“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

This Beta features images for Lubuntu, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu MATE, UbuntuKylin, Ubuntu Studio and Xubuntu.

Pre-releases of 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 flavour developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this release ready.

Beta 1 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 Beta 1 images have been tested and work, except as noted in the release notes, Ubuntu developers are continuing to improve Xenial Xerus. In particular, once newer daily images are available, system installation bugs identified in the Beta 1 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 Beta 1 images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/xenial/beta-1/

More information on Lubuntu Beta-1 can be found at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Beta1/Lubuntu

http://lubuntu.me/xenialb1

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/

Ubuntu GNOME

Ubuntu GNOME is a flavor of Ubuntu featuring the GNOME desktop environment.

The Beta 1 images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/xenial/beta-1/

More information on Ubuntu GNOME Beta 1 can be found here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Beta1/UbuntuGNOME

Ubuntu MATE

Ubuntu MATE is a flavour of Ubuntu featuring the MATE desktop environment.

The Beta 1 images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/xenial/beta-1/

More information on Ubuntu MATE Beta 1 can be found at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Beta1/UbuntuMATE

https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-xenial-beta1/

UbuntuKylin

UbuntuKylin is a flavour of Ubuntu that is more suitable for Chinese users.

The Beta 1 images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/xenial/beta-1/

More information on UbuntuKylin Beta 1 can be found here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Beta1/UbuntuKylin

Ubuntu Studio: Ubuntu Studio is a flavour of Ubuntu configured for working on multimedia projects.

The Beta 1 images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/xenial/beta-1/

More information on Ubuntu Studio Beta 1 can be found here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Beta1/UbuntuStudio

Xubuntu

Xubuntu is a flavour of Ubuntu based on the Xfce desktop environment.

The Beta 1 images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/xenial/beta-1/

More information on Xubuntu Beta 1 can be found at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Beta1/Xubuntu

https://xubuntu.org/news/xubuntu-16-04-lts-beta-1/

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 Xenial, 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 Beta release!

Originally posted to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list on Thu Feb 25 21:24:01 UTC 2016 by flocculant at gmx.co.uk, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team