Ubuntu News Archives

The UBports community that continues advancing the Ubuntu Touch mobile platform has been working on improvements to its installer.

The Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" beta is now available for testing of Ubuntu Desktop / Cloud / Server products as well as derivatives like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu.

When Intel announced 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" last month it wasn't clear how long it would be until seeing systems actually appear with these new processors. Fortunately, the new Dell XPS systems with Tiger Lake and Intel EVO certification are on sale beginning today with shipping dates reported to be later this month.

Mir 2.1 has been released as Canonical's project around offering a set of libraries for constructing Wayland shells particularly with Snap confinement support and other Ubuntu-focused features.

Following Lenovo rolling out Fedora Linux options for their laptops and their other Linux-related announcements this year, Lenovo and Canonical are announcing today nearly thirty different laptops and desktops will begin shipping with the option for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed.

The UBports community has announced the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 as their newest over-the-air update to this Ubuntu mobile operating system.

Back on Friday there was Mark Shuttleworth's comments following some friction within the Ubuntu community and uncertainty over roles. After thinking about it over the weekend, he has decided to go ahead and work to reinstate the Ubuntu Community Council.

For the past number of weeks there have been discussions ongoing about the "loss of leadership" within the Ubuntu community and as part of that the Ubuntu Community Team and Ubuntu Community Council having faded away in recent years. Following a lot of comments on the Ubuntu Discourse, Mark Shuttleworth has chimed in with his thoughts and work moving forward.

The "Ubiquity" installer used by the Ubuntu desktop is set to feature Active Directory (AD) integration with the upcoming Ubuntu 20.10 release.

Back during the Ubuntu 20.04 cycle there was an attempt to switch the iptables back-end to Nftables by default. That plan was ultimately foiled by LXD at the time running into issues and other fallout. But now t hat those issues should be addressed and Debian Buster has switched to Nftables, the move is being re-attempted next week for Ubuntu 20.10.

The UBports' Ubuntu Touch crew has been focusing a lot lately on improving their support for the popular, budget-friendly PineTab tablet and PinePhone smartphone. The next OTA release will bring more improvements for fans of these PINE Allwinner-powered devices.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 20.04.1, the prior Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 Long Term Support series are also seeing new releases.

Ubuntu developers are looking at using Intel IWD as the iNET wireless daemon to potentially replace WPA_Supplicant for offering a better WiFi experience.

For those that prefer waiting until the first point release of a new Ubuntu Long Term Support series before upgrading, Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS is out with the latest bug and security fixes for the "Focal Fossa" release.

Approaching two years already since the release of Mir 1.0 following its shift to Wayland support, Mir 2.0 is now available.

This week Canonical and Google announced they were working together to bring the Flutter application toolkit to Ubuntu/Linux. Flutter is the cross-platform, open-source UI toolkit developed by Google for use from Android to Linux and iOS and Fuschia as well as for web interfaces.

Back in early 2017 "Mircade" was introduced as an arcade-style game launcher on Ubuntu powered by Mir. We hadn't heard much of Mircade since 2017 but the effort is still alive for this Mir-based launcher that can trigger various apps to run under Wayland/Mir.

Following the discussions last month over restricting access to dmesg / kernel logs on Ubuntu in matching the behavior of other Linux distributions for better security practices, Ubuntu 20.10 indeed is moving forward with these plans where dmesg access would require root privileges.

It's not yet ready to take on the likes of Xfce and LXQt, but EGMDE is surprisingly still being worked on by Mir developers of Ubuntu/Canonical as a lightweight desktop.

Dell is announcing this morning that their latest XPS Developer Edition laptops are beginning to ship with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as the latest version of the popular desktop Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 20.10 will likely join other Linux distributions in restricting access to dmesg by unprivileged users.

With Ubuntu 18.04 when running on its Linux 4.15 kernel and not one of the newer hardware enablement kernels, in the mess of patches back-ported to the release it ends up being vulnerable to bypassing the kernel lockdown security and compromising UEFI Secure Boot that is persistent across reboots.

On the desktop side for Ubuntu 20.10 one of the changes we have been eager to see is ZFS encryption support on new installations in an easy-to-use manner and extending their existing OpenZFS file-system support. That ZFS encryption support has begun to land.

As part of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS exclusively using its newer "Subiquity" server installer is a new means of supporting automated installations of the operating system in a server environment.

As part of their work on ZFS support improvements for the in-development Ubuntu 20.10, Zsys 0.5 has been tagged and landing in the "Groovy Gorilla" repository for this ZFS daemon spearheaded by Canonical developers.

In addition to working on easy ZFS encryption for Ubuntu 20.10, the Ubiquity installer in its latest code for this next Ubuntu Linux release is now enabling TRIM by default for all Zpools.

A year after the transition started to import Unity 8 into Ubuntu Touch, the work is now ready for users with the newly released Ubuntu Touch OTA-12 by the UBports crew.

With the recently released Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Ubuntu Server installer exclusively uses the "Subiquity" installer that Canonical has been working on in recent years in moving away from the classic Debian Installer. Unfortunately a security issue crept into Subiquity that has now been resolved.

Ubuntu Studio, the spin of Ubuntu focused on multimedia production, announced last month that for their 20.10 release due out later this year they would be transitioning from their long-standing Xfce desktop environment over to using KDE Plasma. While still in early form, the transition is going ahead quite well.

While Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was released less than two weeks ago, attention by Canonical and the Ubuntu development community has already turned to Ubuntu 20.10 as the Groovy Gorilla. With it being the first release past an LTS debut, they tend to be a more liberal in the changes in allowing plenty of time to stabilize before the next Long Term Support cycle. On the ZFS front it looks like we could be in for some more exciting changes.

Just days after Canonical shipped the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" release, Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" is now open for development.

Either a ploy by Ubuntu developers / Canonical staffers or it's looking like Ubuntu 20.10 could be known as the Groovy Gorilla.

Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" is now available as the distribution's newest long-term support release.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is due for release on Thursday and it's seen a last minute upgrade to its "Subiquity" server installer.

Canonical is transitioning Ubuntu's support in the Amazon AWS environment to have a rolling-release model for its kernel albeit other packages will remain under their traditional stable release update handling. At least though it's good they will be more punctually offering new kernel versions in the cloud

One of the new features to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for those making use of ZFS On Linux with Canonical's Zsys manager is the automated APT snapshots on package transactions to be able to carry out system rollbacks if needed. An important fix around this functionality is on the way.

A public service announcement was issued with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) currently will have issues in running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS so users should either wait for Microsoft to release a fix, upgrade to WSL2, or stick to using the older Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead.

One of the immediate differences Ubuntu 20.04 desktop/laptop users will notice when booting in UEFI mode is the boot splash screen improvements thanks to leveraging Red Hat's work on providing a flicker-free boot experience and pulling in the UEFI BGRT system/motherboard logo during the boot process to provide a more transitive experience. Canonical in turn is working on pushing some of their improvements back into upstream Plymouth.

With our early benchmarking of Ubuntu 20.04 in its current nearing the end of development state, we've been seeing Ubuntu 20.04 boosting Intel Xeon Scalable performance, running well with AMD EPYC Rome, and good AMD Ryzen performance, among other tests. Strangely though the one platform where I've found Ubuntu 20.04 hard regressing so far is with the Dell XPS 7390 Ice Lake.

For those with extra time on their hands due to being at home and social distancing, Canonical released the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS beta today for testing.

It shouldn't come as a big surprise but PHP 7.4 has now landed in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to replace the existing PHP 7.3 support within the "Focal Fossa" package archive.

As part of the ZFS improvements for Ubuntu 20.04 with Canonical's Zsys initiative is the ability to automatically take snapshots on APT operations for being able to do a system rollback/revert if necessary following package management changes. I've begun trying out the ZFS/Zsys changes for Ubuntu 20.04 and so far is working well.

Ubuntu 20.04 is coming out next month and will be the first LTS release with Ubuntu desktop ZFS support available for the root file-system after it was made easy-to-deploy the Ubuntu desktop on ZFS last cycle. One of the areas being expanded upon with the ZFS support has been Ubuntu's Zsys daemon for offering extra functionality for ZFS-based setups.

Multipass is the software developed by Ubuntu-maker Canonical that is advertised as "a mini-cloud on your workstation" that provides an Ubuntu command-line in "just a click" with native hypervisor support.

The Unity 8 desktop environment that continues to be developed by the UBports open-source community for use on UBports' Ubuntu Touch and ultimately back on the Linux desktop as well have renamed the project.

Mir 1.7.1 was released on Monday and while a point release it's quite a big one.

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues focusing on GNOME performance optimizations and this past week still managed to squeeze another optimization out of the near-final GNOME 3.36.

With Python 2 having been end-of-life since the start of the year and Ubuntu 20.04 being a long-term support release, Ubuntu developers are working hard to ensure Python 2 isn't shipped as part of this next Ubuntu LTS release.

PHP 7.4 should be landing in the Ubuntu 20.04 archive in the next week or so.

After a one week delay, Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS is available today as the newest long-term support point release.