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Ubuntu 26.04.1 opens the Ubuntu 24.04 upgrade path. By IT News AI / Fri, Aug 28 2026 / Ubuntu 24.04 LTS systems can now upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS after Canonical released Ubuntu 26.04.1 on August 27. The point release gives administrators the supported LTS-to-LTS route through Update Manager or `do-release-upgrade`, without relying on the premature `-d` option. Why the upgrade was delayed. Canonical holds the LTS upgrade path until the first point release so early installation and upgrade problems can be addressed. Ubuntu 26.04.1 includes updates released since April and should reduce post-installation work, while the normal upgrade process avoids the risks associated with forcing a development-release transition. Administrators should still back up systems, fully update Ubuntu 24.04, disable third-party repositories temporarily, and schedule time to review configuration prompts for services such as SSH, Nginx, and Postfix. Production systems do not need to move immediately: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS receives standard security updates through May 2029. What 26.04.1 changes. The release does not introduce major new features or a hardware enablement stack; the latter is expected with Ubuntu 26.04.2. It does provide refreshed installation media containing accumulated updates, including images for Raspberry Pi, Arm64, and RISC-V. Existing Ubuntu 26.04 installations do not need to download the new ISO. They can install the available updates through Update Manager, and existing 26.04 installation media remains usable when followed by a normal package update. Upgrade options for administrators. Ubuntu 24.04 users can start the supported transition with sudo do-release-upgrade or through the graphical update manager. Although do-release-upgrade -d can force an earlier transition, it is intended for testing and is not an appropriate choice for production servers now that the stable upgrade path is available.

Arduino(R) VENTUNO(TM) Q is available for pre-order with Ubuntu pre-installed. London, UK - August 25, 2026 - Following its initial collaboration announcement in March 2026, Canonical and Arduino (a subsidiary of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.) are excited to announce that VENTUNO Q is now generally available for pre-order, pre-loaded with Ubuntu. VENTUNO Q is a dual-brain developer board designed for edge AI and robotics applications. With pre-orders opening today, developers, researchers, and industrial innovators can go straight from unboxing to executing AI inference and real-time physical actuation on a production-ready Linux environment. With Ubuntu pre-loaded, users don't need to worry about manual board support package (BSP) flashing, complex kernel configuration, or driver downloads. VENTUNO Q comes pre-installed with Ubuntu natively running on its primary Qualcomm Dragonwing(TM) processor. How VENTUNO Q accelerates edge AI performance. At the core of VENTUNO Q is its dual-brain system architecture designed for physical AI applications where perception must trigger instant action: * Primary AI processor: Powered by the Qualcomm Dragonwing(TM) IQ-8275 processor, delivering up to 40 dense TOPS of NPU AI compute alongside integrated CPU and GPU capabilities. It handles heavy AI workloads offline, including Large Language Models (LLMs), Visual Language Models (VLMs), multi-camera computer vision, and speech processing. * Real-time microcontroller: An integrated STMicroelectronics STM32H5 MCU (STM32H5F5) running Zephyr RTOS. Linked to the main processor via RPC, it provides sub-millisecond, deterministic control for motors, actuators, and sensors without jitter. The board comes equipped with 16 GB RAM and 64 GB expandable eMMC storage, providing ample memory to run concurrent multi-model inference pipelines locally at the edge. Unified development tools. Running on top of pre-loaded Ubuntu, the Arduino(R) App Lab is designed to deliver a seamless development experience. Developers can execute private, local AI models out of the box without requiring a cloud connection: * Pre-integrated AI models: Run local LLMs (e.g., Qwen 3, Gemma 4), VLMs, Whisper ASR, MeloTTS, MediaPipe gesture recognition, YoloX object tracking, and FOMO-AD visual anomaly detection directly on the device. * Flexible toolchain (BYOM / TYOM): Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) from Hugging Face or Qualcomm AI Hub, or train custom models via Edge Impulse. Developers can write code in VS Code, Python IDEs, Docker, or traditional Arduino sketches. * ROS 2 ready: Ubuntu on VENTUNO Q natively supports ROS 2, enabling NPU-accelerated perception, SLAM, and Nav2 navigation algorithms out of the box. "VENTUNO Q redefines what's possible at the edge by combining high-performance AI with deterministic, real-time control. We're moving beyond just 'smart' devices to true physical intelligence. With