ReleaseNotes

Revision 28 as of 2015-04-23 09:34:03

Clear message

Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 15.04 and its flavors.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 15.04 will be supported for 9 months for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin along with all other flavours.

Official flavour release notes

Find the links to release notes for official flavors here.


Get Ubuntu 15.04

Download Ubuntu 15.04

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download ISOs from:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/15.04/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/15.04/release/ (Ubuntu Cloud Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/15.04/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/releases/15.04/release/ (Ubuntu Core)

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/15.04/release/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/15.04/release/ (Lubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/15.04/release/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/15.04/release/ (Ubuntu GNOME)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/15.04/release/ (Ubuntu Kylin)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/15.04/release/ (Ubuntu MATE)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/15.04/release/ (Xubuntu)

Upgrading from Ubuntu 14.10

To upgrade on a desktop system:

  • Open the "Software & Updates" Setting in Systemsettings.

  • Select the 3rd Tab called "Updates".
  • Set the "Notify me of a new Ubuntu version" dropdown menu to "For any new version".
  • Press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager" (without the quotes) into the command box.
  • Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '14.10' is available.
  • Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade on a server system:

  • Install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed.

  • Make sure the /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to normal.
  • Launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade.

  • Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.

There are no offline upgrade options for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.


New features in 15.04

Please see the Vivid 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; others have been explicitly pulled in for Ubuntu 15.04.

For a list of all packages being accepted for Ubuntu 15.04, please subscribe to vivid-changes.

Linux kernel 3.19

The Ubuntu 15.04 release delivers a v3.19 based kernel.

Ubuntu Desktop

The general theme for 15.04 on the desktop is one of bug fixes and incremental quality improvements as well as a more significant change in the move to systemd as an init system.

Unity

Unity has had many bugs fixed and new features added. Locally integrated menus are now available for unfocussed windows. There have been a number of usability improvements to the dash.

Unity 7.3

  • A configuration option to have menus displayed at all times instead of only on mouseover.
  • Enable the Dash, HUD, or logout dialogs over fullscreen windows.
  • Tweaks to animations for faster startup and shutdown experiences.

Compiz 0.9.12

  • Fixes for various problems that occur only with the nVidia proprietary driver (mostly blank or black windows) (thanks nVidia).
  • Full integrated support for the MATE desktop on a par with Gnome2 and Unity
  • Refresh of the gtk-window-decorator for Gnome2 support

General

Firefox is updated to version 36 and Chromium is updated to version 41.

Most of the Gnome platform is now based on version 3.14. Qt updated to version XX.

Pulseaudio is updated to version 6 paving the way for a move to Bluez5 next release.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.4 brings a lot of improvements including improved change tracking in Writer, improve mail merge performance, improved shapes which can now have fully formatted content with tables etc, more statistics functions in Calc, improved OpenGL support for slide transitions in Impress and Draw, password protected documents in Impress. Support for digital signed PDF exports has been added, as has support for connecting to Sharepoint and One Drive. Many new multimedia formats are supported including .ra, .rm, .dv, .ac3, .opus, .asf, and .m4a.

Full details here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.4

Ubuntu Make (nee Developer Tools Centre)

Ubuntu Make continues to add support for new platforms, bringing the total to 15 (from 1 last release). This includes highlights such as:

  • Android NDK support and bumped Android Studio to latest version
  • Other new IDEs: IDEA (ultimate and community editions), pycharm (professional, educational and community editions), webstorm, rubymine, phpstorm and eclipse
  • Golang compiler support
  • Firefox developer edition
  • Dartlang editor
  • Stencyl game development platform
  • Numerous usability improvements and accessibility (ppa, doc)

These new features are also available to LTS users.

We also rationalized 3rd party library managers so that they all behave the same and don't overwrite and/or mix with system libraries. Developers don't have to worry about messing up up their installation if they want to install a pipy, npm, rubygem libraries.

Ubuntu Server

OpenStack 2015.1

NOTE: At the point of 15.04 release, all OpenStack projects are at the latest Kilo release candidate for 2015.1 - the final 2015.1 release versions will be delivered as a stable release update post 15.04 release.

Ubuntu 15.04 includes the OpenStack 2015.1 (Kilo) release of the following projects in Ubuntu main:

  • OpenStack Compute - Nova

  • OpenStack Identity - Keystone

  • OpenStack Imaging - Glance

  • OpenStack Block Storage - Cinder

  • OpenStack Networking - Neutron

  • OpenStack Telemetry - Ceilometer

  • OpenStack Orchestration - Heat

  • OpenStack Dashboard - Horizon

  • OpenStack Object Storage - Swift

NOTE: Ubuntu 15.04 includes Swift 2.2.2; this is not the final release version of Swift for OpenStack Kilo as this introduced new dependencies to support Erasure coding which it was not possible to support for 15.04 release.

NOTE: For OpenStack 2015.1, Ubuntu is only tracking the decomposition of Neutron FWaaS, LBaaS and VPNaaS from Neutron core in the Ubuntu archive; we expect to add additional packages for other Neutron ML2 mechanism drivers and plugins early during the Liberty/15.10 development cycle - we'll provide these as backports to OpenStack Kilo users as and when they become available.

In addition, the following projects are provided in Ubuntu universe:

  • OpenStack Data Processing - Sahara

  • OpenStack Database as a Service - Trove

  • OpenStack DNS as a Service - Designate

  • OpenStack Bare-metal Compute Driver - Ironic

  • OpenStack Filesystem - Manila

OpenStack 2015.1 is also provided via the Ubuntu Cloud Archive for OpenStack Kilo for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS users.

