ReleaseNotes

Revision 4 as of 2015-03-26 16:52:56

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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/ (UbuntuKylin)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/15.10/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 OneDrive. 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

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 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

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: