on 7 October 2016
Tags: Snap, snapcraft, Ubuntu Core
Ubuntu Core is an operating system entirely based on snaps. Even the
foundation, such as the kernel, core operating system, and gadget
components, are managed as snaps and are installed and refreshed by
snapd, the daemon and tooling responsible for making it all sing.
Just some of the many hightlights:
Note that most of these improvements are not specific to Ubuntu
Core. They will be landing soon on all classic Linux distributions
supported by snapd.
The images are available for PC (amd64, i386). Pi2/Pi3 and Dragonboard
will follow shortly and can be found at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/xenial/daily-preinstalled/
You need to extract the image once to an uncompressed form:
$ xzcat ubuntu-core-16-amd64-beta3.img.xz > ubuntu-core-16-amd64-beta3.img
Note that contrary to the compressed image which is 300Mb, the .img image is approximately ~4G, with a lot of empty space to install your snaps!
These images are bootable, the PC image can be booted directly in
qemu-kvm or virtualbox. When running the images in qemu-kvm it is
helpful to use the “-redir” feature of qemu-kvm. E.g.:
$ kvm -m 1500 -redir tcp:10022::22 -redir tcp:14200::4200 ubuntu-core-16-amd64-beta3.img
After booting the image you can enter your Ubuntu One email and it
will automatically create a matching user with the right ssh keys. If
you do not have an Ubuntu SSO account yet you can create one at:
The message from console-conf is a bit misleading in this setup. It
will say “ssh @10.0.2.15”. However due to the way that qemu-kvm
user networking behaves, you will actually have to run the following
to ssh into the images:
$ ssh -p 10022 @localhost
The snapweb daemon will be available at http://localhost:14200 in this
setup and has also received many improvements.
These images follow the “beta” channel. If you find any issues, please
let us know via:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/snappy/
Known issues:
Enjoy the fresh images and check out a hands-on video below!
From home control to drones, robots and industrial systems, Ubuntu Core and Snaps provide robust security, app stores and reliable updates for all your IoT devices.
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