Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 19.10 and its flavours.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 19.10 will be supported for 9 months until July 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 19.10

Download Ubuntu 19.10

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download ISOs and flashable images from:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/19.10/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/19.10/release/ (Less Popular Ubuntu Images)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/daily/server/eoan/current/ (Ubuntu Cloud Images)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/19.10/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/19.10/release/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/19.10/release/ (Lubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/19.10/release/ (Ubuntu Budgie)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/19.10/release/ (Ubuntu Kylin)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/19.10/release/ (Ubuntu MATE)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/19.10/release/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/19.10/release/ (Xubuntu)

Upgrading from Ubuntu 19.04

To upgrade on a desktop system:

• Open the "Software & Updates" application.

• 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 '19.10' 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 Prompt=normal.

• Launch the upgrade tool with the command 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 presented with an upgrade to Ubuntu 19.10. Support for i386 as a host architecture is dropped in 19.10.

New features in 19.10

Updated Packages

Linux kernel 🐧

Ubuntu 19.10 is based on the Linux release series 5.3. Default kernel compression algorithm was changed to lz4 on most architectures. Default initramfs compression algorithm was changed to lz4 on all architectures.

Toolchain Upgrades 🛠️

Ubuntu 19.10 comes with refreshed state-of-the-art toolchain including new upstream releases of glibc 2.30, ☕ OpenJDK 11, rustc 1.37, GCC 9.2.1 as default, updated 🐍 Python 3.7.5, 💎 ruby 2.5.5, php 7.3.8, 🐪 perl 5.28.1, golang 1.12.10. 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.

Security Improvements 🔒

Ubuntu 19.10 comes with additional default hardening options enabled in GCC, including support for both stack clash protection and control-flow integrity protection. All packages in main have been rebuilt to take advantage of this, with a few exceptions.

Ubuntu Desktop

GNOME 3.34 Desktop

19.10 includes GNOME 3.34 which includes a lot of bug fixes, some new features and a significant improvement in responsiveness and speed.

• You can group icons in the Activities overview by dragging and dropping on to other icons or groups
• Improved wallpaper settings
• Improved wifi settings

• You can read the 3.34 release notes here: https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.34/

• Improved performance:
  • Consistently higher and smoother frame rates
  • Lower output latency in Xorg sessions (by one frame) for most graphics drivers
  • Lower input latency for some devices such as touchpad scrolling and keyboards
  • Lower CPU usage

Ubuntu 19.10 New Features

• Plug in a USB drive and access it directly from the dock
• New themes: Yaru light and dark variants are now available. Install GNOME Tweaks to easily switch your default.
• Support for DLNA sharing is now available by default. Share you videos to your smart TV.

• Xwayland apps are now supported running as root/sudo.

• Added support for WPA3

• The Chromium browser is only available as a snap in 19.10. This blog post has more details.

ZFS on root

• Support for ZFS as the root filesystem is added as an experimental feature in 19.10
• Create the ZFS file system and partitioning layout automatically direct from the installer

• You can read more details on Didrock's blog here

NVIDIA-specific Improvements

• The driver is now included in the ISO

• Improved startup reliability when the NVIDIA driver is in use (1, 2)

• Improved rendering smoothness and frame rates specifically for NVIDIA

Updated Applications

• LibreOffice 6.3

• Firefox 69
• Thunderbird 68

Updated Subsystems

• PulseAudio 13.0

Ubuntu Server

Images

The ppc64el and arm64 live-server ISO images are now considered production ready and are the preferred media to install Ubuntu Server on bare metal on the two architectures.

QEMU

QEMU was updated to 4.0 release.

See the 4.0 change log for major changes since Disco.

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.

Qemu now has virglrenderer enabled which allows to create a virtual 3D GPU inside qemu virtual machines. That is inferior to GPU passthrough, but can be handy if the platform used lacks the capability for classic PCI passthrough as well as more modern mediated devices.

libvirt

libvirt was updated to version 5.6. See the upstream change log for details since version 5.0 that was in Disco.

Among many other changes worth to mention is the ability to enable QEMUs ability to use parallel connections for migration which can help to speed up migrations if one doesn't saturate your network yet.

dpdk

Ubuntu includes the latest release 18.11.2 of the 18.11.x latest stable series of DPDK. The very latest (non-stable) version being 19.08 was not chosen for downstream projects of DPDK (like Open vSwitch) not being compatible yet.

See the 18.11.1 and 18.11.2 release notes for details.

Open vSwitch

Open vSwitch has been updated to 2.12.

Please read the release notes for more detail.

PHP 7.3

PHP 7.3 brings some refinements to the language: Flexible heredoc and newdoc syntaxes, JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR, list() reference assignment, and several new functions. Case-insensitive constants and several functions have been deprecated and/or removed, so developers moving to 7.3 may find it help to review the 7.2 to 7.3 migration guide.

Raspberry Pi 🍓

Our Ubuntu 19.10 Raspberry Pi 32-bit and 64-bit preinstalled images (raspi3) now support the Raspberry Pi 4 platform out-of-the-box. With this, our images now support almost all modern flavors of the Raspberry Pi family of devices (Pi 2, Pi 3B, Pi 3B+, CM3, CM3+, Pi 4).

OpenStack Train

Ubuntu 19.10 includes the latest OpenStack release, Train, including the following components:

• OpenStack Identity - Keystone

• OpenStack Imaging - Glance

• OpenStack Block Storage - Cinder

• OpenStack Compute - Nova

• OpenStack Networking - Neutron

• OpenStack Telemetry - Ceilometer, Aodh, Gnocchi, and Panko

• OpenStack Orchestration - Heat

• OpenStack Dashboard - Horizon

• OpenStack Object Storage - Swift

• OpenStack Database as a Service - Trove

• OpenStack DNS as a Service - Designate

• OpenStack Bare-metal - Ironic

• OpenStack Filesystem - Manila

• OpenStack Key Manager - Barbican

WARNING: Upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment.

Make sure you read the OpenStack Charm Release Notes for more information about how to deploy Ubuntu OpenStack using Juju.

cloud-init

The version was updated from 18.5 to 19.2. Notable new features include:

• Add new Exoscale datasource

• DataSourceOracle: configure secondary NICs on Virtual Machines

• net: add rfc3442 (classless static routes) to EphemeralDHCP (#1821102)
• cloud-init analyze reporting on boot events.
• Azure now supports waking from preprovision state via netlink messages.
• New cli command 'cloud-id' to display what cloud on which an instance is running.
• write_files config module now supports appending to a file

• Allow identification of OpenStack by Asset Tag (#1669875)

• instance-data.json standardized platform and subplatform values
• select ubuntu archive mirror for armel, armhf, and arm64
• Azure datasource telemetry, network configuration and ssh key hardening
• new config module for interacting with third party drivers on Ubuntu
• EC2 Classic instance support for network config changes across reboot
• Add support for the com.vmware.guestInfo OVF transport.
• Scaleway: Support ssh keys provided inside an instance tag.

• Better NoCloud support for case-insensitive fs labels.

curtin

The version was updated from 19.2. Notable new features include:

• Add opportunistic zkey encryption (s390x)
• block-discover cli/API for exporting existing storage devices to config
• add subcommand schema for storage-config validation
• Add support for s390 DASD devices
• Support for multi-layers images fsimage-layered:// URI
• storage_config: interpret value, not presence, of DM_MULTIPATH_DEVICE_PATH [Michael Hudson-Doyle]
• block-discover: handle multipath disks (LP: #1839915)
• vmtests: significant performance improvements int test configuration, scheduling and image syncs
• vmtests: enable arm64 testing

s390x

IBM Z and LinuxONE / s390x-specific enhancements (since 19.04) include:

Cloud Images ☁

KVM-optimized guest images

A new amd64 qcow2 image has been added. The daily eoan builds are named eoan-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk-kvm.img and contain the linux-kvm kernel.

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 19.10. 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

Enabling Wayland support with the NVIDIA proprietary driver

This is not something we recommend due to a number of bugs. But if you want to try it out then a new step is required in 19.10:

1. Add kernel parameter nvidia-drm.modeset=1

2. Comment out the nvidia line in /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules

3. As step 2 may have reintroduced an old bug you might need to disable the integrated graphics/GPU in your BIOS.

Fractional scaling in Xorg sessions

If you enable fractional scaling in Xorg sessions then you may encounter reduced performance and screen tearing. There are two possible workarounds:

• Only use scaling factors that are multiples of 100%; or
• Log into "Ubuntu on Wayland" instead.

Live Session can take a long time to start

On older hardware with a slow install medium (e.g. older USB drive) the live session can take a few minutes to start while seeding the default snaps finishes.

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 3 A+ issues

Due to some firmware issues, the Ubuntu 19.10 Raspberry Pi images can no longer boot on the Raspberry Pi 3 A+ development devices. This issue is tracked in bug number 1848247.

Official flavours

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

• Kubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu

• Lubuntu https://lubuntu.me/disco-released

• Ubuntu Budgie https://ubuntubudgie.org/blog/2019/10/17/19-10-ubuntu-budgie-released

• Ubuntu Kylin http://www.ubuntukylin.com/news/1910_released-en.html

• Ubuntu MATE https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-19-10-eoan-ermine-release/

• Ubuntu Studio https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuStudio

• Xubuntu https://wiki.xubuntu.org/releases/19.10/release-notes

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

• https://community.ubuntu.com/contribute

More about Ubuntu

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

To sign up for future Ubuntu development announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu's development announcement list at:

• https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce