The new images are available for the all-snap architecture

Jan 15, 2016 03:20 GMT  ·  By

Canonical, through Michael Vogt, has proudly announced the availability of a new set of images for the all-snap architecture for the company's Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system used in embedded and IoT devices.

Everyone is expecting 2016 to be the year of the Snappy Ubuntu-powered devices, and Canonical needs to deliver IoT (Internet of Things) developers the latest technologies and tools that they require in order to create the most innovative devices. As you might know, we've actually covered the development of the Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system during the past few months with all sorts of interesting articles.

Therefore, once again, we're informing our readers about the latest Snappy technologies, as the Snappy team at Canonical has just released the first images for the all-snap architectures. They are available for download right now as binary packages for Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computers and 64-bit platforms, along with their corresponding ubuntu-device-flash utils for flashing the images on your devices.

"I'm happy to announce a new set of images for the all-snap architecture," said Michael Vogt. "The images are available for download together with the matching ubuntu-device-flash based on lp:~snappy-dev/goget-ubuntu-touch/all-snaps. The difference from the previous all-snap images is that the goal is to keep them upgradable on amd64 all the way to 16.04-final."

The switch to SquashFS only

Among the highlights of the all-snap images for Snappy Ubuntu Core, we can mention that they are using kernel and operating system snaps with the final names, SquashFS only snaps, and the /snaps directory as the base location for all installed snaps. Canonical informs all Snappy devs that, because of the switch to SquashFS only snaps, the store support will be limited.

Also, users should be aware of the fact that they can't upload snaps for multiple releases that have the same name at this moment. Until the store is updated, you can use different names for the snaps or sideload them to your Snappy Ubuntu 16.04 image. Last but not least, with this change, existing Ubuntu 16.04-based images won't receive updates anymore.