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Ubuntu 22.04.1: Slightly late, but worth the upgrade

Latest shine on the Jammy Jellyfish brings ton of fixes to keep you working smoothly

The first point-release of the newest Ubuntu is here, which marks the stage it formally becomes the new long-term-support release.

As we mentioned last week, there were some last-minute delays in the 22.04.1 release process. The release was delayed until August 11. But now it's here, as Canonical announced on its official blog. The release notes list the changes.

This is only a point release of the OS, and if you are already running "Jammy Jellyfish" you will automatically get 22.04.1 when you next run a full update. No new installation of the OS is needed. If you are doing new installations, though, Ubuntu makes new installation images for each point release, so if you go to the downloads page, you will get a shiny new 22.04.1 image. If you keep an emergency boot disk, for instance with Ventoy, this is a good time to update it.

All the same, it's significant in a few ways. It's a bug-fix release, so with any luck, you won't notice any changes – just a few things may start working more smoothly. In theory, the Snap-packaged version of Firefox may start a little faster.

One of the most noticeable is that the first point-release that follows an Ubuntu LTS is when people running the previous LTS release will start getting notified and prompted to update. So if you are running 20.04 "Focal Fossa," or the previous short-term release 21.10 "Impish Indri," then you can expect to receive nags any time now.

We are being intentionally vague about the timing as Canonical uses a process called "phased updates," which means that immediately after the release, only 10 percent of users will be notified, and this percentage increments every six hours. So it will take 54 hours, or just over two days, for everyone to get the notification.

If you want to kick off the upgrade from 20.04 or 21.10 right away, before it's been suggested to you, it's pretty easy. Do a full update, however you prefer. We also recommend doing a full backup, just in case.

NOTE: If you make a second copy of your root partition on the same machine, make sure you change the backup's UUID (a partition's internal serial number), or you will have problems. Copy the partition, for instance with Gparted on a bootable USB. Make sure that you know its name, for example, /dev/sdb5, and that it isn't mounted. Then do tune2fs /dev/sdb5 -U random. If you want it to be bootable, you can look up the new UUID with blkid and edit the copy's /etc/fstab to contain the new ID, then in your main installation, run update-grub and it should appear in your boot menu.

Then use the do-release-upgrade command. If it doesn't immediately offer the new version, you can give it a kick with do-release-upgrade -d. Similarly, if you prefer doing updates graphically in the desktop, use update-manager -d.

The Reg FOSS desk had some problems with last week's kernel update to 20.04, so we upgraded a very well-used, decade-old installation on a test machine to 22.04.1. It went without a hitch and runs perfectly. It's probably the single smoothest Ubuntu version upgrade we've ever seen. ®

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