Xubuntu

Xubuntu 14.04 Beta 1

New features, applications and packages

  • Light Locker replaces xscreensaver for screen locking
  • Light Locker Settings for controlling Light Locker and screensaver preferences
  • Mugshot for editing personal preferences
  • MenuLibre (2.0.1) for editing menus, replacing Alacarte

  • Community wallpapers package

Important bug fixes and enhancements

  • The panel now supports GTK3 indicators and uses Whiskermenu as the default menu along with a new single-panel layout
  • Improved documentation which is also updated to match new applications and application versions
  • Updated themes to work with the latest GTK3 version
  • Many icon theme fixes

New application versions

  • gmusicbrowser 1.11.1, bringing in a lot of bug fixes and new features
  • Catfish 1.0.0
  • Parole (0.6) ported to Gtk3 and gstreamer 1.0
  • Xfwm4 (4.11) brings a new accessibility feature: zoom into your desktop using Alt+Scrollwheel
  • Xfdesktop (4.11) bringing some cool new features, such as:
    • invidual wallpapers for each workspace
    • a chronological option which will sort the available wallpaper pictures according to their filename and then goes through them in their sort order and spread them equally over one day;
    • an option to enable tooltips, which will appear when hovering over icons on the desktop with the mouse.

Other changes

  • The image viewer and organizer gThumb is dropped, Ristretto is still included for photo viewing

Known issues

As with any software and software collection, Xubuntu has some bugs and issues. These include:

  • xfdesktop crashes after logging in to the desktop (1282509)

  • Thunar doesn't automatically mount removable devices and media (1210898)

  • Network shares aren't shown on the desktop (1284914)

  • Both xscreensaver and light-locker are active; when recovering from suspend, one needs to enter password twice to unlock (1284918)

  • Wallpaper dialogue empty (1271713)

  • After adding a user with the users-admin, it crashes (1185396)

  • Ubuntu Software Centre sometimes crashes when trying to install new software (1196625)

  • When using the British keyboard layout, the layout changes automatically after login (1284635)

  • Debian wallpaper shown during Try or Install screen (1284910)

  • Abiword's top ruler is not visible on first launch (1261203)



Common infrastructure

Boot, installation and post-install

  • Automatic install is broken on drives that contain partitions that either do not have an operating system installed (eg. a user data partition like /home on Linux or D: on Windows), or partitions that have Windows 8 installed. Selecting automatic install (or upgrade) on these systems will result in the whole drive being wiped and all existing data will be lost. There are also problems dealing with systems with multiple drives. This bug is present in released media of 14.04 and 14.04.1, but is fixed for 14.04.2 and later. If you have a drive with any pre-existing partitions, or multiple drives, then you should use manual partitioning. Ensure you have backups. (1265192)

  • The desktop image installer cannot unlock existing encrypted (LUKS) volumes. If you need to make use of existing encrypted volumes during partitioning, then use the "Try Ubuntu without installing" boot option to start a live session, open the encrypted volumes (for example, by clicking on their icons in the Unity launcher), enter your password when prompted to unlock them, close them again, and run ubiquity to start the installer. (1066480)

  • When using installer to upgrade or reinstall an existing installation with encrypted swap, the installer may fail to reuse the partition. A warning will be shown, however the installation can be completed. The installed system will not have swap activated and users are advised to recreate swap on their systems. Please see advice about adding and activating swap at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq (1066342)

  • Installs on very small memory systems may fail to start or exit without completing with no error. It is recommended that swap be created before install for such systems. Please see advice about adding and activating swap at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq (1172161)

  • In rare circumstances the 'Next' button on the installer 'Install Type' screen is non-functional. This is intermittent and may be resolved by hitting 'Back' and retrying. (1172572)

  • On some systems, after installation, pressing 'Enter' doesn't reboot the system and a hard reset is required (1297851)

  • Live session starts with keyboard set to English US and time zone as UTC even if non-english languages are selected (1297234)

  • In OEM mode, language packs are not installed when the end user selects a non-english language and there is no notification (1307983) To install additional languages, open "System Settings -> Language Support", the language support tool will the propose to install missing language packs.

Upgrade

  • Automatic upgrade on drives containing user data partitions, including from other operating systems, and all Windows 8 systems, will result in the whole drive being wiped and all existing data will be lost. This bug is present in released media of 14.04 and 14.04.1, but is fixed for 14.04.2 and later. If you have a drive with any pre-existing partitions, or multiple drives, then you should use manual partitioning. Ensure you have backups. (1265192)

  • When the system is upgraded from a previous release via the installer, the user has to re-enter their credentials. If the user's home directory is encrypted and the password differs from the password on the pre-upgrade system, the upgrade succeeds but the user cannot login (1308530)

  • Configuration of the package tex-common fails when 12.04 LTS is upgraded to 14.04 LTS (1304972)

  • Configuration of flightgear fails during upgrade from 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS (1308338)

Power Management

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

Desktop

  • On rare occasions Unity's Dash doesn't display (nor search for) any applications (1308037)

Migration

Graphics and Display

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.

AppArmor

  • The major tools in apparmor-utils AppArmor 2.8.95 have been rewritten to improve maintainability. While this allows us to better support them and add fixes going forward, currently the aa-genprof and aa-logprof CLI tools contain several bugs (1294797, 1296218) that affect their utility. These bugs should be fixed before release or in an SRU. It is recommended that people develop policy manually at this time. Update: these and other bugs with the python tools have been fixed and the new tools are expected to work better than tools in previous releases.

Kernel

  • 1292467 - Some laptops (particularly netbook class) with older graphics can experience poor graphical performance when starting with a high resolution external monitor attached. The reason for this is that some graphics cards (like the Intel 945GSE) cannot support accelerated 3D graphics when the combined width of both screens exceeds a certain threshold (typically 2048 pixels). See the bug for appropriate workarounds.

TrustyTahr/ReleaseNotes/Beta1/Xubuntu (last edited 2014-03-01 23:55:53 by xdsl-83-150-81-40)