anD in oTher UbUnTU news…

There’s more to an Ubuntu release than just one distribution. Along with the official flavours, a new Ubuntu release fuels a number of derivative distributions, many of which release updates soon. Perhaps one of the biggest changes to this ecosystem is the dropping of the 32-bit ISO. While many Ubuntu flavours still provided 32-bit ISOs for download for the 18.04 LTS release, a number of them have stuck only to 64-bit for the current 18.10 release. These include Kubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu Studio. Of course, the lack of a 32-bit installation medium won’t prevent existing 32-bit installations from upgrading to the newer release via the repositories.

Besides the desktop releases, Ubuntu’s other major initiative, Ubuntu Server also gets a handful of upgrades. In its release announcement Canonical pointed towards its focus on the financial services market: “This year, the financial services industry has engaged significantly with Canonical and Ubuntu for infrastructure efficiency on-premise and to accelerate their move to the cloud. The push for machine-learning analytics and of fintech efforts around blockchain, distributed ledger applications and cryptocurrencies are current drivers of Ubuntu investments and deployments.”

What it really means is that Ubuntu Server can now also serve the financial institutions along with its other enterprise customers to incorporate private clouds into their infrastructure. Ubuntu Server 18.10 images are available on all major public clouds. To host private clouds 18.10 includes OpenStack’s latest Rocky release that’s designed to address emerging use cases such as edge computing, network functions virtualisation (NFV) and machine learning. There’s also LXD 3.0, which is the first release that can join identically configured LXD servers into a cluster and Kubernetes 1.12 for deploying containerised apps.