Canonical puts out last update to Ubuntu 20.04 before 22.04

Ubuntu has put out the latest point release of its stable version, or the fourth bugfix of 20.04. The main difference will be visible in new installs: a clean install of 20.04.4 – for example on some new hardware – will get kernel version 5.13 from 21.10 "Impish Indri", which came out after 20.04.3 last August. However, if …

[Missing Semicolon]

Last?!??!

Surely "latest"?

[DougMac]

The last point release.

Not the last update.

[BJC]

Timely report

I'd just recently had to do a reinstall on my home laptop. [Long story that I might share more about once correspondence ends.] Anyway, I was having just this problem, with nVidia drivers, and was a little confused what had changed. I'd been working around the issue by booting to the earlier kernel but it's good to get more information about it.

Thanks Reg. :-)

[Primus Secundus Tertius]

Compare cars and computers

I'm glad my car does not need gigabytes of updates every year.

Er, gulp! Should I be that confident?

[ITMA]

Re: Compare cars and computers

You must have an old car....

[Paul Uszak]

Re: Compare cars and computers

Lucky you.

My car's SatNav needs a major update - it's constantly in the Grand Canal in Venice (£150), the screen wash is gone, oil & filter needs changing and the engine flushing. It never fully recovered from me accidentally putting diesel into the petrol tank. Sump plug leaks. Plus the tyres are half flat as they've perished. Wipers are split and the driver's side mirror is taped on. It has no 2nd gear.

God how I wish I could just go online and update the damn car...

P.S. Before anyone says it, I don't mean via webuyanycar.com. I'm attached to Henry.

[ITMA]

Re: Compare cars and computers

Henry? What happened to Oliver? LOL

A guy I used to know way back swore blind by old type Landies and said he "didn't trust any vehicle I couldn't fix with some screw drivers, spanners, a lump hammer and a blow torch".

[David 132]

Re: Compare cars and computers

> it's constantly in the Grand Canal in Venice

Sounds a long way to go just to dip the headlights.

[Mark #255]

Lazy sysadmins of the world, unite

This reminds me, this autumn I'll have to roll my 18.04.5 systems up to 22.04.1

If I remember rightly, when I went from 14.04 to 18.04 I found it easiest to bounce through 16.04.

Still way less hassle than a Windows upgrade (what do you mean, you want sound AND better than 800x600 screen resolution?)

[Liam Proven]

Re: Lazy sysadmins of the world, unite

[Article author here]

Sorry about the headline - we'll fix that on Monday.

Yes, you do have to go through all the intermediate LTS releases. Ubuntu's tools won't let you skip any.

[Dave559]

"There should be a few more point releases to Focal after Jammy comes out."

There should be rather more than a few. LTS releases are fully supported for (at least) 5 years, so 20.04 will be supported until 2025, with only security support after that.

[mark l 2]

Re: "There should be a few more point releases to Focal after Jammy comes out."

You can get security updates for an additional 5 years for free with Ubuntu essential subscription, which is free for personal use on upto 3 devices. So that mean EOL of 20.04.4 would be April 2030.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: "There should be a few more point releases to Focal after Jammy comes out."

The only problem with the 'free' Ubuntu Essential Subscription is that you have to prove that you've done things to aid the Ubuntu community, like taking an active part in the community forums.

I'm a Ubuntu user of 15 years (first install was Dapper Drake). In the past, I pointed people at Ubuntu as a good distro. to move to from other operating systems, but I've never really done anything measurable to aid the community, so I can't get it.

[Henry Wertz 1]

NVidia driver

I'm running NVidia driver for my GTX650 at home, and 5.13 kernel. Do make sure to see what precautions they have especially if you did anything custom with your nvidia driver install. But I'm running the regular nvidia-driver Ubuntu package, and have run HWE kernels fore quite a while. I'm running 5.13.0-30 now and update is trouble-free, part of the update process (DKMS) automatically builds the nvidia kernel modules whenever a new kernel is installed, and the nvidia-drivers Ubuntu package has supported 5.13 kernels for quite a while.

[daftdave]

It should just work?

I put 20.04 on my Dell Precision tower and have had multiple breakages caused by updates.

I mean I naively installed linux-image-extra (or something) to get a driver for my Wifi card, and clicked something in the gui to get an NVidia driver, thinking that once it was working, it would stay working. But no.

So it turns out the image-extra metapackage only gets you extras for the currently installed Kernel, another one comes along and boom the Wifi driver is gone. Then you can't get on line to Google the problem. So this it turns out is because I needed to install 20.04-hwe which then gets you the "extras" on every update.

But potentially breaks the NVidia driver. Usually in a way in which you can't boot. Or was it something else that caused that? I don't know, I got mightily confused trying to trouble shoot. Lucky it keeps the old Kernel eh? Usually a few days later another update comes along and fixes it, but once (and I don't know if it was me) but I got in a complete mess with it altogether and had to remove everything to do with NVidia then work out which version (of many) actually was required for the current Kernel.

Remember Ubuntu's philosophy used to be "it should just work"?

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: It should just work?

Some of this is not Canonical's fault. If you choose the Nvidia binary driver, you will find that Nvidia drop support for older cards periodically. If yo have something older than a gtx7xx card there is a good chance that support may be dropped shortly.

If you put the current open-source driver on (nouveau) driver on, it will probably do most of what you want, for cards going back 15 years or so. But doing that from the command line can be a bit tricky.