Ubuntu 23.10 Is a Minotaur That Moves Faster and Takes Up Less Space (arstechnica.com) 26
SpzToid writes: Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed Mantic Minotaur, is the 39th Ubuntu release, and it's one of the three smaller interim releases Canonical puts out between long-term support (LTS) versions. This last interim before the next LTS doesn't stand out with bold features you can identify at a glance. But it does set up some useful options and upgrades that should persist in Ubuntu for some time.
Two of the biggest changes in Ubuntu 23.10 are in the installer. Ubuntu now defaults to a "Default installation," which is quite different from what the "default" was even just one release prior. "Default" is described as "Just the essentials, web browser, and basic utilities," while "Full" is "An offline-friendly selection of office tools, utilities, web browser, and games." "Default" is somewhat similar to what "Minimal" used to be in prior versions, while "Full" is intended for those who are offline or have slow connections or just want as many options as possible right away.
Elsewhere in the installer, you can now choose ZFS as your primary file system. There's also an experimental option to set up Trusted Platform Module (TPM) full-disk encryption rather than rely entirely on passphrases to encrypt your disk. This brings Ubuntu up to speed with Windows in offering a way to both secure your system and find out the hard way that you lack a backup key to get in after messing with your boot options. (Kidding! Somewhat.)
Two of the biggest changes in Ubuntu 23.10 are in the installer. Ubuntu now defaults to a "Default installation," which is quite different from what the "default" was even just one release prior. "Default" is described as "Just the essentials, web browser, and basic utilities," while "Full" is "An offline-friendly selection of office tools, utilities, web browser, and games." "Default" is somewhat similar to what "Minimal" used to be in prior versions, while "Full" is intended for those who are offline or have slow connections or just want as many options as possible right away.
Elsewhere in the installer, you can now choose ZFS as your primary file system. There's also an experimental option to set up Trusted Platform Module (TPM) full-disk encryption rather than rely entirely on passphrases to encrypt your disk. This brings Ubuntu up to speed with Windows in offering a way to both secure your system and find out the hard way that you lack a backup key to get in after messing with your boot options. (Kidding! Somewhat.)
zfs (Score:5, Informative)
You could choose root on ZFS two versions ago, then they removed it, now it's back.
I did Devuan with root on ZFS manually using the Debian 11 instructions on the Linux ZFS page instead. No snap, no systemd, no problem.
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I wonder how Ubuntu is handling /boot/efi being on a failed drive. I foolishly bought a Sandisk Pro Ultra Extreme Whatever for raidz1 IOPS, to mirror with a China Special M.2 SATA drive, and fstab includes the UUID.
When the SanDisk ate all my data the next boot couldn't mount the EFI partition so boot failed. The docs didn't mention it and I didn't notice the corner case when I built the laptop.
I could write a chain of systemd units to deal, but maybe Ubuntu already has something figured out.
Re:zfs (Score:4, Insightful)
Ubuntu can't really handle /boof/efi being on a failed drive, since the BIOS needs /boot/efi even before Ubuntu gets involved... You can set up a job to copy the /boot/efi partition to the other drive, but even then, the BIOS will likely fail to find it without manual intervention.
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Amazing technology! Just kidding but slackware LILO has been able to replicate the boot sector with a mdraid config on all drives simply by invoking the "lilo" command. Disclaimer: not sure I have dealt with efi and zfs yet but I think I have with a proxmox cluster install in a datacenter. I took for for granted that the boot sector would be replicated to all drives or at least more than one depending on the raidz config. Am I wrong? I never had the first drive fail so far so I never had to use a rescue dis
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You can set up the boot partition with md and the root with zfs. Or you can manually copy boot/efi and have boot on zfs, except for efi. You can set up multiple boot volumes. You can also have multiple efi partitions on the same volume.
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It's a shame the ZFS license conflicts with the GPL. That means the GRUB is stuck with an old version of ZFS. If you use GRUB, you are forced to have two separate pools; an old version for booting and
Re: zfs (Score:2)
You can just not set the newer options on the boot pool...
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I have used ZFS as my file system for years using ZFS Boot Menu [zfsbootmenu.org] and it is great. The boot loader natively supports current versions of ZFS and you can roll-back to prior snapshots, clone your system, recover from backups, etc. I manually take a snapshot before any upgrades, but that could easily be automated.
It's a shame the ZFS license conflicts with the GPL. That means the GRUB is stuck with an old version of ZFS. If you use GRUB, you are forced to have two separate pools; an old version for booting and a newer version for the rest of the system. If you upgrade the boot pool, GRUB won't be able to read it and your system won't boot!
I can't believe if the license is a problem, why hasn't anyone tried to make something better, because Solaris could easily boot from block level filesystem snapshots on x86 - using GRUB, the good one, with the config format you could edit by hand - fifteen years ago at this point. Linux is running out of Unix to copy from and it's starting to show.
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Linux is running out of Unix to copy from and it's starting to show.
There's nothing wrong with that at all. I like it the way it is, for the most part. All I really want is more user-friendly tools for configuring some of the more powerful functionality, like selinux.
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Gosh, thanks, this is quite useful.
Regarding Ubuntu itself, well I'm using Debian and since kernel v6 things have become noticeably faster. Pretty much everything is faster and memory usage is down, too.
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I'm glad having ZFS on root as a part of the basic OS install is back. It is nice to be able to use ZFS snapshots for backups of the root filesystem and /boot. One can just use block level ZFS sends into Borg or Restic, mount the snapshot and back up on a file by file basis, or do both. One can even use incremental snapshots to reduce what gets copied as well.
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You could choose root on ZFS two versions ago, then they removed it, now it's back.
I did Devuan with root on ZFS manually using the Debian 11 instructions on the Linux ZFS page instead. No snap, no systemd, no problem.
They technically didn't remove ZFS on root. They removed zsys which was the utility to manage ZFS on root. You could run Ubuntu 22.04 ZFS on root as well but you simply had to setup the drive in the live CD environment before running the setup, and then instal the ZFS tools afterwards. They now offer to do this automatically for you in the installer.
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They removed it from the installer. It was there, then it was gone, now it's back.
No skin off my nose, I wouldn't use it any more personally.
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Now you can do zfs encrypted with TPM via the new installer but you can't do the old passphrase/security key (at all if you don't have TPM). Look like some people from Google are moonlighting for Ubuntu and brought there this habit of randomly playing with switches instead of thoughtfully moving with a clear direction.
Re:TPM and backup/restore? (Score:4, Informative)
The encryption is done at the LUKS level. If you are doing a backup at the filesystem level, all that encryption is irrelevant.
For example, I have a number of Raspberry Pis with Zymbit Zymkeys on them. LUKS protects the / filesystem and it pulls the key out from the Zymkey to decrypt it. The data on that Pi is backed up using Borg Backup to Borgbase. For a restore, all I need is the Borg Backup key or password, and all is well.
The important thing is to save the recovery key off. That way, you still have another working key if the TPM fails. This won't affect backups, but can turn a complete data loss into a "where did I write down that recovery code?" item.
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You can add as many keys as you want to an encrypted partition. Use a 64 character random passphrase or something, and store it in a safe.
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TPM only holds the key for easy and automatic decryption. You can export the keys. You can decrypt a drive without TPM if you have the key. This goes for Windows as well. TFA is joking about how people never look after this key.
The 23.10 desktop version has been taken down. (Score:1)
Summary
A community contributor submitted offensive Ukrainian translations to a public, third party online service that we use to provide language support for the Ubuntu Desktop installer. Around three hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10 this fact was brought to our attention and we immediately removed the affected images.
After completing initial triage, we believe that the incident only impacts translations presented to a user during installation through the Live CD environment (not an upgrade). During
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Putin!!!!
Ubuntu? (Score:1)
After nearly two decades with Ubuntu they finally lost me with all this snap garbage and trying to eek out more and more profits from their users with advertising and spyware. They already had me on the edge from Unity but that could easily be avoided.
And I haven't even gotten to the "Pro" stuff. Essentially withholding security patches while at the same time giving hackers everything they need to exploit them (because hackers will just pay or use the free version to get all the patches; then they know). Un
Ubuntu still forcing snap on people? (Score:3)
Looks like it, so no thanks; I'll stick with Linux Mint (Cinnamon).
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Yep.
Ubuntu done right: https://linuxmint.com/ [linuxmint.com]