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Ubuntu To Stop Offering 32-Bit ISO Images, Joining Many Other Linux Distros (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical engineer Dimitri John Ledkov announced on Wednesday that Ubuntu does not plan to offer 32-bit ISO installation images for its new OS version starting with the next release — Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) scheduled for release on October 19. The decision comes after month-long discussions on the dwindling market share of 32-bit architectures. Ledkov made it clear that Canonical does not plan to stop support for 32-bit architectures. The Ubuntu team plans to continue to offer security updates and bug fixes, but they won't be offering new ISO images. Lubuntu and Xubuntu, which are Ubuntu offshoots created to run on older computers, will most likely continue to provide 32-bit ISO images, as this is their bread and butter. Manjaro, Tails, and Arch Linux announced similar decisions. Even Google dropped support for Chrome on 32-bit Linux platforms, way back in 2015, predicting the overall trend.
is it 2032 already?
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13
Many people run Ubuntu Server on embedded devices. And Old Wyse terminal server makes a wonderful Cacti and Icinga box. (No good having monitoring inside a VM when the VM server fails...) Perfect for Pi-Hole. A nice syslog server you can drop at a client when needed. And Ubuntu Server is the only distribution you can install totally for free and then add support a-la-carte later. And yes, I have added an expensive support contract to a $10 used Wyse box for a client.
This is a disturbing trend. Not that I could run Ubuntu on my vintage black 2006 MacBook that has a 32-bit processor. Mint Linux is the only version that I ever got to run on my MacBook.
Are there really many 32bit systems being used in general purpose (workstation or similar) settings? I tend to come across 32bit boxes most often now as either embedded systems, mini servers (in low-demand applications), or various novelty / nostalgia applications. All of these could probably be better suited with a more specialized OS than Ubuntu that aims for the general populace. While it can make support a little more tricky (particularly if all your 64bit systems are Ubuntu) it is probably worth the effort. to switch.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Support is the key. Many people want support, or at least the option. Name some specialized distributions that support 32bit for embedded devices or small low powered specific needs. I'll wait...
If you're willing to pay, sure.
Oh wait, you want both the OS and the support to be free? No can do.
We should have been on 64 bit 20 years ago.
Pity those motherboards and CPUs used as a virtual machine host that don't support VT-x and can't run 64-bit VMs even though the host OS can be 64-bit.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If you're willing to pay, sure. Oh wait, you want both the OS and the support to be free? No can do.
Who offers paid support contracts for a 32 bit distribution? Not RedHat, Suse, or Ubuntu (now...) anyway.
Why did this get modded down? It's the truth! TRUTH!
Hugs and kisses,
Juan Epstein
According to the California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, last week's accusation of Russian interference in the US elections was blatantly incorrect. “DHS confirmed that Russian scanning activity had actually occurred on the California Department of Technology statewide network, not any Secretary of State website. Based on this additional information, California voters can further rest assured that the California Secretary of State elections infrastructure and websites were not hacked or breached by Russian cyber actors.” Wisconsin’s chief elections administrator, Michael Haas, has also repeatedly said that Homeland Security assured the state it had not been targeted: “Wisconsin was not provided any information that indicated before the November election that Russian government actors were targeting election systems.”
The latest Red Scare is just a big nothing burger.
After they pulled a Microsoft and tried to dictate what users should and should not like, I thought everyone dumped them like a hot rock.
Roll your own distro. Call it EMBedutu or something.
You'll be a hero, can brag of having your own distro, your pick of super model(s) or porn star(s) or both(s), money, cars and every geeky-dork in the world wishing to be you!
For those arguing that there are still uses for 32bit machines, I gotta wonder: Is the cost of upgrading to something tiny, modern, and 64bit more or less expensive than running 32bit on old hardware if you include the cost of power?
Are there really many 32bit systems being used in general purpose (workstation or similar) settings? I tend to come across 32bit boxes most often now as either embedded systems, mini servers (in low-demand applications), or various novelty / nostalgia applications. All of these could probably be better suited with a more specialized OS than Ubuntu that aims for the general populace. While it can make support a little more tricky (particularly if all your 64bit systems are Ubuntu) it is probably worth the effort. to switch.
