14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical announced that Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (Trusty Tahr), the second point release for the latest LTS branch, has been released and is now available for download.
Ubuntu LTS stands for Long Term Support and it's a special iteration of the operating system that gets five years of support and a few point releases along the way. They can be considered as update packs, but they don't bring any new features. It's usually mostly about upgraded packages that also include the Linux kernel.
Users who already have Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed don't need to do anything extra, they just have to upgrade their system like they always do and everything will be in place. The one thing that changes is the fact that Canonical regenerates the ISOs with all the new packages, so new users can download those instead of the original release.
Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS is all about the updates
This latest version of Ubuntu was delayed for a couple of weeks, but it was more a matter of circumstance than anything else. Canonical was in the middle of a launch for the mobile version and they still needed to fix a couple of kernel-related things, so they chose to postpone the launch.
"We have expanded our hardware enablement offering since 12.04, and with 14.04.2, this point release contains an updated kernel and X stack for new installations to support new hardware across all our supported architectures, not just x86. 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," is noted on the official announcement.
One of the most important upgrades is the adoption of Linux kernel 3.16, from Ubuntu 14.10, along with the matching X.org stack. The developers are saying that it's based on the 3.16.0 Extended Upstream Stable Kernel Release.
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 14.04.2 right now from Softpedia.
