If you were expecting Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS to drop February 13, I come bearing some a punch of awk news: the release has been delayed.
Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta reports that an ‘unfortunate incident’ resulting in some of the newly spun Ubuntu 24.04.2 images (for flavours) being built without the new HWE kernel on board (which is Linux 6.11, for those unaware).
Now, including a new kernel version on the ISO is kind of the whole point of the second Ubuntu point release. It has to be there so that the latest long-term support release can boot on and support the latest hardware – long-term support means just that.
And while the main Ubuntu ISO did include it, flavours images are Ubuntu too – it’s only right they all arrive at the same time.
Ubuntu installer images are being rebuilt with the correct kernel on board but each ISO also needs to undergo (re)testing. As there’s not enough time to do all of that and still meet the original release date of February 13th…
The team has decided to delay the release by one week.
The new release date for Ubuntu 24.04.2 is February 20th, 2025 – not the longest wait, really.
What’s mildly amusing is that the first point release was delayed as well, and further back in the Noble development cycle, so was the beta release — the Numbat has truly embraced the aristocratic art of a tardy arrival!
Keen to ensure this kind of showstopper doesn’t occur again, Gupta says the engineering team at Canonical plan to “do a proper retrospective to prevent this from happening in the future.”
This news may disappoint those who planned to do a new install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS this week but in the grand scheme it’s not that big of an issue: the Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS ISO is still available to download (with Linux kernel 6.8).
As for the new HWE stack with Linux 6.11 and a newer Mesa, that began rolling out to existing users of Ubuntu 24.04 this week (as did an updated base-files package to bump the Ubuntu version number to 24.04.2 LTS in the Settings > System panel).
On the bright side, this means we now have something to look forward next week!