Ubuntu News Archives

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.

Aside from trying to make Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Python-3-only, Kubuntu developers planning for Xenial, and Mark Shuttleworth's keynote, there's also been a lot of other interesting sessions to happen over the first two days of this week's Ubuntu Online Summit.

For years Ubuntu developers have been working on moving from Python 2 to Python 3 and for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS next April that goal will hopefully be finally realized.

The Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 16.04 began yesterday with a keynote by Mark Shuttleworth.

The Ubuntu Online Summit for developers and contributors to Ubuntu Linux begins tomorrow and runs through Thursday as planning gets underway for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, a.k.a. the Xenial Xerus.

Developers continue making progress on maturing the Ubuntu Phone software stack, including Unity 8 atop Mir.

Alongside this morning's release of Ubuntu 15.10 and the other *buntu derivatives is also the latest version of Ubuntu GNOME.

Today's the Wily Werewolf day! Ubuntu 15.10 is now available for download.

Mark Shuttleworth has announced the codename for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release!

Today marks eleven years since the release of Ubuntu 4.10, the Warty Warthog! Ubuntu's birthday is coming just two days before the release of Ubuntu 15.10, the Wily Werewolf.

While thwarted by some open-source Radeon DRM issues, here are some Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics card benchmarks between Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 for those curious.

Last week an application was pushed into the Ubuntu Phone Software Store that when installed would give an intruder root access and modify the boot splash screen.

While Ubuntu 15.10 is set to ship next week and has passed its final freeze a few days ago, the default kernel of Ubuntu 15.10 is running into some troubles with select Radeon GPUs on the open-source driver.

Last week I posted some Ubuntu 15.04 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 benchmarks when comparing the data to FreeBSD 10.2. Enclosed in this article are some more 15.04 Vivid Vervet vs. 15.10 Wily Werewolf performance benchmarks from another system.

Canonical developers released Mir 0.17.0 yesterday in time for the final freeze of Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.

Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" is now under its final freeze for being officially released next week.

With an Ubuntu Long Term Support release coming up in just a half-year, the discussion has been re-ignited again about whether Firefox should remain the default web-browser for the platform.

A Phoronix Premium subscriber inquired this weekend about whether Intel "Haswell" HD Graphics have any performance gains when going from Ubuntu 15.04 to Ubuntu 15.10, now that Haswell has reached a mature state on Linux and most of the Intel Linux developers are busy with Skylake and Broxton.

With Ubuntu 15.10 set to be released later this month, I've started preparing for a variety of Linux performance comparisons involving the Wily Werewolf. This morning I ran some Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 benchmarks on one of my frequent test beds and it's revealed a few significant changes in some of the benchmarks.

Since this summer we've known that Canonical developers have been looking at Vulkan in regards to supporting this forthcoming graphics API by Unity 8 and Mir. Since then we've seen work done in Mir to support renderers other than OpenGL with this Ubuntu display server. As another sign of working towards Vulkan, more of Mir's OpenGL code continues to be re-factored.

While the ZFS file-system isn't supported by the mainline Linux kernel due to the Oracle-owned file-system being under the GPL-incompatible CDDL license, Canonical is making plans to offer ZFS on Ubuntu in some standard way.

Mir 0.16 was quietly released a few days back as the newest upstream release of this display server for Ubuntu Linux.

Generally Ubuntu Linux hasn't allowed new minor point releases of software to be sent down as stable release updates (SRUs) once the Ubuntu release ships, but there's been many exceptions, and now Ubuntu's Technical Board has agreed to make changes to make it easier to send down micro-release updates as well as offering new features to existing LTS (Long-Term Support) releases.

While Mark Shuttleworth talked up before that an Ubuntu Phone supporting their much talked about "converged" experience would be available in 2015, it appears now to be delayed until some time in 2016.

Canonical's design team has been working on redoing the user-interface to the Ubiquity installer that also converges with the setup wizard for Ubuntu Phones.

Canonical sadly hasn't made public any sales numbers about the number of Ubuntu Phone devices out in the wild, but an estimate based upon update reporting pegs the number of current Ubuntu Phone users at around 25,000.

Ubuntu 15.10 final beta is now available along with this being a second beta release for the opt-in flavors participating in the earlier development milestones.

Ubuntu developers working on Mir have been making measurable progress recently on using libinput for their input handling, similar to Wayland and in the X.Org world where libinput is also being used via the xf86-input-libinput driver.

Progress is being made on getting the Unity 8 Greeter working on the Ubuntu Desktop, which will work too even if logging into a Unity 7 session.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS shipping next April on the desktop will be using Unity 7 by default along with the Compiz window manager atop an X.Org Server. While this isn't as big of a change as switching to Unity 8 on the desktop with Mir, there's still thousands of outstanding bugs.

Dell is reportedly shipping an Ubuntu-based Kylin Linux OS on 42% of their PCs in China.

Linux 4.2 is now officially powering Ubuntu 15.10.

Besides working on the legacy X11 support atop Mir, Canonical developers working on this display server have just implemented evdev device detection for Mir.

Canonical posted a video today showing the state of running a Unity 8 session with Mir while supporting legacy X11 applications that lack a Mir back-end.

Cristian Parrino, the former Vice President of Mobile at Canonical where he was the team leader for the Ubuntu Phone project, has left the company.

Since last December we've been receiving emails from a company working on an Ubuntu Tablet inspired by the failed Ubuntu Edge campaign. That company is apparently going to start accepting pre-orders for their device soon with hopes of shipping this unofficial Ubuntu Tablet in January.

The Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" beta is out today for opt-in flavors participating in this development milestone.

Particularly if watching any videos from the web browser with an Ubuntu Phone or using WiFi, your phone's battery can drain quite quickly while the device gets rather warm.

Some Ubuntu developers are currently looking at poor performance of the Ubuntu Phone, particularly when it comes to stuttering or a poor user experience in certain cases.

Canonical's Alberto Milone has patched their Catalyst/fglrx driver so that it will now work under the Linux 4.2 kernel on Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu Kernel Team is still preparing to land Linux 4.2 within Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" for its release in October.

Following yesterday's article about Ubuntu developers wanting to make it easier to run the newest proprietary NVIDIA drivers, a new PPA has been established.

Jorge Castro of Canonical has started coordinating some work around providing newer upstream NVIDIA proprietary graphics drivers for users, primarily Ubuntu gamers.

Canonical has open-sourced their Ubuntu One file syncing code, the biggest piece of their failed Ubuntu One service.

BQ's Aquaris Ubuntu Phones will soon be available in India.

Aside from the Ubuntu Software Center on the desktop frustrating some users over being slow and outdated compared to other "software stores", some app developers are also unhappy with Canonical's handling of the USC for paid apps.

Ubuntu 14.04.3 has been released today as the latest point release to this newest Long-Term Support stack handled by Canonical for Ubuntu Linux.

Last week Ubuntu 15.10 transitioned over to GCC 5 and switching over to this major compiler update plus the associated libstdc++6 ABI changes is causing headaches for some developers.

Olli Ries of Canonical has published a blog post outlining the various client technologies being worked on for Ubuntu, their roadmap, and the plans for making Ubuntu 16.04 a grand Long Term Support release.

Ubuntu derivatives are today releasing their 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" Alpha 2 builds.