I’ve been running Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB for some time now. All things considered it’s probably the best Linux distribution I’ve run on this little board. I find it to be a well balanced and good looking work environment. I’ve been waiting for the distribution to automatically update to the latest release, 24.04.2. Sure enough it has, but I can’t say with certainty when that happened. What I can say with some surprise is that the kernel for this version on this Raspberry Pi is still at version 6.8.0. I say surprise because all the articles have been trumpeting that kernel version 6.11 would be the new kernel for this point release. But apparently not for Ubuntu 24.04.2 on the Raspberry Pi.

Or at least, not automatically, not right now. To be honest I’m not so sure that I want the current working kernel swapped out for the newer version. Earlier versions of this kernel had problems with the GPIO subsystem, but over time all of that was sorted and now everything works as expected. I’m not interested in performing an upgrade only to discover that working with external GPIO devices is broken again. As the old saying goes, be careful what you ask for, especially with Linux kernel upgrades.

I have Ubuntu 24.04.1 installed on my RPi 5. For the most part I’m quite happy with it. One lone exception is when I run apt to perform any package updates. It’s at that time I used to get the message “The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled:”, followed by a list of packages that won’t get the update. I don’t care, and I’m getting ready to remove those applications that require those libraries. In the mean time I wanted a way to turn off the annoying message.

To quiet that output, there is a file in the filesystem at /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/apt-esm/etc/apt/sources.list.d named ubuntu-esm-apps.sources that you can edit with sudo vi (or whatever editor you prefer) to silence the blather. Here’s what the file looks like after the edit.

# Written by ubuntu-pro-client#Types: deb#URIs: https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu#Suites: noble-apps-security noble-apps-updates#Components: main#Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-pro-esm-apps.gpg

Note that every line has a # comment character at the beginning. Excluding line 1, which is a legitimate comment, that’s every line that follows. If I need to re-enable the messages, all I have to do it re-edit the file and remove the comment characters.