14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical announced today that the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system would be delayed for a week, until February 14th, due to a boot error that cannot be fixed in time.
In a mailing list announcement published earlier today, Canonical's Adam Conrad announced that Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS would be released next week, on Valentine's Day, February 14th, instead of the initial February 7th launch. The cause for the delay appears to be a critical boot error with the Linux 4.18 kernel.
The bug was reported on Launchpad by several users, which claim that their Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) installations failed to boot after an automatic upgrade to linux-image-4.18.0-14. The system was stuck on the "Starting Load/Save RF Kill Switch Status..." line, but users managed to boot with an older kernel, linux-image-4.18.0-13.
"Don't take this as an invitation to try to get all your pet bugs fixed in the next few days, but if you've seen anything else in your testing that would be critical to fix for boot/install, please escalate it NOW, so we can address those in the same iteration and make sure 18.04.2 is as shiny as can be," said Adam Conrad.
Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS will ship with Ubuntu 18.10's kernel, graphics stack
As we reported earlier this week, the Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS was expected to ship on February 7th, as the second point release in the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series and the first to upgrade both the kernel and graphics stacks. Therefore, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS will ship with Ubuntu 18.10's kernel and graphics stacks.
Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS represents an up-to-date installation medium for those who want to deploy the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system on new computers without having to download hundreds of updates from the main archives after installation. Existing Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS users need only to have their installations up to date to run Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS.