Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) Beta 1 Released.

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the first beta release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.

Codenamed “Precise Pangolin”, 12.04 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 throughout this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

This release introduces a new set of images for the ARMv7 “hard float” ABI, denoted as armhf. There are still some armel images around, as we finish the migration, but 12.04 for ARM will be based on armhf.

The technology that allows GPUs to go into a very low power consumption state when the GPU is idle (RC6) is now enabled by default for Sandy Bridge systems, which should result in considerable power savings when this stage is activated.

The CD image size has been adjusted to 703MB to squeeze in every bit of package goodness we can on the installation CD images.

With Ubuntu 12.04, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Studio also reached Beta 1 status today.

Ubuntu Changes

Some of the new features now available are:

  • A new way to quickly search and access any desktop application’s and indicator’s menu, called the HUD, can be accessed by taping the Alt key and entering characters.
  • Unity setting can now be configured by the System Setting panel, and Nautilus support has been added to the Unity launcher.
  • Support for ClickPad devices has been enhanced an now when a button is pressed on the trackpad surface, a second finger may be used to drag the cursor.
  • The default music player has been switched to Rhythmbox, which again includes the UbuntuOne music store.
  • LibreOffice has been updated to 3.5 beta 2. Please report any regressions that you notice.
  • When installing packages through the software center, the corresponding language support packages are now installed automatically as well.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ for details.

Ubuntu Server and Cloud Images

  • Improvements to OpenStack, LXC, and server provisioning have been included.
  • The identity service (Keystone) used by OpenStack for authentication (authN) and high-level authorization (authZ) was updated to Keystone-light (redux branch).

Ubuntu Core

Ubuntu Core is a minimal rootfs for use in the creation of custom images, and now includes ARM hard float (armhf) images. Developers can use Ubuntu Core as the basis for their application demonstrations, constrained environment deployments, device support packages, and other goals.

Kubuntu

Kubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 has updated KDE’s plasma and applications to 4.8. In addition other significant changes include:

  • Telepathy-KDE brings improved instant messaging to Kubuntu, offering easy chat capabilities on Facebook, MSN, GMail and many other services.
  • Amarok 2.5 has added an MP3 shop and integration with GPodder, an online personal podcast archive.
  • The Calligra office and creativity suite is now available, featuring Krita the world’s best painting app and top MS Office file importers.

Please see https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PrecisePangolin/Beta1/Kubuntu for details.

Edubuntu

Edubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 now ships the newest upstream version of LTSP 5.3, offering improved support for fat clients and other improvements. Other significant changes include:

  • Epoptes, the new classroom management software, has an updated user interface.
  • The Ubiquity slideshow has been updated.
  • pastebinit and vim are now both installed by default.

For more details on what has changed in Edubuntu 12.04, please refer to http://www.edubuntu.org.

Xubuntu

Xubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 now uses the new Ubiquity installer. Other significant changes include:

  • Alacarte is available by default, and will show all Xfce-related menu items on Xubuntu as well.
  • New wallpaper and other tweaks and improvements to the looks of Xubuntu are in, including lots of GTK3 fixes for the Greybird theme.

For more information about the changes in Xubuntu 12.04, please go to http://xubuntu.org/.

Lubuntu

Lubuntu 12.04 now uses Lightdm as the display manager with the default gtk greeter. A new software-center optimized for Lubuntu is now available by default as well.

For more information about the changes in Lubuntu 12.04, please go to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu.

Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio 12.04 Beta 1 ships a live DVD for the first time,and is properly configured for the lightdm greeter. The XFCE transition is now almost complete, and there is an updated application set for typical desktop tasks (i.e. text editor, movie player, etc)

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/precise/beta1 for more details on the above products.

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, 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 technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support.

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate.

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions really help us to improve this and future releases of Ubuntu. Instructions can be found at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs.

To Get Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1

To upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 from Ubuntu 11.10, follow these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PreciseUpgrades

Or, download Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 images from a location near you:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/download (Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server).

