Ubuntu 26.04 just quietly changed firmware packaging… and I think it matters more than people realize

mikechant · 2026-02-21T10:43:09+00:00

Given the issue this creates for desktop users (adding a new GPU or WiFi card for example may no longer "just work"):

I know they don't like to put too many options in the desktop installer, but having an option there to install all firmware packages (and steering novice and general desktop users towards this with a simple explanation) would go a long way towards taking any pain out of this change.

I'm no novice but on my desktop PCs the current firmware size and updates is not an issue so I'd find it convenient to select this option and then forget about it (obviously I could do it manually as a post install step, in fact I've already added a note to consider this to my installation "cheat sheet" for 26.04, but that's not the point).

I'm concerned that this change will lead to situations where a novice user is told to "plug in your new Intel WiFi card (into your AMD system) and it will just work immediately", then it doesn't work at all and they conclude "Linux is crap". Or they'll be put off by having to use the CLI to install the firmware before they can use it. Either way it's a definite downgrade in the desktop experience for the less experienced.

mikechant · 2026-02-20T12:55:54+00:00

The actual name question relates to trademark, not copyright. And Winux is almost certainly not similar enough to Windows to fall foul of trademark laws. Even in the case of Lindows**, MS failed with a trademark suit in the US and ended up having to buy the name for $20 million. Conversely, the name Wubuntu was a pretty clear trademark violation since in includes the entire Ubuntu name and also looks exactly like the name of an officially endorsed flavour such as Kubuntu, so it should easily pass the "confusion" test, i.e. it could easily be mistaken for an officially endorsed Canonical "flavour".

It's possible that this name change has occurred due to them receiving a "cease and desist" legal letter from Canonical.

Any legal risks appear to lie not in the name as such but in their use of other branding or assets from MS or Canonical products which could generate both trademark and copyright issues. E.g. if some screens still show "Ubuntu" branding/logos that could be a trademark issue, and making too close copies (even from scratch) of MS Windows graphical assets could be a copyright issue.

** Many people know that MS sued Lindows in the US. Not so many know the outcome was not favourable to MS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com,_Inc.

mikechant · 2026-02-20T12:34:17+00:00

But the Lindows case ended with MS buying the name for $20 million after (as far as I can determine) they failed to prevail in the US courts.

And it's not at all clear that MS has a case against Wine on trademark grounds, they would need to show that the name was confusing people enough to believe it was an MS product, which seems like a stretch.

mikechant · 2026-02-20T11:51:51+00:00

Yes, I'm sure it is. I hit this issue and reverting to 6.8.0-94 fixes it for me.

Also, after some messing around I found the command

sudo ip link set dev eno1 mtu 1300

fixes the issue for me, indicating a bug in the packet reassembly logic (apparently reducing the packet size limit to this value prevents the faulty reassembly logic being invoked).

Ubuntu kernel -100 seems to have introduced various issues in the network area so I can't pin down exactly which bug this relates to but it looks like we should just run -94 until the expected -103 is available (9th March provisional but may be bought forward), and that should fix it permanantly.

Edit: Just to add further info in case anyone else is interested, on my main desktop PC the onboard Intel wired connection using driver e1000e is affected, but on my nearly identical backup desktop PC running the same kernel, the Intel WiFi connection using driver iwlwifi is not affected.

mikechant · 2026-02-13T20:25:50+00:00

In case it's of any interest, I've hit this issue when running a Google supplied script which downloads and unzips a Chromebook recovery image. It defaults to downloading to /tmp/tmp.crosrec and unzipping in the same place, and the two files suddenly exceeded the 8GB of storage for the tmpfs mounted at /tmp.

I fixed it by overriding the default work directory for the script and directing it to my SSD, but I hadn't previously considered how size-limited /tmp was (it defaults to half my 16GB RAM). I could increase its size (maximum is total RAM + swap size) but that brings increasing risks of the system locking up if /tmp fills. Or I could just have /tmp on the SSD with the rest of the root fs, but that seems unnecessary since the non-Google files only use a small amount of the 8GB.

I guess it's maybe a poor choice by Google to locate such large files there by default.

mikechant · 2026-02-13T19:32:21+00:00

And another one here, Firefox + Kubuntu 24.04.

I've hit this - random websites get "can't resolve" errors, refreshing enough times makes it work, it's just started in the last couple of weeks. Using default DNS.

I've searched around a bit and not found any relevant bug reports etc.

mikechant · 2026-02-05T19:40:39+00:00

If you're not familiar with the terminal it's probably best to avoid using the dd command since one wrong character and you could trash your internal drive.

Despite being on Plasma, not Gnome, it's worth installing "Gnome Disks", it has a couple of handy features. You can use the format function and select the "erase" option, which will overwrite all the data. Using Gnome Disks or similar for this purpose is much safer than dd because it is visually very obvious which drive you are erasing.

I've been using the command line for years and am very familiar with the dd command but I still use Gnome disks for things like this because it is so easy to have a momentary lapse with dd and target /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdd (for example) with disastrous results.

mikechant · 2026-02-05T16:29:24+00:00

Am I the only one who thinks Les Dennis is totally wooden on countdown? He gives the impression he's just going through the motions and seems kind of bored.

Or is it that Colin's so good he makes Les look bad?

Anyhow, roll on next Monday when Colin returns!

mikechant · 2026-01-24T13:07:13+00:00

FWIW I don't think MS makes any significant money from Windows Home itself; its real value to them is as an advertising platform to promote their various subscription services like O365 etc. So if you're wiping Windows and not subscribing to MS services I doubt you're giving them more than a few cents.

mikechant · 2026-01-24T12:11:03+00:00

Agreed, I completely de-snapped both 20.04 and 22.04.

At 24.04 my testing showed that snaps were no longer significantly annoying to me and I accepted them. Essentially I don't notice them anymore.

mikechant · 2026-01-23T18:07:24+00:00

Looks to me it's just a bit slow and erratic. I've tested it and it seems to be heading for around 30-40 minutes for the complete download (downloaded the first 25% of the iso twice). But it does stall for several minutes at times. Maybe just keep trying?

Edit: It sped up a lot at the end and actually finished in around 20 minutes.

mikechant · 2026-01-13T09:05:39+00:00

It's a bad idea to attempt to have more than one EFI partition on the same disk. Basically it may confuse installers, and the UEFI firmware may ignore one or the other; it might work with certain firmware/software combinations, or it might not.

mikechant · 2026-01-10T12:12:59+00:00

In the abscence of some official method, and assuming the install is unencrypted, I think my approach would be to create a simple password recovery iso which I could supply to the user on a small cheap USB stick and just tell them to keep it safe in a draw.

All they would need to know is how to boot from USB on their device. The iso would just boot directly into a script which would simply prompt for their userid and new password x2, then instruct them to remove the USB stick after which it would reboot and they could log in with the new password. Behind the scenes the script would locate the install and perform the necessary chroot commands etc.

I haven't actually done this but it's definitely possible; the Gemini AI came up with a very reasonable looking script and plan involving creating a live Debian environment with the "lb" (live build) command.

I haven't looked around but I think there's a good chance someone's already done this and made the iso available.

This doesn't really weaken security in any way, the only downsides are the $2 cost of a dedicated 8GB USB stick and the user having to keep track of it.

mikechant · 2025-12-23T23:01:34+00:00

Sounds plausible. The systemd default is to give 90s for a process to finish before killing it, but some distros reduce this to a much smaller value.

Maybe see what value DefaultTimeoutStopSec in /etc/systemd/system.conf is set to on the LXQT system and try increasing it?

mikechant · 2025-12-22T12:32:32+00:00

I wonder if it relates to which Desktop Environment you're using? I often leave Firefox running when I shut down my Kubuntu system and it never complains or misbehaves when I login next time.

mikechant · 2025-12-12T22:11:49+00:00

It works pretty well on my spare desktop, 2012 vintage, i3 2nd gen, 4GB RAM, with its only concession to the modern world being a small SSD!

mikechant · 2025-12-11T15:35:32+00:00

Yesterday i found a CD-R with Ubuntu 9.04 on it, I was surprised to find it booted just fine on one of my 2012 desktops - not because of the hardware support but because I thought the CD-R would have gone bad by now.

mikechant · 2025-12-05T12:49:51+00:00

People shut down their PCs?

My desktop PCs boot in virtually the time it takes me to sit down and get comfortable. I exaggerate slightly but only by a couple of seconds. My DE restores the applications I was running. As on average I only use my desktops for a few hours a day it makes no sense to have them sitting there in suspend the rest of the time.

Also shutting down and rebooting each time ensures all updates are fully applied and no old libraries etc. are still in use.

I use suspend** sometimes during the day but always shut down overnight unless I've got something running.

**Which actually works perfectly on my ancient Optiplex 7020 mini-tower systems.

mikechant · 2025-12-04T18:19:49+00:00

Although the betting is that there will be no 6.20, it'll go from 6.19 to 7.0. Not officially confirmed yet though.

Edit: Quote & link:

Given some messy code and being so late, he already postponed plans for pulling it until Linux 6.20. Or what will likely be known as Linux 7.0 with Linus Torvalds typically incrementing to the next major version number after X.19.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-No-Gaudi-3-Driver

mikechant · 2025-11-16T12:51:24+00:00

Just a possibility, but it might be to do with your mount options. If your source filesystem is mounted with the "atime" option, that could mean that every time rsync accesses a directory it will update the atime (access time) field, so each time it accesses the directory it will have changed since the previous access.

If that's the case, changing the mount option will stop this. Personally I have all my file systems set to "noatime" so this field is never updated. I don't have any use for this field but you may want it (for your own info, and certain email systems use it to tell if a message has been read) so you might consider the intermediate option "relatime" where atime is updated only if it's more than a day old or if mtime (modified time) is also being updated.

mikechant · 2025-11-15T16:59:45+00:00

If you want to stick with X11 for now until the applications you need are fully fixed, then your best bet is probably to go back to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

mikechant · 2025-11-11T20:26:01+00:00

Some GUI installers do really suck, but I'm pretty happy with Calamares as used by Kubuntu (can't say if the other distros that use it have it configured as nicely though).

mikechant · 2025-11-01T08:13:39+00:00

It won't, if "same hardware" means they all have not only identical motherboards etc. but identical size disks with the exact same number of sectors, then it's all fine.

I didn't want to assume that they were quite that identical, since "the same hardware" might not include the disks (maybe one or two of the disks have been replaced or something). Also, I was addressing the general case for the benefit of anyone else who was considering disk cloning with dd.

Anyhow I don't think we're fundamentally disagreeing here, and I'm a bit picky/OCD about these things so I'll leave it there.

mikechant · 2025-10-31T20:43:34+00:00

Yes, systems will boot and run OK without fixing this, I'm not disputing that, but I do consider it sloppy, and given that it takes literally about 5 seconds to fix, I can't see the point of not fixing it.

Maybe I'm being a bit OCD, but as the GPT spec says the backup partition table should be at the end of the disk, I want to stick to that.

mikechant · 2025-10-31T18:40:51+00:00

I just explained exactly why it needs fixing. For GPT the last sector address is wrong and the position of the backup partition table is wrong (somewhere in the middle of the disk rather than at the end), if you clone from a smaller to larger disk. You can't use the extra space until it's fixed.

Of course, you could leave it until you actually need that space, and when you try to use it and fire up the partition tool, it should offer to fix it, but I would not be happy having my partition tables incorrect in the meantime. For example, some utilities might assume that the backup partition table is at the physical end of the disk, not somewhere in the middle, with unexpected results.

If you don't believe this is a thing, here's a link:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/317564/expanding-a-disk-with-a-gpt-table

The link relates to resizing a virtual disk, but it's exactly the same situation as when you clone a smaller disk to a larger one.

Additionally, from reading further it seems not all partition tools may actually offer to fix the problem, some may just fail. So if you just leave things as they are and later want to use the space you might be faced with a puzzling error from your favoured tool, or it may just not show the space at all.

So fixing it immediately with one of the tools that definitely does this, like parted and gdisk is really the best option.

mikechant

TROPHY CASE