We’re preparing Lubuntu 14.10, the Utopic Unicorn, for distribution in October 2014. With this early Alpha pre-release, you can see what we are trying out in preparation for our next version. We have some interesting things happening, so read on for highlights and information.

NOTE: This is an alpha pre-release. Lubuntu Pre-releases are NOT recommended for:

• Regular users who are not aware of pre-release issues
• Anyone who needs a stable system
• Anyone uncomfortable running a possibly frequently broken system
• Anyone in a production environment with data or workflows that need to be reliable

Lubuntu Pre-releases ARE recommended for:

• Regular users who want to help us test by finding, reporting, and/or fixing bugs
• Lubuntu developers

Getting Lubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2

Upgrading from Previous Versions

To upgrade to Lubuntu 14.10 from previous releases, follow the Upgrade Instructions.

Download a Disk Image

• Bootable images for standard PCs/laptops/netbooks

Instructions for burning the image to a DVD or USB flash drive can be found on the Burning ISO Howto.

We recommend you learn how to check your image file so your pre-release is as it’s supposed to be. Compare your MD5 checksum with the correct ones found alongside the images.

Alpha 2 Highlights

Software Updates

Infrastructure

Linux Kernel

The Alpha 2 Utopic Unicorn snapshot includes the 3.15.0.6 Ubuntu Linux kernel which is based on the the upstream v3.15 Linux kernel. The 3.15 release includes mixed mode UEFI support, as well as improvements to suspend and resume times, open-source graphics drivers, newer laptop support ACPI and power management, ext4 filesystem, audio and sound, to name a few; additional highlights are described here.

Known Problems

Lubuntu Desktop

• There are no ppc or amd64+mac images due to a lack of official testing. We would like to continue to support these architectures, but we need testers! If you have this hardware, please join the official testing. The documentation is required for images to be released.

• Alt + F2 shortcut does not work

• power manager has wierd black background on lxpanel

• iBus does not support certain keyboard layouts

  • previously this also affected chromium (but not firefox) but is now resolved with the current version of the browser

Feedback

Development of Lubuntu 14.10, the Utopic Unicorn is ongoing and bugs are fixed every day. Before reporting bugs, please ensure your system is up to date. For verifying installation related bugs, updated disk images are available from Daily bootable images for standard PCs/laptops/netbooks.

Please feel free to contact us with feedback.