17.04 Release Notes

Ubuntu GNOME is an official flavor of Ubuntu, featuring the GNOME desktop environment.

The second (and final) beta of Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 (codename "Zesty Zapus") is now available. The development team is proud to offer this development milestone to encourage testing to ensure the final release is as good as possible. Please note that this is still beta software. We appreciate your help in identifying bugs and bugfixes to ensure that the final 17.04 release will be another great release!

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 will be released April 13, 2017. This regular release will be supported for 9 months from October 2016 until July 2017. If you need longer support, we encourage you to use Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS which is supported until April 2019.

Please note that you do not have to wait for a milestone to test Ubuntu. All of our daily images should be installable and should be usable with the usual warnings about pre-release beta software.

Getting Ubuntu GNOME 17.04

Minimum System Requirements

• 1 GHz processor (e.g Intel Celeron) or better
• 1.5 GB RAM
• 10 GB of free hard drive space
• CD/DVD drive or a USB port for the installation media
• Internet access recommended (for installing updates during installation)

If you have an old machine, consider less resource-intensive alternatives such as Lubuntu or Xubuntu.

Download Disk Image

Disk images for standard PCs/laptops.

If your PC was released after the year 2007, you probably need the 64-bit version.

Please use the torrent link. BitTorrent is a good client if you do not already have one.

• Torrenting is fast and saves on server costs, which means more money in the budget for all Ubuntu flavors
• Seeding is an easy way to help others!

Instructions for burning the image to a DVD or USB drive.

Check MD5SUM

An MD5SUM is like a fingerprint: two copies of the same file should share the same exact MD5SUM.

• Compute the MD5SUM of your downloaded disk image, then

• Compare it against the reference MD5SUM

If they are not equal, that means your file was corrupted during download, and you must download it again.

Upgrade

If you were using the gnome3-team/gnome3-staging PPA, run the following before upgrading:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging
sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt install ubuntu-gnome-desktop^

The included GUI update manager will offer you the latest release of Ubuntu GNOME. Access this via the terminal:

update-manager -d

Alternatively, run the following command:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

Highlights

Select GNOME changes since Ubuntu 16.10

• Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 proudly features GNOME 3.24. Read the official 3.22 and 3.24 release notes to see what's new! Or check out the short release video.

• GNOME 3.24 introduces Night Light which can automatically reduce the blue light emitted by your computer screen at sunset or whenever you choose.

• The Calendar app now has a Week view.

• For stability, the Evolution stack is still at its GNOME 3.22 versions.

• A few apps are still at their GNOME 3.20 versions: the Files app nautilus (1635988) and the Terminal app (1636666). See the manifest for specific version numbers of included software.

• The Software app has been updated to 3.22 and now supports Flatpak.

• Flatpak 0.8 is now installed by default. Ubuntu Snap (snapd) is still installed. Both Flatpak and Ubuntu Snap are alternative app installation frameworks.

• The chrome-gnome-shell system helper is installed by default. Visit https://extensions.gnome.org/ to install the required browser addon to use the site to manage your GNOME Shell extensions.

• The tracker search indexing engine is now sandboxed.

• Several apps are no longer installed for new installs, but will not be automatically removed from existing installs: brasero (a CD burning app), evolution (email suite), seahorse (GPG and SSH key management app), xdiagnose (display troubleshooting app). These apps are still available for install in the Software app.

• gnome-icon-theme is no longer installed for new installs. The default icons have been provided by the Adwaita icon theme instead for the past 2 years. This might cause issues for some older apps that still try to use old stock icon names. If this affects an app you use, please file a bug and install gnome-icon-theme as a workaround.

• gconf is no longer installed by default since it has long been superseded by gsettings. Note that statistics and preferences for the aisleriot card games will be reset when upgrading to 17.04.

• The brand new GNOME Recipes app is available for install but is not installed by default.

• For other changes since Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, see the 16.10 Release Notes.

Other Software Updates

• LibreOffice 5.3 is included.

• The Linux kernel has been updated to 4.10.

• For new installs, a swap file will be used by default instead of a swap partition.

• The default DNS resolver is now systemd-resolved.

• The experimental wayland session is included but is not the default. If your computer supports open source graphics drivers and you would like to try Wayland, log out, choose GNOME on Wayland from the gear menu below the password entry, and log back in.

• Many other bugs have been fixed. Where possible, bug fixes have been backported to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Volunteers are requested to identify other bug fixes that can be provided to 16.04 as Stable Release Updates.

Known Bugs

New since Ubuntu 16.10

• GNOME Shell 3.24 uses the SpiderMonkey (mozjs) 38 engine which requires stricter JavaScript syntax. Some GNOME Shell extensions will need to be fixed by their developers before they can be used with GNOME Shell 3.24.

• Until 17.04 is released, all updates will be installed automatically in the background (1649709)

• New picture thumbnails are not being generated. Also, it's not possible to set a custom picture as your user profile picture (1665602)

• GNOME 3.24's new feature to launch apps with the dedicated graphics card (on supported computers) requires switcheroo-control which is not available in Ubuntu yet (1671828)

Also affecting Ubuntu 16.10

• The Software app can't open third-party .debs for packages not in Ubuntu. Also, the Software app can't open .flatpakref files. (1672424)

• Installing additional languages in 'Region & Language' Settings app doesn't work (1631750)

• Initial Setup utility requires logging out and logging back in after selecting a keyboard layout. Alternatively, you can manually click a keyboard layout in the top bar.

• Initial Setup utility does not include language chooser. (1614816)

• GTK+ 3.20 requires theme developers to make changes to their themes. Many (but not all) popular themes are now compatible with GTK+ 3.20.

Also affecting Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

• The prompt asking for media removal might not be shown during system shutdown from the install image (966480)

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