Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus is out! Get it before everyone else

STH is a big Ubuntu user and we just saw Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Xenial Xerus, is out. There are some major upgrades in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS that we are extremely excited about.

Download Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Download Ubuntu 16.04 LTS here. You can also find mirrors which have already published the final images.

The official Ubuntu pages as of 21 April 2016 7AM Pacific (GMT -8) are still not updated but we found the images online in the official repositories.

Major changes in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

The LTS releases for Ubuntu are a big deal as they are widely adopted and have long lifespans. There are a number of new features in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS that we wanted to highlight:

• ARM and Power8 support – We have been working with the team at Cavium and their ThunderX parts. We heard that the out of the box support for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is going to be much improved. To the point that we got an off the cuff estimate that about 95% of the out of the box stuff will work and decently optimized in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, instead of requiring patches in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This is a big deal.
• Huge storage upgrades – ZFS on Linux and Ceph are now part of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. ZFS is extremely popular as a single machine scale up storage platform while Ceph is perhaps one of the most popular and widely deployed scale out storage platforms. Coincidentally, STH uses both ZFS and Ceph quite extensively in our hosting.
• LXD container upgrades – Containers are the hot topic and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has a number of upgrades to its LXD containers which help make containers more secure, flexible and easier to use
• Snap – Snap is a new package manager that is supposed to compliment .deb packaging. We like .deb because of its wide use so this may be more relevant in years to come
• Driver updates – one of our favorite features of new Ubuntu releases is the availability of new driver updates as we test a lot of new hardware. For example, Intel i219 or X557 network drivers were not part of the original 14.04 LTS release. They were added in future dot releases which made using systems with those NICs much easier.

Go download Ubuntu 16.04 LTS now before all of the mirrors get flooded on release day!

If you are trying Ubuntu 16.04 LTS you can discuss on our dedicated STH forum thread.