14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical is preparing to pull the plug on Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander), the operating system that was launched only nine months ago.
Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) was released on October 17, 2013 and the developers from Canonical have announced right from the start that they intend to only provide support for nine months.
This latest announcement finally corrects the support period for all the Ubuntu OSes. After Canonical switched from 18 months to 9 months of support, some unusual situations were created with the upgrade path, but now everything is in order.
"Ubuntu announced its 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) release almost 9 months ago, on October 17, 2013. This was the second release with our new 9 month support cycle and, as such, the support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 13.10 will reach end of life on Thursday, July 17th."
"“At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 13.10. The supported upgrade path from Ubuntu 13.10 is via Ubuntu 14.04 LTS," reads the official announcement.
The update process for Ubuntu 13.10 to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is pretty straightforward and shouldn't pose any problems. Users jut need to run the update-manager application, select the sub menu Updates from the Software Sources application, confirm the "Notify me of a new Ubuntu version:" option is set to "For any new version", check for updates, and then simply perform the upgrade.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the other hand is supported for five years, until 2019. When the support for Ubuntu 13.10 will end, the only two desktop versions that will still received updates will be Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 14.04, which are LTS releases.
To make things a little bit clearer, users will be able to use Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) after the date July 17 date, but they won't be receiving any updates, which makes the system more vulnerable.
The good news is that Canonical will release a new Ubuntu version in October, the 14.10 version. It will also feature nine month of support, but the next one after that, 15.04 will arrive in April 2015 and Canonical will have more supported OSes once more.
Users can download Ubuntu 14.04 LTS right now, if they want to install a fresh version, or they can try the daily build for Ubuntu 14.10. The latter version is not stable and it should be us used only for testing.