In the past week Canonical unveiled he announced the release of the new Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS Bionic Beaver update, this being a version aimed at the desktop, server and cloud editions of the distribution.
Ubuntu is one of the most predictable operating system distributions in terms of the release cycle (A new version is released in April and October of each year). Most of these versions are intermediate versions, supported for nine months from their release; but the April version of each even-numbered year is an LTS (Long Term Service), backed by five years.
“The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS (Long Term Support) for its desktop, server and cloud products, as well as other Ubuntu releases with long term support.
Like the previous LTS series, 18.04.4 includes hardware trigger batteries for use in newer hardware. This support is offered on all architectures and is installed by default when using one of the desktop images, ”says Łukasz Zemczak, Canonical.
Besides coming with a Linux 5.3 kernel,Ubuntu 18.04.4 supports new AMD and Intel chips with integrated graphics, the proprietary Nvidia drivers provided by Ubuntu have received several updates covering the new graphics cards also offering network queue management which should be more efficient etc.
As well arrival of preliminary support for Wi-Fi 6 highlighted (802.11ax) (details of the products in question are not provided).
Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS fixes several potential minor bugs during installation, including a bug that sometimes prevented a clean shutdown or reboot from the installation environment. There are also some minor bug fixes to update the installations, but the biggest patch class affects the system itself and wslu package was also added with settings and utilities to integrate Ubuntu with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) environment.
“As usual, this release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and fixes for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Of the other changes that stand out in this update:
- The Gnome software has obtained several user interface fixes.
- The Thunderbird email client has gotten a new upstream version.
- WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) environments now correctly detect, install, and start X11 and PulseAudio for Windows.
- Canonical's package containerization system, snapd, has received a new upstream version.
- The Amazon web launcher, which should be gone in the next LTS (20.04 Focal Fossa) this year, is removed from Ubuntu 18.04 with this release.
- Update the setting policy so that access to audio recording is conditional on connecting the «pulseaudio» or «audio-record» interfaces.
- Backport fix for parse error warnings displayed when connecting to an AP with special characters
- Backport to bionic for the 18.04.4 HWE stack update.
Finally, if you want to know more about this launch, you can check the details in the publication made by Canonical In the following link.
How to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS?
Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS can now optionally use the latest kernel from Linux 5.3, Mesa and related components of 19.10 to provide better hardware support compared to the older 18.04.3 using an HWE stack from the 19.04 file.
So that, for those who are interested in being able to obtain the updates of this new version, they can transfer their existing installations to the new versions of the kernel and graphics stack, by running the following command:
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-18.04 xserver-xorg-hwe-18.04
If you do not have a previous installation of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, you can obtain the system image by going to the official Ubuntu website. The link is this.