Download Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS

A new version of Ubuntu Linux is released twice a year. As with AMD’s Catalyst drivers, the release year and month form the version number. Canonical provides support for each version for a year and a half in the form of patches and updates. Once every two years, however, there is a special LTS edition, especially for business. The abbreviation stands for Long Term Support and means that support is provided for three years. The last LTS edition was 8.04 and last Friday here is the fourth update for it appeared. The most important changes are listed below for you:

top bugs

• Fix handling of SMB/CIFS shares on the desktop

Installation bugs

• Add support for using the contents of the CD image on a USB device with the cdrom-detect/try-usb=true preseed option
• cache_coherency.diff: Flush buffer cache on disk devices after writing to any partition devices they contain, so grub can be installed onto JFS partitions
• Grab change from version 1.27 to fix check for lilo-installer/skip

Upgrade bugs

• Update kubuntu_33_skip_intrepid.diff to support hardy to karmic upgrades
• Fix version number ordering between Ubuntu releases by renaming orig.tar.gz

Hardware support bugs

• init: Add extra mark_rodata_ro quirk for Acer Aspire One
• USB: EHCI: fix remote wakeup regression
• rt2x00: Hardcode TX ack timeout and consume time
• Report TX retry and fail count to mac80211 in rt73usb
• include igb support for Intel 82576
• Fix the problem with the microphone of the Lenovo webcam
• Merge WEXT scan capabilities to iwlwifi
• Add support in e1000e for a couple of ICH10 PCI IDs

desktop bugs

• fix firefox crash in NSSRWLock_LockRead_Util()
• fix regression in stack memory protections caused by unmarked assembly
• add debian/libnss3-1d/usr/lib/nss to LD_LIBRARY_PATH for the shlibsign invocation used to sign libs in debian/rules, fixing a package build failure
• Backport support for version 16 of the Yahoo! Messenger Protocol. The old authentication mechanism was disabled, meaning that it can no longer be used for signing in to Yahoo! services
• New upstream version: 4.7.5
• new upstream release 3.12.3.1 RTM (NSS_3_12_3_1_RTM)

Server bugs

• Fix ‘reload’ action so that it doesn’t just stop the daemon
• x86: use cpu_khz for loops_per_jiffy calculation
• Enable multicast routing (including PIM1 and PIM2) for hppa, ia64, sparc
• Fix flooding syslog – Syslog fills with hundreds of these errors if you have a network interface, eg eth2, with no IP address, but you have an alias, eg eth2:1, that does have an IP address (and netmask)
• Point to the right place for /etc/sensors3.conf
• Fix for Counter64 in perl subagent
• Fix python segmentation fault
• Suppresses annoying registrations in startup
• pg_maintenance: Fix $PATH to include /usr/bin, so that the cron job can run the “id” command
• PgCommon.pm, change_ugid(): Use /usr/bin/id instead of manual parsing with getgrent(), which is reportedly magnitudes faster for environments with a large number of groups in remote databases
• Fix init script failure because pid file is not created properly
• Backport fix from vblade-15 for vblade discovery bug

Other bugs

• Update rmadison’s Ubuntu URL to cope with people.ubuntu.com -> people.canonical.com; invoke curl in such a way as to follow redirects by default
• use stack guard randomization patch from Intrepid to eliminate use of a static sentinel
• unionfs: enable delete=all mount option LP: #445673
• Bangladesh DST change (effective from 2010-01-01)
• Fiji will use DST this year (effective from Nov 29)
• bdst-workaround.diff: Move end date to 2038, so that it works on 32 bit systems, too
• Adjust DST rules for Argentina
• New timezone data 2009n