Ubuntu News Archives

One of the many changes with the recent Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release was enabling systemd-oomd by default as the out-of-memory daemon that can kill processes when under memory pressure. Unfortunately, for some users this has led to a poor desktop experience with finding their applications being unexpectedly killed. Ubuntu developers are now discussing how to improve this OOMD handling.

Adding to the list of planned changes for the Ubuntu 22.10 release this October is transitioning from WPA_Supplicant to Intel's IWD daemon for Linux wireless needs.

Mir 2.8 is now available as the newest feature update to this Wayland compositor developed by Canonical for various Ubuntu use-cases, primarily around IoT, digital signage, and similar fields.

An early change made this week to Ubuntu 22.10 in its early development state is replacing the PulseAudio sound server with PipeWire.

Since Ubuntu 20.10 there has been Active Directory integration in the Ubiquity installer while now it looks like the latest effort by Canonical on enhancing the Ubuntu desktop for the enterprise is around Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration.

Canonical continues investing a lot in ensuring a first-rate Ubuntu experience when using Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2) with Windows 10 and newer. Rather than needing to wait longer to see the fruits of that work in the next Ubuntu releases, Canonical has now made "Ubuntu Preview" available from the Microsoft Store to have a daily-updated, bleeding-edge Ubuntu experience.

Those using the Chromium web browser on Ubuntu by way of the Snap package, the latest build has now enabled (optional) Wayland support.

Building off last month's Ubuntu 22.04 Long-Term Support release, Canonical today has published the beta builds of the upcoming Ubuntu Core 22.

With last week's release of the much anticipated Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Canonical announced they would begin providing a real-time kernel flavor too for this Long Term Support release though that RT kernel is initially in beta form. Today they outlined more information on their real-time kernel beta and how to actually go about trying it out.

In addition to Ubuntu 22.04 switching back NVIDIA to using X11 by default rather than Wayland as a launch-day change, separately, there was another rather notable last minute change affecting 3D support for virtual machines... Those with Ubuntu 22.04 hosts and launching Ubuntu 22.04 desktop VMs will find 3D acceleration disabled by default.

One of the less talked about features with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is Canonical offering up a "beta" of a real-time Linux kernel image for use with this long-term support release. In doing so, Canonical is expanding their aim for Ubuntu Linux within industrial and other use-cases demanding real-time needs.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is now available for download.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is set to be officially released this Thursday while available today are the hopefully-final release candidate images.

Ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipping next week, a new version of their Zsys daemon/client for ZFS-based Linux installations has been issued.

In working toward the official Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" release on 21 April, today Canonical and the Ubuntu community have announced the beta release.

A change that had been expected but finally buttoned up in time for next month's Jammy Jellyfish release: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will now default to using the GNOME Wayland session when running the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The caveat/limitation is that's only the case when using the NVIDIA 510 series driver or newer and not when using any of the older legacy driver branches.

Back in late 2020 it was originally talked about for Canonical's effort around Snap packages to switch to LZO compression for faster start-up times. Today they published a new blog post on the Ubuntu site highlighting the Snap speed-ups while looking at KDE packages. The LZO-compressed packages are faster than XZ indeed, but still rather a lengthy start-up time for cold apps.

As part of diversifying their supported range of Linux distributions since it was announced CentOS 8 would be going end-of-life, the popular cPanel commercial software package for easing the administration of Linux web server has added support for AlmaLinux and wit cPanel v102 is full support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will be carrying the patches so the GNOME desktop makes use of the on-demand triple buffering support when necessary in order to boost the GPU rendering performance in order to allow for a smoother desktop experience.

Vodafone in collaboration with Canonical is showing a prototype "Cloud Smartphone" as Mobile World Congress happening this week in Barcelona.

Canonical this afternoon published Ubuntu 20.04.4 as the newest point release to their current Long Term Support (LTS) series.

Canonical this morning released Mir 2.7 as the newest version of its display stack that is centered around easing Wayland usage for various use-cases.

Gigabyte and Canonical today announced that they will be working together to certify Gigabyte server hardware moving forward for use under Ubuntu Server.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is going to be making use of systemd-oomd for aiming to improve the experience when out of memory or under heavy memory pressure on the Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will likely do away with the Ubuntu/Canonical Partner Archive where their software partners could upload select proprietary/binary-only software for easy access by Ubuntu users.

It turns out Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is planning to use the Linux 5.15 kernel as its default kernel. It makes sense in that Linux 5.15 is also a long-term support kernel, but unfortunate in that Ubuntu LTS releases haven't always used LTS kernel versions and v5.15 will be a half-year old already by the time the "Jammy Jellyfish" ships in April. This is a choice particularly unfortunate for those with recent hardware but at least there is the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA and other non-default options available.

A few minutes ago a new Ubuntu blog post hit the wire entitled "The Future of Snapcraft" where immediately I wondered if it was announcing plans to move away from their own app packaging/store/update tech and shift over to a Flatpak world like the rest of the Linux ecosystem for app sandboxing, app store, and distribution. Nope, but they are going to overhaul Snapcraft's architecture.

Canonical is looking to capitalize on the renewed interest around Linux gaming and the raised prospects thanks to Valve's Steam Play allowing a growing number of compelling Windows games becoming playable on Linux.

Ubuntu and parent company Canonical had another great year not only on the Linux desktop but continuing its commercial successes around the server, cloud, and IoT sectors too. Ubuntu 21.04 and 21.10 delivered new features across all fronts this year and developers are now busy preparing for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release next spring.

Due to changes with the upstream GRUB 2.06 bootloader, Ubuntu developers are figuring out how they are going to be managing dual-boot/multi-boot scenarios moving forward with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Canonical is looking to increase the outlook for Ubuntu on FPGAs and has announced a collaborative partnership with Xilinx to get the Linux distribution working on more of their hardware.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS isn't expected to run on aging IBM POWER8 hardware as Canonical is shifting its PPC64EL architecture baseline to POWER9 for building packages.

While Ubuntu switched from LZ4 to Zstd for compressing its initramfs, they now are finding they were too aggressive in defaulting to Zstd with the highest compression level of 19. Due to speed and memory consumption concerns, they are looking at lowering their Zstd compression level.

Back in the day Ubuntu's Wiki was a great resource for Linux documentation but less so these days while the Arch Linux Wiki is often viewed as a gold standard for open-source documentation. Canonical though is now hoping to radically improve the documentation for Ubuntu and its other software offerings.

Currently when running Linux distributions within Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), systemd isn't used but that could soon be changing at least for Ubuntu.

Along with the work-in-progress new Ubuntu desktop installer, another GUI project being pursued by Canonical going into the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS cycle is the "firmware-updater" as a firmware updating GUI solution written in the Flutter toolkit and Dart.

Canonical has begun publishing Ubuntu install images that are optimized for use on next-generation Intel IoT platforms.

With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" beginning development, Canonical is soliciting community feedback as they plot out more of the planned changes for this next major release and areas to focus on enhancing over the next six months.

An effort going on for a while at Canonical has been to develop a new desktop installer for Ubuntu. With the recent Ubuntu 21.10 release they are still using their classic Ubiquity installer by default but have published a new preview build of Ubuntu 21.10 with their new desktop installer option. Here is a look at Ubuntu's forthcoming new installer.

Canonical today formally opened the "Jammy" archive for development for what will be the next version of Ubuntu, 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish".

Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" is now officially available as the latest six-month update to Ubuntu Linux and also serving as the last release prior to the next long-term support cycle, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Canonical today announced the launch of Ubuntu Frame, its full-screen shell built atop the Wayland-embracing Mir server for embedded displays, IoT, and related use-cases.

Canonical continues advancing their Wayland-based Mir stack for embedded and IoT use-cases. Out today is Mir 2.5 with the latest features as they work to provide better support for on-screen keyboards.

Canonical has released the final beta of next month's Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" release.

UBports on Tuesday released Ubuntu Touch OTA-19 as the latest refinement to this Ubuntu Linux spin for smartphones and tablets.

Canonical is announcing this morning they are extending the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" releases to a ten year lifespan.

The unplanned Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS release is available today that was made on short notice for addressing unbootable media with Ubuntu 18.04.5.

While Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS shipped one year ago as the last planned point release to the "Bionic Beaver", an emergency issue is leading to Ubuntu 18.04.6 now being prepared.

For those wondering how the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 release is looking for Intel "Rocket Lake" owners, here are some Ubuntu 21.04 versus 21.10 development benchmarks across dozens of different tests.

Canonical is preparing to soon release Snapcraft 6.0 as the latest version of their utility for packaging and distributing Snaps, the Ubuntu-preferred route for sandboxed apps.