14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, the first point release in the new series, has been released and is now available for download.
All the Ubuntu LTS versions get this special treatment and a few point releases are made available in the maintenance course of a distribution. The regular releases, like Ubuntu 14.10 for example, won't get any major updates like this one and will only benefit from nine months of support.
Canonical has changed the support periods for its distributions and all the Ubuntu variants, like Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, now feature five years of support. The 14.04.1 build is just the first point release and the next ones will arrive in the next couple of years, at least until the release Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
“As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS,” notes Canonical's Adam Conrad.
As you can imagine, in the few months that passed since the official April release, quite a few changes and improvements have been made. For example, the developers have explained that Ubuntu 14.04.1 includes the 3.13.0-32.57 Ubuntu Linux kernel, which in turn is based on the 3.13.11 upstream stable Linux kernel.
According to the changelog, Open vSwitch 2.0.1 support has been implemented and this provides better bonding support, better bridge management and diagnosis, and new buffer bloat avoidance measures. The TCP connection management has been improved, Intel wifi 6K/7K support has been added, nftables is now used by default, the default I/O scheduler has been changed from CFQ to Deadline, and Intel RPL (Running AVerage Power Limit) support has been implemented for enforcing and monitoring power limits on modern Intel processors.
Also, a number of improvements to Xen and KVM have been implemented, VMWare support has been added, a few general performance and latency improvements for the filesystem have been made, checksumming and improved quota support for Btrfs, XFS, and Ext4 have been included, AppArmor now allows more fine-grained control over applications, ARM multiplatform support has been added, the i386 generic-pae flavor has been removed, and the armel architecture support has been discontinued.
Canonical also says that all the Ubuntu variants will feature five years of support, and that includes Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu Kylin, Edubuntu, and Kubuntu. All the other flavors will only get the three years of support from their maintainers.
You can download Ubuntu 14.04.1 right now from Softpedia.