Ubuntu and Arduino App Lab handling the complexity of the underlying stack - from containers to AI models - developers have the freedom to focus entirely on bringing their most ambitious ideas to life." Fabio Violante, Vice President and General Manager of Arduino at Qualcomm Enterprise ready and production grade. "We've worked closely with Arduino and Qualcomm Technologies to deliver an 'industrial-grade' software stack as a starting point. By pre-loading a production-ready Ubuntu environment on VENTUNO Q developer boards, we're removing the barriers between prototyping and commercial scale." Cindy Goldberg, Vice President of Cloud and Silicon Partnerships at Canonical For teams moving from prototype to commercial deployment, the VENTUNO Q is designed to provide a direct scaling path: * Hardware compatibility: Expansion options with support for standard Arduino(R) UNO(TM) shields and carriers, Modulino(TM) nodes, and Raspberry Pi(R) HATs. * Rich connectivity: Features 3x MIPI-CSI camera connectors, 3x CAN-FD interfaces, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, 2.5 Gb Ethernet, HDMI, and multi-pin GPIO/PWM options. * Prototype-to-production pipeline: Code developed on VENTUNO Q developer board can be easily ported onto commercial products such as the production-certified Dragonwing IQ8 System-on-Modules (SoMs) through the Works with Arduino(TM) program. Getting started. Download the official Ubuntu image for VENTUNO Q directly from Canonical at ubuntu.com/download/qualcomm-iot#ventunoq. To order your VENTUNO Q board or explore technical specifications and documentation, visit arduino.cc/product-ventuno-q About arduino. Arduino (a subsidiary of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.) is a leading open-source hardware and software provider and an accessible platform for creating interactive projects. With an estimated 33 million active users, the Arduino ecosystem has expanded over 20 years to address new demands and challenges, offering products for IoT, wearables, 3D printing, and embedded environments. About Canonical. Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, provides open source security, support and services. Its portfolio covers critical systems, from the smallest devices to the largest clouds, from the kernel to containers, from databases to AI. With customers that include top tech brands, emerging startups, governments and home users, Canonical delivers trusted open source for everyone. Qualcomm branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. Arduino, VENTUNO, UNO, and Modulino are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arduino S.r.l.

Canonical funds three-year test of AI-powered C-to-Rust migration. By IT News AI / Mon, Aug 24 2026 / Canonical is funding a three-year University of Bristol research project to determine whether AI can convert large, mature C codebases into safe, maintainable Rust - not to immediately rewrite Ubuntu. The project will test a hybrid approach combining machine learning, program analysis, and formal methods on AppArmor and snap-confine. Research before production migration. The work will investigate how programs containing hundreds of thousands of lines of C can be broken into manageable components and translated while preserving behavior. Canonical and the university will study whether the resulting Rust is genuinely idiomatic and memory-safe, rather than merely C-shaped code that compiles with extensive use of unsafe operations. AppArmor is a Linux security framework that restricts what applications can access, while snap-confine helps enforce confinement for snap packages. They are being used as case studies for the research, not announced as immediate Rust rewrites. Why conventional translation falls short. Existing source-to-source translators can process substantial code volumes, but often reproduce C's structure too literally. That can leave awkward ownership patterns, unsafe sections, and considerable manual cleanup for maintainers. The research will also examine whether translation can retain undocumented behavior accumulated through years of fixes and production edge cases. That hidden knowledge may be easier to preserve from the existing implementation than to rediscover during a clean rewrite. Canonical is building on smaller Rust replacements. Canonical has already supported Rust-based replacements for familiar Linux utilities, including sudo and coreutils through the independent sudo-rs and uutils projects. Those efforts were human-written implementations, however; the Bristol project addresses the much harder problem of transforming existing, interconnected C rather than recreating individual tools. Canonical is co-sponsoring the PhD project with UK Research and Innovation. The outcome should provide evidence about where AI-assisted migration works, where human intervention remains essential, and whether the hardest obstacle is translating code or correctly decomposing an entire system.