Table of Contents

Contents

WARNING: Release reached End of Life

This release is no longer supported, please see Releases

WARNING: Release reached End of Life

Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 17.10 and its flavors.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 17.10 was supported for 9 months until July 2018.

Official flavour release notes

Find the links to release notes for official flavors here.

Get Ubuntu 17.10

Download Ubuntu 17.10

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download ISOs and flashable images from:

As fixes will be included in new images between now and release, any daily cloud image from today or later (i.e. a serial of 20170926 or higher) should be considered a beta image. Bugs found should be filed against the appropriate packages or, failing that, the cloud-images project in Launchpad.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 17.04

To upgrade on a desktop system:

Open the "Software & Updates" Setting in System Settings.
Select the 3rd Tab called "Updates".
Set the "Notify me of a new Ubuntu version" dropdown menu to "For any new version".
Press Alt F2 and type in "update-manager -c" (without the quotes) into the command box.
Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '17.10' is available.
- If not you can also use "/usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/check-new-release-gtk"
Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade on a server system:

Install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed.
Make sure the Prompt line in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to normal.
Launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade.
Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.

For other changes since 16.04 LTS, see the 17.04 Release Notes and 16.10 Release Notes.

Updated Packages

Linux kernel 4.13

Ubuntu 17.10 is based on the Linux release series 4.13. It includes support for the new IBM z14 mainframe CPACF instructions and new KVM features.

Network configuration

ifupdown has been deprecated in favor of netplan and is no longer present on new installs. The installer will generate a configuration file for netplan in /etc/netplan, which will set up the system to configure the network via systemd-networkd or NetworkManager. Desktop users will see their system fully managed via NetworkManager as it has been the case in previous releases, but Server users now have their network devices managed via systemd-networkd on new installs. This only applies to new installations.

Given that ifupdown is no longer installed by default, its commands will not be present: ifup and ifdown are thus unavailable, replaced by ip link set $device up and ip link set $device down.

The networkctl command is also available for users to see a summary of the network devices. networkctl status will display the current global state of IP addresses on the system; and networkctl status $device can display the details specific to a network device.

For more information about netplan, please refer to the manual page using the man 5 netplan command.

Ubuntu Desktop

32-bit installer images are no longer provided for Ubuntu Desktop.
The Ubuntu Desktop now uses GNOME instead of Unity.
On supported systems, Wayland is now the default display server. The older display server is still available: just choose Ubuntu on Xorg from the cog on the log in screen.
GDM has replaced LightDM as the default display manager. The login screen now uses virtual terminal 1 instead of virtual terminal 7.
Window control buttons are back on the right for the first time since 2010.
Apps provided by GNOME have been updated to 3.26. For more details about GNOME 3.26, see their Release Notes.
Driverless printing support is now available for IPP Everywhere, Apple AirPrint, Wi-Fi Direct devices. Follow the instructions from 17.04.
Printer configuration is now done in the Settings app: Choose Devices and then Printers. The tool uses the same algorithms for identifying printers and choosing drivers as the formerly used system-config-printer, and makes full use of driverless printing to support as many printers as possible. Note that some options, like printer sharing, are missing. To reach them, click the Additional Printer Settings… button at the end of the list of available print queues and you get good old system-config-printer.
The Amazon app now loads in the default web browser.
The default on screen keyboard is GNOME's Caribou instead of Onboard.
Calendar now supports recurring events.
LibreOffice has been updated to 5.4.
Python 2 is no longer installed by default. Python 3 has been updated to 3.6.
The Rhythmbox music player now uses the alternate user interface created by Ubuntu Budgie developer David Mohamed.
The Settings app has been redesigned.
Simple Scan has a new workflow and design and is now part of core GNOME.
System Log has been replaced by Logs, an app to view logs from the systemd journal.
The Ubuntu GNOME flavor has been discontinued. If you are using Ubuntu GNOME, you will be upgraded to Ubuntu. Choose the Ubuntu session from the cog on the login screen if you would like the default Ubuntu experience.
Install gnome-session and choose GNOME from the cog on the login screen if you would like to try a more upstream version of GNOME. If you'd like to also install more core apps, install the vanilla-gnome-desktop metapackage.

