DRAFT: preliminary version of Oneiric Release Notes

Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) provide an overview of the release, and document the known issues with Ubuntu 11.10 and its variants.

Release Overview

Oneiric Ocelot includes new releases of all major flavors of Ubuntu: desktop, server, cloud, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Edubuntu, Mythbuntu, and Ubuntu Studio. For Ubuntu, this release provides a full Unity experience, even without 3D hardware acceleration, promoting Unity 2D to the primary fallback shell. LightDM steps forward as the login manager for Ubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Mythbuntu, and Ubuntu Studio, and includes a customized Unity greeter. Kubuntu showcases the best and the newest features of the KDE Platform, Plasma Workspaces, and Applications, including the Muon Software Centre. Ubuntu Server introduces a technical preview of Juju, a thoroughly modern approach to service deployment and orchestration on cloud and bare metal environments, as well as support for the ARM architecture.

Ubuntu

New Features

Lenses and Interface Changes

11.10 includes a new release of compiz and Unity. Highlights of this release are:

• A new Alt+Tab switcher.
• "Places" were renamed to "Lenses", now integrating multiple sources and advanced filtering like ratings, range, categories.
• The Dash has a new music lens, linked to Banshee, that searches your personal and online music collections.
• Better performance of launchers and panel, ported to GTK 3 and GTK 3-based indicator stack.
• Full support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other script languages.

Unity 2D reduces the delta with Unity, shares more code with it, and has an almost completed accessibility support set of features. See known issues for the missing accessibility parts.

The indicators got a visual refresh which includes a refactoring of the session indicator and a new power indicator.

The Ubuntu Font Family, developed under the guidance of the Dalton Maag type foundry and the Canonical design team, has been expanded with Ubuntu Mono and Ubuntu Condensed.

Revised Software Center

The Ubuntu Software Center now has "top rated" views to the main category page and all subcategory pages, which allows you to edit or delete your own reviews. Significant speedup for standalone deb file installations (gdebi functionality) are now implemented, Full CJK support is also available. OneConf is now built in to keep your installed applications in sync between computers, to activate it, use "File → Sync between computers…".

New ARM subarchitectures

Ubuntu 11.10 is introducing two new desktop images for ARM subarchitectures: armel+ac100 for the Toshiba ac100 netbook (NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC), and armel+mx5 targeted at the Freescale i.MX53 Quick Start development board. Both of these images are "best-effort" community-supported images aimed at developer and hobbyist use.

Revised DVD content

In Ubuntu 11.10 there is now a revised, smaller (in size), DVD based on community feedback over the last few cycles. This new DVD has a more manageable size of 1.5G. The new DVD image is an extension of our current CD image, which includes all the language packs and some other useful applications, such as Inkscape, GIMP, Pitivi, and a more complete LibreOffice suite. All the packages that used to be on the DVD are still available from the archive.

New App Developer Site

Coinciding with the Ubuntu 11.10 release a significant milestone in the ongoing effort of making Ubuntu a target for application developers has also been reached: the Ubuntu App Developer site launch.

developer.ubuntu.com should now be the central point of reference for any topics related to Ubuntu application development. From creation to publication: porting, sharing, contributing, finding information… a site that should grow organically to provide the tools, share the knowledge and act as the springboard to foster application proliferation and developer community growth in this exciting area.

Read more in the official announcement.

New Localized ISO Tools

A set of tools for Ubuntu LoCO teams to create custom images to provide an experience even closer to the culture of the region they cover are now available. After setting the foundations in Ubuntu 11.10, next cycle we'll be working with the community on expanding their usage. Learn more.

Updated Applications

Thunderbird is included as the default email client. Which now includes menu and launcher integration via Unity.

Déjà Dup is included as the default backup tool, making it easy to upload backups to Ubuntu One.

The new Gwibber landed in Oneiric, which brings improved performance and a new interface using the most recent GNOME technologies.

GNOME 3.2 is included which is a major upgrade from GNOME 2.32 included in Ubuntu 11.04. GNOME Classic is no longer installed by default, but can be enabled after installation completes by installing gnome-panel. Note that the indicator status menus have not yet been ported to the new gnome-panel and the default upstream panel layout is used instead of the heavy Ubuntu customizations. GNOME Shell is also available for install.

LightDM now uses the new Unity greeter by default on Ubuntu.

Synaptic and pitivi are no longer included in the default install but are still available in the Ubuntu repositories.

