"Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel for example – I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation."
– Nazim Hikmet
The second alpha of the Xenial Xerus (to become 16.04) has now been released!
This alpha features images for Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Kylin and the Ubuntu Cloud images.
Pre-releases of the Xenial Xerus are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu flavor developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this release ready.
Alpha 2 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.
While these Alpha 2 images have been tested and work, except as noted in the release notes, Ubuntu developers are continuing to improve the Xenial Xerus. In particular, once newer daily images are available, system installation bugs identified in the Alpha 2 installer should be verified against the current daily image before being reported in Launchpad. Using an obsolete image to re-report bugs that have already been fixed wastes your time and the time of developers who are busy trying to make 16.04 the best Ubuntu release yet. Always ensure your system is up to date before reporting bugs.
Lubuntu
Lubuntu is a flavour of Ubuntu based on LXDE and focused on providing a very lightweight distribution.
The Lubuntu 16.04 Alpha 2 images can be downloaded from:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/xenial/alpha-2/
More information about Lubuntu 16.04 Alpha 2 can be found here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Alpha2/Lubuntu
Ubuntu MATE
Ubuntu MATE is a flavour of Ubuntu featuring the MATE desktop environment for people who just want to get stuff done.
The Ubuntu MATE 16.04 Alpha 2 images can be downloaded from:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/xenial/alpha-2/
More information about Ubuntu MATE 16.04 Alpha 2 can be found here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Alpha2/UbuntuMATE
Ubuntu Kylin
Ubuntu Kylin is a flavour of Ubuntu that is more suitable for Chinese users.
The Ubuntu Kylin 16.04 Alpha 2 images can be downloaded from:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/xenial/alpha-2/
More information about Ubuntu Kylin 16.04 Alpha 2 can be found here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Alpha2/UbuntuKylin
Ubuntu Cloud
Ubuntu Cloud images can be run on Amazon EC2, Openstack, SmartOS and many other clouds.
The Alpha-2 images can be downloaded from:
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/xenial/alpha-2/
Regular daily images for Ubuntu can be found at: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com
If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop Wily, we suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases and other interesting events.
http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce
A big thank you to the developers and testers for their efforts to pull together this Alpha release!
Originally posted to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list on Fri Jan 29 20:09:40 UTC 2016 by Walter Lapchynski and Martin Wimpress, on behalf of Ubuntu Release Team