In addition they can be found at the following links:

The final version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is expected to be released on April 26, 2012.

More Information

You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this beta release on our website, IRC channel and wiki.

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 sent to the ubuntu-release mailing list by Kate Stewart on Thu Mar 1 22:21:43 UTC 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 Development Update

Development Update

Today marks the transition of Ubuntu 12.04 from Alpha Testing into the first phase of Beta Testing as Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 is released. Nicholas Skaggs has a number of items you can help out with by simply doing a bit of testing. We still have eight weeks until release, so let’s take a closer look at what the next weeks will bring:

This means there is still time to get fixes into Ubuntu, but don’t wait for too long! 🙂

Letting developers speak for themselves

Daniel Holbach talks about the unique experience of learning to contribute to development and how you can get involved and give feedback.

Nicholas Skaggs discusses some new opportunities in QA Testing Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1.

Jeremy Bicha provides details on why Raspberry Pi cannot support Ubuntu.

Alexander Sack and Kiko Reis were interviewed about what’s going on at Linaro.

Robert Ancell announces the addition of the 101st test case for LightDM. Let’s how long until they hit 200 test-cases.

Events

Ubuntu Global Jam
This weekend (2nd-4th March), teams around the world get together locally to make Ubuntu better together. Translations, testing, documentation, bug work, packaging, development, web development, all kinds of things are being worked on, with two goals: to have fun and to improve Ubuntu even further. There are participating events in: Egypt, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Australia, Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Canada, Mexico, USA, Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago. Awesome and just as diverse as the whole Ubuntu Community is.

Fix-It Friday
Coinciding with Ubuntu Global Jam, the Ubuntu developers have a really nice treat for you on Friday, 2nd March. They’ll make themselves available to answer all your questions on #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net, help you get involved, review your code and upload your changes to Ubuntu. As we are eight weeks away from release, this is just the perfect time to go and fix a few bugs. All you need to do is, check out these articles: Introduction to Ubuntu development, Getting Set Up and Fixing a bug in Ubuntu, and turn up in #ubuntu-motu.

What we are going to work on is

  1. Packages which don’t build anymore.
    If you have worked with compiling source code before, you know that a mistake like a syntax error can get you into a situation where the build is broken and does not succeed. There are lots of other reasons why this might happen, a good idea is usually to review the build log referenced in the link above.
  2. Bugs which have been fixed elsewhere.
    Our bug life cycle works like this: make sure the bug can be reproduced reliably, gather all the information necessary, figure out if it’s an Ubuntu-specific problem or if it happens in the vanilla code of the software authors as well, then forward the bug with all the relevant information upstream. The Launchpad bug tracker is a great tool, which puts us into the situation where we are able to go through bugs which were fixed elsewhere already. Taking these fixes and applying them to Ubuntu is a great target for improvements, especially being eight weeks away from release.

It’s going to be a fun event and maybe your first patch which goes into Ubuntu! 🙂

Things which need to get done

If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

  • Also did John Lea from the Ubuntu Design team talk to us and mentioned that there are bugs up for grabs, where the design has been decided on and the implementation might need YOUR help. If you want to help improve Ubuntu’s UI, have a look at these!

Interview: Benjamin Kerensa

We had a chat with Benjamin Kerensa from Portland, USA. Read what he has to say:


Benjamin Kerensa

What interested you to get involved in Ubuntu development?
I feel that it is prudent for more and more Ubuntu Members to try and play some role in Development even if it is minimal work like doing bug fixes because these kinds of contributions bring stability to our distribution which is used by so many millions of people including me.

How did it happen?
I really became more optimistic about being involved in Development shortly after a joint Ubuntu/Debian event we had here in Portland where we worked on transitioning packages to Multi-Arch. I was very impressed by the passion in development that people like Steve Langasek and Kees Cook displayed and ever since that event I have been allocating more and more time towards improving my packaging abilities and also contributing to bitesize bug fixes.

Which bugs or packages did you primarily work on?
I transitioned libaudiofile to Multi-Arch, Fixed Some Bitesizes (Linux-Tools, Liboggz etc) and am now even doing ISO Testing.

