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Here we go again! Canonical is looking for help from the community to test drive the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS (Xenial Xerus) point releases.
After last week’s release of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS as the first point release in the Focal Fossa series, Canonical is now working on new point releases for its long-term supported Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system series.
Your reaction right now would be like… wait, Ubuntu 16.04.7? Why? Aren’t there only five point releases during the life cycle of an Ubuntu LTS series? Yes, you’re right, Canonical usually bakes only five ISO point releases for each LTS series, but sometime they have to release emergency ISOs because of some nasty bugs.
It happened last year with Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS (now ESM) to patch a critical security vulnerability in the APT package manager, which allowed attackers to execute code as root or possibly install malicious apps and crash the system.
And it’s happening again, due to the recently disclosed BootHole vulnerability, which affects the GRUB2 bootloader. Therefore, if you plan on installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), which will be supported until April 2021, you’ll soon have new installation images on your hands, patched against this nasty flaw.
The Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS (Xenial Xerus) ISOs will be released only for the Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Kylin flavors on the 64-bit architecture, and you can help Canonical test drive the Release Candidate ISO images right now here.
On the other hand, the Release Candidate ISOs of the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (Bionic Beaver) point releases are also available for public testing here. They are available for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, and Ubuntu Kylin flavors on all supported architectures.
Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS is the fifth and the last planned point release in the Bionic Beaver series. It’s a major update that comes with HWE (Hardware Enablement) kernel and graphics stacks from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), such as Linux 5.4 LTS kernel and Mesa 20.0.8 graphics stack.
Both Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS point releases are expected to be released later this week on August 13th, right on my birthday! If you have some spare time, do give them a try.
Last updated 4 years ago
