The announcement comes minutes after Canonical announced the end of life of its Ubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” operating system on January 13, 2018, saying that it’s beneficial to have Ubuntu 17.10 images available in the face of the impending EOL for Ubuntu 17.04, as users will need to upgrade their installations.
Last month, several users reported broken BIOSes due to a bug in the Ubuntu 17.10 installation images. Laptops from Lenovo, Acer, and Toshiba were affected by the issue, which locked users out of their BIOS settings. The bug could make user’s system unbootable even if the image was booted in live mode.
Canonical immediately took action and disabled downloads for the Ubuntu 17.10 Desktop images from the ubuntu.com website. Meanwhile, to fix the issue, they had to update the kernel packages in Ubuntu 17.10 to disable the intel-spi driver at boot time, and they’ve been working on rebuilding the ISOs since.
Early next week, around the date of January 11, Canonical will release the new ISO images for Ubuntu 17.10 and all official flavors, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu Budgie, and they’re announcing today a call for testing to make sure the respin images work correctly.
While the company announced earlier this week that it is working on patches to mitigate recently disclosed Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities on the Ubuntu 17.10, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 ESM releases, the Ubuntu 17.10 respins won’t include these patches.
Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/canonical-plans-to-release-ubuntu-17-10-respins-for-all-flavors-early-next-week-519258.shtml
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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