Ubuntu: Telemetry, Security Updates, and Microsoft Projects
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Ubuntu ☛ Managing OTA and telemetry in always-connected fleets
If you’ve been reading my blogs for the past two years, you know that the automotive industry is probably the most innovative one today. As a matter of fact, some of the biggest company valuations revolve around electric vehicles (EVs), autonomous driving (AD) and artificial intelligence (AI). As with any revolution, this one comes with its set of challenges.
I’ve noticed that the most difficult technologies to grasp and master aren’t always the ones that seem the most complex at first sight. Over-the-air (OTA) updates and managing the telemetry of a fleet are typically some of the most promising, but also deceptively complicated, technologies in automotive today.
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McPhail ☛ Ubuntu Security Updates Are a Confusing Mess
OK, so why would tomcat9 users on 22.04 be penalised compared to 20.04 users? Well, there’s another layer to all of this. Canonical don’t support every package in an Ubuntu LTS release for 5 years. Rather, they support a core of about two thousand packages in the main repository. The remaining 90% of available packages are in the universe repository, and Canonical only support those on a “Best Effort” basis. This means that regular LTS users will only see security updates in those packages if they’ve been fixed by community members, can be inherited from a stable Debian release, or if the vulnerability has some form of exceptional impact which would prompt Canonical to release a fix themselves. However, Canonical do commit to providing security patches for Ubuntu Pro subscribers for all packages, including universe:
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Ubuntu Desktop’s 24.10 Dev Cycle - Part 3: July Update - Desktop - Ubuntu Community Hub [Ed: Canonical working for Microsoft and Windows]
This week we published our first Ubuntu 24.04 LTS images 10 for Windows Hyper-V which enables users to create instant Ubuntu VMs on Windows. Keep an eye out for this image appearing in the Hyper-V ‘Quick Create’ menu soon!
For Ubuntu WSL 3 users I recommend trying our new cloud-init tutorial 9 for WSL which arrived alongside Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. By seeding a cloud-config file in your Windows filesystem, each new WSL instance you create will automatically inherit the same configurations, minimising setup time after a fresh install. Administrators can use this feature to standardise WSL instances across their developer estate and ensure each new instance conforms to company policies.