firefox during high memory/swap use and that leading to a poor user experience when desktop users not being aware of the situation and suddenly finding their software killed.

Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 is out today as the newest Ubuntu mobile operating system update for smartphones from the folks at UBports that continues maintaining the code-base left by Canonical and now pushing ahead in their own direction.

With the recent release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it is shipping systemd-oomd by default on their desktop for trying to better handle low-memory / out-of-memory situations. However, in real-world use systemd-oomd is too easily killing user-space applications like Firefox and Chrome when approaching memory pressure. This is a poor Ubuntu 22.04 user experience but the developers now have an idea for their approach to addressing this solution.

From 2011 to 2017 while Ubuntu had been using the LightDM display manager developed by Canonical, their engineers were actively supporting it and making new releases to coincide with new Ubuntu Linux updates. But with Ubuntu now using GDM as its default desktop display manager, there hasn't been a new LightDM release in three years and not much in the way of upstream activity. Today Canonical's lead LightDM maintainer issued a status update for the project.

Slow start-up performance of the Firefox web browser has been a frequent complaint on Ubuntu Linux since Canonical shifted over to using the Snap'ed version of Firefox by default. It's certainly what I find most annoying with Ubuntu as well, but at least Canonical engineers continue working on addressing the performance and other awkward issues with the Firefox Snap.

Canonical has officially released Ubuntu Core 22 as its fully containerized version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that is optimized for IoT and edge computing use-cases.

In recent weeks Ubuntu developers have been working on bringing up and improving support for the Starfive VisionFive, which is one of the most promising "low-cost" RISC-V single board computers to date. Hopefully for Ubuntu 22.10 we'll be seeing good support for this sub-$180 RISC-V computer.