Ubuntu News Archives

Mir 0.14 had been in development since May as a big feature release. Mir 0.14 is already found in the Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" archive while it's soon going to land for Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid users.

With Ubuntu Phone reviews frequently pointing out the lack of games/apps for Ubuntu Phone compared to other platforms, Ubuntu developers have been working on porting more HTML5 mobile games over to Ubuntu Phone.

Ubuntu MATE developer Martin Wimpress announced this weekend that they'll be removing the Ubuntu Software Center from their default install of Ubuntu MATE 15.10.

Reviews of the Ubuntu Phone this week by general tech slights have largely expressed disappointment over the current Ubuntu Phone stack while being years in the making.

Debian unstable is switching to GCC 5 and so is Ubuntu 15.10. Here's the latest update on the planned transition from GCC 4.9 to GCC 5.2 by month's end.

After the Linux Git kernel built by the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA failed to work for the past two weeks, the kernel should now be bootable again.

As part of Ubuntu's Python 3 plans, Python 3.5 is now hitting the Ubuntu Wily archive for Ubuntu 15.10.

Canonical has been readying OTA-5 as the next over-the-air update to Ubuntu Phone users.

With Linux 4.2 there is UEFI ESRT support as a necessary prerequisite for supporting UEFI firmware upgrades / capsule upgrades. That kernel System Resource Table support is in the process of being back-ported for riding on Ubuntu 15.04's kernel.

Last month the BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Phone was launched in Europe. While the hardware may not be the best out there and the Ubuntu Phone software stack is still maturing, early reviews seem fairly positive.

For those interested, it's becoming possible to play with Ubuntu's Snappy next-generation package manager from a personal desktop.

Canonical is back to working on the Launchpad.net code, their website that pairs code hosting with bug tacking, translations, blueprints, and more.

Ubuntu 15.10, the Wily Werewolf, will closely follow Debian in its GCC 5 compiler upgrade and libstdc++6 ABI updates. They hope to have everything settled for Ubuntu 15.10 to avoid any big tool-chain changes during the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS cycle.

An annoying setting of Ubuntu's GRUB configuration is going to be finally addressed in Ubuntu 15.10 and will be addressed in current Ubuntu releases via a stable release update.

Ubuntu MATE, the spin of Ubuntu that ships with the popular fork of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, has announced a hardware partnership in shipping their distribution pre-loaded on a "free software friendly and 100% blobless Linux driver" PC.

While Ubuntu itself doesn't participate in the alpha releases but rather focuses upon the quality of their daily ISOs, the opt-in flavors of the Ubuntu family that does do these early development releases have announced their 15.10 Alpha 1s.

Mark Shuttleworth this morning announced Fan: their solution to container-to-container networking.

This past week the Ubuntu 15.10 desktop updated many of their GNOME packages to the GNOME 3.16.x series. There's also been other improvements on the desktop front.

While Jono Bacon is no longer working for Canonical, he hasn't stopped thinking about Ubuntu or being involved with the community. Over the night he wrote a lengthy blog post with his idea for rebasing the Ubuntu Phone off Android.

The upcoming Mir 0.14 for Ubuntu Linux will take another step towards reducing lag.

The Ubuntu Developer Membership Board (DMB) has issued a call for nominations to fill a vacant seat on the board following the recent resignation by Scott Kitterman.

Kevin Gunn of Canonical has provided another update on the latest developments happening around Unity 8 and their Mir display server.

Will Cooke of Canonical shared this morning that they have got the first Snappy build of Ubuntu Desktop Next built for i386.

Last week we found out Ubuntu was coming to the BQ Aquaris E5 smartphone and this morning the pre-orders have started rolling in.

Earlier this year Dell released their XPS 13 laptop with an Intel Broadwell processor and all-around looks like a great developer laptop. Back when the hardware first appeared, the Linux support wasn't in great shape. Dell is now shipping the XPS13 2015 model with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS preloaded, but sadly, there's still some issues with the initial pre-install.

Beginning next week the BQ Aquaris E5 pre-loaded with Ubuntu Phone will become available in Europe.

Earlier this week a huge fiasco began over the Ubuntu Community Council removing Jonathan Riddell from any leadership position relating to Ubuntu for one year. The Kubuntu Community Council came out in support of Jonathan as have many others from the community, but today the Ubuntu Community Council issued a lengthy statement where they re-affirm they will be sticking by their original decision.

This month's Ubuntu Phone Update sent over-the-air is bringing a number of new features and improvements for Ubuntu smartphone users over the next few days.

Canonical will be kicking off June by making some announcements with their partners for new Ubuntu Phones in Europe.

The longtime leader of Kubuntu, Jonathan Riddell, appears to be out of any leadership position relating to Ubuntu for at least twelve months. This decision has caused some to criticize the Ubuntu Community Council for their decision made in relative private -- a decision that was also backed by Mark Shuttleworth.

Mark Shuttleworth is reportedly considering a move to make Canonical a public company.

For those that haven't seen/heard yet, the Ubuntu 15.10 release schedule has now been firmed up.

It's been four years and two weeks since Mark Shuttleworth expressed his goal of "200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years." While Ubuntu's presence has continued to increase over the past four years, it doesn't look like that goal has been realized yet or will be by the end of the calendar year.

Ubuntu enthusiasts in Europe have been able to buy the first Ubuntu phone for some time now, the BQ Aquaris, while starting now Chinese developers are able to buy the second official Ubuntu phone: the Meizu Ubuntu MX4.

While Linux distributions like Fedora and Mageia have adopted predictable/persistent network interface names, Ubuntu has not. However, that is looking to change and it might also be the case for upstream Debian.

While there isn't much to see yet out of the current Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" state compared to the recent Ubuntu 15.04 release, the daily ISOs have now begun for Ubuntu Wily.

With Canonical having hosted the Ubuntu Online Summit this past week to lay out and plan early details of Ubuntu 15.10, here's a recap of our Phoronix coverage over the past week for their next major update due to ship in October.

Mir, Canonical's display server for Unity 8 that's currently in use by Ubuntu Touch, is now under development for its next major version.

Back when the GNOME 2 desktop was forked in 2011 as the MATE Desktop Environment, there were polarized views from the Linux community how this fork of GNOME2 could survive and what sort of future it would have. Four years later, MATE is still being maintained, there's distributions shipping with MATE as the default desktop, and the project is managing to stay relevant.

While Snappy packaging on Ubuntu is only a few months old, it's generating a lot of interest and will eventually replace .deb packages on Ubuntu. One of the interesting features to be worked on going forward for Snappy is deduplication support.

Another one of the interesting discussions this week at the Ubuntu Online Summit was with regards to plans for merging off of Python 2 and providing Python 3 by default over the next year, in time for the long-term support release of Ubuntu 16.04.

While Ubuntu 15.04 marked the point of switching from Upstart to systemd, Ubuntu Linux doesn't currently make use of all systemd functionality, such as networkd. However, at least for networkd, that soon could be changing.

The Lubuntu derivative of Ubuntu that traditionally has been powered by the LXDE desktop environment is in the process of transitioning to LXQt.

Besides all the other Ubuntu 15.10 chatter happening this week, which is heavily centered around Unity 8 / Ubuntu Convergence and Snappy topics, there was also talk of "Ubuntu Benchmarking Workloads" in the Ubuntu Cloud track.

For Ubuntu Touch/Phone users interested in seeing Upstart go out on their device in favor of systemd, progress is being made by Canonical on the switch.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but Ubuntu 15.10 will be using the GCC 5 compiler by default.

In continuation of this morning's Ubuntu 15.10 UOS session about plans for Unity 8 on the Ubuntu desktop, that was followed by a demo of the current Unity 8 desktop experience -- including some experimental code shown by Canonical developers.

Discussed this morning during the second day of the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 15.10 was "Unity 8 as the default desktop." Unity 7 will remain the default for Ubuntu 15.10, but a lot of progress is expected this Wily Werewolf cycle.

The latest Ubuntu-related announcement this week is the debut of Xubuntu Core.

Revealed today during this first full day of the Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 15.10 were some of the roadmap items and features coming soon for the Ubuntu Phone.