Mir 1.7 was released today as the newest feature release for this Ubuntu-focused display stack that for the past two years now has focused on serving viable Wayland support.
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1,651 Ubuntu open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
With Ubuntu 20.04 to see installation on many desktops (and servers) given its Long-Term Support status, Canonical and the Yaru community team have begun working on a successor to the Yaru theme for this Linux distribution release due out in April.
While Canonical no longer develops their Unity 8 stack for Ubuntu, the UBports crew continues advancing Ubuntu Touch mobile as a community project and as part of that they do work on Unity 8 for their devices and desktop support. But if you're hoping to see Unity 8 running nicely on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, that could be a while.
Apple AirScan is akin to their AirPrint technology for supporting various printers from Apple devices without the need for specialized drivers. Multi-function printers compliant with AirPrint also need to implement AirScan for scanner functionality, thus opening up most of today's multi-function printers to supporting this scanning standard. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS could end up supporting AirScan nicely thanks to new SANE back-ends.
With Python 2 having reached end-of-life at the start of 2020, Ubuntu and Debian developers continue their work on removing Python 2 at least from the base OS. Work continues on transitioning packages to Python 3 or otherwise ultimately dropping unmaintained packages.
Last week I posted benchmarks looking at seven years of Ubuntu Linux performance in re-testing the releases of Ubuntu 13.04 through Ubuntu 19.10 stable and even the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS daily development image. A question that came up was how much better that performance would have been without any CPU vulnerability mitigations in place for Ubuntu 20.04... Well, here's that answer.
A Phoronix Premium reader recently inquired about the performance impact of LUKS LVM-based disk encryption that continues to be offered by Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer on new installations and if it's worthwhile. As I've said for many years, it's certainly recommended for production systems -- particularly laptops where there are greater chances of theft -- and the performance impact isn't generally all that bad with modern CPUs and the likes of AES-NI.
It was just last week that Canonical released Multipass 0.9 as their means of easily spinning up Ubuntu virtual machines across Linux / Windows / macOS. Today Multipass 1.0.0 made the surprisingly fast debut and marks their first stable release.
Canonical is soliciting desktop and server users to participate in a brief survey for helping to focus their work on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and moving forward.
It was back in April 2017 that Canonical decided they would abandon Unity 8 and switch back to GNOME. While Mir played a big role together with Unity 8, they continued working on Mir with staffing changes and a shifted focus of adding Wayland support and tailoring it for primarily IoT use-cases and tightly integrated with their Snap packaging concept. Two years later, Mir is still alive and earlier this month marked the release of Mir 1.6. Here's a look back at the Mir highlights for 2019.
There are early discussions going on over the possibility of shipping WireGuard support in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS that could be done either using the existing DKMS kernel module or patching their Linux 5.5-based kernel with WireGuard now that the necessary crypto API changes made it into that release.
Introduced back in Ubuntu Server 17.10 and improved upon since has been "Subiquity" as a new Ubuntu Server install option rather than their classic installer derived from Debian. But with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, they will be dropping that Debian Installer based option and focusing solely on their modern "Subiquity" server installer option.
Ubuntu 19.10.1 has been released as an unscheduled re-spin of Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine for Raspberry Pi 2 / 3 / 4 ARM single-board computers.
Multipass, the Canonical-led open-source project that aims to make it easy to spin up Ubuntu VM instances on Linux and Windows and macOS, is up to version 0.9 ahead of a possible 1.0 release for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
While we aren't even half-way through the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle yet, Ubuntu's Trello board provides a look at some of the changes and new features being at least considered for this next Ubuntu long-term support release.
Looking to further capitalize upon the popularity of Ubuntu in the cloud, Canonical today announced Ubuntu Pro premium images for Amazon's EC2 cloud.
Mir 1.6 is out today with the latest batch of features for this Ubuntu-focused display server that offers Wayland client compatibility.
Canonical's Ubuntu engineers in cooperation with community members have figured out their 32-bit support adjustments for the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release.
The UBports community developers maintaining Ubuntu Touch have landed the 64-bit ARM (ARM64/AArch64) version of libhybris into their "Edge" development branch. This in turn opens up Ubuntu Touch to more easier porting to newer Android devices.
We have done a lot of benchmarks on Intel/AMD x86_64 for Ubuntu 19.10 for seeing how its performance is looking, but what about IBM POWER9 with the likes of the libre Raptor Blackbird? Here are some Ubuntu 19.04 vs. 19.10 POWER benchmarks I recently carried out.
The latest enterprise push by Ubuntu maker Canonical is Charmed OSM as their own commercial flavor of Open-Source MANO.
Debian's APT package manager has supported the --no-install-recommends for years so only the main dependencies are installed and not the "recommended" packages. Seemingly it's taken Canonical until now to figure out how practical that option is for reducing the size of their Docker containers.
The goal for Ubuntu 20.04 is to ship with Python 2 removed since Py2 will be end-of-life after the start of the year and this next Ubuntu Linux release is a Long-Term Support release, but there still are many Python 2 depending packages left currently in Debian unstable and Ubuntu's "Focal Fossa" archive.
With Ubuntu 19.10 bringing some CPU/system performance changes compared to earlier Ubuntu releases as a result of compiler/toolchain upgrades, the newer kernel, and more, here is a quick weekend look at how the Ubuntu 19.10 performance compares across ten different AMD Ryzen and Intel Core systems.
While Ubuntu 19.10 just shipped two weeks ago with its initial desktop install support to a root ZFS file-system option, feature work is already happening of ZFS changes destined for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu's Zsys daemon being built around ZFS' advanced feature set.
With the recently released Ubuntu 19.10 there is initial support for the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computers sans the highest-tier 4GB version that embarrassingly suffers from USB ports not working with the current Ubuntu 19.10 build. Fortunately, Canonical is working to address that issue with the RPi4 4GB version as well as making other Raspberry Pi support improvements.
In addition to Mir's other road-map items around replaceable renderers and hybrid graphics driver support, it also turns out the Canonical developers involved are working on expanding the graphics platform support.
With Ubuntu 19.10 it's the first time we have seen the Radeon gaming performance under a GNOME Wayland session match or exceed the performance found under the default GNOME X.Org session.
Canonical's Chris Halse Rogers has shared a road-map for Mir (or terrain map as he prefers calling it) about their future plans for this open-source display server that remains focused now on providing Wayland support.
The Ubuntu 20.04 cycle is now officially underway. Following the recent release of Ubuntu 19.10, the "Focal" archive has been created and back to syncing against the latest Debian unstable packages.
Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt who has become well known for focusing on his GNOME performance optimizations over the past two years is not done yet. While recapping their performance achievements around GNOME Shell for Ubuntu 19.10, he commented on performance work to happen for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.10 later on.
The UBports community has released the eleventh over-the-air update to Ubuntu Touch that they continue advancing as the open-source Linux smartphone/tablet stack based currently on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
With Ubuntu 19.10 having successfully shipped last week and the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS cycle just getting off the ground, longtime Ubuntu Desktop Director Will Cooke announced he is leaving Canonical.
While last week's release of Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" is new enough for Radeon RX 5700 series support with the Linux 5.3 kernel and Mesa 19.2, it doesn't actually work out-of-the-box for these Navi graphics cards.
If you are planning to run the newly-released Ubuntu 19.10, among the initial round of stable release updates is an important kernel fix.
Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" has hit mirrors today for an on-time release of this six-month non-LTS installment to Ubuntu Linux.
In addition to this week being exciting for the Ubuntu 19.10 release due out on Thursday followed by the kicking off of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" cycle, Ubuntu maker Canonical coincidentally made their financial statement filings in the UK this week where they are headquartered that gives a fresh look at their financial performance ahead of a possible IPO in the next few years.
With Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" releasing tomorrow (17 October), development is about to kick-off for the next Ubuntu development cycle under the codename Focal Fossa.
While it is already exciting to have the Ubuntu 19.10 desktop easily support installations to a root ZFS file-system, moving ahead with their original Zsys effort it should be even more exciting for Ubuntu storage possibilities on both the desktop and server.
Canonical's developers continuing to advance the Mir display server that continues to be focused on providing an abstraction for Wayland support have issued a new feature release.
As we reported this weekend, the Ubuntu desktop installer "Ubiquity" has landed the much anticipated ZFS install support. That's now propagated through to the Ubuntu 19.10 daily ISOs and does indeed make for a quick and easy setup of Ubuntu Eoan running off a root ZFS file-system.
With less than two weeks to go until the Ubuntu 19.10 release, on Friday the experimental ZFS root file-system install support was merged into the Ubuntu desktop "Ubiquity" installer.
One of the benefits of upgrading to Ubuntu Server 19.10 this month is for a newer version of PHP7 providing new features and better performance. While that took close to one year to land PHP 7.3 in Ubuntu 19.10, it looks like next spring's Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be pulling in PHP 7.4 that is shipping later this year.
The Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" is now available in beta form with the official release being less than one month away.
With Ubuntu 19.10 one of the changes we have been looking forward to the most is the planned Ubuntu desktop installation support atop ZFS as a root file-system and Canonical's related work around the new ZSYS daemon. It's looking like the basic ZFS root installation support will make it in time for next month's Ubuntu 19.10 release but more advanced installation features won't be ready in time.
Canonical's Mir developers since re-shifting focus to serving as a Wayland compositor have been working with the likes of the GNOME2-forked MATE desktop environment to implement Wayland support using Mir. For helping those interested in porting MATE applications from X11 to Wayland, one of the Mir developers has now issued a porting guide.
Earlier this year Canonical announced they would be pulling 32-bit support from Ubuntu ahead of next year's 20.04 LTS. But following public backlash, they stepped back to provide 32-bit support for select packages. Today they announced the 199 32-bit packages that will continue to be supported through Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Ubuntu's kernel team has decided to switch to LZ4 kernel image compression beginning with Ubuntu 19.10 in order to speed-up the boot times.
With Qt 6 becoming an increasing development focus and Qt 5 already seven years old, Ubuntu developers are looking at finally removing Qt 4 ahead of their 20.04 Long-Term Support release.
The UBports community that maintains the (currently 16.04 LTS derived) Ubuntu Touch have now shipped OTA-10 as their newest over-the-air feature update.
1651 Ubuntu news articles published on Phoronix.