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.

19 Jan

Introducing the Lubuntu Council

The Lubuntu community has grown exponentially since our switch to LXQt. With new users, contributors, and Lubuntu enthusiasts among many other people who have decided to join our community, we are finding the need to scale the project further than the unwritten technically-led oligarchy that we currently have in the Lubuntu project. Therefore, we are pleased to announce the Lubuntu Council.

Read More

20 Dec

Sunsetting i386

Lubuntu has been and continues to be the go-to Ubuntu flavor for people who want the most from their computers, especially older hardware that cannot handle today’s workloads. However, the project and computing as a whole has drastically changed in many ways since its origin ten years ago. Computers have become faster, more secure, and most notably, have moved off of the traditional 32-bit i686 (generalized as i386 in Debian and Ubuntu) architecture.

As an increasing number of Linux distributions have focused their attention on the 64-bit x86 architecture (amd64) and not on i386, we have found that it is harder to support than it once was. With i386-only machines becoming an artifact of the past, it has become increasingly clear to the Lubuntu Team that we need to evaluate its removal from the architectures we support. After careful consideration, we regret to inform our users that Lubuntu 19.04 and future versions will not see a release for the i386 architecture. Please do note that we will continue to support Lubuntu 18.04 LTS i386 users as a first-class citizen until its End of Life date in April of 2021.

We would like to sincerely thank the contributors to and the users of Lubuntu on i386. Without you, Lubuntu would not be what it is today. The Lubuntu Team would like encourage you to read our post regarding taking a new direction if you would like to understand more about our future aspirations as a project. Lubuntu is far from slowing down; if you would like to join our growing team of contributors, check out our Telegram/Matrix/IRC channels.

14 Oct

Help test Lubuntu 18.10 Release Candidates!

Adam Conrad always does a great job in stating that people should test the Release Candidates. Here’s what he has said this time:

Over the next few hours, builds will start popping on the Cosmic Final milestone page[1] on the ISO tracker. These builds are not final. We’re still waiting on a few more fixes, a few things to migrate, etc. I’ve intentionally not updated base-files or the ISO labels to reflect the release status (so please don’t file bugs about those).

What there are, however, are “close enough” for people to be testing in anger, filing bugs, fixing bugs, iterating image builds, and testing all over again. So, please, don’t wait until Wednesday night to test, testing just before release is TOO LATE to get anything fixed. Get out there, grab your favourite ISO, beat it up, report bugs, escalate bugs, get things fixed, respin (if you’re a flavour lead with access), and test, test… And test. Did I mention testing? Please[2] test.

Thanks,

… Adam

[1] http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/397/builds
[2] Please.

Please, help us test Lubuntu Release Candidates. You can find the link to the dailies on our downloads page. When you’re done, so we know you tested, please get an Ubuntu SSO account (if you don’t have one already) and report the result on iso.qa.ubuntu.com. This means you, i386 testers. It’s your time to shine!

Have you tested this ISO to your heart’s content and reported your results? Help us with some of the other non-technical tasks which need to be done before the release, including proofreading the new Lubuntu Manual and helping us polish the release announcement.

Also, send us your Lubuntu screenshots before Tuesday (on any one of our social media accounts) to get them in the announcement!