ReleaseNotes

Revision 18 as of 2019-04-16 15:38:16

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Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 19.04 and its flavours.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 19.04 will be supported for 9 months until January 2020. If you need Long Term Support, it is recommended you use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead.

Official flavour release notes

Find the links to release notes for official flavors here.


Get Ubuntu 19.04

Download Ubuntu 19.04

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download ISOs and flashable images from:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/19.04/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/19.04/beta/ (Less Popular Ubuntu Images)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/daily/server/cosmic/current/ (Ubuntu Cloud Images)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/19.04/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/19.04/beta/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/19.04/beta/ (Lubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/19.04/beta/ (Ubuntu Budgie)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/19.04/beta/ (Ubuntu Kylin)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/19.04/beta/ (Ubuntu MATE)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/19.04/beta/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/19.04/beta/ (Xubuntu)

Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.10

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 -c" (without the quotes) into the command box.
  • Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '18.10' 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.

  • Follow the on-screen instructions.

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

There are no offline upgrade options for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.

Upgrades on i386

Users of the i386 architecture will not be allowed to upgrade to Ubuntu 19.04 as dropping support for that architecture is being evaluated and users of it should not be stranded on a release with a shorter support window than the release they are already running.


New features in 19.04

Updated Packages

Linux kernel 🐧

Ubuntu 19.04 is based on the Linux release series 5.0. It includes support for AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics processor, complete support for the Raspberry Pi 3B and the 3B+, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, many USB 3.2 and Type-C improvements, Intel Cannonlake graphics, significant power-savings improvements, P-State driver support for Skylake X servers, POWER memory protection keys support, KVM support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization, enablement of Shared Memory Communications remote and direct (SMC-R/D), Open for Business (OFB), and zcrypt on IBM Z among with many other improvements since the v4.15 kernel shipped in 18.04 LTS.

Toolchain Upgrades 🛠️

Ubuntu 19.04 comes with refreshed state-of-the-art toolchain including new upstream releases of glibc 2.29, ☕ OpenJDK 11, boost 1.67, rustc 1.31, and updated GCC 8.3, optional GCC 9, 🐍 Python 3.7.3 as default, 💎 ruby 2.5.5, php 7.2.15, 🐪 perl 5.28.1, golang 1.10.4. There are new improvements on the cross-compilers front as well with POWER and AArch64 toolchain enabled to cross-compile for ARM, S390X and RISCV64 targets.

Ubuntu Desktop

Desktop Updates

Ubuntu 19.04 ships with the latest GNOME desktop 3.32. This brings performance improvements, a host of bug fixes and some important new features.

  • Desktop upgraded to GNOME 3.32
    • Numerous performance improvements. GNOME Shell now feels faster and more responsive. More technical details here

    • Fractional Scaling support.
      • The Wayland session can now be scaled between 100% and 200% in 25% increments.
      • Experimental support in the Xorg session can be enabled to achieve the same. Read more here <link TBD>

    • New sound configuration panel making it easier to select your input and output devices
    • Changes to GNOME Initial Setup to add more settings up front and make it easier to enable location services (for example, to allow automatic timezone switching)
  • Tracker is now included by default. This allows the desktop to keep track of recently used files and improves searching.
  • Right click handling is now "area" by default. This allows both two-finger right clicking and clicking in the bottom right corner of the touchpad
  • alt-tab handling now switches windows by default. Switching applications by default can be done with super-tab
  • Preview order of windows in the dock is now static and based on the order in which the windows were added
  • IWD can now be enabled for use with Network Manager. IWD is a new alternative to wpa supplicant and is in testing for consideration in the future.
  • Installing Ubuntu Desktop on vmware will now automatically install the open-vm-tools package to improve integration.
  • The Yaru theme has seen further refinement and updates and includes a new icon theme.
  • Safe Graphics Mode. A new option is added to the Grub menu which will boot with "NOMODESET" on. This may help you resolve issues on certain graphics cards and allow you to boot and install any propriatary drivers needed by your system.

The latest releases of Firefox (66.0) and LibreOffice (6.2.2) are available and installed by default.

Ubuntu Server

qemu

QEMU was updated to 3.1 release.

See the change log for major changes since Bionic.

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

libvirt was updated to version 5.0. See the upstream change log for details since version 4.0 that was in Bionic.

Among many other changes administrators might like the ease of a new local include apparmor to the libvirt-qemu profile that allows local overrides for special devices or paths matching your setup without conffile delta that has to be managed on later upgrades.

Installer support for zkey on IBM Z 🔐

s390-tools were upgraded and added support for automatic usage of zkey and pervasive encryption from the installer. When using the installer and selecting "Guided - use entire disk and setup encrypted LVM" zkey pervasive encryption will be used automatically, if the master key is configured in the CryptoExpress domain.

Raspberry Pi

Ubuntu 19.04 comes with an easy way of enabling bluetooth support on the raspi* ubuntu-server preinstalled images through the installation of the pi-bluetooth package (now available in multiverse).

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 19.04. 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

  • When selecting 3rd party drivers during install there is a long pause before install proceeds. This is the ubuntu-drivers tool refreshing it's cache. Please wait a couple of minutes and install will continue normally. (bug 1824905)


Official flavours

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


More information

Reporting bugs

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve the quality of future releases. Please report bugs using the tools provided.

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

Participate in Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

More about Ubuntu

You can find out more about Ubuntu on the Ubuntu website and Ubuntu wiki.

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