What was your experience like?
The experience thus far has been pleasant and I have found plenty of help from MOTU and Core Devs when I have sought such.

What would you recommend to other new contributors?
I would honestly recommend trying to find a current Ubuntu Developer to mentor you and perhaps even meet you at a LoCo event to give you some hands-on learning so to speak.

You are also member of the Ubuntu Developer News team – can you explain a bit what you have been doing there?
I have been helping with the Ubuntu Developer News by doing interviews with various First Time Contributors, Developers and Development Teams and also helping with summaries and providing feedback for future issues of Ubuntu Developer News.


Get Involved

  1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
  2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
  3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

Find something to work on

Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.

In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 254

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #254 for the week February 20 – 26, 2012, 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 Krumbach
  • Benjamin Kerensa
  • 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

Interview with Balloons

I came across Balloons in the #ubuntu-community-team a few months ago when seeking some advice on a forum matter. Balloons is a “new” member of the Canonical Community Team working as the QA Community Coordinator. I asked if he would be willing to do an interview, he said yes and here we are now…

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.

My real life sometimes does exist off of the pc. My name is Nicholas Skaggs, and I’m a transplant to the sunny state of Florida in the US. The weather lets me enjoy my outdoor hobbies like biking, sailing, hiking, etc. I have the wonderful privilege of working for Canonical on the community team, as the QA community coordinator. It’s been wonderful getting to work with different folks across the community that I had not worked with previously.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?

I still remember destroying and rebuilding my family’s first pc back in the day. I had used computers (remember the Macintosh era in the US schools systems during the 80′s?) before, but having one inside your house is different story. I broke and subsequently was forced to “fix” my family pc many times. My father wasn’t so keen on me doing such things I’d imagine, but I enjoyed learning. Pretty easy to bork your system when your running windows 95 and think the internet is AOL. Say hello 1995!

My first linux experience pre-dated ubuntu; it was in College and I had the privilege of installing some version of linux for a friend — I’m still struggling to remember which version it was. I’m fairly sure it was a Suse Linux boxset with something like 5 cd’s or so. I remember the install taking forever, and when we finally finished it (SO SO many cd’s), we had forgotten the password to the account we created. Whoops. No idea how to recover, and so I never saw the desktop or used the system. I think my friend my have simply reinstalled it or switched back to windows.

Fast-forward another year or two and I discovered open source software. I was becoming increasingly annoyed at the bloatware, adware, etc of software for windows; and indeed windows itself. I never cared for netscape, but that was old news by now and I was using Phoenix/Firebird which would go on to become Firefox. Removing IE became more of a chore as windows versions increased, so i stayed on windows 98 rather than move to XP. Then I discovered an open source replacement for windows media player ( media player classic) and outlook express (thunderbird), and started using tools like nlite to remove almost everything from a custom windows 2000 iso. I can’t say which day it happened, but at some point it clicked that since I’m running all these open source pieces of software I could simply run an open source operating system (you mean there is such a thing?!). It was a wonderful revelation.

I started trying out some distros, landing on SimplyMepis 3.3 as one of the first that stayed around for awhile. Coming from windows, I couldn’t appreciate the elegance of less is more so to speak, and my first experience in gnome was meh (I remember thinking I can’t right-click ANYTHING!). One day I discovered the Hoary Hedgehog, and even though it ran gnome, heh, I loved it. Since then I’ve tried fvwm, fluxbox, lxde, xfce, kde, e16/e17 and enjoyed all of them immensely. Other distros I liked outside of ubuntu is puppylinux and arch — if you want to really get your hands dirty and learn some things, compiling and running source based packages is one way to do it :-) . I used puppylinux on a livecd for an old laptop that otherwise couldn’t run anything, this later got migrated to a ubuntu-minimal install with things like fluxbox, fvwm, etc. Ubuntu has been on my main machine non-stop since Hoary. I must say reminiscing this was quite fun. Just look at the visual history here :-)

3. When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there?

I was a lurker on the forums for a over a year before joining. Looks like my username (guitara, feel free to say hello!) was registered April 18th, 2006 — man time flies. It was an important part of my learning about linux and ubuntu. I got great help on the forums and enjoyed helping others as well.

4. Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?

I am not currently a ubuntu member. I do plan on becoming one, and hope to one day wear that badge proudly.

5. What distros do you regularly use? What software? What’s your favorite application? Your least favorite?

I use only ubuntu at the moment. Pretty much every device I own runs it — it’s practically a requirement before I’ll purchase some hardware. I have had a longstanding requirement that I must be root on hardware I own, and if applicable, then I would prefer to run ubuntu on it :-) I dual-boot my android phone and chromebook, both allowing me to have root, running OSS, and by extension I can run ubuntu on them.

Favorite Apps? So 7 years later I’m still enjoying thunderbird and firefox (chromium is in here now too). I actually really like gedit and between that and geany I’m all set for coding / editing. My favorite software by a mile however is gnome-terminal. Try running a different OS for awhile — the command line is my best friend and I’m literally handicapped without it. I don’t really dislike any software on linux, as long as I can get the source for it.

6. What’s your fondest memory from the forums, or from Ubuntu overall? What’s your worst?

No answer given.

7. What luck have you had introducing new computer users to Ubuntu?

I have many techy friends, and in general spreading ubuntu love is really easy. If possible, I used it on my desktop at work, and I’m happy to say at my last workplace I was able to convince the entire development team to switch to and use only linux. Many of them chose ubuntu :-) Nowadays I get to work in my natural ubuntu environment and I’m thrilled.

8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?

Open source is an idea that is as strong as ever. I see good things in the future; there are kids growing up using a diversity of platforms, being exposed to software, development, ideas, etc. The flow of information is powerful and the internet helped increase the flow. It’s hard to say what social norms may look like in 20 years, but ubuntu will be there to run the devices that we’ll be using :-) .

9. If there was one thing you could tell all new Ubuntu users, what would it be?

Freedom is a powerful thing; be thankful and don’t waste it! Get involved with the community in ubuntu and you will find a like-minded group who wants to bring linux and open source to people. At the end of the day, people matter; ubuntu is community.

Originally Posted here on 2012-02-24

Juju Charm Contest – Help bring Free Software into the cloud

I’m proud to announce the first ever Juju Charm Contest! Right now we have 51 services that you can easily deploy via juju on EC2, OpenStack, and bare metal. However there is so much Free Software out there that can run in the cloud, and we’d like to see what creative ways you can help other people deploy them. We’ll be offering three prizes, a $300 Amazon Gift Card for the winner and 2 $100 Amazon gift cards for the 2 runner’s up.

So what can you charm? As you can see from the list of what we have so far it really is anything that can run on the cloud. We’ve had contributions for simple LAMP services like Thinkup; to things like ownCloud, which lets you run your own cloud services on your own terms. We also have complex services like Hadoop and CloudFoundry and even some fun services like game servers for Minecraft and Steam games. All of these things will be fully deployable in 12.04 with just a few commands, and we’d like to see as many services be that easy to run right out of the box, so if you’re passionate about something and want to charm it up, dive in! We have a list of things we think people might like, but anything that can run on the cloud will be welcome!

We’ve got some resources to help you out:

  • Here’s the workflow for submitting you Charm when you’re ready.
  • #juju on Freenode IRC is full of experts waiting to help you.
  • Our mailing list.
  • We’re holding a live webinar where we will go deep into charming and answering your questions.

The contest will start this Monday, 27 February, and will run for 4 weeks, the deadline being 23 March. After 4 weeks the 3 judges will review all the submitted Charms and pick the winners. We have the complete set of rules here. Even if you don’t win one of the top 3 prizes if your Charm passes review and gets shipped in the store we’ll hook you up with a juju shirt and Ubuntu travel mug for your contribution.

Good luck!

Originally posted by Jorge Castro here on February 23rd, 2012