Linux in The News 6-13-22

Canonical released today Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for download as the latest version of their popular Linux-based operating system for personal computers, servers, and cloud computing.

Dubbed by Canonical as the “Jammy Jellyfish,” Ubuntu 22.04 LTS has been in development for the past six months and comes as an upgrade to the Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) release, as well as to the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) long-term support release.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS comes with the latest GNOME 42 desktop environment with the triple buffering patch included, yet it still uses apps from the GNOME 41 stack due to compatibility issues between GTK4 apps included in the upstream release and Ubuntu’s Yaru theme. Apps that weren’t ported to GTK4 are from the GNOME 42 stack, such as the Nautilus (Files) file manager.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS sticks to the same look and feel used since 2011 with the Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” release. However, there are some minor design changes, such as the fact that the Home and Trash desktop icons are now shown in the bottom right corner by default.

Also, there are new settings to control the look and behavior of the Dock, system-wide dark style for all apps and dialogs, improved integration of Dock devices and file manager, as well as 10 accent color choices for both dark and light styles of the default Yaru theme, which now mimics the look and feel of GTK4 apps.

Another big feature of the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release is the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series, which brings a brand-new implementation of the NTFS file system to let you read and write data to such drives without relying on a third-party driver or software. Linux kernel 5.15 LTS will be supported until at least October 2023 with security and bugfix updates.

On top of that, Jammy Jellyfish brings RDP support for sharing your desktop remotely with better security, privacy, and performance, Wayland as the default session for most systems that don’t have an NVIDIA graphics card, there’s support for hardware with privacy screen support, UDP is now disabled by default for NFS mounts, and there’s a new logo that you can see on the boot splash screen and on the About page of the Settings app.

Under the hood, there’s an updated toolchain featuring some of the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies, including but not limited to GCC 11.2, GNU C Library 2.35, GNU Binutils 2.38, systemd 249.11, Python 3.10.4, Perl 5.34, Ruby 3.0, Golang 1.18, Mesa 22, OpenSSL 3.0, LLVM 14, BlueZ 5.63, PulseAudio 16, OpenJDK 11, xdg-desktop-portal 1.14, NetworkManager 1.36, BlueZ 5.63, CUPS 2.4, rustc 1.58, and Poppler 22.02.

Among other noteworthy changes in this release, there’s support for the linux-restricted-modules package on the ARM64 (AArch64) platform for NVIDIA drivers to allow the use of the ubuntu-drivers tool to install and configure NVIDIA proprietary drivers from the Ubuntu repositories, as well as support for the latest Linux 5.17 kernel series for OEMs. Also, ssh-rsa is now disabled by default in OpenSSH for better security.

Furthermore, Ubuntu no longer displays other installed operating systems in the boot menu when you upgrade unless you install a fresh copy alongside another OS, nftables is now the default backend for the firewall, and the Mozilla Firefox web browser is now only provided in Ubuntu as a Snap package.

On the Server side of things, Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS ships with a live installer image for the RISC-V architecture, OpenStack Yoga, Ceph Quincy, LXD 5.0 LTS, BIND 9.18, Open vSwitch 2.17.0, DPDK 21.11 LTS, virt-manager 4.0.0, libvirt 8.0.0, QEMU 6.2.0, Chrony 4.2, Samba 4.15.5, PHP 8.1.2, MySQL 8.0, PostgreSQL 14, Django 3.2.12, Apache 2.4.52, OpenLDAP 2.5, runc 1.1.0, contained 1.5.9, Corosync 3.16, and Pacemaker 2.1.2.

For Raspberry Pi users, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS adds support for the official Raspberry Pi Imager utility (via rpi-imager package) to write image files to microSD cards or other supported media, support for the rshell utility (via pyboard-rshell package) for working with micro-controller boards supporting MicroPython, such as the Raspberry Pi Pico, support for the rpiboot utility for working with Raspberry Pi Compute Modules, support for the official DSI touchscreen, as well as support for all variants of the popular Pimoroni Unicorn HAT.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellifish) is now available for download as Desktop and Server images, as well as official flavors (e.g. Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.). Ubuntu will be supported for the next 5 years with standard maintenance updates and regular point releases every six months, until April 2027, while the rest of the flavors will only be supported for 3 years.

Upgrades to the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release are currently not enabled due to a bug with the snapd and update-notifier packages. Canonical says that the upgrade path will be opened in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, you can download Ubuntu 22.04 LTS below and check out the new features in our first look video.

The postmarketOS devs announced today the release and general availability of postmarketOS 22.06 as a new major update for this GNU/Linux distribution targeted at mobile devices.

Coming five and a half months after postmarketOS 21.12, which received no less than five service packs that brought minor improvements and bug fixes, the postmarketOS 22.06 is here to celebrate the project’s 5th anniversary as a major release with several new features, support for new devices, and updated UIs.

The biggest new feature in the postmarketOS 22.06 release is the fact that upgrades from previous releases are now finally possible. That’s a huge change actually as you no longer have to reflash postmarketOS to get a new release.

Now, postmarketOS 21.12 users can upgrade to postmarketOS 22.06 just by running a script called postmarketos-release-upgrade in a terminal emulator. Since the script is not installed by default in previous releases, users will have to install it with the apk add postmarketos-release-upgrade command prior to performing an upgrade.

postmarketOS 22.06 also brings support for new devices, namely the Samsung Galaxy S III and SHIFT 6mq smartphones, bumping supported devices up to 27, as well as the latest mobile UIs, namely Plasma Mobile Gear 22.04, Phosh 0.17.0, and Sxmo 1.9.0.

Among other noteworthy changes, postmarketOS 22.06 makes it possible for users to upgrade their modem to Biktor’s alternative firmware via the fwupd firmware upgrade utility and replaces the built-in DHCP server solution with unudhcpd, which offers a minimalistic approach that faster and more reliable when connecting your phone to your PC via USB.

Under the hood, the new postmarketOS release is based on Alpine Linux 3.16, which means that it ships with some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and software packages. You can download postmarketOS 22.06 for your device right now from the official website.