Well, I have a neat little Atom based Netbook that I use as my inventory and library computer. It is technically a 64 bit system, but its specs are such where a 64 bit OS and 64 bit applications are just too damn slow, and the only drivers available were for XP and 32 bit Windows 7; so after trying various solutions (even both Debian and Ubuntu), I ultimately settled on 32 bit W7.
On another note, since I can't be arsed at the moment to check out the article, is it only ISOs they are discontinuing, or is it all paths to a 32 bit installation (like network based install from bootable media for example)?
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I can run 30% more VMs on my Linux Host using 32-bit server images. I understand dropping desktop, but i686 for server still makes perfect sense. I have 30 512 VMs running with 16 GB of Ram. If I was forced to upgrade to x86-64 today, I could only run 21 VMs. Not sure Ubuntu was considering the wasted memory when they made this call.
something tiny, modern, and 64bit
Sometimes modern isn't tiny.
The first round of netbooks, such as the Eee PC 900, were 9" laptops with a 32-bit Celeron processor. The second round of 9" and 10" netbooks used a 64-bit-capable Atom processor, but many shipped with 1 GB of RAM and can't be upgraded past 2 GB. At RAM sizes of 1 GB or less, pointer size increase becomes substantial, and "x32" (x86-64 with 32-bit pointers) never drew enough of a following to come close to displacing i386. (Xubuntu will still be around to support 1 GB PCs, and 64-bit Xubuntu appears to run OK on 2 GB.) A new netbook in 2017 won't be especially "tiny", as 11.6" appears to be the minimum screen size nowadays.
It's about time, as most modern hardware has >4GB of memory that needs addressing. That 64bits can address twice as much memory as 32bits ought to be seen as a bare necessity at this point.
I have three old Eee PCs that are all still in use, and they all are 32-bit systems. They are fine for reading e-books, email, listening to music, watching movies, IRC and reading comics.
One of them even has an SSD instead of the original HDD, since it cooked itself.
Doesn't really matter as two of them have Xubuntu, and hopefully they will continue to offer images.
One runs Devuan, since I wanted to test it out before rolling it out to my workstations, if need be.
Why do I still have those machines? They are not broken, and they are useful enough. And I don't need to worry about someone stealing one of them on a train trip etc. - of course all are also encrypted. I never throw away stuff that still works.
Spam trying exonerate Russia on a totally unrelated comment section of an article about a Linux distro. That's not suspicious at all. *eye roll*
How many rubbles does being a pro-Putin astroturfer pay per hour?
Fucking Russians. Putin has big warehouses of these guys spreading disinformation KGB style.
Anyone gullible enough to believe these paid trolls ought to move to Russia with them.
One of the biggest Linux use cases for me is executing on ancient hardware. Linux is efficient enough to serve music on legacy machines.
Anyone who installs linux on their machines understands that Ubuntu is not a corporate vanguard for FOSS hippies or run by a tech "evangelist". They've decided to cease providing service for machines that are over 10 years old, which is what a PC running an Intel CPU older than the Core I-series (or a slightly less recent ARM cpu). If you don't like that, boo-effing-hoo.
I can find drivel like this on reddit. I expect Slashdot to do better job at curation of articles.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I run an Ubuntu guest on my Windows box using Oracle's VirtualBox. It doesn't allow me to install 64-bit Linux guests, only 32-bit. So, am I doing something wrong or am I just screwed here?
64-bit ought to be faster: 16 64-bit GPRs, PC-relative addressing etc. If you want smaller pointers, it is nothing hindering you to run 32 bit apps on the 64-bit OS.
for me
yes indeed linux is all about you and your needs. support costs are irrelevant to your happiness so why should they be considered?
yes. also weight/power-usage. i have 2, sometimes 3 gigabyte 386 laptops with ssds mirroring each others configs and serving up various things across the house. all of them are silent, useful and secure copies of my ~/ for very very little power. i have a spare i take hiking and to coffee shops to write. battery life is great and i find all of them more useful than the 64bit netbooks mirroring my / ... so yeah, they are very useful.
you also gain great efficiency when you are able to run the same version of all your scripts and apps on all your boxes. what's next, everyone drop rpi support??
Windows Me (Millennium Edition) came out in late 2000, when PCs were shipping with Pentium III processors and 128 MB of PC133 RAM upgradable to 512 MB. The AMD64 spec was first published around that time, but the first 64-bit Opteron CPU didn't ship until August 2003.
There was at least one 64-bit Atom iteration which could do x64 just fine, but which did not ever have appropriate drivers available for Windows.
"Slower" in 64-bit here can be for a variety of reasons.
Kid-proof tablet..
It says that this was an account for trolling and your other account, ole -2 was the real account. Please use your real account to post your pointless stories about how many calories you get a day, what kind of lattes you drink, what kind of linux you use for porn.
Nobody cares. I think you just need a real social life, we all got shit we want to talk about. Why not join a club or take a community college class... stop using slashdot for your blog. Or if you do use it as a blog.. then write in the journal.
I'm gonna laugh when GNAA decides to turn you into a lolcow.
- any sysadmin worth their salt bailed on Ubuntu when Debian decided they were going with sysd.
Isn't this the point? Apparently no one wants to purchase support for Ubuntu on 32bit systems, so they're no longer doing so.
If they had clients that requested this I suspect the support would continue to be there.
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I was at a SF bathhouse last weekend and saw creimer there being creepy even for an old man at a bathhouse.
He's not a christian and loves dick.
This was the Cherry Trail series I believe, which used the GMA 3150 GPU which was basically just like the GMA 500 from Imagination Technologies and required a proprietary blob to operate. Intel never released a 64bit driver for that GPU (or they tried, it had glitches and they didn't want to continue supporting it).
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A Commodore 64/128 computer won't run Linux, but it will run LUnix.
The first 64-bit *IX OS/system was: Alpha (DEC hardware) + OSF/1 (eventually became 'Tru64') arrived in late 1992 (to DEC internal developers)
But really? Every non-embedded x86 CPU (that I can think of) since about 2005-ish has been 64-bit capable. Not sure of the date when phones all had 64-bit capable CPUs.
A new book by The MIT Press looks interesting: "For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Linux continues to support 32-bit x86.
Ubuntu is not Linux. It merely uses Linux.
Really? All current (and for the last 10 years) x86 and ARM CPUs are 64-bit capable.
I call "Trump News" on the claim that 32-bit boxes are "being used" because of other than "nostalgia" reasons. Err. Incompetence on the part of the deployer....
First, there is VERY little on a typical computer that requires 64-bit code. Perhaps a very complex 3D shooter game, or a video editing suite. For anything else if you need that many gigs of addressing you're probably just dealing with incompetent/lazy coders wasting performance.
Second, there are tens (hundreds?) of millions of computers that are incapable of running 64-bit linux. What shall we all do? Throw them all into landfills just because a few crappy programmers with the newest CPU in their desktop/laptop are lazy jerks? I thought young coders were at least pretending to be "green" and environmentally-responsible.
I have a whole bunch of PCs running my business and they nearly all run on Linux. When I last checked, several are quad-core, yet only TWO of my systems were capable of running in 64-bit mode. Am I really supposed to dropkick about 30 PCs into the junk pile and spend thousands replacing them so I can run 64-bit versions of code that offer no advantage over the 32-bit versions? New releases are often desirable because of the security improvements (which are needed by all the people who have these not-64-bit-capable systems.
This seems closely related to the way so many websites are now being loaded with megabytes of garbage scripts and video ads etc by web site designers in big cities with unlimited highspeed net connections - who seemingly are unaware that there are vast areas of the country where fiber optic, cable and even DSL are not viable and there are many people still accessing the net via DSL or even dial-up with no reasonable affordable faster alternatives.
The 7xx were Celeron M, and starting with the 900a, they used atoms.
I moved my 701 to Voidlinux, which is not a derivative of any other distro. Hopefully Void will keep 32 bit supported longer than the debian/arch derivatives.
I also happen to dislike systemd, and Void boots very quickly.
This post was written using said 701 (4g surf).
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
64 bit applications tend to be a bit larger than their 32 bit counterparts, mostly because pointers and some other data types are larger. (Even if you keep the same data sizes within your application, the size of some data items called for by APIs like time stamps and I/O counters for streams get bigger.) Code size tends to stay about the same; the 64 bit code uses fewer instructions because of having more registers available, but the instructions are on average a bit larger.
How all of this affects execution speed varies. AMD processors are generally faster running 64 bit code. Intel has been more of a mixed bag. One notable case was Intel's first 64-bit capable CPU, the Pentium D; its speed was limited by the CPU's ability to fetch instructions rather than by execution units, so the fact that code size stayed the same or grew by a bit meant that the same was true of execution speed.