Ubuntu Server

qemu 2.10

Qemu has been updated to the 2.10 release.

Since the last version was 2.8 see both Changelogs of 2.9 and 2.10 for details.

Among many other changes there is one that might need follow on activity by the user/admin: Image locking is added and enabled by default. This generally makes execution much safer, but can break some old use cases that now explicitly have to opt-in to ignore/share the locks by tools and subcommands using the --force-share option or the share-rw dqev property.

libvirt 3.6

Libvirt has been updated to version 3.6. See the Changelogs for details.

LXD 2.18

LXD was updated to version 2.18.

Some of the top new features are:

Native Ceph RBD support
Support for cloud instance types
Preseeding of the "lxd init" questions through yaml
New client library
Improved storage handling (volume resize, auto re-mapping on attach, ...)
A lot of small improvements to the client tool

See the Changelogs for details.

DPDK 17.05.2

Ubuntu 17.10 includes the latest release of DPDK that has stable updates: 17.05.2.

See the Release Notes as well as the stable release announcement stable .1 announcement stable .2 and for more detail.

This made it possible to integrate Open vSwitch 2.8.

Open vSwitch 2.8

Open vSwitch has been updated to 2.8.

Please read the release notes for more detail.

Remember that since version 2.7 you need to specify dpdk devices via dpdk-devargs.

New Bind9 KSK

The DNS server bind9 was updated to include the new Key Signing Key (KSK) that was published on July 11, 2017. Starting on October 11, 2017, that key will sign the root zone key, which in turn is used to sign the actual root zones. For more details, visit:

Existing installations of bind9 should automatically update their anchor keys following RFC 5011, but new installations after the rollover event on October 11th, 2017, will need this new package or have the key updated manually.

cloud-init

The version was updated to 17.1. Notable new features include:

Python 3.6 support
Ec2 support for IPv6 instance configuration
Expedited boot time through cloud-id optimization
Support for netplan yaml in cloud-init
Add cloud-init subcommands collect-logs, analyze and schema for developers
Apport integration from cloud-init via ‘ubuntu-bug cloud-init’
Significant unittest and integration test coverage improvements

curtin

The version was updated to 0.1.0~bzr519-0ubuntu1. Notable new features include:

Network configuration passthrough for ubuntu and centos
More resilient UEFI/grub interaction
Better support for mdadm arrays
Ubuntu Core 16 Support
Improved bcache support

Samba

Samba was updated to version 4.6.7.

Noteable changes in the 4.6.x series include:

Multi-process Netlogon support
New options for controlling TCP ports used for RPC services
AD LDAP and replication performance improvements
DNS improvements

The OS Version for the printing server has been increased to announce Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 ID mapping checks added to the testparm(1) tool. There are some ID mapping backends which are not allowed to be used for the default backend. Winbind will no longer start if an invalid backend is configured as the default backend.

Known issues

As is to be expected, with any release, there are some significant known bugs that users may run into with this release of Ubuntu 17.10. The ones we know about at this point (and some of the workarounds), are documented here so you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

Incompatibility with BIOS in certain Lenovo, Acer systems

A bug in the Linux 4.13 kernel shipped in Ubuntu 17.10 can leave users unable to update any of their BIOS settings, including their system’s boot order, after booting this version of Ubuntu.

A kernel with a fix for this issue will be available in zesty-updates shortly, but, the Ubuntu 17.10 installer images still contain the kernel with this bug. Users with affected systems should not upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10 or boot an Ubuntu 17.10 installer image until this issue as resolved. Doing so may result in your computer requiring professional servicing in order to restore BIOS functionality.

A full list of known affected models can be found in 1734147.

If you have already installed Ubuntu 17.10 on an affected system, you may not immediately notice this problem because Ubuntu will continue to boot from disk. To verify whether your system has been affected by this bug, create a USB stick with the Ubuntu 16.04 desktop image and try to boot it. If you are able to boot it, your system has most likely not been impacted by this bug.

