Canonical re-releases Ubuntu 17.10 on Thursday

Canonical will release a new version of Ubuntu 17.10 on Thursday. They don’t have fixes for Specter and Meltdown, but they do for the vulnerability that corrupted the bios on certain laptops and made computers unusable.

It’s a special situation because Canonical rarely releases a second release of an Ubuntu version that isn’t an lts, ​​Canonical developer Steve Langasek reports. For this time, the company makes an exception, because 17.10 contains an error that can corrupt the bios of several laptops.

Canonical further reports that it will not immediately include fixes for the Specter and Meltdown leaks to speed up the release of 17.10. The bug affects many Lenovo models and some Acer laptops, according to the list on the bug page. The bug is due to incompatible Intel SPI drivers, Canonical says. By deactivating those drivers, it is possible to save settings in the bios again. Once the fix is ​​in Ubuntu 17.10, Canonical will put the download back online.