LONDON, January 27, 2009: Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor for Ubuntu, announced today an update for the Long Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu 8.04 – including more than 200 updates for security, added stability and compatibility. Long Term Support releases offer businesses, individuals and the ecosystem around Ubuntu a stable platform on which to build multi-year initiatives. To ensure the stability and reliability of that choice, 'point releases' are issued on a six month basis with rolled-up bug fixes, security and maintenance updates and new hardware support. “This is the second maintenance release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS in a series of updates and security fixes planned through April 2011 for desktops and April 2013 for servers,” said Rick Clark, engineering manager of Ubuntu Server Edition at Canonical. “With the enhancements this time, our focus was providing even more stability and compatibility for LTS users, allowing them a robust platform for their business strategies.” Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has proven an extremely popular platform for businesses looking to perform common workloads, particularly on the server version in datacenters. It has the convenience of the full version being freely available while being backed by global services such as support, migration, deployment and training. Organisations such as Wikipedia have announced their migration to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as their core server infrastructure. Canonical and the Ubuntu server community's continued commitment, as evidenced through this point release, ensures these organisations have made a sound choice. In all, more than 200 updates were integrated – from security updates to corrections for other operating issues. The main purposes of a point release are to aggregate corrections that were made to the LTS release in the past six months and provide support for installations on additional hardware. Updated installation media is available with 8.04.2 so that fewer additional updates are required following installation and our installation process detects more hardware that was released in the last few months.

 

A full list of corrections and new hardware support is available at:

To download Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS, or to obtain CDs, please visit:

About Canonical Ltd

Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organisation committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities. World-class 24x7 commercial support for Ubuntu is available through Canonical's global support team and partners. Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world. Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem. For more information visit www.canonical.com or www.ubuntu.com