Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Alpha 4 is now ready to download and test. This is a great opportunity to boot your machine with a LiveCD (or USB image) and check out to see if there any regressions - and if so, please file a bug so it can be fixed before the final version is rolled out.
I'm currently running Karmic on my laptop and servers. I'm really impressed with the improved boot speed and the Kernel Mode Setting (KMS). KMS is especially effective with suspend/resume and also reduces the screen mode transitions during boot.
So download a suitable Alpha 4 image give it a try!
Showing posts with label alpha. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alpha. Show all posts
Friday, 14 August 2009
Friday, 24 July 2009
Ubuntu Karmic Alpha 3 ready for testing!
Ubuntu Karmic Koala Alpha 3 is ready for downloading and testing.
This is an Alpha release. Do not install it in production machines. The final version will be released on October 29th 2009.
Features include:
GNOME 2.27.4 development version
Empathy as the default messaging client
gdm 2.27.4 login manager
Ubuntu One file sharing service
Linux 2.6.31 kernel
New UXA Intel Video Driver acceleration method
Kernel Mode Setting (KMS)
gcc 4.4
ext4 filesystem by default
GRUB2 by default
ISOs and torrents available at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/alpha-3/ Ubuntu Desktop, Server, Netbook Remix
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-3/ Kubuntu Desktop and Netbook
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-3/ Xubuntu
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/karmic/alpha-3/ Ubuntu Studio
Check out the Karmic Alpha 3 webpage for the full details.
This is an Alpha release. Do not install it in production machines. The final version will be released on October 29th 2009.
Features include:
GNOME 2.27.4 development version
Empathy as the default messaging client
gdm 2.27.4 login manager
Ubuntu One file sharing service
Linux 2.6.31 kernel
New UXA Intel Video Driver acceleration method
Kernel Mode Setting (KMS)
gcc 4.4
ext4 filesystem by default
GRUB2 by default
ISOs and torrents available at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/alpha-3/ Ubuntu Desktop, Server, Netbook Remix
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-3/ Kubuntu Desktop and Netbook
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-3/ Xubuntu
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/karmic/alpha-3/ Ubuntu Studio
Check out the Karmic Alpha 3 webpage for the full details.
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha Testing
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is still in its early Alpha stage, but I bit the bullet over the weekend and did a clean install on my Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop. Although I've been running with a Karmic kernel on my laptop for several weeks and also upgraded my servers to Karmic very early on, it's only now that I decided it was time to go the whole hog and upgrade my laptop.
Rather than just do a rolling upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic, I backed up my home directories and some configs in /etc and then did a clean install from Alpha 2 and pulled in all the updates. Then I restored /home and did some minor tweaks to my configs.
Starting afresh is quite cathartic; I got rid of a load of old applications that I'd installed a while ago and don't use any more, and I also started afresh with ext4. Ext4 brings some more speed, especially when fsck'ing the drive on boot. Ext4 is noticeably faster when removing hundreds of files, for example rm -rf on kernel source trees.
Karmic also now uses the Grub2 boot loader; this is working well across a wide variety of machines, as can be seen from the Grub2 testing page.
With Karmic we also get Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) too. So far, this is working fine - you soon notice that there are less screen mode setting flickers on boot and suspend/resume is slicker. Audio works OK with the default audio player Rhythmbox and with proprietary software such as Skype - I've not yet noticed any audio dropping, so this is a good sign so far.
There's going to be a lot more changes made over the next months, hopefully we won't see many regressions on the kernel, but with all the change, stuff does occasionally get broken. So I encourage you to help us by testing the Alpha and Beta releases of Karmic so we can squish those bugs and get changes upstream good and early!
Rather than just do a rolling upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic, I backed up my home directories and some configs in /etc and then did a clean install from Alpha 2 and pulled in all the updates. Then I restored /home and did some minor tweaks to my configs.
Starting afresh is quite cathartic; I got rid of a load of old applications that I'd installed a while ago and don't use any more, and I also started afresh with ext4. Ext4 brings some more speed, especially when fsck'ing the drive on boot. Ext4 is noticeably faster when removing hundreds of files, for example rm -rf on kernel source trees.
Karmic also now uses the Grub2 boot loader; this is working well across a wide variety of machines, as can be seen from the Grub2 testing page.
With Karmic we also get Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) too. So far, this is working fine - you soon notice that there are less screen mode setting flickers on boot and suspend/resume is slicker. Audio works OK with the default audio player Rhythmbox and with proprietary software such as Skype - I've not yet noticed any audio dropping, so this is a good sign so far.
There's going to be a lot more changes made over the next months, hopefully we won't see many regressions on the kernel, but with all the change, stuff does occasionally get broken. So I encourage you to help us by testing the Alpha and Beta releases of Karmic so we can squish those bugs and get changes upstream good and early!
Friday, 12 June 2009
Karmic Koala Alpha 2 ready for testing.
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha two is now ready to download for testing. This is an Alpha release, so do NOT install it on production machines! The final stable version will be released on October 29th, 2009.
So what's new?
The new Intel video driver architecture is available for testing. In later Alphas there will be probably a switch from the current "EXA" acceleration method to the new "UXA". This will solve major performance problems of Ubuntu 9.04, but is still not as stable as EXA, which is why it is not yet enabled by default. To help testing UXA, please check out the instructions and testing webpage.
Feedback about the new Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) feature is also heavily appreciated. This will reduce video mode switching flicker at booting, and dramatically speed up suspend/resume. To help test this, check out the KMS instructions and feedback webpage.
For more details visit http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/alpha2
So what's new?
- Linux 2.6.30-5.6 kernel based on 2.6.30-rc5, with Kernel Mode Setting enabled for Intel graphics. Note that LRM is now deprecated in favour of DKMS packages.
- GNOME 2.27.1
- GRUB 2 by default
- GCC-4.4
The new Intel video driver architecture is available for testing. In later Alphas there will be probably a switch from the current "EXA" acceleration method to the new "UXA". This will solve major performance problems of Ubuntu 9.04, but is still not as stable as EXA, which is why it is not yet enabled by default. To help testing UXA, please check out the instructions and testing webpage.
Feedback about the new Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) feature is also heavily appreciated. This will reduce video mode switching flicker at booting, and dramatically speed up suspend/resume. To help test this, check out the KMS instructions and feedback webpage.
For more details visit http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/alpha2
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