Canonical Makes It Easier to Run Ubuntu VMs on Apple M1 Macs with Multipass

Ubuntu Multipass Apple M1

Canonical informs 9to5Linux today about the latest release of their Multipass tool for orchestrating virtual Ubuntu instances on Apple M1 Macs.

The company behind Ubuntu have updated Multipass to verison 1.8, a release that introduces support for setting up and running Ubuntu virtual machines on Apple M1 MacBook devices with minimal effort.

In fact, Multipass promises to offer Apple M1 MacBook developers interesting in developing apps for the Linux/Ubuntu desktop the fastest way to run Linux cross-platform, running a Ubuntu VM in as little as 20 seconds.

“Until now, M1 users haven’t had many options for running Linux. Popular VM tools such as VirtualBox and VMWare either do not support the new architecture or are still in the preview stage,” said Canonical. “Multipass is Canonical’s answer.”

According to Canonical’s product manager Nathan Hart, “Canonical wants to get developers running on Linux faster than any other option on the market, and the Multipass team has helped accomplish that.”

In addition to Apple M1 support, the new Multipass release also introduces aliases to bring Ubuntu to your favorite terminal by linking commands from a virtual machine to commands on the host operating system.

On top of that, the Multipass 1.8 release adds support for using the Xfce Terminal for a better GUI experience, makes LXD the default backend on Linux, except for amd64, adds support for version --format, improves support for the MATE desktop environment, workflows runs-on support, and fixes several bugs.

Canonical also adds that, with this update, Multipass is now supported on every major computing platform. As expected, this gives application developers a consistent development environment experience on any system.

You can download Multipass 1.8 from the project’s GitHub page for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems. On Ubuntu, you can easily install or update Multipass as a Snap using the commands below.

snap install multipass
snap refresh multipass --channel stable

Image credits: Canonical (edited by Marius Nestor)

Last updated 2 years ago

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