Walter Lapchynski

24 May

“Your fair discourse hath been as sugar, Making the hard way sweet and delectable.”

As you may have noticed on Twitter, Mastodon, IRC, our mailing lists, and this website, we have now launched a forum using the incredibly popular open source Discourse software. We join Ubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, LXQt, Phabricator, and others that share this powerful tool for communication with us.

This forum is a general meeting point for any topic, but most notably (at this point) support and development. It will not supercede other forms of communication like the mailing lists, but instead will complement them. While we’re on the subject of mailing lists, there are options in Discourse that we’re working on enabling for people that prefer mailing lists over forums. Keep watching for updates about that.

You can click on “forum” on any page on our website to get to it or simply navigate to https://discourse.lubuntu.me or https://forum.lubuntu.me to join the conversation.

The quote in the title is from William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act II, scene 3, line 6 (c. 1595).

29 Sep

Lubuntu Yakkety Yak 16.10 Beta 2 released!

You may have noticed that Yakkety Yak 16.10 Beta 2 was released
earlier this morning, nearly a week late. It was quite a busy week with new
kernels popping in at the last minute and causing all sorts of havoc.
Finally, in the last day or so, it culminated in a problem due to a dropped
Xorg package for Lubuntu alternates which the team managed to scramble
together at the last minute to smoke test. That said, sorry for the belated
announcement, but here it is! As always, the best place to download and
find out more information about the release is the Release Notes.

In other news, the final release is coming 13 October. Testing is scheduled
to begin approximately one week before, right around the 6th or 7th of
October. That said, please join us for testing! It’s fun and easy and
doesn’t require you to have a separate testing machine. If you’ve got even
1GB of total memory (the more the better, though!) and ~8GB of free space,
you should be able to set up a virtual machine and still run your normal
stuff while you test. You don’t have to be a computer whiz kid, either.
Best of all, we have people on hand to walk you through it. So please,
join us!

If you have questions, comments or concerns, please reply to the
lubuntu-devel mailing list or come visit us at #lubuntu-devel on
freenode.

25 Feb

Xenial Xerus Beta 1 released

The Lubuntu Release Team is happy to announce the first beta milestone of Xenial Xerus (to become 16.04 LTS in April) has now been released! A few bug fixes have come since the last alpha, but one piece of excitement is that this new milestone includes the 4.4 kernel that will be shipping with the final product.

Make sure to read the release notes to be aware of known bugs and workarounds. Your help would be most appreciated in terms of helping confirm/troubleshoot/triage those bugs, as well as filing any new bugs you find.

Speaking of bugs, though we’re still working on LXQt for a future release, we do expect to have some bug fixes for LXDE in the final release, so make sure to keep watching for announcements, especially on the Lubuntu Development mailing list.

For Release Notes and downloads, please see the Lubuntu Wiki.

To everyone that helped make this release possible, thank you. To those that would like to help, please get in touch (especially those of you that have PowerPC machines!).

29 Jan

Lubuntu Xenial Xerus with LXQt— on PowerPC!

We reported how to run upcoming Lubuntu desktop LXQt in Xenial Xerus on a Raspberry Pi 2 and now, thanks to tester Herminio Hernandez, Jr. (and his iBook G4), we can confirm that it works on PowerPC machines!

To replicate:

install a Xenial Xerus 16.04 image (the Alpha 2 just came out!)
follow the instructions on the wiki to install the LXQt packages

Previous to having the LXQt packages in the repositories, PPC testers were unable to use the PPA because Launchpad didn’t build for architectures outside of i386 or amd64. The other benefit is that it should be less cutting edge and thus more stable.

Since we release PowerPC images only for LTS versions and since we’re not planning on releasing LXQt for Xenial, there will be a bit more waiting for PPC users, but at least in this way, a pretty solid preview can be obtained.

Should you follow this procedure, please report any bugs against the appropriate package itself, since all of the necessary packages are in the repos.

Meanwhile, PPC testers can get back to ISO testing the LXDE Xenial Xerus image, which is due 21 April 2016.

Further questions can be directed at the Lubuntu QA Team.