Ubuntu News Archives

In continuation of the results earlier this week looking at How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing With AMDGPU/Radeon Graphics Compared To Ubuntu 14.04 With FGLRX, here is an extra run with the Radeon/AMDGPU results while enabling DRI3 rendering support.

Earlier this week was the news that Catalyst/fglrx was being deprecated in Ubuntu 16.04. While there was some hope that one could simply install the driver manually on Ubuntu 16.04, it doesn't look like that will be supported as it sounds like there won't be any new Catalyst / Radeon Software release to support X.Org Server 1.18.

With Ubuntu 16.04 LTS due for release next month, I found it time to do my occasional 32-bit vs. 64-bit Linux OS comparison for showcasing the performance difference of using the 64-bit software on supported hardware. This time around, at a premium member's request, I also did some power consumption monitoring between the 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Ubuntu 16.04 on an Intel laptop/ultrabook.

Ubuntu developers have deprecated the fglrx / Catalyst Linux display stack for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Users of this upcoming Ubuntu release are now encouraged to use the open-source Radeon display stack.

The Mir team at Canonical now has initial support for Vulkan with their next-generation display project.

Going back a few years have been an aim by Ubuntu developers to remove Python 2 from their ISOs in favor of Python 3. While some other distributions have made good on their transition to Python 3, the Ubuntu desktop ISO still has been held back in keeping Python 2.

Opt-in flavors of Ubuntu have today issued their first beta of the "Xenial Xerus" release.

The Software Freedom Conservancy has opined today that Canonical's inclusion of the ZFS file-system module into their Linux kernel for Ubuntu 16.04 is a violation of the GPL.

Canonical has announced they are making a 64-bit ARM developer environment based on Ubuntu Core and will use the DragonBoard 410c as its reference platform.

The Ubuntu Design Team has put out a fresh blog post detailing some of their latest work on the visual design of convergent apps and have included plenty of screenshots / mock-ups.

Canonical developers have put out version 0.20 of Mir in time for the next OTA update for Ubuntu Phones.

With Canonical heavily promoting ZFS for Ubuntu 16.04 with the file-system support being added to their default kernel, their latest work is on creating an Ubuntu ZFS guide for those wanting to play with this advanced file-system.

While playing around with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS this weekend in its current development state, I was a bit surprised to see that this next Ubuntu release still isn't shipping with VDPAU, VA-API, or OpenCL support by default.

Ubuntu 14.04.4 was released today as the newest point release in the Trusty Tahr LTS series.

Canonical and Meizu have announced today the Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition as their new high-end smartphone

Ubuntu developers have been working on ZFS support for Ubuntu 16.04 and all of that file-system support is getting squared away.

This morning I posted some Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 LTS Radeon graphics benchmarks while if open-source AMD graphics driver evolution doesn't get you excited, in this article are results from other non-graphics benchmarks in comparing the Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 performance for these long-term support releases in their current form.

As some complementary data to this week's Radeon Gallium3D OpenGL Performance From Fedora 18 To Fedora 23 and the earlier Ubuntu 6.06 LTS to 16.04 LTS benchmarks is a look at the Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 (in its current development state) performance with an AMD FirePro graphics card.

A greater number of Android smartphone/tablet vendors are said to be eyeing Ubuntu Phone for new devices later this year.

With the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA still not enabling the experimental AMDGPU PowerPlay or CIK (Sea Islands / GCN 1.1) support in their kernel builds (although they basically are both off by default at runtime), here is my spin of the newly-released Linux 4.5-rc3 kernel with these features turned on.

As anticipated, the first official Ubuntu Tablet done in cooperation with Canonical is Bq's Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition.

The dates for the next Ubuntu Online Summit have been finalized and will take place two weeks after the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Mir 0.19 was quietly released at the end of last week while Mir 0.20 is now officially under development with the latest Bazaar code.

Ubuntu developers have released Snapcraft 2.1, their tool for building packages as a snap for their new Snappy package management system.

Ubuntu developer Dimitri John Ledkov has started a public conversation about dropping the Ubuntu Desktop i386 ISOs in favor of focusing resources on the 64-bit Ubuntu desktop.

While earlier this week it was looking like Ubuntu 16.04 Alpha 2 might not happen for the opt-in flavors, it ended up getting released today.

Ubuntu Phone OTA-9 has begun rolling out to owners of Ubuntu Phones. This is yet another big feature update but plenty of bug fixing.

The Linux 4.4 kernel is now effectively just one step away from landing within Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" LTS.

While Ubuntu itself hasn't participated in the alpha releases now for a few years in favor of focusing on high-quality daily ISOs, Ubuntu derivatives such as Kubuntu and Xubuntu have long been pushing out alpha releases to help with testing by the community. However, for lack of people stepping up to manage these releases, it's looking like they may not happen or with fewer alpha releases.

While there's been various weird Ubuntu Tablet initiatives, it looks like next month will be the first official Ubuntu Tablet announcement that will usher in the long talked about convergence support.

Ubuntu developers have been working on sending out some updated phone/convergence apps that take advantage of their new Suru visual language.

Canonical developers continue making progress in replacing the Ubuntu Software Center with GNOME Software.

Debian/Ubuntu developer Matthias Klose has run a test rebuild of Ubuntu Linux re-compiled under the in-development GCC 6 compiler.

The first alpha release is now available for Ubuntu flavors opting-in to do their first 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" development release.

This year Ubuntu switched over to using systemd in place of Upstart, other distributions have also decided to take advantage of systemd, this project hosted its first conference, and the systemd feature-set continued to expand.

Back in October we heard Ubuntu was planning for better ZFS support and to make it part of the distribution's "standard offering." Work in that direction has continued to advance for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Ubuntu Linux made a lot of headway in 2015 particularly around their Unity 8 and Mir projects as part of their converged vision between mobile and desktop devices as well as in the Snappy space and the growing IoT market.

Aethercast is a new Canonical-led project for enabling wireless display support on Ubuntu.

In response to my article this past weekend about It Doesn't Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year, Dustin Kirkland of Canonical's Ubuntu Product and Strategy team has come out to say that number should be over one billion.

The Canonical team working on the Mir display server has just announced their Christmas 2015 update, which brings the version up to 0.18.

Four years ago at UDS Budapest was a lofty goal laid out by Mark Shuttleworth: 200 million users in four years.

Ubuntu's kernel team has temporarily moved up to the Linux 4.3 kernel in the archive, but it will be short-lived.

After failing to build working kernels for the past few weeks, the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA is finally offering working daily Linux kernel builds.

Ubuntu's Mir display server has gained support for the KHR_fence_sync EGL extension in order to eliminate some cases of graphics corruption.

Ubuntu developers working on the Mir display server have been continuing to land more improvements to this X11/Wayland alternative although there hasn't been too much to report as of late for significant feature additions.

Ubuntu's kernel team continues to be focused on having Linux 4.4 for Ubuntu 16.04.

Last week I spun an early Linux 4.1-rc1+ kernel for Ubuntu testing with the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA failing. With the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA still down, here's a spin of Linux 4.4-rc2.

Now that Linux 4.4-rc1 was released this weekend as the first development release towards Linux 4.4 with its many new features, I'm onto benchmarking it at Phoronix for articles looking at the Nouveau Kepler re-clocking changes, Radeon/Intel graphics performance too, file-system tests, and more.

Kubuntu is moving on in the absence of Jonathan Riddell who left the project and his longtime role as the release manager.

Ubuntu Make, the command-line tool to assist in deploying the latest version of various developer tools on Ubuntu Linux, has added support for Rust.