12 Jul

Lubuntu 22.04 Backports PPA – LXQt 1.1 Call For Testing

The Lubuntu Team is happy to announce that the Lubuntu Backports PPA is now available as a beta. Please see details below to help us test it.

What is the Lubuntu Backports PPA?

Our Backports PPA is modeled after Kubuntu’s. It exists to provide the latest LXQt desktop stack on top of a stable Ubuntu base. (The concept could also be considered similar to KDE Neon.)

As time goes on, our development focus will continue to be on new releases, and we plan on landing and testing changes there prior to pushing them to Backports. That being said, this is a perfect middle ground between stability and new features that users of all experience levels will be able to enjoy.

Is this a separate edition of Lubuntu?

Nope, this is still the same Lubuntu you know and love, you’re just getting new features available on the regular releases earlier than everyone else on the LTS release. You’re jumping on an in-between track.

Why is it still in beta if you already tested it in the development release?

The development release has a different audience than LTS users. LTS users may notice changes that development release users may not, and vice versa. Also, this is our first run of backports. Future updates should be smoother.

Okay, so how do I help?

The Backports Staging PPA is available here. You can add the PPA using the following command:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubuntu-dev/backports-staging

Please test it and give us feedback (Matrix preferred). One thing to note, YOU SHOULD NOT KEEP THIS PPA ENABLED, ENABLE THE OFFICIAL BACKPORTS PPA WHEN IT COMES OUT AND INSTALL PACKAGES FROM HERE SELECTIVELY.

We plan on releasing this repository officially on Tuesday, July 19th, 2022 assuming no showstopper issues present themselves.

(If demand is popular, we may also release an ISO alongside 22.04.1 with the Backports PPA enabled. Please let us know in the comments or on social media if you want that.)

You, yes you, can help

If you have some time, please consider joining us. If you would like to help us continue the development of the project long-term, you can donate to the Lubuntu project here.

(Please support our friends at 9to5linux.com and at TuxDigital.)

27 Sep

Lubuntu 19.10 Beta Released!

We are pleased to announce that the beta images for Lubuntu 19.10 have been released!

While we have reached the bugfix-only stage of our development cycle, these images are not meant to be used in a production system. We highly recommend joining our development group or our forum to let us know about any issues.

Where can I download it?

You can download the Beta images off of our Downloads page.

Results of the Lubuntu Wallpaper Contest

For this release we asked the community to get involved in creating the wallpaper for the desktop. The submissions were fantastic and the decision was difficult for the committee to decide. The committee scored the choices and narrowed the selection down. The Lubuntu Members then voted for the winning wallpaper:

The author provided some context around their creation:

Hello, how are you? Very happy to participate in the contest and to have been selected to be part of the desktop of the next version of Lubuntu.
I send you the final version of the desktop wallpaper that I created for the attached contest like LubuntuFINAL.svg, created in Inkscape and also a .zip file with different design variants, including the original blue background version. I have modified the images so that they have the corresponding license.
The image story comes like this. I am a man who likes to investigate and learn repairing old computers, as a computer fan, without much knowledge, I am trying different Linux distributions, at the moment I learn how to use the terminal, the commands and the dynamics of the hardware. For what they have given me an old cpu that tried to make work for what I found a while ago with Lubuntu as a very good option for that team since with this operating system it works smoothly and made the team functional, since that team It would be used by the family for general uses. Since I am very satisfied with Lubuntu as a system, I looked for a way to get involved in some way, so I arrived at the Lubuntu forum, it is there where I learned about the contest and where it seemed a good idea to create a desktop background. I have been using open-source programs for some time, as you may have noticed, I am self-taught, I am not a professional graphic designer; so I also ran into Inkscape. As one of my hobbies, I design cartoons, logos, etc.
I thought it was a good idea about the contest but I wasn’t sure…
So I decided to first post it on reddit and see what opinion the users of my desktop background had. That’s where I was encouraged to enter the contest and where I decided to sign up. Well I think I extended too much, I thank you for taking into account for this contest, for being able to participate together with other users who also had very good jobs and for being able to get involved in the next launch of Lubuntu. I hope that users enjoy both the wallpaper, as I enjoy creating it for all of you…
A Big hug!

Marcelo D. Moreira from Argentina.

While the wallpapers didn’t make it into this Beta release, you can expect to see them in time for the final release, and on your computer (please keep your system updated!).

Known Issues

Keyboard Shortcuts

Many keyboard shortcuts have been updated in this release. We have moved many of the keyboard shortcuts from Openbox to the native LXQt shortcut manager, and have spent time polishing the existing shortcuts.
You can find a list of all the updated shortcuts here.
Unfortunately, they won’t be updated automatically when upgrading from Lubuntu 19.04 to Lubuntu 19.10.
Here are the steps to update them manually:

  1. Delete the following files:
    • ~/.config/lxqt/globalkeyshortcuts.conf
    • ~/.config/lxqt/lxqt-runner.conf
    • ~/.config/openbox/lxqt-rc.xml
  2. Reboot

Follow the same procedure for all users if there are more than one present.
This will reset all the shortcuts to new defaults as listed in the manual. (Editor’s note: Add link to man page.)

Note: This will clear any non default shortcuts you might have configured by yourself (e.g: Super+T for qterminal). You will have to assign them again using shortcuts settings from LXQt Configuration Center.

Thanks!

This release could not have happened without the help from our contributors. Thank you to the following people that make Lubuntu happen:

If you find Lubuntu useful, please consider donating to the project or contributing your time.

27 Jul

Lubuntu 18.10 End of Life and Current Support Statuses

Lubuntu 18.10, our first release with LXQt, has reached End of Life as of July 18, 2019. This means that no further security updates or bugfixes will be released. We highly recommend that you update to 19.04 as soon as possible if you are still running Lubuntu 18.10.

The only currently-supported releases of Lubuntu today are 18.04, with LXDE, and 19.04, with LXQt. All other releases of Lubuntu are considered unsupported, and will not receive any further updates from the Lubuntu team. Please note that the i386 architecture is still supported for 18.04, while 19.04 and beyond do not have support. You can find more details here.

You can find instructions on how to upgrade your Lubuntu installation to a new release here. Upgrading from releases before or including 18.04 to 18.10 or greater is unsupported and will break your system. Please do a fresh install.

More information, including how to install Lubuntu, is available on our Downloads page.

27 Jun

Donate to Lubuntu!

The Lubuntu Team is happy to announce that we now have ways that you can directly donate to the project and purchase apparel. You can find quick links to all of the sites described in this post on our Donate page.

Why does Lubuntu need donations?

Lubuntu is a community-developed project that relies on support from the community to continue development. There are specific costs we would like to address to take the burden off of specific contributors, their employers, and the Ubuntu project as a whole. Specifically, Altispeed Technologies has graciously provided hosting support for our Phabricator instance, forum, and other pieces of critical Lubuntu infrastructure. We would like to eventually move off of Altispeed’s infrastructure, or be able to pay for the infrastructure ourselves.

Additionally, Lubuntu Developers attend several major Linux conferences each year, specifically LinuxFest NorthWest, the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, SouthEast LinuxFest, and others. Lubuntu would like to be able to support some of these conferences and trips to these conferences without relying so much on e.g. the Ubuntu Community Donations Funding.

Rationale for each platform

We have accounts on four different platforms set up thus far: Patreon, Liberapay, PayPal, and Teespring. All four of these serve a specific purpose, and are meant to provide a variety of options for donation.

Patreon is, by far, the most popular recurring donations platform existing today. Donations could either be per-release or per-month; we selected the per-month option to best suit our users. In exchange for high visibility and ease of use, Patreon takes 8% of the donations per month, plus any additional fees that may arise. While this isn’t ideal, it works best for many people.

Liberapay is meant to provide a reasonable alternative to Patreon. Not only does it not take such a large percentage of donations, the platform is free software. The downside is that they previously had issues with one of their payment processors, and they have less visibility. However, it is a preferable option for people who wish to avoid Patreon.

We created a PayPal account for the purpose of one-time donations and payment processing for Liberapay temporarily. The advantage is that this allows for many types of currencies, and PayPal is a large platform which has a fair amount of visibility.

Teespring allows indirect donations via apparel purchase. Once purchases begin, we will publish a full breakdown (from our perspective) of what portion goes to Teespring and what portion goes to Lubuntu. The “profit margin” varies per-product, and we will publish all of that as purchases come in.

Accountability and transparency

We have observed with some other open source projects that accept donations that accountability for purchases and transparency in general is lacking. When Lubuntu accepts donations, it is essential to us to publish exactly where money is flowing and how it is being used to help further the project. While the decision-making process is limited to the Lubuntu Council and official members of the Lubuntu project, we see no reason to hide where the community’s money is going.

What’s next?

We plan on publishing updates to our donations process, reports on where the money is going, and all other pertinent information directly on the Donations page. Check there for regular updates.

Are you aware of another platform we should utilize? Do you have further questions about how we plan on using the money? Leave a comment below or contact the Lubuntu Council.

12 Mar

Statement Regarding Infrastructure Data Loss

At 2:15 AM Central US Time, the Lubuntu Team was informed by our hosting provider, Altispeed Technologies, that there had been a problem with the server we use for Lubuntu’s infrastructure, including Phabricator, Weblate, Jenkins, the IRC bridge and other services. This resulted in complete data loss for all of the aforementioned services. Below is a statement from Altispeed Technologies regarding the incident:

In an effort to demonstrate good stewardship of Linux and open source,
Altispeed Technologies donates the server, storage space, and bandwidth for
hosting many of the Lubuntu resources. During a migration effort last night,
the virtual machine that stores production data for the Lubuntu Phabricator
instance (among other services) was inadvertently destroyed. Despite having
backups enabled, our VPS provider was unable to recover the data and it has
been permanently lost.
Our team is working to re-provision the system and we have signed an
agreement with a datacenter to run our services under our control. All
Lubuntu resources hosted by Altispeed will be moved at that time. We
apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and will continue to
work towards giving back to the community.

We still have complete access to the Git repositories hosted on the Phabricator instance, as they have been mirrored to GitHub, however, all of the tasks on our Phabricator instance as well as the wiki and login information for all users has been lost.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and expect services to be back up before the end of the day Central US time. On a positive note, starting anew has allowed us to refine the way the services are organized on the server, to offer a faster and more secure experience going forward.