On Friday 29th August Canonical announced the availability of the first point release of Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat” LTS. If you’ve been running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS this means you will shortly receive a prompt to upgrade. Alternatively you can manually upgrade via Ubuntu’s software updater or via the terminal via running:

sudo do-release-upgrade

There’s a number of worthwhile changes to Ubuntu especially if you are upgrading from the previous LTS release. Not only will you receive kernel 6.8 with the latest improvements there but there are also a number of refinements in the desktop OS such as the redesigned system menu in GNOME 46, a reworked App Centre which is far better than the old one and also updates to the various tools and packages Ubuntu relies upon.

As always make sure your backups are current and tested before opting to upgrade.

Upgrade Issue on Devices Using Secure Boot?

For me however it wasn’t all that straightforward. There’s definitely a case for doing fresh installs for any desktop OS rather than upgrades. I found the following error after trying to upgrade my StarBook MK V. This was noted after the upgrade failed then I ran software updater to try again:

The shims are to do with UEFI/Secure Boot and Ubuntu’s implementation of it. For my device this was solved by running the following in the terminal and then trying the upgrade again:

sudo apt-mark hold shim-signed grub-efi-amd64-signed

This effectively gets the apt package manager to hold these packages back. From looking around I think that this perhaps has something to do with running Coreboot and upgrading through various iterations of the firmware.

This week’s big release has been Ubuntu 21.10 codenamed Impish Indri. This is an interim release with 9 months of support from Canonical.

There are lots of changes to talk about here. This release brings Linux Kernel 5.13, Firefox as a snap by default, GNOME 40 with horizontal workspaces as well as tweaks to the UI, touchpad gestures and zip password support in Nautilus as a few examples.

I’ve installed this to my Dell XPS 9360 this week. So far I’m really liking the horizontal workspace change. It’s admittedly a feature I’ve never got used to working with for Ubuntu and Windows alike but I’ve decided to give it another go.

The change to Firefox as a Snap app is a controversial choice given the reception of snaps. Personally I’m not noticing much of a difference and so long as security updates come in on time I don’t think I’ll be too bothered about it.

You can upgrade your existing Ubuntu distribution to 21.10 now but if you haven’t tried Ubuntu now’s a really good time to Download Ubuntu 21.10 and see it for yourself. As before if you get the torrents I’ll be pleased to serve you the bits.