Ubuntu Server

New Features

Orchestra is a collection of the best free software services for provisioning, deploying, hosting, managing, and orchestrating enterprise data centre infrastructure services, by, with, and for the Ubuntu Server available in 11.10. Orchestra enables users to quickly deploy a solution in the datacenter. Instead of manually setting up a complex network installation environment, users can leverage Orchestra to rapidly deploy new servers in production using the best open-source tools. The process is standardised and fully automated, minimising manual intervention and ensuring consistency. This is a response to all of our users who’ve been asking us to help them in the process of making multiple installs and deployments easier.

A core component of Orchestra provisioning is Cobbler, which has been receiving significant attention.

Juju is available in Ubuntu 11.10 as a technical preview; it is a critical part of Ubuntu Server that is designed to handle service deployment and coordination for both cloud and bare metal. Juju has many Charms available, including OpenStack deployment - primarily for bare metal deployments. While the development team uses juju on a regular basis, it is still under heavy development and changing rapidly, however the included snapshot is enough to get you started and testing Juju in a development environment. We currently don't recommend using it in production systems; however we do recommend using juju via the regular snapshot releases that will be provided here. We also highly recommend you follow development reports of juju as they are posted here to be aware of changes to Juju over the next few months.

Ubuntu Server 11.10 is the first release with support for the ARM architecture. Usually thought of as something used in embedded or mobile devices, the ARM architecture has advanced tremendously over recent years. ARM processors are now able to handle workloads traditionally done by Intel and AMD based servers. Over this past cycle, the Ubuntu Server team worked closely with the Ubuntu ARM team, as well as ARM partners interested in the ARM server market, to produce this technical preview of Ubuntu Server for ARM.

Updated Applications

Former UEC components (including Eucalyptus) are no longer part of the CD image and are no longer included in the security-supported main component of the archive. An upgrade path is provided from from 11.04.

The Xen hypervisor has now been reintroduced as an option in Ubuntu Server.

Ubuntu Cloud

Ubuntu 11.10 introduces the new Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure and Ubuntu Cloud Guest images. The Cloud Infrastructure images are the successor of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, and provide a ready to deploy Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS) based on the Openstack Diablo release. Ubuntu Cloud Guest, which used to be called Jeos or UEC-image. This Ubuntu Server image is specially tailored for use in a public or private cloud instance.

ARM cloud images are now being built as well, but there isn't currently a cloud infrastructure that can consume them, and therefore are available on a best effort basis.

More information is available at https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com.

Ubuntu Common Infrastructure

Hybrid CD/USB images supported

32-bit compatibility on amd64 systems

Ubuntu 11.10 provides "multiarch" support for installing 32-bit library and application packages on 64-bit systems. For all amd64 installs and upgrades, select 32-bit software, such as skype and flash, will now be installable directly using the same 32-bit packages that are used on i386 installations, without the need to install the ia32-libs compatibility package. For users this means 32-bit libraries will always be available at the same time as their 64-bit counterparts, even in the case of security updates, and users will only need to install those 32-bit libraries needed by the applications they have installed.

Linux 3.0 Kernel

Ubuntu 11.10 includes the 3.0.0-12.20 Ubuntu kernel which brings the 3.0 upstream kernel, the latest mainline release. The Ubuntu kernel is based on the linux v3.0.4 upstream stable kernel.

This kernel update brings a number of performance improvements both to ext4 (the default filesystem) and the process scheduler, which should improve interactive beahviour. It also brings support for newer hardware.

For the server, the kernel also brings the return of Xen dom0 support as a tech preview building towards full support for the 12.04 LTS Release. It also has container and namespace improvements enabling full LXC support which is of particular interest on ARM platforms. There are also a number of networking and netfilter improvements.

A note to application developers, the default number of file descriptors has been increased in order to simplify management of programs utilising very large numbers of files.

For the deeply technical there are improvements to TCP and fragment identifier generations, BTRFS has a number of significant improvements, ext4 has SMP scalability improvements, and the Big Kernel Lock is dead!

Gcc 4.6 Toolchain

Ubuntu 11.10 includes gcc 4.6 as the default compiler. The toolchain is based 4.6-1-9ubuntu3 version of gcc. Some of the notable changes over the gcc 4.5 compiler include:

TODO: work with doko to get summary ?? include bintuils info, what about eglibc and cross compile??

Python 2.7

TO DO: double check on this and Python 3.0; default earlier/ 2.6 removed.

