Ubuntu Noble updates on hold while 20th anniversary teaser bears retro-styled gifts

Ubuntu 24.04.1 is still available, but for now you can't update to it from Jammy Jellyfish until a bug is sorted. To compensate, there are some fun goodies coming in 24.10.

A few days ago The Reg wrote that Noble Numbat upgrades for 22.04 were available, but we mentioned a number of glitches that were affecting some users as reported on various forums. Not anymore. The upgraded version has been removed from the https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release-lts file on Canonical's website, meaning that machines running 22.04 won't offer it as an upgrade for now.

Official confirmation from Canonical comes in the form of a terse email, which says that it has been withdrawn "due to a critical bug in ubuntu-release-upgrader in the way it's using the apt solver. This is being worked on and as soon as this is fixed, we'll re-enable the upgrades."

We wrote about improvements to the APT solver last May, and can't help but wonder if there is some connection here. The email adds: "We're also working on an announcement post/mail so that people are aware."

We can't see any sign of that yet, so until Canonical publishes more info, hang on to your Jellyfish. Although it's intentional, there is an open bug for the disappearing upgrade, and subscribing to that may get you more info sooner than anything else.

The Oracular Oriole reveals some of its wisdom

The next release of Ubuntu, 24.10 "Oracular Oriole," is due late next month. The Ubuntu team often drops some tasters of what's coming before a release goes into beta, such as new wallpapers or themes. The Reg FOSS desk doesn't tend to report on these as we're not terribly fussed - we rarely use the default GNOME edition except for evaluation purposes. This time around, though, things are a bit different.

What some sites are calling "Easter eggs" in Oracular are changes in the look and sound of the distro that hearken back to "Warty Warthog," the first ever release of Ubuntu, which came out 20 years ago. (Like Windows NT, its release number didn't denote its youth. The first release of NT was 3.1, and the first release of Ubuntu was 4.10 because it appeared in August 2004.)

Warty had a unique color scheme in shades of brown, which stuck around in Ubuntu for its first few versions. This vulture ran that first ever release, and every one since then, and we really liked the old look. Most OSes have some boring combinations of grays or muted blues, and Ubuntu's rich Earth tones were a striking and pleasant contrast. It also had a login sound theme of tribal drum sounds, which we kept around for years thereafter. The colors, sounds, wallpapers, and codename are nods to the South African roots of Canonical founder and "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life" Mark Shuttleworth.

We don't mind the orange and purple tones, but we liked the brown theme and are glad to hear it's coming back. There will be a display theme, some wallpapers, and the login sound - if you want them. If you don't, there will be a modern wallpaper too, but we're quite looking forward to some retro styling.

In other respects, Warty lived up to its name. There was no graphical installer yet, no live CD, and it didn't detect our twin Athlon XP CPUs and downgraded our machine to uniprocessor for quite some time. Its graphics configuration tools were so basic that we dual-booted with SUSE for years, just to use SUSE's SaX tool to configure X11 for our twin Matrox graphics cards, then copy across the configuration file. We don't want to return to any of that, thanks, but, as it happens, this vulture also grew up in Africa and found the theme to be a refreshing change. ®