18.04

Revision 34 as of 2018-04-19 20:49:45

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Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and its flavors

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be released on April 26.

Ubuntu 18.04 is still in beta and is not recommended for use on production systems or on your primary computers yet.

Support lifespan

The 'main' archive of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until April 2023. Support lengths for community supported Ubuntu flavors vary and will be announced.

Official flavor release notes

Find the links to release notes for official flavors here.


Get Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Download Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download the latest ISOs and flashable images from:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ (Ubuntu Desktop and debian-installer based Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/daily-live/current (Ubuntu Live Server)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/daily/server/bionic/current/ (Ubuntu Cloud Images)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/daily-live/current/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/daily-live/current/ (Lubuntu and Lubuntu Alternate)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/daily-live/current/ (Ubuntu Budgie)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/daily-live/current/ (Ubuntu Kylin)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/daily-live/current/ (Ubuntu MATE)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/dvd/current/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/daily-live/current/ (Xubuntu)

You can download older Beta 2 ISOs and flashable images from:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/18.04/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/18.04/beta-2/ (Less Popular Ubuntu Images)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/18.04/beta-2/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/18.04/beta-2/ (Lubuntu and Lubuntu Alternate)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/18.04/beta-2/ (Ubuntu Budgie)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/18.04/beta-2/ (Ubuntu Kylin)
https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/ (Ubuntu MATE)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/18.04/beta-2/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/18.04/beta-2/ (Xubuntu)

As fixes will be included in new images between now and release, any daily cloud image from today or later (i.e. a serial of 20180324 or higher) should be considered a beta image. Bugs found should be filed against the appropriate packages or, failing that, the cloud-images project in Launchpad.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 17.10

To upgrade on a desktop system:

  • Open the "Software & Updates" Setting in System Settings.

  • Select the 3rd Tab called "Updates".
  • Set the "Notify me of a new Ubuntu version" dropdown menu to "For any new version".
  • Press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager -cd" (without the quotes) into the command box.
  • Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '18.04' is available.
    • If not you can also use "/usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/check-new-release-gtk"
  • Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade on a server system:

  • Install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed.

  • Make sure the Prompt line in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to normal.

  • Launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d.

  • Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.


New features in 18.04

Updated Packages

Linux kernel 4.15

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is based on the Linux release series 4.15.

Security Improvements

Network configuration

New since 17.10

Teaming support with libteam is available in NetworkManager.

New since 16.04 LTS

The default DNS resolver is systemd-resolved.

ifupdown has been deprecated in favor of netplan.io and is no longer present on new installs. The installer will generate a configuration file for netplan.io in the /etc/netplan directory. This netplan.io configuration in turn renders backend-specific configuration via either systemd-networkd or NetworkManager. Desktop users will see their system fully managed via NetworkManager as it has been the case in previous releases. Server users will now see their network devices managed via systemd-networkd. This only applies to new installations.

Given that ifupdown is no longer installed by default, the commands: ifup and ifdown are also unavailable. Please use the ip command to achieve similar functionality, specifically ip link set $device up and ip link set $device down.

The networkctl command is now available for users to see a summary of network devices. networkctl status will display the current global state of IP addresses on the system. networkctl status $device displays details specific to a network device.

The ifupdown package remains available and supported in Ubuntu main for users that find netplan does not currently meet their networking needs.

For more information about netplan.io, please refer to the manual page using the man 5 netplan command or visit https://netplan.io/.

Scripts in /etc/network/ifup.d and /etc/network/ifdown.d no longer work in this new configuration. For the systemd-networkd backend, similar scripts can be added into subdirectories of /usr/lib/networkd-dispatcher (dormant.d, no-carrier.d, off.d, routable.d), if networkd-dispatcher is installed. Later on, custom scripts can be placed in /etc/networkd-dispatcher and potentially also override the ones in /usr/lib.

Other base system changes since 16.04 LTS

  • The gpg binary is provided by gnupg2

  • For new installs, a swap file will be used by default instead of a swap partition.

  • Python 2 is no longer installed by default. Python 3 has been updated to 3.6. This is the last LTS release to include Python 2 in main.

  • The installer no longer offers the encrypted home option using ecryptfs-utils. It is recommended to use full-disk encryption instead for this release. (1756840)

  • OpenSSH now refuses to use RSA keys smaller than 1024 bits. ssh-keygen -l -f /path/to/key.pub can report the length of a key.

Ubuntu Desktop

New since 17.10

  • X is the default display server. Wayland is provided as a Technical Preview and is expected to be the default display server in 20.04 LTS. To try it out, just choose Ubuntu on Wayland from the cog on the log in screen.

  • The installer offers a minimal install option for a basic desktop environment with a web browser and core system utilities. Many official 18.04 desktop flavors are using this new feature too!

  • Apps provided by GNOME have been updated to 3.28. For more details about GNOME 3.28, see their Release Notes.

  • LibreOffice has been updated to 6.0.

  • Emoji now show in color in most apps. Keyboard shortcuts for the emoji input chooser are Ctrl+. or Ctrl+;

  • Calendar now supports weather forecasts.

  • Some utilities have been switched to the snap format for new installs (Calculator, Characters, Logs, and System Monitor). Snap apps provide better isolation which allows them to be upgraded to new stable releases during the LTS lifecycle.

  • The Characters app replaces the older Character Map by default.

  • The Ubuntu Software app allows easy switching between different channels for Snap apps.

  • The To Do app has been added to the default normal install.

  • spice-vdagent is pre-installed for better performance for Spice clients such as the GNOME Boxes app.

  • The right-click method for touchpads without physical buttons has changed to a two-finger click instead of clicking in the bottom right of the touchpad. You can use the GNOME Tweaks app (not installed by default) to change this setting.

  • Although libinput is the default driver for mice and touchpads, it is now possible to use the synaptics driver with the Settings app. Support for the synaptics driver will be dropped in a future Ubuntu release.

  • Computers will automatically suspend after 20 minutes of inactivity while on battery power.

  • GNOME Shell now supports Thunderbolt 3.

Other highlights since 16.04 LTS

  • 32-bit installer images are no longer provided for Ubuntu Desktop.

  • The Ubuntu Desktop now uses GNOME instead of Unity.

  • GDM has replaced LightDM as the default display manager. The login screen now uses virtual terminal 1 instead of virtual terminal 7.

  • Window control buttons are back on the right.

  • Driverless printing support is now available.

  • GNOME's built-in screen keyboard is used instead of Onboard.

  • Calendar has a Week View and supports recurring events.

  • These apps have received major user interface redesigns: Disk Usage Analyzer, Files (nautilus), Remmina, Settings, and Ubuntu Software.
  • System Log has been replaced by Logs, an app to view logs from the systemd journal.

  • Many GNOME apps now have a Keyboard Shortcuts popup available in the app menu.

  • gconf is no longer installed by default since it has long been superseded by gsettings. Note that statistics and preferences for the Aisleriot card games will be reset when upgrading from 16.04 LTS or 16.10. gconf will be removed from the Ubuntu package archives in a future Ubuntu release.

  • The Ubuntu GNOME flavor has been discontinued. If you are using Ubuntu GNOME, you will be upgraded to Ubuntu. Choose the Ubuntu session from the cog on the login screen if you would like the default Ubuntu experience.

  • Install gnome-session and choose GNOME (or GNOME on Wayland) from the cog on the login screen if you would like to try a more upstream version of GNOME. If you'd like to also install more core apps, install the vanilla-gnome-desktop metapackage.

Ubuntu Server

New since 17.10

Server installer

  • The next generation Subiquity server installer, brings the comfortable live session and speedy install of Ubuntu Desktop to server users at last.

  • If you require any of the following features in the installer, you will want to continue to use the alternate installer which can be downloaded from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/18.04/beta-2/:

    • LVM
    • RAID
    • multipath

LXD 3.0

LXD 3.0 has been released, see the project release announcement for full details. Highlights include:

  • Native Clustering out of the box.
  • Physical to container migration with lxd-p2c

  • Support for NVIDIA runtime passthrough
  • Numerous other improvements

QEMU 2.11.1

QEMU has been updated to the 2.11.1 release.

See the Changelog for major changes since Artful.

Among many other changes, fixes around Meltdown/Spectre are included. Since fully utilizing these mitigations needs more than just an upgrade, it is recommended to read details at the qemu.org blog post.

QEMU in Ubuntu 18.04 now has rdma support enabled as over the past year much unification in the rdma-core project has occured.

Migrations from former versions are supported just as usual. When upgrading it is always recommended to upgrade the machine types allowing guests to fully benefit from all the improvements and fixes of the most recent version.

libvirt 4.0

libvirt has been updated to version 4.0. See the upstream Changelogs for details since version 3.6 that was in Artful.

The packaging now builds libvirt storage drivers as pluggable libraries. This slims down the installation requirements but some drivers of less general interest will now be found in universe. (ex: gluster, sheepdog, zfs)

DPDK 17.11.x

Ubuntu includes 17.11.x the latest stable release branch of DPDK.

See the Release Notes for details.

By the new Stable Release exception for DPDK future stable updates to 17.11.x will be made available to Ubuntu 18.04

Open vSwitch 2.9

Open vSwitch has been updated to 2.9.

Please read the release notes for more detail.

Chrony

In Ubuntu 18.04 chrony will replace ntpd as the recommended server for the NTP protocol. See the upstream changelog for an overview of recent changes as well as the FAQ which will help for smooth conversions from NTP.

The comparison among ntp servers by the chrony maintainers may interest some users looking to see a high level reason why this change was made. It does lack the rather new and not yet completely ready ntpsec, but otherwise is a fair analysis.

For simple time sync needs the base system already comes with systemd-timesyncd. Chrony is only needed to act as a time server or if you want the advertised more accurate and efficient syncing.

Going along with this change, ntpd has been demoted from main to universe. ntpd will continue to work but will only receive best-effort security maintenance. When upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 it is highly recommended to migrate to chrony if you had set up ntpd before.

cloud-init

The version was updated to 18.2. Notable new features include:

  • VMware: support for 64-bit platforms and identifying OVF datasource provided
  • GCE: Improvements and changes to ssh key behavior for default user.
  • Azure pre-provisioning speed improvements
  • NoCloudKVM and EC2 tests now run in continuous integration.
  • New cloud support: IBMCloud and HetznerCloud now have official datasources and OpenTelekom is now recognized by cloud-id

  • OpenNebula: Improve network configuration support.

  • New cloud-init command-line tools available: status, analyze and clean
  • New ubuntu cloud-config modules for managing snaps and ubuntu-advantage services

curtin

The version was updated to 18.1. Notable features include:

  • Add experimental zpool and zfs filesystem support, including ZFS on root.
  • Add support for installing remote sources that are a filesystem image. (1746348)

  • Add pollinate user-agent configuration support.
  • Improved device teardown of dirty devices to support re-deployment (1750519) (1743643) (1713537) (1722322) (1708052) (1718699)

  • Default config now automatically tars curtin logs upon error using new curtin collect-logs command.

  • storage: accept filesystem mount options (1709284)

  • Extensive integration test coverage and improvements.

SSSD

SSSD was updated to version 1.16.x and its secrets service is now enabled. Previously it was disabled because it required the http-parser library which lived in Universe, but a successful MIR brought it to main so SSSD could link with it.

landscape-client

landscape-client has been ported to Python 3 and is now available to install on the default image.

ubuntu-advantage-tools

  • New dynamic MOTD support for Canonical Livepatch. This indicates, at a glance, the status of livepatches when logging in on a console.
  • New enable-fips-updates command to enable a special FIPS repository with non-certified updates for FIPS enabled systems.

s390x-specific enhancements (since 17.10)

  • improvements for IBM z14,z14 ZR1,LinuxONE Rockhopper II and LinuxONE Emporer II (1725260) (1736100)

  • s390-tools major version upgrade to v2.2.0 (1735447)

  • cryptsetup rebase and enhancements in support of dm-crypt (1724592)

  • protected key support for dm-crypt (1741904)

  • TLB enhancements (1732426) (1732452)

  • TOD-Clock Epoch Extension Support (1732437) (1732691)

  • DASD multi-queue (1732446) support and block layer discard support (1732440)

  • Improved memory handling (1734120)

  • support for new crypto hardware CEX6S (1735437)

  • AP bus kernel API for KVM (1732449)

  • CPU-MF/perf improvement (1735433)

  • CPACF enhancements and acceleration for AES GCM (1735438) (1743750)

  • HiperSocket connections enhacements (1735695)

  • parted update for fdasd/vtoc (1737144)

  • openssl-ibmca rebase (1747626)

  • opencryptoki rebase for EP11 and ECC enhancement (1751272)

  • lock optimization enhancement (1747877)

  • libica upgrade for z14 and ECC support (1737159) and to use PRNO-TRNG to seed SHA512-DRBG (1754617)

  • auto detect layer2 setting in qeth driver (1747639)

  • Kernel support for STHYI/LPAR (1736093)

  • rebase libpfm4 for z13/z13s CPU-MF hardware counters (1741905)

Known issues

As is to be expected, with any release, there are some significant known bugs that users may run into with this release of Ubuntu 18.04. The ones we know about at this point (and some of the workarounds), are documented here so you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

Desktop

  • Several gnome-settings-daemon services time out when starting the live session (1750846)

  • It's not possible to unlock encrypted external drives. Install libblockdev-crypto2 and restart (1757321)

  • The computer suspends after 20 minutes of inactivity even if a user is logged in remotely. (GNOME:gnome-control-center#22)

  • Videos will not resume correctly after being paused in Webkit apps such as the Help viewer (1752197)

  • Bluetooth audio devices cannot be used in the Greeter. This will cause issues for people using the accessibility features such as screenreaders at the login screen. Once logged in everything should work as expected.
  • Some admin utilities will not work with GNOME on Wayland since the apps have not been adapted to use PolicyKit to only use admin privileges for the specific functions needed. Also, some screenshot and screencast apps and all remote desktop server apps do not currently work on GNOME on Wayland. As a workaround, you can use the default Ubuntu session.

  • Exiting the live session may get stuck with a "A start job is running for " error. You may need to forcefully power off the computer if you see this. (1706939)

  • The Dock and Appindicator system extensions appear to be Off in tools like GNOME Tweaks. (They are on but cannot be disabled because they are system extensions for the Ubuntu session.) (1718850)

  • The screen reader is not working for the Ubuntu installer from the menu 'Install Ubuntu' (1719995) but it works fine when the installer is started from the live session.

  • Tracker is not installed by default. When installed, you must log out and log back in for the tracker service to start (1697769)

  • Opening the Users panel in Control Center is slow.
  • Systems may fail to boot when connected over DisplayPort to an external screen, on NVidia graphics hardware such as the GTX970 chipset. (1723619)

  • When an external monitor is connected to a laptop, the login screen is only displayed on the internal one and in some case is not visible (1723025)

  • The warning dialog when a user force a UEFI installation does not respond to input event and the installation is then blocked at this stage (1724482) Avoid yourself some troubles and do not force a UEFI installation without a UEFI partition, grub-installer will fail anyway.

  • Doing an "Entire disk" installation over an existing LVM installation will fail because the installer selects the wrong boot device (1724417) Use custom partitioning instead and manually select the right boot device in the combo box.

  • The Files app remains at 3.26.

Server

  • Partitioning step allows to configure LVM across multiple devices without requiring to setup a separate /boot partition. This may lead to failure to install the bootloader at the end of the installation, and failures to boot the resultant installations. (1680101)

  • LVM configuration cannot be removed when volume groups with the same name are found during installation. Partitioner does not support installation when multiple conflicting/identical volume groups have been detected. For example reinstalling Ubuntu with LVM across multiple disk drives that had individual LVM installations of Ubuntu. As a workaround, please format disk drives prior to installation, or from the built in shell provided in the installer. (1679184)

  • cio_ignore blacklist is no longer active after installation, because not all install-time parameters, like cio_ignore (s390x), are propagated to the installed system. Workaround is to edit /etc/zipl.conf to apply these and re-run sudo zipl to update the IPL. (1571561)

  • bash won't work in a qemu chroot (1751011)

Printing

  • USB printers do not get set up automatically and IPP-over-USB does not work at all. Please set up your USB printer using "Devices"/"Printers" in the GNOME Settings. If possible, especially for driverless printing, connect your printer via network (Ethernet or Wi-Fi) or wait to upgrade to 17.10 until the problem gets fixed (1721839).


Official flavors

The release notes for the official flavors can be found at the following links:


More information

Reporting bugs

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If you want to help out with bugs, the Bug Squad is always looking for help.

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