CommonInfrastructure

Revision 108 as of 2012-10-16 13:39:09

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New Features

Common Infrastructure

  • Up until Ubuntu 11.10, administrator access using the sudo tool was granted via the "admin" Unix group. Since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, administrator access is granted via the "sudo" group. This makes Ubuntu more consistent with the upstream implementation and Debian. For compatibility purposes, the "admin" group continues to provide sudo/administrator access in 12.10.

  • The tool responsible for migrating user accounts from other operating systems to Ubuntu (migration-assistant) has been removed from the installer.

Linux kernel 3.5.5

The Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal release includes the 3.5.0-17.28 Ubuntu Linux kernel which was based on the v3.5.5 upstream Linux kernel. This is an update from the 3.2.0-23.36 Ubuntu Linux kernel which shipped in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin and was based on the v3.2 upstream Linux kernel. Other notable changes with the Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal kernel include:

  • Transitioning of the i386 generic-pae flavor to become the generic flavor offering
  • Collapsing of the virtual flavor back into the generic flavor
  • Homogenizing the entire linux-meta package
  • Arrival of a new highbank arm server kernel flavor
  • Changing of the default scheduler from cfq to deadline
  • Packaging updates for signed kernels

Python 3.2

The Ubuntu desktop has begun migrating from Python 2 to Python 3. Most Python applications included in the desktop and their dependent libraries have been ported to Python 3. In most cases, Python 3 versions of libraries are available alongside their Python 2 counterparts. Ported applications will only run with Python 3. Work will continue in Ubuntu 13.04.

If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.

GNU Toolchain

Ubuntu 12.10 is distributed with an updated default toolchain that includes: GCC 4.7.2 (was GCC 4.6 in 12.04 LTS), a binutils snapshot from the 2.23 branch (was 2.22 in 12.04 LTS), eglibc 2.15, and gdb-7.5.

Further information can be found upstream (GCC-4.7, gdb).

Java Toolchain

Ubuntu 12.10 ships OpenJDK7 as the default Java implementation. This brings improved performance, new features and better compatibility with other Java 7 implementations.

Use of the OpenJDK6 is now deprecated and the openjdk-6-* packages in universe for Ubuntu 12.10 will not be provided in future releases of Ubuntu.

TEMP: Blueprints - should they have Release Notes?

Known Issues

Installation

  • If an error message is seen when booting complaining that keystatus and loadenv couldn't be loaded because secure boot prevented it. It should be followed by a "Press any key to continue.." message which appears to timeout after 15-30s which then boots the machine just fine. (1066399)

  • On ARM hardware if you get a black screen during installation, its likely that the system has booted fine, but you'll need switch to another tty then back to tty7 (Ctrl+Alt+F1 and Alt+F7) to get graphics. (1065902)

  • Users who were installing using the alternate CD:
    • to install with LVM or full-disk encryption you should now use the desktop image.
    • to install LTSP, please install using Ubuntu Server 12.10, then add ltsp post-install; or, stick with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and upgrade.
    • to install RAID there are several options:

Updates

  • With certain combinations of software sources, apt-get update and similar operations may fail with a segmentation fault (1066445). A temporary workaround is to open a terminal and "echo 'APT::Cache-Start 50331648;' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99cache-start". This doubles the initial size of APT's cache in memory, thereby happening to avoid this problem. This will cause APT to use more memory, so you should remove /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99cache-start after upgrading to apt 0.9.7.5ubuntu4 or newer.

Kernel

  • [Feature] Haswell Processor Graphics Support (1066975)

  • On some systems, when opening lid, there is a kerneloops with a suspend/resume failure message seen. (1054732)

  • On machines with AMD graphic chips, WMI event and ACPI interrupt are sent at the same time while hitting the hotkey. (1052278)

  • [ASUS Laptop N53SN] kernel does not boot without noefi on commandline (1053897)

  • Wrong stride for efifb on some systems. (1065263)

  • [ti-omap4] black/blue screen before installer, tty switch fixes it (1065902)

Networking

  • In order to improve compatibility with other local nameserver packages, NetworkManager now assigns IP address 127.0.1.1 to the local nameserver process that it controls instead of 127.0.0.1. If the system's /etc/resolv.conf is absent or is a static file instead of the symbolic link to ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf installed by default then this static file will have to be updated by the administrator in order to continue using the NetworkManager-controlled nameserver.

Libvirt

  • Windows vms which previously worked with 'vga' video now need 'cirrus' video.

Toolchain

  • Python 2.7.3 includes a fix for a security vulnerability affecting Python's dict and set implementations. Carefully crafted, untrusted input could lead to extremely long computation times and denials of service. Although disabled by default, vulnerable applications such as CGI scripts can explicitly enable "hash randomization" to prevent this exploit. Due to implementation details of this fix, virtualenvs created with older 2.7.x releases may not work with 2.7.3. Specifically, the os module may not appear to have a urandom function. This problem can be solved by recreating the broken virtualenvs with the newer Python 2.7.3 version. See http://bugs.python.org/issue13703 for full details. (954595)