Ubuntu News Archives

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.

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.