TechnicalOverview

Revision 69 as of 2010-09-02 02:21:26

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Introduction

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Maverick Meerkat Beta is the beta release of Ubuntu 10.10, bringing with it new features for the next version of Ubuntu.

This is a beta release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released on October 10, 2010.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

To upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a desktop system, press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager -d" (without the quotes) into the command box. Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '10.10' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a server system: install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed; edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set Prompt=normal; launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d; and follow the on-screen instructions.

Download Beta

Get it while it's hot. ISOs and torrents are available at:

New features in Maverick

Feature development for Maverick has completed. Please see the Maverick blueprint list for details.

Please test and report any bugs you find:

Updated Packages

As with every new release, packages--applications and software of all kinds--are being updated at a rapid pace. Many of these packages came from an automatic sync from Debian's Unstable branch. The period of automatic syncs has stopped now, so from now on there will be fewer changes.

For a list of all packages being accepted for 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, please subscribe to maverick-changes:

Ubuntu

  • waiting input, needs update?

The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.31 versions. This particularly includes the new dconf and gsettings API. Evolution was updated to the 2.30 version, which operates much faster compared to the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Ubuntu Netbook Edition

  • waiting input, needs update?

The new Unity interface is now the default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. This includes the global menu bar as part of the default interface. The date/time indicator now has a real calendar widget.

The standard photo management application has been switched to Shotwell.

Kubuntu

  • waiting input from Riddell, needs update?

KDE Platform was updated to the 4.5 release candidate. The standard web browser is now Rekonq, a KDE browser based on Webkit.

Qt was updated to the current 4.7 beta release.

Xubuntu

  • waiting input, need update?

Xfce4 was updated to the current 4.6.2 release. This fixes many of the bugs and updates the programs used in Xubuntu.

New default applications: Parole (Xfce4 Media Player) replaced Totem Movie Player, Xfburn (Xfce4 CD/DVD burning tool) replaced Brassero, and xfce4-taskmanager (Xfce4 process manager) replaced Gnome-Task-Manager.

Edubuntu

Edubuntu changes include the changes from Ubuntu. In addition, Edubuntu now includes Gnome Nanny, which provides parental controls in Edubuntu. There is new wallpaper included ( periodic table breakout). In addition, OEM Install mode is now available.

For those interested in learning more, there's a new web site as well, check out: www.edubuntu.org.

Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio has had several applications updated and includes the changes from Ubuntu. There is now better integration between Pulse Audio and JACK - starting JACK does not automatically suspend Pulse Audio anymore. JACK and Pulse Audio can be used side by side if they are using different audio interfaces, if they are trying to use the same audio interface JACK will take precedent. In addition, the network connections can now be configured with gnome-network-admin (removed a patch that disabled the network connections configuration).

Help would be appreciated in testing out:

  • Integration between Pulse Audio and JACK
  • gnome-network-admin network connections configuration

Mythbuntu

In this release, Mythbuntu has updated to MythTV 0.23.1. There is also a new backup and restore tool.

There are a couple of known issues to watch out for

  • On KMS hardware, the background might not be stable during installation
  • No way to currently configure the backend until after installation

Software-Center

The software-center got a "Featured" and "Whats New" carousel in the Frontpage. It is faster and more responsive and contains a "History" feature that keeps track of what was installed/removed/upgraded. Plugin support is added and technical items will not be shown by default.

Once the server is turned on (estimated next week) you will be able to purchase software.

Ubuntu Server Cloud images

  • check if this needs updating?

cloud-init, the configurable initialization process for Ubuntu Server cloud images, has gained new features in Maverick Alpha 2, including pluggable hooks, ebsmount, ext4 support, and new stanzas in the cloud-config format.

Starting with Alpha3, cloud images instances can now manage their own kernel, and can upgrade kernels with apt. This is done by utilizing pv-grub provided by Amazon.

Installation

The new btrfs file system may now be used during installation via manual partitioning, as long as /boot is on some other file system.

Linux kernel 2.6.35

Beta includes the 2.6.35-19.28 kernel which is based on the 2.6.35.3 upstream stable kernel.

This kernel also includes input subsystem patches for improved multitouch capability, ALSA device patches to resolve audio and microphone issues, miscellaneous driver updates for intel_ips, lirc, iscsitarget and rtl8192se, general security updates(CVE-2010-2240,CVE-2010-2803,CVE-2010-2959), and security enhancements for ARM.

Please note, the Maverick Beta kernel has decommissioned support for the ia64 and sparc architecture ports per a decision from the Ubuntu Tech Board.

Known issues

As is to be expected at this stage of the release process, there are several known bugs that users are likely to run into with Maverick Beta. We have documented them here for your convenience along with any known workarounds, so that you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

  • The Gwibber micro-blogging client has switched to SQLITE for back end storage. This should make it faster, but means that syncing of account details across computers is no longer supported. Also note that due to a change to the Twitter service, Gwibber will not work with Twitter until updates are applied.
  • The Wubi Windows installer was reported to fail. Investigation of the problems are ongoing (613288)

  • Ubuntu Netbook Edition with Unity does not currently provide a fallback for systems without a 3D capable video driver, such as NVidia cards. (600567)

  • On systems with very little memory (256 MB and below), ureadahead causes out-of-memory conditions, which may break booting. (600359)

  • A pre-release version of Eucalyptus 2.0 was included, and it still has rough edges that are being worked on. In particular, when Installing a 'node' system, expect 2 x grub issues that can be safely ignored. (613463).

  • Maverick thumb drive images built on Lucid (& earlier?) fail to boot due to differences in syslinux version - the 'ui' keyword in the syslinux.cfg file needs to be removed to get it to boot. A fix for this on Lucid is available to be applied, see lucid-updates. (608382)

  • A lot of USB 3G cards currently just expose themselves as a CD drive instead of a modem. To fix this, please upgrade your system to get udev version 161+git20100827-1, which should fix this. (625110)

  • Inconsistent certificates prevent CC to start correctly (627963). This is an inconsistent issue that is not being reliably reproduced. The raised bug should indicate the best workaround known.

  • eucalyptus-get-console-output will not display the instance console log (619843). This is due to a change in the user libvirt uses. Performing a "sudo adduser eucalyptus kvm" should resolve this. However, closely following beta release; a fix should be uploaded which would mean a resolution is provided with a post install upgrade.

  • cloud-debug.log reports errno=2 trying to execute 'bttrack'. For most common use cases, the potential for this causing an issue is minimal. However, it can be resolved with installing bittorrent or bittornado. A normal upgrade following beta release, should also resolve this issue.
  • Issues with upgrading Eucalyptus from Lucid to Maverick Beta (617053). Shortly following Beta release, a standard upgrade should resolve this issue.

  • Duplicate registration tries show up in registration.log (628025). This is currently considered a harmless warning error message.

Reporting bugs

It should come as no surprise that this alpha release of Maverick Meerkat contains other bugs. Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve future releases. Please report bugs using the tools provided.

If you want to help out with bugs, the Bug Squad is always looking for help.

Participate in Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

More information

You can find out more about Ubuntu on the Ubuntu website and Ubuntu wiki.

To sign up for future Ubuntu development announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu's development announcement list at: