Latest version of Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dong) Released
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.
Ubuntu 19.04 comes 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.
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 5.0.
Among many other changes worth to mention is the ability to have GL enabled graphics as well as mediated devices to be configured while still being guarded by custom apparmor profiles generated per guest. This is required for the use of gpu based mediated devices as well as VirGL mentioned above in the qemu section.
- dpdk
Ubuntu includes 18.11.x the latest stable release branch of DPDK. The very latest (non-stable) version being 19.02 was not chosen for downstream projects of DPDK (like Open vSwitch) not being compatible.
DPDK dependencies were reorganized into more or less common/tested components. Due to that most DPDK installations will now have a smaller installation footprint and less potentially active code to care about.
- samba
Samba was updated to version 4.10.x, and one of the big changes here is python3 support. In Disco, samba and its dependencies are all python3 only now, with the exception of tdb. tdb still builds a python2 package, namely python-tdb, but all the others, including samba itself, are python3 only.
- open-vm-tools
To run well integrated as VMware guest Ubuntu 19.04 comes with the latest open-vm-tools version 10.3.10.
- Raspberry Pi
Ubuntu 19.04 comes with an easy way of enabling Bluetooth support on the raspi3 ubuntu-server preinstalled images; install the pi-bluetooth package (now available in multiverse) with sudo apt install pi-bluetooth.
Please note that supported Pi devices which have Bluetooth (at the time of writing, the Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+, and 3A+) can have either serial console or Bluetooth support enabled at any given time (not both).
With the pi-bluetooth package installed, edit /boot/firmware/config.txt and set enable_uart=1 to enable serial console, or enable_uart=0 to enable Bluetooth. The change will take effect after the next reboot.
You can Download Ubuntu latest version 19.04 here
