Building your product¶
With Ubuntu Frame and Ubuntu Core¶
You’ve built an application and packaged it with a snap for use with Ubuntu Frame. Now you want to deliver the whole thing to your customers.
What you need is an Ubuntu Core image. It’s a pre-configured bootable image that includes one or more snaps to provide a specific set of features: Using Ubuntu Core.
Which base?¶
You should make an explicit decision on which base to build your appliance with. Corresponding to each recent LTS there is a base for snaps:
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Corresponding LTS |
|---|---|
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Ubuntu 24.04LTS |
|
Ubuntu 22.04LTS |
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Ubuntu 20.04LTS |
|
Ubuntu 18.04LTS |
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Ubuntu 16.04LTS |
As well as providing more recent libraries and tools to work with, that means support for the base is limited by support for the LTS. For example, The core20/20.04 version is supported until April 2030.
Ubuntu Frame supports all base: core20, base: core22 and base: core24.
For base: core20 and base: core22 there are a 20 and 22 tracks, using the matching graphics-coreXX (with mesa-coreXX default providers). These are in maintenance mode and will only receive security updates.
For base: core24 there is a 24 track using graphics-core24 (with a mesa-core24 default provider). This is the basis for ongoing development.
Your application snap can also make use of any of the above bases, and the corresponding graphics interface.
In principle, it is possible to mix & match snaps with different bases but that comes at a cost having multiple base and graphics snaps installed.
Ubuntu Frame also has a default latest track. This is deprecated in favour of appliances explicitly choosing one of the XX tracks.
Maintaining your snap¶
You also need to consider maintenance of your snap and testing with changes to the other snaps you are packaged with.
The snap store will send you emails if there is a security update to any of the packages included in your snap. You should be ready to for a “no-change” repackaging of your snap to pick up these updates.
If you’ve based your snap on one of our tutorials be aware that we sometimes update these. Either because we find a better approach, or because we update things. (At the time of writing, we’ll soon be updating our examples from base: core20 to base: core22.)
There’s more documentation on managing your snaps here:
Call for testing (Ubuntu Frame)¶
As part of the release cycle of Ubuntu Frame we test it with the snaps we maintain and those we have developed with customers. Following that we promote the release to the candidate and announce a “call for testing”. You also should run your testing devices on the candidate channel, in which we keep our next stable for at least a week before promoting to stable.
Branding¶
If you are a commercial entity, not an individual packager, then you may well wish to publish your snap(s) from a brand account:
Commercial options¶
You can gain explicit control over the versions of snaps distributed to your devices with a “Brand Store”:
https://ubuntu.com/core/docs/dedicated-snap-stores
If you want official support for your snap and our QA pipeline replicate your exact setup, please contact our support team at https://ubuntu.com/support.