Desktop

Bluetooth audio devices cannot be used in the Greeter. This will cause issues for people using the accessibility features such as screenreaders at the login screen. Once logged in everything should work as expected.
Some admin utilities will not work with GNOME on Wayland since the apps have not been adapted to use PolicyKit to only use admin privileges for the specific functions needed. Also, some screenshot and screencast apps and all remote desktop server apps do not currently work on GNOME on Wayland. As a workaround, you can use the Ubuntu on Xorg session. For more details read upstream notes about known issues and major changes.
Exiting the live session may get stuck with a "A start job is running for " error. You may need to forcefully power off the computer if you see this. (1706939)
The Dock and Appindicator system extensions appear to be Off in tools like GNOME Tweaks. (They are on but cannot be disabled because they are system extensions for the Ubuntu session.) (1718850)
Mouse & Touchpad settings and behavior will not work right in the Ubuntu desktop if xserver-xorg-input-synaptics is installed. Some desktop environments such as Unity require xserver-xorg-input-synaptics. (1686081)
The screen reader is not working for the Ubuntu installer from the menu 'Install Ubuntu' (1719995) but it works fine when the installer is started from the live session.
The Color Emoji feature of GNOME 3.26 is not available in Ubuntu 17.10.
Tracker is not installed by default. When installed, you must log out and log back in for the tracker service to start (1697769)
Opening the Users panel in Control Center is slow.
Systems may fail to boot when connected over DisplayPort to an external screen, on NVidia graphics hardware such as the GTX970 chipset. (1723619)
When an external monitor is connected to a laptop, the login screen is only displayed on the internal one and in some case is not visible (1723025)
The warning dialog when a user force a UEFI installation does not respond to input event and the installation is then blocked at this stage (1724482) Avoid yourself some troubles and do not force a UEFI installation without a UEFI partition, grub-installer will fail anyway.
Doing an "Entire disk" installation over an existing LVM installation will fail because the installer selects the wrong boot device (1724417) Use custom partitioning instead and manually select the right boot device in the combo box.

Server

On s390x architecture, in KVM virtual machines interface names are not preserved on upgrade, and new predictable interface names are used. This will result in lack of network connectivity due to incorrect names in /etc/network/interfaces. An upgrade SRU to preserve ethX interface names is being prepared. (1682437)
Partitioning step allows to configure LVM across multiple devices without requiring to setup a separate /boot partition. This may lead to failure to install the bootloader at the end of the installation, and failures to boot the resultant installations. (1680101)
LVM configuration cannot be removed when volume groups with the same name are found during installation. Partitioner does not support installation when multiple conflicting/identical volume groups have been detected. For example reinstalling Ubuntu with LVM across multiple disk drives that had individual LVM installations of Ubuntu. As a workaround, please format disk drives prior to installation, or from the built in shell provided in the installer. (1679184)
cio_ignore blacklist is no longer active after installation, because not all install-time parameters, like cio_ignore (s390x), are propagated to the installed system. Workaround is to edit /etc/zipl.conf to apply these and re-run sudo zipl to update the IPL. (1571561)

Printing

USB printers do not get set up automatically and IPP-over-USB does not work at all. Please set up your USB printer using "Devices"/"Printers" in the GNOME Settings. If possible, especially for driverless printing, connect your printer via network (Ethernet or Wi-Fi) or wait to upgrade to 17.10 until the problem gets fixed (1721839).

Official flavours

The release notes for the official flavours can be found at the following links:

Kubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu
Lubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes/Lubuntu
Ubuntu Budgie https://ubuntubudgie.org/blog/2017/09/25/17-10-release-notes
Ubuntu Kylin https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuKylin
Ubuntu MATE https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-artful-final-release/
Ubuntu Studio https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuStudio
Xubuntu http://wiki.xubuntu.org/releases/17.10/release-notes

More information

Reporting bugs

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve the quality of future releases. Please report bugs using the tools provided.

If you want to help out with bugs, the Bug Squad is always looking for help.

Participate in Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

https://community.ubuntu.com/contribute

More about Ubuntu

You can find out more about Ubuntu on the Ubuntu website and Ubuntu wiki.

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