From this page you can order Ubuntu 14.04.2 with Long Term Support, or any of it's popular derivatives. Lubuntu 14.04 is highly recommended for older MAC/PowerPC (PPC) computers.
Latest system requirements for the "Ubuntu Desktop Edition" are
- 700 MHz processor (about Intel Celeron or better)
- 1 GB RAM (system memory) (Kubuntu will require at least 1GB)
- 5 GB of hard-drive space
- VGA capable of 1024x768 screen resolution
- Either a DVD drive or a USB port for the installer media
- (Internet access is helpful)
New features in 14.04 LTS
Updated Packages
As with every new release, packages--applications and software of all kinds--are being updated at a rapid pace. Many of these packages came from an automatic sync from Debian's unstable branch; others have been explicitly pulled in for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
For a list of all packages being accepted for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, please subscribe to trusty-changes.
Linux kernel 3.13
Ubuntu 14.04 includes the 3.13.0-24.46 Ubuntu Linux kernel which is based on the v3.13.9 upstream stable Linux kernel. Along with the usual collection of new features, fixes and improvements, the following are some of the more noteworthy highlights since the previous LTS release:
- Networking - Included Open vSwitch 2.0.1 support (including VXLAN), better bonding support, better bridge management and diagnosis and new buffer bloat avoidance measures. We also introduce better TCP connection management in the face of packet loss, plus TCP fastopen and improved attack tolerance. Intel wifi 6K/7K support was included as well as Infiniband stack updates to provide Mellanox RDMA and VXLAN support. Finally, we see the first stages of the switch to nftables, which should see incremental improvements to network security.
- Scheduling - the default I/O scheduler was changed from CFQ to Deadline.
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Thermal and Power Management - Power management and efficiency continues to be a focus and we saw the inclusion of the Intel RPL (Running AVerage Power Limit) support for enforcing and monitoring power limits on modern Intel processors. Additionally, we saw the introduction of the Intel PowerClamp driver for improved power efficiency. We also disabled intel_pstate by default as we witnessed poor behavior on some systems (1188647)
- Virtualization - As well as major improvements to Xen and KVM (including ARM support for both), we also see VMware support, full support for KVM 2.0.0 (including QEMU KVM), version 1.2.2 of libvirt and the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. Alongside general performance improvements in the virtio subsystems, support for namespaces in containers was also introduced and we finally saw support for unprivileged containers.
- Filesystems - general performance and latency improvements have been made across the board for filesystems such as Btrfs, XFS, and Ext4. Metadata checksumming and improved quota support for Btrfs, XFS, and Ext4 have been included as well as Ext2/3 support via the Ext4 driver.
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Security - Improvements to AppArmor allow more fine-grained control over applications. See detailed AppArmor release notes below. The Integrity Measurement Architecture has also been enabled. Packaging updates for signed kernels were also performed as well as EFI boot support.
- Hardware support - ARM multiplatform support has been added, enabling you to build a single ARM kernel image that can boot across multiple hardware platforms. Additionally, the ARM64 and Power architectures are now fully supported. X32 ABI support (64-bit mode with 32-bit pointers) was also introduced. We also saw copious amounts of HW enablement such as support for Intel Haswell processors, Lynx Point chipsets, Avoton SoC support, i915 driver support for Broadwell graphics, AMD Kabini and Kaveri APU enablement, AMD Sea Islands GPU enablement, and ARM64 APM X-Gene platform support. Also, Ubuntu kernel flavors and architectures were cleaned up with the removal of the i386 generic-pae flavor and eliminating armel architecture support.
Python 3.4
We eventually intend to ship only Python 3 with the Ubuntu desktop image, not Python 2. The Ubuntu 14.04 LTS image continues this process, although we will not be able to convert everything to Python 3 for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release.
If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.
AppArmor
AppArmor has a number of new features in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS LTS. Notably:
AppArmor policy has been adjusted for packages that ship it to work with these changes, but local policy may need to be adjusted, especially for signal and ptrace rules. See man 5 apparmor.d for details.
Oxide
Oxide is a webview based on Chromium to deliver web content. Oxide allows us to better support 3rd party developers and applications within the Ubuntu archive by providing a fast, secure and up to date webengine library for the duration of the LTS. While other web content libraries such as those based on webkit are available, their maintenance will be limited to new upstream minor version releases only, and application developers are encouraged to use Oxide instead.
Upstart 1.12.1
Upstart has been upgraded to version 1.12.1. More details are available in the Upstart Technical Overview.
Ubuntu Desktop
Unity
Unity Desktop has been streamlined for the 14.04 LTS release. Important new features include:
- Support for High-DPI screens and desktop scaling
- New screen saver and lock screen that matches the Unity greeter visual designs, with improved speed and security.
- The option (under Appearance settings) to show menus embedded in the window's title bar instead of the top menu bar
- The application spread (Super + W) has been redesigned, with new features including the ability to type in order to filter the displayed applications / windows
- New window decorations, with improved appearance and performance. Windows contents are now updated live as they are resized
- Dash scopes can now be enabled and disabled from Application lens, inside dash itself
General
The rest of the Ubuntu desktop also received many updates. Some important changes include:
- Nautilus now defaults to type-ahead find instead of intiating a search when you are looking for files within a directory
- Many default applications regained well-integrated menu bars under Unity
- New Ubuntu-specific settings application, derived from GNOME's control center
Libreoffice
The Libreoffice office suite has been updated to the latest and greatest verision, 4.2.3, containing new features:
- General
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A new start center gives previews and easy access to recently used documents
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A new flat icon theme: sifr, installable with apt-get install libreoffice-style-sifr
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initial HiDPI support
- Improved import and export filters
- support for BCP 47 language tags
- support for native MATE and XFCE file dialogs
- Writer
- a new default document template
- in-place editing of text fields
- document search for right-to-left languages
- spellcheck and change tracking consolidated
- Calc
- trendline enhancements: multiple trendlines, force intercept, extrapolation, polynominals, moving averages
- a new calculation engine, paving the way for high performance calculation on graphics cards with OpenCL
- quick right-click context menu to switch between sheets
- random number generation and statistic functions
- functions to access web data (WEBSERVICE, FILTERXML)
- new functions: LEFTB, LENB, MIDB, RIGHTB, COVARIANCE.P, COVARIANCE.S, STDEV.P, STDEV.S, VAR.P, VAR.S, BETA.DIST, BETA.INV, BINOM.DIST, BINOM.INV, CONFIDENCE.NORM, CONFIDENCE.T, F.DIST, F.DIST.RT, F.INV, F.INV.RT, F.TEST, EXPON.DIST, HYPGEOM.DIST, POISSON.DIST, WEIBULL.DIST, CHISQ.DIST, CHISQ.DIST.RT, CHISQ.INV, CHISQ.INV.RT,CHISQ.TEST, CRITBINOM
The full list of new features in LibreOffice 4.2 can be found here.
Xorg
The Xorg display server and drivers have been updated to the 15.0.1 release and mesa has been updated to 10.1.
Ubuntu Server
OpenStack 2014.1
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes the OpenStack 2014.1 (Icehouse) release of the following projects in Ubuntu main:
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OpenStack Compute - Nova
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OpenStack Identity - Keystone
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OpenStack Imaging - Glance
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OpenStack Block Storage - Cinder
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OpenStack Networking - Neutron
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OpenStack Object Storage - Swift
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OpenStack Telemetry - Ceilometer
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OpenStack Orchestration - Heat
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OpenStack Dashboard - Horizon
The OpenStack Charms for deploying OpenStack using Juju have been updated to support deployment of Icehouse - see the charm release notes for full details.
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.
Users of OpenStack 2012.1 (Essex) on Ubuntu 12.04 should note that several components have changed/been superseded over the last two years:
- Nova Volume has been replaced by Cinder.
- Neutron has been introduced alongside Nova Network (deprecated but not removed yet).
- The configuration file format has changed from a flags based format to a section based ini style format - configuration files should be reviewed and updated accordingly.
Existing OpenStack installations must be step upgraded through interim OpenStack releases (Folsom, Grizzly and Havana) using the Ubuntu Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04. The Ubuntu Cloud Archive also provides the Icehouse release for 12.04; Users may prefer to upgrade to this release on 12.04 prior to upgrading the base Ubuntu operating system to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Please refer to the upstream release notes for full details of upgrading between OpenStack releases and the features introduced in each release.
Puppet 3
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Puppet 3. This is a major version upgrade from previous Ubuntu LTS releases and includes many changes which are not compatible with Puppet 2.7.x.
Please review the upstream release notes to determine which breaking changes apply to your installation.
Xen 4.4
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Xen 4.4. This is a significant upgrade from the previous release. Of particular note the xen hypervisor no longer supports 32bit only CPUs on the x86 architecture; 32bit Dom 0 running on the 64bit hypervisor is still supported. The hypervisor will automatically be upgraded to the 64bit version (the Dom 0 does not need to change). Ensure your host is 64bit capable _before_ upgrading.
Also the XM (xend) management stack has been deprecated since Xen 4.1 and will be removed in the next version of Xen (4.5). Therefore we urge all users to start using the new xl toolstack. For that reason the default toolstack setting (/etc/default/xen) is changed to xl.
The format of normal configuration files is mostly identical, only usage of Python inside the config file is no longer supported. Also managed domains, which were managed by xend and stored in a different (sxpr) format will need to be migrated. When upgrading to Xen-4.4 an automatic migration of xend managed domains into xen and libvirt config files is attempted. However, due to many dependencies, this is failing more often than not. So when upgrade has been done and the host is running the new Xen hypervisor, the migration into xen config files can be started by calling "sudo /usr/lib/xen-4.4/bin/xen-migrate-xend-managed-domains". The resulting config files are written into /etc/xen and should be reviewed before usage.
Likewise, when libvirt is used to manage machines, the xend managed domains can be migrated into libvirt xml definitions by calling "sudo libvirt-migrate-xend-managed-domains". The resulting definitions should also get reviewed before usage (either virt-manager, virsh or looking in /etc/libvirt/libxl).
Once the new VM configs are working, it is recommended to remove the old ones (/var/lib/xend/domains/). This is not done automatically for safety reasons.
Ceph 0.79
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Ceph 0.79; Ceph will be upgraded to the Firefly stable release via a stable release update when 0.80 is released upstream. This release of Ceph includes efficient erasure coding of data for cold storage and tiered pooling. Please refer to the upstream release notes for full details on upgrading.
Qemu 2.0.0
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Qemu 2.0.0. Due to incompatibilities in the emulated hardware, KVM virtual machines created on 12.04 cannot be live migrated to 14.04 LTS. Likewise, virtual machine snapshots from 12.04 cannot be restored on 14.04 LTS. Memory snapshots can be restored, and virtual machines created on 13.10 can be migrated to 14.04 LTS.
User emulation of arm64 binaries is now supported, and support for armhf and arm64 kvm-accelerated virtual machines is now available.
From 12.04 to 14.04, the default vmware vga memory size for machine type pc-1.0 has been reduced. If you are using a desktop image and being placed in low graphics mode, then switching to a new machine type, for instance pc-1.2 pc-i440fx-1.7, should solve the problem.
Open vSwitch 2.0.1
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Open vSwitch 2.0.1. See the upstream release notes for details of all features included in this release. Note that the openvswitch-datapath-dkms package is not compatible with the Linux 3.13 kernel shipped as default in 14.04 LTS; The native Open vSwitch module in the 3.13 kernel provides all the features of the dkms module apart from support for experimental LISP tunnelling and should be used instead.
Libvirt 1.2.2
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Libvirt 1.2.2 with full support for ceph and Xen 4.4
LXC 1.0
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes the newly released LXC 1.0, featuring fully unprivileged containers, a new more flexible seccomp policy language, fast container clones using btrfs, overlayfs, LVM or zfs backing stores, API bindings for python 3.0, go, ruby, lua and C, and SELinux support.
MAAS 1.5
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS contains MAAS version 1.5. In addition to bug fixes and minor improvements, MAAS version 1.5 contains the following major features:
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Advanced Networking: MAAS now supports multiple managed network interfaces in a single cluster, and has support for VLANs.
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Zones: A Zone is arbitrary grouping of nodes. This grouping can then be used as a constraint for deployment.
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Hardware Enablement Kernels: MAAS now supports using kernels other than the default kernel for an Ubuntu release. This includes enlistment, commissioning and deployment and is primarily focused on allowing users to use Hardware Enablement Kernels.
See the upstream changelog for full change information.
Juju 1.18.1
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes the latest stable release of Juju, the service orchestration tool for Ubuntu. See the upstream release notes for full details of all new features and improvements in this release. Existing 1.16.6 juju environments can be upgraded to 1.18.1 by running:
juju upgrade-juju
strongSwan
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS now includes official support for strongSwan IPSec. strongSwan is a feature rich, modern IPSec solution. ipsec-tools, the supported IPSec solution in prior releases of Ubuntu, now receives community support and users are encouraged to migrate to strongSwan to maintain official support. For more information, please see this page.
MySQL
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS continues to provide official support for MySQL 5.5. Three other community supported alternatives of MySQL are also included:
- MariaDB 5.5 - a drop in replacement for MySQL 5.5.
- Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5 - a Galera based Active/Active MySQL solution.
- MySQL 5.6 - the next release of Oracle's MySQL.
Note that upgrading to MySQL 5.6 is an automatic one way process; it is possible to downgrade manually - see the upstream documentation on details of how to perform this process.
Apache 2.4
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Apache 2.4; this is a major version upgrade from Apache 2.2 in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and users should take care to read the upgrade notes included in the packaging and the upstream upgrading documentation.
PHP 5.5
PHP has been updated to 5.5, which is a major upgrade from 5.3 as available in the previous LTS. Upstream introduced some incompabilities in this update, and recommend testing before upgrading production environments. For more details, see the PHP migration guide.
Due to licensing problems, Debian dropped the PHP-supplied json module in Debian bug 692613, replacing it with a compatible json module instead. Ubuntu is aligned with Debian by default, and thus has picked up this change in 14.04 LTS, first in 13.10. The upgrade process will automatically pull in the new module. There have been claims of some edge case incompabilities in bug 1287726; testing is advised.
Ubuntu Touch
As part of the wider Ubuntu 14.04 release efforts the Ubuntu Touch team is proud to make the latest and greatest touch experience available to our enthusiast users and developers.
While this Ubuntu Touch release is still not a supported release, we feel it is important to hand out a relatively "stable" build for wider testing and feedback while we are continuing with high velocity towards our going-to-market milestone late this summer. Also, while not product quality yet, this image is a big step forward feature-wise compared to our initial release done in October 2013, so we hope you will enjoy using this on your phone and tablet.
Devices
For this milestone we added tablets to the mix of devices we offer builds for. The set of devices with builds available is:
- Nexus 4 Phone (mako)
- Nexus 7 (2013) Tablet (flo)
- Nexus 10 Tablet (manta)
Unfortunately, we had to drop support for some platforms that previously had maintained builds to allow our engineering team to stay focussed on a small set of mobile hardware that are close to what we will have to support when going to market later this year. The following devices we stopped producing builds for:
- Galaxy Nexus Phone (maguro)
- Nexus 7 (2012) Tablet (grouper)
How to install or update
Our 14.04 release images are now available for consumption through our “stable” touch channel. Instructions on how to install Ubuntu Touch on those devices are available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install. You can also proceed with a system update on the officially-supported devices running the latest stable image.
What’s new?
This version features the tablet form-factor with the introduction of the side-stage when the screen size gives enough room to display it. You are able to set a phone-factor application into that side-stage and switch between the main and side stages. Multiple core applications as well have been extended to support and be responsive for various form factors and screen sizes in addition to getting a ton of new features and bug fixes.
A new Scope and Homescreen experience
The home screen and scope experience has seen a complete overhaul, delivering an even better and more stunning experience than before. Users can now enable and disable scopes to get more control about what is searched and delivering more accurate answers and will surely see the attention to detail that our design and engineering team has put into bringing these main UI experiences to where we are now. Give it a try!
Webapp story gets upgraded through oxide engine
The Web applications story just got boosted through integration of the oxide engine, a new web container featuring the V8 javascript engine and chromium rendering. With this we are now delivering an even faster web experience than before. Note that our browser is also using the same technology for a reliable and relaxing daily browsing experience.
Plumbing layer comes with all the latest from Ubuntu and Android 4.4 and Qt 5.2
On top of the usual freshness of the core stack that comes with an Ubuntu release, we upgraded our UI toolkit to Qt 5.2, featuring the new v4 javascript engine, and also uplevelled our enablement stack to Android 4.4 to better support latest android devices.
Developers get more features and convenience
On the developer side, a new layout framework and new facilities like tabulation title enhancement inherited by the new SDK release are available in our 14.04 framework. Also, developers can now use an emulator on their Ubuntu Desktop to do app and core system development.
And more ...
On top of the highlighted items above, there are many user noticeable improvements. Here is a short list:
- support for multiple sim cards and simultaneous calls
- render optimizations through MIR and Qt
- working app lifecycle support so you never run out of memory
- geolocation support
- initial alarm system
- calendar and contact sync
- user notifications for system events such as available system images