Canonical Launching Ubuntu 16.04 LTS April 21

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By Michael Justin Allen Sexton
published

Canonical announced that it will introduce Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the latest version of the OS. The LTS designation means that Canonical will maintain support for the next five years. Although the long-term support for the OS is beneficial in and of itself, a new software feature inherent in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will arguably be the more attractive aspect of the operating system called "snap."

Snap is new application format designed to work side-by-side with traditional deb packages. Snap is designed to be easy to produce using a new tool called "snapcraft," which can compile applications from deb packages or from source code.

Snap applications are completely isolated from the rest of the system, which has several advantages. As it cannot interact with other files on the system, it is inherently secure against malicious software, and it helps to ensure that it is compatible with existing software. As snap files are essentially self-contained, it's also easier for them to be migrated to other devices with widely varying hardware configurations. This eases the creation of software capable of running unaltered on systems from IoT devices to high-end servers.

Canonical intends to use snap to help extend long-term software support for this Linux distro.

The company also added support for the LXD pure-container hypervisor, which is used in conjunction with OpenStack on the OS as a cloud computing platform. LXD is capable of 14x the workload density and significantly higher performance compared to traditional virtualization technologies for each guest device connected to the cloud platform.

The OS also supports the ZFS-on-Linux software, which functions as a file system and volume manager with a wide array of data management tools. Alternatively, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS also supports the CephFS file system, which can better handle large-scale enterprise storage devices and cluster computing.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will be available on April 21.

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Michael Justin Allen Sexton
Michael Justin Allen Sexton is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He covers hardware component news, specializing in CPUs and motherboards.
7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ComputerSecurityGuy
    This version adds native 32 bit EFI support as far as I can tell. For anyone with BayTrail products that's good news.
    Reply
  • leaded gas only
    WooT!
    I've been using Xubuntu for the past few years but I need better driver support so I'm looking at going back to Ubuntu. I like to stick to LTS releases because otherwise all support stops for intermediate releases and you are left for dead.
    Reply
  • amk-aka-Phantom
    This version adds native 32 bit EFI support as far as I can tell. For anyone with BayTrail products that's good news.

    Not everyone. Some Bay Trail SoCs are 64-bit, have been EFI booting Ubuntu 14.04 on them since day 1.
    Reply
  • Darkk
    Good thing I read the upgrade docs since I use Radeon R9 390 card:

    "If you use a device with AMD Radeon graphics hardware you should NOT upgrade at present. The fglrx driver is now deprecated in 16.04, and although open source alternatives (radeon and amdgpu) are recommended, they do not deliver comparable performance."

    Guess I'll have to wait awhile for the official driver support from AMD.
    Reply
  • ComputerSecurityGuy
    It isn't coming, AMD is killing off fglrx and integrating the stack as open-source, from what I have heard.
    Reply
  • Darkk
    It isn't coming, AMD is killing off fglrx and integrating the stack as open-source, from what I have heard.

    Yeah, it's one of the reasons I upgraded to the newest Radeon R9 to take advantage of the open source. So I guess it's going to take awhile to get the most performance and speed benefits out of this card. I will back up my current setup since I have three monitors so usually goes wonky after the upgrade and have to go through a couple of tries via installing the AMD drivers to get it to work properly.

    Reply
  • cat1092
    What good is the new release when they're not supporting highly popular AMD GPU's? Some of which cost over $300, while many are below that price, still no proper driver support, that leaves many Ubuntu's users with only one choice....ride out 14.04 LTS until Canonical comes to their senses & provide graphics support for AMD users.

    Tried the Ubuntu MATE version, the only hardware driver offered was for AMD CPU microcode, and the screen looks & acts as though garbage.

    Hopefully with Linux Mint 18 is released (normally Mint updates 2-3 months after Ubuntu), they'll have a solution for those with AMD graphics.

    Looks as though Canonical is giving AMD the cold shoulder with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

    Cat
    Reply