Ubuntu 15.04 also includes the first Ubuntu release of of the Nova Compute driver for LXD ('nova-compute-lxd'). This driver should not be considered ready for production use and is provided for experimentation and early testing at this point in time.

WARNING: Upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment.

Make sure you read the OpenStack Charm Release Notes for more information about how to deploy Ubuntu OpenStack using Juju.

LXC

The LXC container manager was updated to the latest upstream version, 1.1. More specifically the 1.1.2 bugfix release. This brings full systemd support, both on the host and in the container as well as new features such as checkpoint/restore using CRIU, openvswitch support and support for qcow2 backed containers.

More details on the new LXC release can be found at: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxc/news/

This new version of LXC also comes with a new helper filesystem called LXCFS. That filesystem exposes the container resource limits into the container so that tools like free, top, ... report them properly. It's also a vital part of making Systemd work properly in containers.

More details on the new LXCFS release can be found at: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxcfs/news/

CGManager, the LXC CGroup manager was also updated to version 0.36, fixing many bugs and introducing some new features that were needed for LXCFS.

More details on the new CGManager release can be found at: https://linuxcontainers.org/cgmanager/news/

LXD

Ubuntu 15.04 is the first Ubuntu release to feature LXD.

LXD has been developped to provide a fast, reliable and scalable way to manage system containers across the network. It's entirely image based, secure by default, supports snapshots, live migration and offers a simple yet powerful REST API.

LXD ships with two clients:

  • - lxc, a command line client for small and medium size deployments where the operator doesn't mind or prefers manual control.

    - nova-compute-lxd, an OpenStack Nova plugin which makes managing containers as simple as managing virtual machines.

Ubuntu 15.04 ships with LXD 0.7. This is the result of an intense 6 months of development and while not ready for production workloads, it's definitely ready for experimentation.

More details on LXD can be found at: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd

Juju

MAAS

MySQL family

Packaging across the MySQL family has been overhauled to better permit packaging of multiple variants. The biggest change is that /etc/mysql/my.cnf is now a symlink to the configuration file of the currently active variant. See the update-alternatives manpage for details on managing this symlink.

MySQL has been updated to 5.6 and remains in main. In universe, Percona XtraDB Cluster has been updated to 5.6, MariaDB to 10.0 and Percona Server 5.6 has been added.

With the switch to systemd, process limits such as the maximum number of open files can now be controlled by tuning the unit configuration file, and MySQL and variant daemons are already limited by systemd defaults. If you are already tuning these values, we recommend that you remove any open_files_limit type configuration settings from my.cnf and configure everything from the systemd unit file instead in order to avoid conflicts between configurations in both locations. See bug 1434758 for details.

libvirt 1.2.12

Libvirt has been updated to the 1.2.12 release. A profile script has been added to automatically set the default URI on a xen system.

qemu 2.2

Qemu has been updated to the 2.2 release. The default vga device has been switched to stdvga. If this is an issue, the old default can be explicitly requested using '-vga cirrus'.

See http://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/2.2 for details.

ceph 0.94.1

Ubuntu 15.04 includes the latests stable release of Ceph, 0.94.1 'Hammer'.

For full details on the Ceph Hammer release, please refer to the upstream release notes.

cloud-init 0.7.7

Cloud-init now uses Python 3, and uses systemd. It supports running on Digital Ocean and base64 encoded user-data on Google Compute. Chef support is also improved.

docker 1.5.0

The release notes describing the features available in docker 1.5 are located here: https://docs.docker.com/v1.5/release-notes/

In addition to the features outlined above, we have provided experimental support for ppc64el and arm64.

  • corosync
  • haproxy
  • pacemaker

Known issues

As is to be expected, with any release, there are some significant known bugs that users may run into with this release of Ubuntu 15.04. The ones 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

  • The installer currently has a bug where after the installation is complete, the installation medium will eject, but you will be unable to press ENTER to reboot. Powering off and back on should boot you into your installed system. This will be fixed before final release and is being tracked in bug #1436715

  • The OEM installer has a bug wherein the "oem" user isn't correctly removed when preparing the system for shipment to the end user. Due to this bug, it is highly recommended that the beta images are *not* used for OEM installs, though we generally don't recommend using anything but release images for OEM installs anyway. This is being tracked in bug #1436937

  • The amd64 (Intel x86 64bit) images specifically targeted at Apple hardware (amd64+mac) are no longer produced. Most Apple computers are now capable of booting the amd64 image directly using the EFI (not legacy) boot method so long as their firmware is up to date. If for some reason your hardware doesn't boot properly using the amd64 image, make sure you don't have a pending EFI update and if that still doesn't work, then patch the 64-bit ISO using the software in bug #1298894 (tested working on Macbook 2,1). Alternatively, simply use the i386 (32bit) image instead.

  • Due to changes in syslinux, it is not currently possible to use usb-creator from 14.04 and earlier releases to write USB images for 14.10; we believe that it is also not possible to use usb-creator from a 14.10 system to write USB images for earlier releases. For now the workaround is to use a matching release of Ubuntu to write the images, but we intend to issue updates soon to work around this incompatibility. 1325801

  • On OEM installation the temporary OEM user is not removed after the end user setup (LP:1436937), the 2 accounts co-exist and OEM is selected by default on first login. On UEFI systems, at the end of the end user setup, the graphical environment fails to come up due to crashes of either Xorg or unity-settings-daemon LP:1436861. Upon reboot the system works fine. These issues will be fixed before final release.

Upgrade

Power Management

Desktop

Migration

Graphics and Display

Networking

Kernel

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


Official flavours

The release notes for the official flavours can be found at the following links:


More information

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

More about Ubuntu

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: