14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical announced today that it's working on the sixth security-oriented point release of the long-term supported Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series.
Following on last week's Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS (Xenial Xerus) emergency point release to patch a critical security vulnerability affecting the APT package manager, which could allow attackers to execute code as root and possibly crash the system by installing malicious apps, Canonical is now working on Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS.
The Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS point release will be similar to the Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS point release, but for those who want to deploy the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series on new computers without taking any security risks caused by the said APT vulnerability.
"The situation is a bit different here than with 16.04.6 as there's only a few flavors still supported for trusty at this stage," said Lukasz Zemczak in a mailing list announcement. "Seeing that the series EOLs next month anyway, even for those flavors participation is completely optional (and some have already rightfully opted out)."
Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS slated for release on March 7th
Canonical said that the Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS emergency point release would be available to download later this week, currently slated for release on Thursday, March 7th, and they already have the first set of RC (Release Candidate) images in place for public testing to see if everything is working properly for everyone.
So if you want to help them test the Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS Release Candidate images, feel free to download the ISOs from the official ISO Tracker page and report any issue you may encounter on Launchpad. The Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS (Trusty Tahr) point release will only be released for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, and Ubuntu Kylin flavors for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.