14 DAY TRIAL // One day after announcing the availability of the first Beta images of the forthcoming Ubuntu Snappy Core 16 operating system for IoT and embedded devices, Canonical's Michael Vogt informed us about the release of the Snapd 2.14.2 Snappy daemon.
Snapd is the brain behind the Snappy technologies used for installing and running Snap universal binary packages in Ubuntu Linux and other GNU/Linux distributions that support it, and Snapd 2.14.2 is currently the most stable and advanced version, available now for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Fedora 24 (in the COPR repos).
"We are happy to announce that the 2.14.2 release of Snapd is released in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Fedora 24 (COPR). Other distributions will follow soon," says Michael Vogt in the mailing list announcement. "We also released a new version of the 'core' Snap that contains this version of Snapd."
Here's what's new in Snapd 2.14.2
Coming hot on the heels of Snapcraft 2.16 Snappy creator tool, Snapd 2.14.2 implements the "--force-dangerous" option, which can be used when attempting to install Snaps without assertions, adds support for installing Snaps or removing them based on their revision number, as well as support for downloading Snaps using the new "snap download" command.
Moreover, a bunch of new interfaces are now available, including fwupd to be able to upgrade the firmware of your computer (if supported), upower-observe, and screen-inhibit-control. The x11, browser-support, bluetooth-control, and default policy interface have also been updated.
Lastly, Snapd 2.14.2 disables the "reexec" feature, but you can re-enable it if you want by using the "SNAP_REEXEC=1" parameter in the Terminal app, and adds some performance improvements to the removal of Snaps functionality, by using the "umount" command. There are also numerous image-related improvements and bugfixes, so you need to update as soon as possible.