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

Xenial Xerus alpha 2

The second alpha of the Xenial Xerus (to become 16.04) has now been released! As usual, you are asked to read the release notes so that you are aware of issues and thus save you time filing them again. But, please do test it as widely as possible. Features:

  • LXQt is still in development, as such Xenial Xerus is GTK based
  • This Xenial Xerus snapshot includes the v4.3 kernel. 16.04 will ship with the 4.4 kernel which is available for testing
  • As this is an LTS, there will be a new PPC version released

Release Notes and downloads at the wiki page.

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!

xenial-lxqt-ppc

To replicate:

  1. install a Xenial Xerus 16.04 image (the Alpha 2 just came out!)
  2. 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.

15 Jan

Lubuntu Xenial Xerus (with LXQt) in a Raspberry Pi 2

A nice experiment made by wxl from the Lubuntu QA Team: running Lubuntu Xenial Xerus on a Raspberry Pi 2, with LXQt desktop. Made with Ubuntu Pi Flavour Maker, and following simple instructions:

  • Get the image from here
  • Install the image
  • do-release-upgrade to Xenial
  • Install LXQt packages following the wiki guide

And that’s all. Enjoy Lubuntu in your new Pi. Remember this is just an experiment, it may be unstable. But what are Raspberry Pi computers for, but testing and having fun?

W404t14

04 Jan

Xenial Xerus alpha 1

Hi folks, the 1st milestone release of what will be our 16.04 LTS is now out in the wild. I’m only posting the release notes link, as it is important you know of issues (none are computer critical) so that you don’t waste your time reporting an issue we already know of. If you find new issues, please follow the reporting section at the bottom of the notes.

Grab it while it’s hot!