Ubuntu News Archives

Will Cooke of Canonical has shared another weekly status update for the work going into the GNOME desktop for Ubuntu 17.10 and their other efforts this cycle.

Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" Alpha 1 is now available as the first official development release (sans the daily ISOs) for this upcoming milestone.

Originally Mir 1.0 was expected early in the Ubuntu 17.10 development cycle, but with their dramatic shift away from Unity 8 and Mir, that's no longer happening but there are new plans for Mir 1.0.

We recently reported on Ubuntu planning to finally ship video acceleration by default, at least for Intel hardware, and they have made progress in this area.

System76 continues working on improvements to the GNOME stack as part of their transition in-step to using it over Unity 7, in line with Canonical's decision to switch Ubuntu over to GNOME and abandon their grand Unity 8 ambitions.

As part of the switch over to the GNOME Shell desktop environment by default for Ubuntu 17.10, they are also abandoning the LightDM display/log-in manager in favor of GNOME's GDM.

One year after Ubuntu developers announced their Netplan project for consolidated networking configuration across platforms, they are now planning to use Netplan by default in Ubuntu 17.10 across all editions.

Mentioned in the weekly Ubuntu Kernel Newsletter are the developers reiterating their plans to ship Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" with the Linux 4.13 kernel.

It's 2017 and Ubuntu is finally looking at shipping GPU-accelerated video playback support out-of-the-box on the Ubuntu desktop.

Plenty of changes are taking place for Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" beyond just transitioning from Unity to GNOME.

With Canonical divesting in Mir from the desktop and abandoning their mobile phone/tablet ambitions, we might not see Mir v1.0 ever reached as was anticipated to happen for the Ubuntu 17.10 cycle. However, Mir is still being maintained for IoT use-cases and today is a new point release.

The UBports camp is now shipping their first stable over-the-air (OTA-1) update to those wishing to use this fork of Ubuntu Phone / Unity 8.

In April, Canonical's longtime CEO Jane Silber announced she was stepping down and that Mark Shuttleworth would be returning to the role as CEO.

Those downloading the very latest Ubuntu desktop ISO of 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" for testing will find that it now boots to the GNOME Shell desktop and also provides an option for running GNOME on Wayland.

It's now been nearly two months since Canonical announced they were abandoning their Unity 8 / Ubuntu Phone dreams and about the same amount of time since the forks started around Unity 8, Mir, and Ubuntu Touch itself.

The UBports developers continue firming up plans for their fork of Ubuntu Touch following the news last month of dropping Unity 8 / Ubuntu Touch.

Cockpit, the open-source project providing a pleasant web-based administrative interface to Linux systems and developed significantly by Red Hat / Fedora developers, is now officially available in Ubuntu and Debian.

Ubuntu developers today have announced a "tech preview" of their new text-based installer for Ubuntu Server.

In addition to the Ubuntu 17.10 codename of Artful Aardvark coming out this week, the release schedule for this next Ubuntu Linux development cycle has also been published.

According to Launchpad, it looks like we finally have the codename for the successor to the Zesty Zapus.

With switching back over to the GNOME desktop, Ubuntu is migrating to Wayland by default as presumed. But Mir is to be maintained for IoT use-cases, according to previous comments by Shuttleworth. However, it looks like multiple developers from the small Mir team were sent packing and there's been no public commits to Mir in the past week.

Following the successful launch of Ubuntu 17.04, the Ubuntu Server team is beginning to formalize their plans for Ubuntu 17.10.

In early April AMD released the AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver as their first hybrid proprietary driver update in some time. With this update came support for Ubuntu 16.04.2 (and also 16.10, unofficially) but to little surprise it doesn't work out-of-the-box with this week's Ubuntu 17.04 release. But it can be made to work.

The UBports community are among those planning to fork the work on Unity 8 and they've already made ambitious plans like porting Unity 8 to Wayland. More details were revealed today.

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 was released today alongside the other Ubuntu 17.04 flavors, but for those wondering what's happening to Ubuntu GNOME now that Ubuntu 18.04 will use GNOME with Unity being dropped, the Ubuntu GNOME flavor is winding down.

Ubuntu mirrors are now live with the final builds of 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" for those wanting to upgrade to this latest six-month release of Ubuntu Linux.

With Ubuntu 17.04 having switched to X.Org Server 1.19 at the last minute, I ran some classic 2D tests from the Zesty Zapus to see how the 2D X11 performance has been impacted thanks to the GLAMOR optimizations that took place for the xorg-server 1.19 cycle.

Last week we were the first to exclusively report that Jane Silber would be out as Canonical's CEO with Mark Shuttleworth returning to the role as CEO. Today, Jane Silber has publicly announced she's indeed stepping down.

Canonical developer Alan Griffiths has been blogging a lot in recent days about the Mir display server. He's been trying to get the community to support Mir and even potentially add native Wayland client support. His latest post is entitled "Why Mir" with many still wondering why they should care about Mir when Wayland has proven to be the tested and widely-adopted path forward.

While Canonical is expected to maintain Mir for IoT use-cases, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is expected to use the GNOME desktop on Wayland. The community forks so far of Unity 8 also appear to want to switch to Wayland eventually rather than Mir. In trying to maintain relevance for Mir, longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths is asking whether the community would be interested in native Wayland client support in Mir.

The stock kernel of Ubuntu 17.04 is doing away with Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) support for a number of ancient graphics processors.

By now you have probably read Mark Shutttleworth's Google+ comments from Friday concerning Ubuntu GNOME, including the continuing of Snaps, UBports looking to take over Unity 8, and the desire to move quickly in supporting Ubuntu GNOME. He has now provided more follow-up comments.

With the big shake-up this week at Canonical resulting in abandoning Unity and switching back to GNOME, former Compiz developer and Canonical employee Sam Spilsbury has shared a retrospective on his years of working on Compiz and Unity for Ubuntu.

One of the lead developers on the Mir project at Canonical, Alan Griffiths, has finally opened up about this week's news of Ubuntu dropping efforts around Unity 8 and switching back to GNOME. This also is pretty much definitive that Mir is being dropped and Ubuntu will end up making use of Wayland.

There's a big meeting going on today at Canonical regarding changes being made at the company. This follows the dramatic news this week of Ubuntu dropping Unity 8 and switching back to GNOME Shell. There's now information obtained that Mark is planning to reprise the role of CEO.

Dustin Kirkland, the leader of product manager at Canonical, recently asked the folks at HackerNews what they would like to see done for Ubuntu 17.10. He's collected their feedback and offered a few insights into the current happenings.

Following news of Ubuntu abandoning Unity 8 there are now reports of headcount reductions happening at Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth eyeing possible outside investments into the company.

Following yesterday's news of Canonical dropping work on Unity 8 and Ubuntu Phone and switching back to GNOME as their desktop environment, some community developers are determined to keep the projects going.

Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8 desktop environment and will be switching back to GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04.

There is just one week to go until the Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" release yet landing now is X.Org Server 1.19.3.

More and more recently we have found ourselves talking about Mir's abstraction layer, MirAL. It turns out that this set of interfaces to Mir has advanced from being a hobby project by a Canonical developer to now being a formal project within the organization and more of Unity 8 is making use of MirAL's API/ABI.

Ubuntu 12.04/14.04/16.04/16.10 is affected by a new medium priority CVE this morning that could allow a local attacker to execute code as root.

Just as a quick notice for those curious, while Mesa 17.0 has worked its way recently into Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus", the Vulkan support isn't enabled by default

While the Ubuntu 17.04 final release is expected to happen in just over two weeks and the final freeze is quickly approaching, X.Org Server 1.19 has yet to land as anticipated into the Zesty Zapus.

The final beta releases for Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" has just occurred.

A few days ago we reported on Ubuntu's Mir now supporting drag and drop while now another important desktop feature has come to Ubuntu's Mir abstraction layer, MirAL.

With Mir 1.0 expected to be coming soon, the developers working on this display server for Ubuntu Linux are tackling the remaining work items, some are larger than others.

For those wondering about the NVIDIA binary driver support for Ubuntu's Mir display server, Mir appears to be planning its own support for using NVIDIA's EGL Streams implementation that has been criticized by Wayland developers while they continue hoping for a new API that's yet to materialize.

After being at Canonical for nearly one decade, Jorge Castro is leaving his work on the Ubuntu Cloud and joining a new startup.

Canonical developer Alan Griffiths has shared a few details about getting Mir 1.0 ready for release.