Linux distribution
Ubuntu 24.10
Nate Drake brims with excitement at Canonical’s latest offering. Will this distro be a plumed Oriole or just plain ’Orrible?
IN BRIEF
An oriole is a brightly-coloured bird with a rich, whistling song. This carries over into Ubuntu 24.10, which has an upgraded installer, a new Gnome desktop and an experimental Security Center.
SPECS
CPU: 2GHz dual-core
Mem: 4GB HDD: 25GB
Builds: x86-64, ARM640, RISC-V, ppc64le (POWER8 and later), s390, ARMhf (ARMv7 + VFPv3-D16)
Twenty years ago, in October 2004, the very first stable release of Ubuntu (4.10) was made available to the public. It represented the fruits of the labour of Mark Shuttleworth and a small team of Debian developers. Since that time, with one exception, new releases of Ubuntu have been issued every six months. Version numbers correspond to the current year and month of release.
This has culminated in the latest version (24.10). In true Ubuntu tradition, it bears the alliterative code name of an animal (this time, it’s Oracular Oriole).
As one of the most popular Linux distros, Ubuntu supports a wide range of architectures. The AMD64 ISO is a rather weighty 6.7GB. This is around a 1GB increase over Ubuntu 24.10, which was roughly the same size as a Windows 11 ISO.
If you decide to test Ubuntu 24.10 in VirtualBox, as we did, you may see an error message on startup: vmwgfx seems to be running on an unsupported hypervisor. In our tests, we found this disappeared after installing the Guest Additions.