Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) released

By lyz | Published: 2016-04-21

The Ubuntu team is very pleased to announce our sixth long-term support release, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core.

Codenamed “Xenial Xerus”, 16.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is the first long-term support release available for the new “s390x” architecture for IBM LinuxONE and z Systems, as well as introducing the new Ubuntu MATE community flavour.

The Linux kernel has been updated to the 4.4.6 longterm maintenance release, with the addition of ZFS-on-Linux, a combination of a volume manager and filesystem which enables efficient snapshots, copy-on-write cloning, continuous integrity checking against data corruption, automatic filesystem repair, and data compression.

Ubuntu Desktop has seen incremental improvements, with newer versions of GTK and Qt, updates to major packages like Firefox and LibreOffice, and stability improvements to Unity.

Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS includes the Mitaka release of OpenStack, along with the new 2.0 versions of Juju, LXD, and MAAS to save devops teams time and headache when deploying distributed applications – whether on private clouds, public clouds, or on developer laptops.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS introduces a new application format, the ‘snap’, which can be installed alongside traditional deb packages. These two packaging formats live quite comfortably next to one another and enable Ubuntu to maintain its existing processes for development and updates.

The newest Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu are also being released today. More details can be found for these at their individual release notes:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseNotes#Official_flavours

Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Core, and Ubuntu Kylin. All the remaining flavours will be supported for 3 years.

To get Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In order to download Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download

Users of Ubuntu 15.10 will be offered an automatic upgrade to 16.04 LTS via Update Manager shortly. Users of 14.04 LTS will be offered the automatic upgrade when 16.04.1 LTS is released, which is scheduled for July 21st. For further information about upgrading, see:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/upgrade

As always, upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge.

We recommend that all users read the release notes, which document caveats, workarounds for known issues, as well as more in-depth notes on the release itself. They are available at:

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseNotes

Find out what’s new in this release with a graphical overview:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/features

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but aren’t sure, you can try asking in any of the following places:

Help Shape Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at:

http://community.ubuntu.com/contribute

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, netbooks and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional services including support are available from Canonical and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/support

More Information

You can learn more about Ubuntu and about this release on our website listed below:

http://www.ubuntu.com

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

Originally posted to the ubuntu-announce mailing list on Thu Apr 21 16:17:59 UTC 2016 by Adam Conrad, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 462

By tsimonq2 | Published: 2016-04-19

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #462 for the week April 11 – 17, 2016, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Elizabeth K. Joseph
  • Simon Quigley
  • Mary Frances Hull
  • Chris Guiver
  • And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 461

By lyz | Published: 2016-04-12


Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #461 for the week April 4 – 10, 2016, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Elizabeth K. Joseph
  • Simon Quigley
  • Leonard Viator
  • Daniel Beck
  • And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

New Ubuntu Community Donations report [Q3 2015]

By lyz | Published: 2016-04-10

Somehow I missed the fact that I never wrote Community Donations report for Q3 2015. I only realized it because it’s time for me to start working on Q4. Sorry for the oversight, but that report is now published.

The next report should be out soon, in the mean time you can look at all of the past reports so see the great things we’ve been able to do with and for the Ubuntu community through this program. Everybody who has recieved these funds have used them to contribute to the project in one way or another, and we appreciate all of their work.

As you may notice, we’ve been regularly paying out more than we’ve been getting in donations. While we’ve had a carry-over balance ever since we started this program, that balance is running down. If you like the things we’ve been able to support with this program, please consider sending it a contribution and helping us spread the word about it.

Originally posted here by Michael Hall on Sat April 9 2016

Nominations to the Tech Board

By lyz | Published: 2016-04-05

The nominations for Ubuntu Technical Board are, in no particular order:

  • Ben Collins
  • Kees Cook
  • Steve Langasek
  • Jason de Rose
  • Marc Deslauriers
  • Adam Conrad
  • Stéphane Graber
  • Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre
  • Didier Roche
  • Paul Sladen
  • Sebastien Bacher
  • Robie Basak

We are very fortunate to have such an excellent group of nominees, and I am confident that the Ubuntu developer community will choose well.

I’d like to thank both the most recent technical board, who have (literally 🙂 gone well beyond the call of duty in their commitment to the stewardship of Ubuntu, as well as this group of nominees for their willingness to stand for this critical role.

I will ask the Community Council to setup and run the CIVS election in standard Ubuntu fashion, and wish all of the candidates the best.

I have done a rather bad job of the process this time around, taking far too long to firm up the list of candidates for no good reason, and so will ask the Community Council to run the TB nomination process next time, while retaining my short-listing rights.

Originally posted to the technical-board mailing list on Mon Apr 4 12:25:39 UTC 2016 by Mark Shuttleworth