Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has disabled downloads of its latest version, 17.10, released in October, due to reports of it corrupting the BIOS on some laptops, mainly Lenovo models.
In a statement on its website, Canonical said downloads of version 17.10, otherwise known as Artful Aardvark, were being discouraged due to an issue on certain Lenovo laptops.
It said the downloads would be enabled again as soon as a fix was available.
A bug report said, "Many users are reporting issues with BIOS corruption with 17.10. This seems to stem from enabling the Intel-SPI-* drivers in the kernel, which don't appear to be ready for use on end-user machines."
{loadposition sam08}The following Lenovo machines which were affected were listed:
Lenovo B40-70
Lenovo B50-70
Lenovo B50-80
Lenovo Flex-3
Lenovo Flex-10
Lenovo G40-30
Lenovo G50-70
Lenovo G50-80
Lenovo S20-30
Lenovo U31-70
Lenovo Y50-70
Lenovo Y70-70
Lenovo Yoga Thinkpad (20C0)
Lenovo Yoga 2 11" - 20332
Lenovo Z50-70
Lenovo Z51-70
Lenovo ideapad 100-15IBY
Also listed as affected were:
Acer Aspire E5-771G
Acer TravelMate B113
Toshiba Satellite S55T-B5233
One user has outlined a workaround for the problem but it appears to be for more technical users.