Pssst,% username%, Ubuntu 21.04 is here

Today, some good news on Habré. So, the Mars spacecraft made its second flight, and we almost immediately received a gorgeous video of this event. Well, in the evening there is more news – Canonical here just released Ubuntu 21.04 “Hirsute Hippo” with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, default Wayland and SDK for Flutter. In addition, Canonical and Microsoft announced Microsoft SQL Server performance optimizations and joint product support.

“Integration of Native Active Directory and certified Microsoft SQL Server on Ubuntu are priority innovations for corporate users. For developers, Ubuntu 21.04 is provided by Wayland and Flutter, ”said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. Let’s see what more surprises await us.

And their surprises quite a few:

  • The new distribution uses GNOME Shell 3.38 as a desktop, built using GTK3. Actually, it was, but now the GNOME applications are in sync with GNOME 40, because the developers decided that it was too early to switch to GTK 4.
  • As stated above, the default session is based on the Wayland protocol. In the case of using proprietary Nvidia drivers, the user is presented with an X server based session. But for other configurations, this session is transferred to the category of options. Over the past few months, we have removed a number of GNOME session limitations based on Wayland. After that, it became possible to share the desktop through the Pipewire media server.
  • For the first time, they tried to transfer Ubuntu to Wayland in 2017, but due to a number of problems, it was necessary to return the graphical stack based on X.Org Server. By the way, Wayland is now supported by assemblies for the “raspberry”. So, added support for GPIO (via libgpiod and liblgpio). Compute Module 4 boards now support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
  • Appeared boring wallpaper Yaru skin and icons for file types.

  • Among other things, the developers have added support for the Pipewire media server. This enables you to organize your screen recording, improve audio support in sandboxed applications, as well as open up professional audio processing and eliminate fragmentation.
  • The Linux kernel has been updated to version 5.11. In addition to support for enclaves in Intel SGX, a new mechanism for intercepting system calls, a virtual auxiliary bus, a prohibition of assembling modules without MODULE_LICENSE (), a fast filtering mode for system calls in seccomp, the end of support for the ia64 architecture, the transfer of WiMAX technology to the “staging” branch , the ability to encapsulate SCTP in UDP.
  • The nftables packet filter is enabled by default. But for backward compatibility, the iptables-nft package is provided, which provides utilities with the same syntax as iptables, but with translation of the resulting rules into nf_tables.
  • There is now support for authentication using smart cards.
  • Added the ability to change the power consumption profile, and on the desktop you can now move resources from applications using the Drag & Drop method.
  • The installer supports the creation of backup keys to restore access to encrypted partitions. They can be used to decrypt if the password is lost.
  • Now more about integration with Active Directory. In addition to improving integration, the developers added the ability to authenticate users to Active Directory with GPO (Group Policy Objects) support immediately after installing Ubuntu. Thus, system administrators were able to place settings directly on the Active Directory domain controller for Ubuntu workstations (including desktop settings and a set of custom applications). You can use GPOs to define client security policies, including setting user access options and password rules.
  • Changes have been made to the model of access to user home directories in the system. The latter are created with 750 (drwxr-x —) permissions, granting access to the directory only to the owner and group members. Previously, users had the ability to view the contents of other users’ directories.
  • UEFI SecureBoot support has been improved for x86_64 (amd64) and AArch64 (arm64) systems. In the layer for the organization of verified boot, the SBAT (UEFI Secure Boot Advanced Targeting) mechanism is used. It solves problems with revocation of certificates. The grub2, shim and fwupd packages now support this mechanism.

  • A number of system components and programming languages ​​have been updated, including:

– GCC 10.3.0,
– binutils 2.36.1,
– glibc 2.33,
– Python 3.9.4,
– Perl 5.32.1 ,.
– LLVM 12,
– Go 1.16,
– Rust 1.50,
– OpenJDK 16,
– Ruby 2.7.2,
– Rails 6.

  • Also updated versions of applications and subsystems, such as:

– Mesa 21.0,
– PulseAudio 14,
– BlueZ 5.56,
– NetworkManager 1.30,
– Firefox 87,
– LibreOffice 7.1.2,
– Thunderbird 78.8.1,
– Darktable 3.4.1,
– Inkscape 1.0.2,
– Scribus 1.5.6.1,
– OBS 26.1.2,
– KDEnlive 20.12.3,
– Blender 2.83.5,
– Krita 4.4.3,
– GIMP 2.10.22.

  • Additionally updated components for server systems:

– PostgreSQL 13.2,
– Samba 4.13.3,
– QEMU 5.2,
– SSSD 2.40,
– Net-SNMP 5.9,
– DPDK 20.11.1,
– Strongswan 5.9.1,
– Open vSwitch 2.15,
– Chrony 4.0,
– OpenVPN 2.5.1,
– Virt-manager 3.2.0,
– Libvirt 7.0,
– Rsyslog 8.2102.0,
– Docker 20.10.2,
– OpenStack Wallaby.

  • There are assemblies for HiFive SiFive Unleashed and HiFive SiFive Unmatched boards based on RISC-V architecture. We wrote about RISC-V boards here.
  • The targetcli-fb toolkit is now used for iSCSI. Previously used tgt.
  • The needrestart package is included with Ubuntu Server. It runs at the end of every APT transaction, detects changes that require a reboot, and informs the administrator of this.
  • The support of the lua-module for nginx, which is not compatible with new versions of nginx, has been eliminated. Of course, nginx is supported, but instead of a separate module, there is now a special edition of Nginx with integrated LuaJIT support.
  • In Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, Lubuntu, desktop and software changes have been made.

  • Plus the community has offered two unofficial Ubuntu 21.04 flavors: Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 21.04 with Cinnamon desktop and Ubuntu Unity Remix 21.04 with Unity desktop.

You can download Ubuntu 21.04 by this link

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