Ubuntu 17.04: what's new

Today a new version of Ubuntu is released - 04.17 Zesty Zapus .

Test builds became available back in November last year. Many reviews of innovations have already been published on the Internet. Some innovations became the subject of discussion long before the official release: users of the desktop version very ambiguously accepted plans to stop developing the Unity 8 graphical shell and replace it with GNOME 3.22. In Ubuntu 17.04, Unity 7 is still used by default, but in all future versions it will be gone.

Judging by the claims of Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, a dramatic turnaround will soon take place in the development of Ubuntu. This is noticeable even by the name of the new version, in which both words begin with the letter Z, the last in the Latin alphabet. According to  some information, Ubuntu 17.10 will be called Acrobatic Aardvark, and this return to the beginning of the alphabet is associated with the beginning of a movement in a new direction.

Recently, Canonical's priorities have changed dramatically: the company plans to focus on developments in the field of IoT and cloud technology.

Work on projects such as Mir, Ubuntu Personal and Ubuntu Phone has been stopped or at least postponed indefinitely. But in the server version of Ubuntu, apparently, a lot of new things will appear soon.

In this article, we would like to consider the innovations implemented in Ubuntu 17.04. But it’s better to see once than hear a hundred times. Therefore, we offer not only to talk about the new Ubuntu, but also to try it in practice: we added the corresponding image to  Vscale today, on the day of the official release.

Kernel and software update

Ubuntu 17.04 uses the kernel of the latest stable release (4.10). All implemented changes and improvements can be read in detail here (in English) and  here (in Russian).
Of the most significant software updates in the server version, it is worth noting the addition of the latest versions of qemu (2.8), libvirt (2.5) and  DPDK (16.11.1). Ubuntu 17.04 also includes the latest version of OpenStack - Ocata .

In the desktop version, the latest version of the GNOME graphical shell is available - 3.24 . The latest versions of popular programs have been added, in particular:

• Firefox 52;
• Thunderbird 45;
• LibreOffice 5.3;
• Nautilus 3.20.4;
• Rhytmbox 3.4.1.

Swap file instead of swap partition

Doubts about the appropriateness of allocating an entire partition on a disk under swap have been expressed repeatedly. Today, when the amount of memory on the server is measured in gigabytes, it makes no sense to create a partition larger than RAM that is never or almost never used.

An alternative solution was proposed in kernel version 2.6: it was possible to create a page file instead of a separate section, as in Windows. But I had to do it manually. In Ubuntu 17.04, a swap file is created automatically. Its default size is set to 5% of the free space in the file system, but it should not exceed 2 GB. If necessary, the swap file size can be easily changed.

This change will not affect installations that use the LVM logical volume system.

Systemd-resolved

In Ubuntu 17.04, systemd-resolved, which appeared in the previous version (16.10), is used as the default DNS resolver. The purpose of introducing systemd-resolved was primarily to unify approaches to working with DNS in the desktop and server versions (see more details here ). Among its advantages should be called lightness, support for DNSSEC, the ability to directly interact with DNS servers in the event of a local resolver failure.

Systemd-resolved features are a complex topic that goes far beyond the scope of this article. Soon we will devote to her a separate publication on our blog.

PowerPC: Support Discontinued

Starting with version 17.04, Ubuntu will not support the 32-bit PowerPC architecture . At the same time, support will continue in Ubuntu 16.04 and will continue until April 2021.

How to upgrade from an earlier version

With Ubuntu 16.10

Everything is extremely simple here - just complete two commands:

$ sudo apt update && apt upgrade
$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d

With Ubuntu 16.04

Upgrading from Ubuntu 16.04 is a bit more complicated. First, execute:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade
$ sudo apt install update-manager-core

After that, open the file / etc / update-manager / release-upgrades and find the following line in it:

Prompt=lts

Edit it as follows:

Prompt=normal

Save the changes and execute:

$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d

This command will upgrade your system to version 16.10. To upgrade to 04.17, you will need to run it again (see above).

And in Vscale, you can create a virtual server running Ubuntu 17.04 in just a couple of clicks - join and experiment!

Conclusion

In this article, we talked about the main changes and innovations that appeared in Ubuntu 17.04. We invite you to discuss the prospects for further development of Ubuntu and share your impressions of the new version in the comments.

We will also be glad to see your comments, suggestions and suggestions regarding Vscale. We will certainly take note of the most interesting ideas and will try to implement it soon.