Ubuntu Core

Ubuntu Core is a new minimal rootfs for use in the creation of custom images for specific needs. Developers will now be able to use Ubuntu Core as the basis for their application demonstrations, constrained environment deployments, device support packages, and other goals. More information is available on the Ubuntu Core wiki page.

Ubuntu One

The new music lens in the Dash supports searching your personal and online music collections, as well as the Ubuntu One Music Store.

The Déjà Dup backup tool, shipped by default in Ubuntu, supports backing up to the Ubuntu One cloud.

Ubuntu One music collections are now streamed to Android and iOS devices, as well as supporting file sharing cross-platform compatibility with Windows.

Kubuntu

Kubuntu 11.10 brings together lots of exciting new development from the KDE community and Kubuntu team. Some of the highlights of the release are listed below, and more details can be found in the Kubuntu 11.10 announcement.

New from the KDE community

Plasma and Applications 4.7.1

The latest stable release of KDE's Plasma Workspaces and Applications brings new features and improvements all around. Highlights include:

• Visual updates include a new Oxygen icon theme
• A cleaner default look to Dolphin
• Gwenview's new ability to compare two or more images
• New breadcrumb feature in the Kickoff menu that simplifies navigating submenus
• More improvements in the Network Management widget

More details can be found in the plasma 4.7 announcement and the applications 4.7 announcement.

KDE Personal Information Management Suite 4.7

Kubuntu 11.10 introduces the new KDEPIM suite, which includes the Kmail 2 application. The look and feel is familiar to previous versions, but under the hood, most of the applications have been updated to use the Akonadi storage service. This will enable better email, calendar, and other PIM activities moving forward.

IMPORTANT: Do note that this is a major upgrade to the mail, calendar and addressbook systems, and still needs usage and migration testing. While loss of data should not be an issue, it is highly recommended to back up all important data, mail, contact information, and calendars if you plan to upgrade to 11.10. Migration information can be found here.

Amarok 2.4.3

This new and improved version of the default music player features native support for remote NFS and SMB/CIFS collections, a better looking user interface, support for gpodder.net, as well as vastly improved reliability.

For more information have a look at the release announcements of Amarok for versions2.4.1 and 2.4.3

Technical Preview of OpenGL ES Powered Desktop Effects

For those adventurous and curious, Kubuntu 11.10 has packaged the work towards using a more compatible and reliable version of OpenGL, OpenGL ES. This new technology is particular interesting in the not so distant future for mobile devices.

New from the Kubuntu team

Muon Suite 1.2

The Kubuntu team is proud to present our new suite of tools for installing and managing software. Installing of .deb packages, updating, and software management is all part of this new, integrated suite, specifically designed to work with Debian style package management.

• Muon Software Center: Accessing thousands of free applications for your computer has never been easier. The Muon Software Center provides an easy-to-use way to access extra applications, games and accessories to further customize your desktop. Applications come with ratings and reviews for each application from the wider Ubuntu community, as well as with screenshot previews to help you make informed decisions.

• Muon Package Manager: For the budding system administrator, the Muon Package Manager provides a powerful feature set with a usability-driven interface. With its lightning-fast quick-search and extensive filtering abilities, you should have no trouble finding exactly the right package. From selective upgrades to package pinning to mass package removal, the Muon Package Manager should give you every tool you need to quickly and efficiently administer your system.

Updated Applications

TO DO: work with ScottK to fill in

Xubuntu

TO DO: work with charlie-tca to insert overview comments

New Features

gThumb is now in the default Xubuntu 11.10 installation, to help users with image transformations and viewing.

leafpad is the new default text editor(was mousepad), and now includes the ability to print.

pastebinit is now included in Xubuntu 11.10 intallations by default. If you need to use http://paste.ubuntu.com/, you can use pastebinit in terminals to paste directly without copying and pasting the data.

LightDM is the new application that manages logins in Xubuntu 11.10.

Updated Applications

Onboard (the onscreen keyboard) is now included in the default Xubuntu menus, under Accessories. For those who require an onscreen keyboard, this will be much easier to access using only a mouse or touchpad.

Lubuntu

Lubuntu 11.10 is a brand new flavor of Ubuntu based on the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE), as its default GUI. The goal is to provide a very lightweight distribution, with all the advantages of the Ubuntu world (repositories, support, etc.). Lubuntu is targeted at "normal" PC and laptop users running on low-spec hardware. Such users may not know how to use command line tools, and in most cases they just don't have enough resources for all the bells and whistles of the "full-featured" mainstream distributions.

With many LXDE components, Lubuntu also uses well-known applications, such as Chromium, Openbox, Pidgin, to name a few. The Lubuntu project wiki contains more information on the project and the applications used available.

Edubuntu

Edubuntu 11.10 inherits all the changes that occurred in the Ubuntu desktop.

This release of Edubuntu is better translated than ever before with all of our tools fully supporting translation.

If you want to try Edubuntu 11.10 without having to download our DVD, you can try it online on WebLive: http://www.edubuntu.org/weblive

To learn more about Edubuntu 11.10, go to: http://www.edubuntu.org.

New Features

There is a refreshed look and feel with new wallpaper and login screen.

The default desktop environment is now Unity with fallback to Unity 2D when the hardware doesn't support running the 3D version. Gnome 3 Fallback (which uses an updated gnome-panel) is available for those who want it as an option in the installer.

Updated Applications

Updates in this release include:

• gobby was updated to gobby-0.5.

• gbrainy was updated to the latest and greatest version 2.

Default changes include:

• Nanny, Pessulus and Sabayon haven't been ported to Gnome 3.0/dconf yet and were consequently dropped from the default installation.

Mythbuntu

11.10 isn't a feature heavy release, but does bring in new HW support from the updated kernel and graphics stack. It is leading up in preparation for the new Mythbuntu release strategy, LTS only releases starting with 12.04.

New Features

LightDM is the new application that manages logins in Mythbuntu 11.10.

Chromium has been adapted by the Mythbuntu team to replace Firefox by default.

software center is now the default rather than synaptic, in line with the rest of Ubuntu.

Updated Applications

MythTV has been updated to more recent builds. While MythTV is still on the 0.24 series, it has been growing more stable with each new build.

Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio 11.10 is still working through our XFCE transition, so some items or features might not be completely resolved yet.

More details can by found at: UbuntuStudio/11.10release_notes

New Features

LightDM is the new application that manages logins in Ubuntu Studio 11.10 and has a new background.

The menu will be different as the Ubuntu Studio team is moving towards a more DE agnostic way of handling categories and submenus.

The icon set has changed.

Updated Applications

Many non-A/V/G specific applications, text editor for example, have changed to XFCE equivalent. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu Studio team was not able to be as active as hoped this cycle and testing was incomplete. Therefore deficiencies are expected and we apologize in advance.

Installation

Overview

Download

Ubuntu 11.10 images can be downloaded from a location near you:

• http://www.ubuntu.com/download (Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server) .

In addition they can be found at the following links:

• http://releases.ubuntu.com/11.10/ (Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server)

• http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/11.10/ (Ubuntu Cloud Images)

• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/11.10/ (Ubuntu DVD, preinstalled ARM images, source)

• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/11.10/ (Ubuntu Netboot)

• http://releases.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/11.10/ (Kubuntu)

• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/11.10/ (Kubuntu DVD)

• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/11.10/ (Xubuntu)

• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/11.10/ (Edubuntu)

• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/11.10/ (Ubuntu Studio)

• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/mythbuntu/releases/11.10/ (Mythbuntu)

• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/11.10/ (Lubuntu)

Upgrading

Upgrading from Ubuntu 11.04

To upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 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 '11.10' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 on a server system: install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed; launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d; and follow the on-screen instructions. Note that the server upgrade is now more robust and will utilize GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of e.g. dropped connection problems.

Upgrading from Other Releases

Users of other Ubuntu releases need to upgrade first to 11.04, and then to 11.10.

For further information on upgrading to 11.04, please see the instructions in:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NattyUpgrades

Known issues

The issues we know about at this point (and some of the workarounds), are documented here so you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

Boot, installation and post-install

• In some cases, booting the live system takes a long time until the desktop starts. (791139)

• When overwriting an existing installation in the Ubiquity desktop installer, it creates a new swap partition instead of re-using the already existing one. (782507)

• Ubiquity desktop installer proceeds to use free space without warning, if sufficient free space exists, and "install alongside" is selected, then clicking on the forward button just begins the installation without warning. (766265)

• omap3/omap4 netboot images are known to be too small (806751).

• The "Memory test" mode is hanging indefinitely without any progress on some systems (confirmed on Dell Mini 10). (856055)

• Chinese installs need to use the live environment instead of install only, to be able to type localize character. (871726)

Upgrades

• Ubuntu 11.10 has migrated away from /var/run, /var/lock and /dev/shm and now uses /run, /run/lock and /run/shm instead (respectively). While the Ubuntu AppArmor packages and shipped policy have been adjusted for this, custom policy may need to be updated. The following my be used to aid in migration (it allows both the old an the new paths):

  $ sed -i -e 's#/var/run#/{,var/}run#' -e 's#/var/lock#/{run,var}/lock#' -e 's#/dev/shm/#/{dev,run}/shm/#' <profile>

• Ubuntu 11.04 failed to upgrade to 11.10 with gcj-4.4-jre installed (853688)

• amd64 users who updated to oneiric prior to August 16th or who installed oneiric prior to Alpha 3 will need to manually enable multiarch support on their systems to ensure they get the same experience (and see the same packages) as other users. This is as simple as running the following command: $ echo foreign-architecture i386 | sudo tee /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch  An apt-get update later, and you'll have access to the full array of i386 packages in addition to the amd64 ones.

• Any users who have updated to ubuntu 11.10 beta 1 and haven't updated since then, may encounter the fact that 'apt-get update' returns non zero, although it does successfully update the Packages file. In GUI tools, this translates to update-manager showing an error, but it does display the updated apt and allow it to be installed. (871731)

Graphics and Display

• We had to revert from unity-window-decorator to gtk-window-decorator for performance reasons. This means that the "1 px border" for resizing window is back temporarily. (Bug: ???)

• On Intel N10 Graphics, plugging in external monitor to VGA port makes both displays corrupted with thick slanted lines. (830949)

• Remote Desktop does not work with the -fglrx video driver, nor with the legacy nvidia drivers. You can establish a connection but the remote screen does not update. As a workaround use Unity2d, or switch to the free drivers or nvidia-current. (772873)

• The Onboard window in Unity2d when maximized puts the window on top of everything and has no window controls when maximised as it refuses focus, and you can't double click the title bar to restore it. Once maximised your only real option is to switch to another workspace using a hard keyboard ctrl+alt+arrow keys then run gconf-editor and in the apps\onboard section change the height, or reboot into Unity3d and double click or drag down the top panel. (859288).

• Orca can't read what is going on with Unity3d. By default if you install using the screen reader you will boot into the 2d desktop. (Bug: ???)

• For languages that are read left to right (arabic, hebrew), there is some inconsistency in display between the login screen (lightDM) and the desktop environment (unity). (871764)

Desktop

• The Skype website currently directs users to download a package for 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 systems which is not compatible with multiarch. Users are instead recommended to install the skype package via the Canonical partner archive using Software Center. Alternatively, you can manually install this i386 package from the command line by running:

 $ sudo apt-get install skype:i386

Kernel

• Sandy Bridge power regression from kernel 3.0.0-6 to 3.0.0-7 (30% more power at idle) (818830)

Ubuntu Server

• When running an i386 system under a virtual machine without enough memory allocated a kernel error is detected during installation. (790712)

Ubuntu Cloud

• ?

Kubuntu

• Kmail migration fails (857828). You will need to delete your ~/.kde/share/config/kmail-migratorrc file, and run the migrator manually - kmail-migrator --interactive or skip the migration tool and reconfigure Kmail from scratch.

• Shutdown in the live session under VirtualBox sometimes does not work and seems to just hang on the desktop. Just restart the computer with the power button in that case, there is no possibility of data loss. (805906)

• A window may retain a taskbar entry after closing the application. (KDE Bug 275469):

Xubuntu

• When using the new plymouth splash screen, occasionally using the desktop cd to install, the message "hit any key to continue" does not appear. Should you get a black screen with text and the sliding throbber, when the throbber stops moving and the cd ejects, remove the cd and hit enter on the keyboard to continue.(872472)

• There is no screen title or headings when choosing "Install Xubuntu" from the CD menu (840094)

Edubuntu

Ubuntu Core

• DRM libraries are always installed, even for users who are not enabling graphical environments (819802)

Lubuntu

• In some cases, Lubuntu desktop ISO boot to a terminal prompt instead of the desktop session. You can manually start the session by typing "sudo start lxdm" (854837)

• Ubiquity require more than 4 Gb of free space to install, please use alternate ISO if you are in this case (819538)

• Keyboard layout can't be saved using LXKeymap. Please run "sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration" (729880)

• On persistent mode, items created on the desktop are not displayed until next reboot. (837470)

For a listing of more known issues, please refer to the Oneiric Ocelot bug tracker in Launchpad.

Reporting bugs

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve the quality of 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

• http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

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:

• http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce