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Beta1

Introduction

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Precise Pangolin Beta 1 release of Ubuntu 12.04 gives a preview of the next LTS version of Ubuntu.

Get Ubuntu 12.04

Upgrading from Ubuntu 11.10

To upgrade from Ubuntu 11.10 on a desktop system, press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager -d" (without the quotes) into the command box. Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '12.04' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 11.10 on a server system: install the package if it is not already installed; launch the upgrade tool with the command ; and follow the on-screen instructions. Note that the server upgrade is now more robust and will utilize GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of e.g. dropped connection problems.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 10.04

There are some known issues at this time, so only developers and testers should try doing this upgrade at the moment. (927993)

Download the Beta 1

Beta 1 images can be downloaded from a location near you:

In addition they can be found at the following links:

New features in Precise

Please see the Precise blueprint list for details.

Please test and report any bugs you find:

Ubuntu Kernel

Beta-1 includes the 3.2.0-17.27 Ubuntu kernel which is based on the v3.2.6 upstream stable Linux kernel. This is an update from the 3.2.0-12.21 kernel which shipped in Alpha-2 (based on upstream stable v3.2.2 ). As with Alpha-1 and Alpha-2, the Beta-1 kernel no longer carries a separate amd64 -server and -generic kernel flavor. These have been merged to help reduce the maintenance burden over the life of this LTS release. AUFS also remains disabled in the Beta-1 kernel. Anyone needing AUFS is encouraged to migrate to overlayfs.

Beginning with the Beta-1 kernel we have also enabled RC6 by default for Sandy Bridge systems. RC6 is a technology which allows the GPU to go into a very low power consumption state when the GPU is idle (down to 0W). It results in considerable power savings when this stage is activated. When comparing under idle loads with machine state where RC6 is disabled, improved power usage of around 40-60% has been witnessed. Up until recently, RC6 was disabled by default for Sandy Bridge systems due to reports of hangs and graphics corruption issues when RC6 was enabled. Intel has now asserted that RC6p (deep RC6) is responsible for the RC6 related issues on Sandy Bridge and corresponding patches have been submitted upstream. In an effort to provide more exposure and testing, the Ubuntu kernel team has applied these patches to the Beta-1 kernel and has additionally enabled plain RC6 by default on Sandy Bridge systems so that users can benefit from the improved power savings by default. We ask that anyone interested in testing and providing feedback to please refer to the PowerManagementRC6 wiki.

Ubuntu Desktop

New Applications and Defaults

  • The default music player has been switched to Rhythmbox, which again includes the UbuntuOne music store.

  • LibreOffice has been updated to 3.5. Please report any regressions that you notice.

Interface updates

  • The System Setting's "Appearance" panel now allows users to easily configure some properties of Unity.

  • Nautilus quicklist support has been added to Unity launcher.

  • There is a new way to quickly search and access any desktop application's and indicator's menu, called the "HUD". Tap the Alt key and enter some letters and words, and it will show the corresponding entries, including some fuzzy matching. Press enter to execute the action. This one is executed on the current focused application as well as all indicator facilities (like managing emails, sound list, quit…). Also it learns from your previous choices to make the search more and more accurate for you.

ClickPad support

ClickPad devices are trackpads where the physical button is integrated into the trackpad surface. Ubuntu Precise now has enhanced support for these devices. When the button is pressed on a ClickPad device, a second finger may be used to drag the cursor.

  • ClickPad support requires extra handling that conflicts with "Click Action" support. Click Actions allow for separate actions when multiple fingers are active on a trackpad. The default Ubuntu settings enable right button behavior when two fingers are in contact with the trackpad surface and the physical trackpad button is pressed. Because of conflicting behavior, ClickPad devices do not support Click Actions in this release.

  • Most Synaptics brand ClickPads are recognized out of the box. Apple MacBook trackpads are recognized as well. Support for Apple Magic Trackpads and more Synaptics brand ClickPads will follow in the next release.

Ubuntu One

  • All new Control Panel provides an installer, ability to add/remove folders to sync. Those upgrading from an earlier version of Ubuntu will likely need to manually install the package ubuntuone-control-panel-qt
  • Ubuntu One Music Store is back in Rhythmbox
  • Proxy support is not fully functional, it will be by Beta 2.

Other

  • Until Ubuntu 11.10, the Unix group for administrators with root privileges through sudo had been admin. Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it is now sudo, for compatibility with Debian and sudo itself. However, for backwards compatibility, admin group members are still recognized as administrators.
  • Automatic Apport crash reporting has been enabled by default again to catch problems early on. It now checks for duplicates on the client side, which will avoid uploading debug data and creating Launchpad bug reports unnecessarily in many cases now.
  • When installing new software through software-center, corresponding language support packages (translations, spell check modules particulat to that software, help files, etc.) are now installed along automatically. This removes the need to open "Language Support" after installing new software.
  • pm-utils now has two new scripts to power down USB and various PCI devices in battery mode. A number of desktop packages were fixed to wake up less often. Both of these reduces power consumption and thus battery lifetime.

  • resolvconf is now used to manage /etc/resolv.conf on all Ubuntu systems. For systems using Network Manager DNS resolution is now done through dnsmasq, which should help split-DNS VPNs and faster DNS resolution. You can learn more here

Ubuntu Core

  • This flavor provides a minimal Ubuntu environment suitable for highly customised installs, and mainly just saw the general version upgrades for the contained packages.

  • In sync with the rest of the Ubuntu ARM images, builds for the ARMv7 hard float (armhf) architecture are now available. This is the supported architecture for all ARM Ubuntu images now.

Ubuntu Server

Ubuntu Server and Cloud Workloads

  • Hadoop Ubuntu beta packages available in PPA

  • Juju Charm testing framework now functioning to test basic Charm deploys. Work continues to increase charm workload testing.

Kubuntu

  • Telepathy-KDE brings up to date IM to Kubuntu offering easy chat on Facebook, MSN, GMail and many other services.

  • Oxygen-GTK3 makes software using the new GTK3 widget kit fit in with the rest of KDE Software.

  • Owncloud 3 is available in universe as an easy way to provide your own cloud services for storage, music, photos and much more.

  • LightDM is experimentally available as a new login manager providing up to date features such as language selection for Plasma Desktop users.

  • The new Calligra office and creativity suite is available, featuring Krita the world's best painting app and top MS Office file importers written by KO GMBH.

See more details at the Kubuntu Beta 1 page https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PrecisePangolin/Beta1/Kubuntu

A new Kubuntu Active flavour will be emerging shortly as a tech preview of Kubuntu for tablet devices. It uses KDE's Plasma Active interface. Install the daily kubuntu-active image and run plasma-device to get a preview. We hope to have images ready for Beta 2.

Xubuntu

For more information and download links for stable release of Xubuntu, go to http://xubuntu.org/

Edubuntu

  • Edubuntu now ships the newest upstream version of LTSP 5.3, offering improved support for fat clients and a variety of other improvements.

  • LTSP-Live has been greatly improved to be much faster and reliable.

  • Epoptes, our new classroom management software, has an updated UI.

  • The Ubiquity slideshow has been updated.

  • pastebinit and vim are now both installed by default.

To learn more on Edubuntu and download a stable version of it, go to: http://www.edubuntu.org

Mythbuntu

A pre-release MythTV 0.25 snapshot is now in Precise. The final release of MythTV 0.25 will be uploaded to Precise when it's complete.

  • NOTE: Any MythTV 0.24 versions on your network are incompatible with MythTV 0.25. If you want to test Precise, you will need to upgrade your other machines to MythTV 0.25 as well. See http://mythbuntu.org/auto-builds for information about upgrading earlier Ubuntu releases to 0.25.

  • There have been some upgrade problems found with packages that have changed (mythvideo, libmyth-0.25-0). These are now fixed.
  • There were some logging problems with new rsyslog support. These are now fixed.

  • For more information about what has changed in MythTV 0.25 please see: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.25

Mythbuntu images were not able to be released for beta 1 due to an interaction with the artwork an upstream (GTK's unico theme) interface change, which made the images not usable at this time. Please check the daily Mythbuntu images for a usable Mythbuntu image as soon as this bug 943682 is resolved.

Lubuntu

  • Lightdm is used as the display manager, with the default gtk greeter.

  • A new software-center optimized for Lubuntu available by default.

The artwork is still being updated (see known issues).

Ubuntu Studio

This is an exciting beta image and the culmination of much effort! Thank you to all who were involved.

Some of the new features include:

  • live DVD
  • properly configured (but not completely modified) lightdm greeter

  • almost complete XFCE transition

  • updated application set for typical desktop tasks (i.e. text editor, movie player, etc)

Issues under investigation and input would be appreciated on:

  • not sure if pre-seeding is giving users -rt privileges as live user and installed user

  • not sure how Pulse Audio <-> JACK bridging is functioning

The lowlatency kernel is not included in image yet (it's in REVU new queue and still needs to be approved).

Known issues

Boot, installation and post-install

  • When installing with accessibility enabled, choosing "manual partitioning" will crash the installer. Either choose one of the proposed partitioning schemes or start the installer without accessibility support (for example, through the live session). (939450)

  • There is no network support on some Beagle board versions. (838200)

  • On AC100 ARM images no keyboard selection is offered, a manual workaround is shown in the bug (925482)

  • On OMAP4 Pandaboard images a camera is detected falsely resulting in the installer trying to take a picture while this is not possible (924419)

  • On PowerPC, when installed alongside linux, the system does not automatically boot into the newly installed system. The workaround is to hold down option key to get a boot menu and proceed from there.

Upgrades

  • The package that used to provide 32-bit libraries on 64-bit () installations has been removed in favour of multiarch. Systems using must migrate to multiarch in order to upgrade to 12.04. In most cases, this should be set up automatically by the upgrade process. Some users who upgraded through previous development releases may have removed , and must restore it with the contents in order to have 32-bit library support in 12.04.

  • In some cases, the package manager in Ubuntu 11.10 may not be able to decide on a correct unpack ordering when upgrading 64-bit systems with the package installed; if this is the case, it will fail before starting to unpack any new packages with a message something like "Couldn't configure pre-depend libtinfo5 for libncurses5, probably a dependency cycle". A workaround is to install the and packages from precise before starting the upgrade. (924079)

  • Landscape is currently incompatible with multiarch. We hope that this will be fixed in time for 12.04; but if you are using Landscape then you will need to either remain with 11.10 or remove any 32-bit libraries.

  • Aptitude does not work on 64 bit systems without disabling multiarch in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch . (831768)

Default keybindings

  • Unity 3D keybindings are by default Ctrl + Alt + arrow keys for switching workspaces and Ctrl + Alt + Shift + arrow keys for moving a window between workspaces. However Unity 2D keybindings are still on the newer changes that has been reverted for 3D, meaning Shift + Super + arrow keys for switching workspace, and Super + Alt + arrows keys for movig a window between workspaces. A metacity upload is staged to revert it to the previous defaults as well. (940085)

Graphics and Display

  • On Intel N10 Graphics, plugging in external monitor to VGA port makes both displays corrupted with thick slanted lines. (830949)

  • Remote Desktop does not work with the -fglrx video driver, nor with the legacy nvidia drivers. You can establish a connection but the remote screen does not update. As a workaround use Unity2d, or switch to the free drivers or nvidia-current. (772873, 918815)

  • Maximized windows can be accidentally closed from wrong monitor.(865701)

  • For languages that are read right to left (arabic, hebrew), there is some inconsistency in display between the login screen (lightDM) and the desktop environment (unity). (871764, 834386)

Desktop

  • There are known audio issues on the OMAP and OMAP4 images (925094, 925069)

Kernel

  • For any issues seen as a result of RC6 enablement, please refer to PowerManagementRC6

  • Software RAID fails to rebuild after testing degraded cold boot (925280)

  • Intel wireless randomly drops connection (911059)

Ubuntu Server

  • Squid Proxy update from 2.7 to 3.19 fails as config file has moved, and features in 2.7 not available in 3.x (924739)

  • Server install fails when selecting everything but 'VM host' & 'Manual selection' from tasksel (923681).

  • apparmor makes it impossible to install postgresql-common on Precise (925024)

  • OpenStack: DB migration failing when upgrading glance - trying to create existing tables (883988)

  • OpenStack: Nova API does not listen on IPv6 (850443)

  • OpenStack: console.ring files should not be world readable (929780)

Ubuntu Cloud

  • fsck / dirty filesystem on instance is death (928990).

  • cloud-init should allow pre-seeding of ec2 datasource:Ec2:metadata_urls (924375)

Ubuntu Core

  • DRM libraries are always installed, even for users who are not enabling graphical environments (819802)

Kubuntu

  • There are audio issues on the OMAP and OMAP4 images (925094, 925069)

Edubuntu

  • As Edubuntu includes a standard Ubuntu desktop, most of the issues above also apply to Edubuntu.

Xubuntu

  • When using the new plymouth splash screen, occasionally using the desktop cd to install, the message "hit any key to continue" does not appear. Should you get a black screen with text and the sliding throbber, when the throbber stops moving and the cd ejects, remove the cd and hit enter on the keyboard to continue.(872472)

  • For the desktop images installing from the CD menu is failing, however, allowing the CD to spin until it stops at "try Xubuntu" fixes this and "Install Xubuntu" works again.
  • For some live sessions, the network-manager indicator might be hidden. Running nm-connection-manager allows you to access the network management interface.

Lubuntu

  • The new artwork is still in progress for the gtk3 part. (943682)

  • Some installer windows are too big for a netbook screen (744834)

  • Ubiquity requires more than 4 Gb of free space to install, please use alternate ISO if you are in this case (775124)

  • In persistent mode, items created on the desktop are not displayed until next reboot. (837470)

  • Lubuntu xfce4-power-manager displays a "broken" icon in lxpanel. (871553)

  • Ubiquity crashed with TypeError in partman_column_name(): argument of type 'NoneType' is not iterable. (912031)

  • Lubuntu Precise live CD boots to a Unity-like DE (925358)

Ubuntu Studio

  • lightdm greeter is not modified from stock, which is fairly unattractive while entirely functional
  • applications menu icon has incongruous background colour WRT panel

  • package flashplugin-downloader 11.0.1.152ubuntu1 failed to install/upgrade. (870643)

  • live user does not have access to rt privileges
  • installed user does not have access to rt privileges by default (jackd is not configured properly)

  • lightdm does not configure correctly preventing x from starting (922424)

  • menu is not optimally organized

  • ubiquity Hangs on 12.04 alpha install (925240)

Mythbuntu

  • Upgrades will currently pull in the entire gnome stack (bug:936761). You can safely remove unity and the rest of gnome if you decide to upgrade.

  • Mythbuntu has been affected by GTK's unico theme interface change, and images are not usable at this time. Please check the daily Mythbuntu images for a usable Mythbuntu image as soon as this bug is resolved. (943682).

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

Reporting bugs

It should come as no surprise that this Beta 1 release of Precise Pangolin contains other 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 Improving Ubuntu

Participate in Checking if "Fixed Bugs" are Fixed

Updated images with bug fixes are being made available daily now, and the latest can always be found on the ISO tracker. If you end up doing an install with one of these daily images please let us know what you find out (we want to know if a fix works, as well if there's still a problem).

Checking the Desktop Default Applications

The QA team has made available a ppa containing a preliminary set of manual application tests covering the default ubuntu desktop applications. You are encouraged to participate in testing your installation after installing Beta 1 by running these tests and reporting your results with checkbox.

In addition, contributions for testcases are very welcome. The current tests cases can be improved and more applications can be added. To help, see the directions for contributing manual application testcases for checkbox.

Other ways to help ...

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

More information

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:

PrecisePangolin/TechnicalOverview/Beta1 (last edited 2012-03-30 21:51:17 by fo0bar)

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