Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Beta

(2010.09.02)

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Maverick Meerkat Beta is the beta release of Ubuntu 10.10, bringing with it new features for the next version of Ubuntu.

This is a beta release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released on October 10, 2010.

Upgrading from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
To upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 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 '10.10' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a server system: install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed; edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set Prompt=normal; launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d; and follow the on-screen instructions.

Download Beta
(Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Netbook)
(Ubuntu Server for UEC and EC2)
(Kubuntu)
(Xubuntu)
(Edubuntu DVD)
(Ubuntu Studio)
(Ubuntu ARM)
(Mythbuntu)
(Kubuntu Mobile Preview)
(Kubuntu Mobile Preview ARM)

New features in Maverick
Feature development for Maverick has completed. Please see the Maverick blueprint list for details.

Please test and report any bugs you find:
- http://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

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. The period of automatic syncs has stopped now, so from now on there will be fewer changes.

For a list of all packages being accepted for 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, please subscribe to maverick-changes:
- https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/maverick-changes

Ubuntu Desktop Edition
The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.31 versions. This particularly includes the new dconf and gsettings API.

Evolution was updated to the 2.30 version, which operates much faster compared to the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default photo manager.

Gwibber has been updated to support the recent change in Twitter's authentication system, as well as changing the back end storage to improve performance.

The Sound Indicator has been enhanced to include music player controls.

The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the new "Featured" and "What's New" views for showcasing applications, an improved package description view, and a "For Purchase" software category has been added. You can also now easily access your package installation history too.

Ubuntu One: Polished desktop integration with new sign up and sign in process. Tighter integration with Ubuntu SSO. Nautilus enhancements for managing folder sync preferences. Faster file sync speed. Share links to music within the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Ubuntu Netbook Edition
The new Unity interface is now the default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. This includes the global menu bar as part of the default interface. The date/time indicator now has a real calendar widget.

The standard photo management application has been switched to Shotwell. Evolution express is also available in the default launcher. This interface is more suited to netbook interfaces.

Kubuntu
Kubuntu 10.10 Beta comes with the latest KDE Software. KDE Platform, Workspaces and Applications were updated to 4.5.0. The recently released 4.5.1 update will arrive shortly.

For 10.10 Beta, Kubuntu has merged the Desktop and Netbook images into one image featuring both the Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook workspaces. The appropriate workspace for your machine will be launched at login, you can also change the workspace in System Settings.

Plasma Netbook now sports the Global Menu by default.

The defaults web browser is now Rekonq, a KDE browser based on Qt Webkit.

The new KDE bluetooth application collection Bluedevil is now installed by default.

Pulseaudio is the default sound server to match other Ubuntu variants.

KPackageKit updates bring a faster backend and an updated UI that provides a new Categories page, and new features such as a backup/restore tool for the list of installed packages.

Kubuntu's installer (Ubiquity) now has an updated look and layout. Install starts after partitioning making it a quicker experience.

Qapt-batch now replaces install-package as the update/batch-installer utility

Qt was updated to the current 4.7 beta release and Qt Webkit to a preview of 2.0.

For more information see our release page https://wiki.kubuntu.org/MaverickMeerkat/Beta/Kubuntu

Xubuntu
Xfce4 was updated to the current 4.6.2 release. This fixes many of the bugs and updates the programs used in Xubuntu.

New default applications: Parole (Xfce4 Media Player) replaced Totem Movie Player, Xfburn (Xfce4 CD/DVD burning tool) replaced Brassero, and xfce4-taskmanager (Xfce4 process manager) replaced Gnome-Task-Manager.

Edubuntu
Edubuntu changes include the changes from Ubuntu. In addition, Edubuntu now includes Gnome Nanny, which provides parental controls in Edubuntu. There is new wallpaper included ( periodic table breakout). In addition, OEM Install mode is now available.

For those interested in learning more, there's a new web site as well, check out: www.edubuntu.org.

Ubuntu Studio
Ubuntu Studio has had several applications updated and includes the changes from Ubuntu. There is now better integration between Pulse Audio and JACK - starting JACK does not automatically suspend Pulse Audio anymore. JACK and Pulse Audio can be used side by side if they are using different audio interfaces, if they are trying to use the same audio interface JACK will take precedent. In addition, the network connections can now be configured with gnome-network-admin (removed a patch that disabled the network connections configuration).

Help would be appreciated in testing out:
- Integration between Pulse Audio and JACK
- gnome-network-admin network connections configuration

Mythbuntu
In this release, Mythbuntu has updated to MythTV 0.23.1. There is also a new backup and restore tool.

There are a couple of known issues to watch out for
- On KMS hardware, the background might not be stable during installation
- No way to currently configure the backend until after installation

Software-Center
The software-center got a "Featured" and "Whats New" carousel in the Frontpage. It is faster and more responsive and contains a "History" feature that keeps track of what was installed/removed/upgraded. Plugin support is added and technical items will not be shown by default.

Once the server is turned on (estimated next week) you will be able to purchase software.

Ubuntu Server Cloud images
cloud-init, the configurable initialization process for Ubuntu Server cloud images, has gained new features in Maverick Alpha 2, including pluggable hooks, ebsmount, ext4 support, and new stanzas in the cloud-config format.

Starting with Alpha3, cloud images instances can now manage their own kernel, and can upgrade kernels with apt. This is done by utilizing pv-grub provided by Amazon. The functionality is also provided on UEC hosts running Maverick Alpha 3 or later.

Starting with Beta, cloud images can now easily be run outside of an EC2 or UEC instance environment. This will allow you to quickly and easily test function in cloud-init or other features of the image without needing to start a new instance. There is more information available on the Ubuntu wiki.

Installation
The new btrfs file system may now be used during installation via manual partitioning, as long as /boot is on some other file system.

Linux kernel 2.6.35
Beta includes the 2.6.35-19.28 kernel which is based on the 2.6.35.3 upstream stable kernel.

This kernel also includes input subsystem patches for improved multitouch capability, ALSA device patches to resolve audio and microphone issues, miscellaneous driver updates for intel_ips, lirc, iscsitarget and rtl8192se, general security updates(CVE-2010-2240,CVE-2010-2803,CVE-2010-2959), and security enhancements for ARM.

Please note, the Maverick Beta kernel has decommissioned support for the ia64 and sparc architecture ports per a decision from the Ubuntu Tech Board.

Known issues
As is to be expected at this stage of the release process, there are several known bugs that users are likely to run into with Maverick Beta. We have documented them here for your convenience along with any known workarounds, so that you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

- USB stick installs will fail unless they are created without persistence enabled. This is fixed in updates, but not on the CD. (627672)

- The Gwibber micro-blogging client has switched to SQLITE for back end storage. This should make it faster, but means that syncing of account details across computers is no longer supported. Also note that due to a change to the Twitter service, Gwibber will not work with Twitter until updates are applied.

- The Wubi Windows installer was reported to be unable to open Windows' boot configuration data store in some (but not all) cases. Investigation of the problems are ongoing (613288)

- Upgrading Wubi systems from 10.04 LTS is known to fail, and is not recommended at this time. (610898, 617715)

- Ubuntu Netbook Edition with Unity does not currently provide a fallback for systems without a 3D capable video driver, such as NVidia cards. (600567)

- On systems with very little memory (256 MB and below), ureadahead causes out-of-memory conditions, which may break booting. (600359)

- Maverick thumb drive images built on Lucid (& earlier?) fail to boot due to differences in syslinux version - the 'ui' keyword in the syslinux.cfg file needs to be removed to get it to boot. A fix for this on Lucid is available to be applied, see lucid-updates. (608382)

- Installation in OEM mode is broken when trying to install without network connection (628681, 628290, 628911)

- A lot of USB 3G cards currently just expose themselves as a CD drive instead of a modem. To fix this, please upgrade your system to get udev version 161+git20100827-1, which should fix this. (625110)

- Inconsistent certificates prevent CC to start correctly (627963). On affected systems, you don't get anything in /var/log/eucalyptus/cc.log. This is an inconsistent issue that is not being reliably reproduced yet, and is actively being worked on: see on the bug for the best workaround known.

- eucalyptus-get-console-output will not display the instance console log (619843). This is due to a change in the user libvirt uses. Performing a "sudo adduser eucalyptus kvm" should resolve this. Closely following beta release, a fix will be uploaded.

- There are still some issues with upgrading Eucalyptus from Lucid to Maverick Beta (617053). Shortly following Beta release, a standard upgrade should resolve this issue.

- Known major issues for Kubuntu:

- The live CD "Guided" install option replaces the existing operating system installation in the selected partition (including destroying user data). This is not obvious from the description. See Bug (628864) for details.

- The live CD autoresize installation option is not always available (see Bug (628897) for details). To work around this issue, do any needed partition resizing before starting the live CD. Partitions can be deleted and created using the manual partioning option if no data needs to be saved from them.

- A list of notable Kubuntu bugs can be found at http://tinyurl.com/33p7vu3

- 613636 Kubuntu Maveric ISOs show purple "Ubuntu 10.10" boot splash

- 628681 Kubuntu OEM did not install oem-config-kde

- 628808 maverick try/install kubuntu graphics are cut off

- 628812 kubuntu slideshow too large for widget

- 628815 Cannot resize from kubuntu partitioner

- 628836 did not install restricted packages

- 628839 kfmclient not installed in kubuntu maverick beta cd

Reporting bugs
It should come as no surprise that this beta release of Maverick Meerkat contains other bugs. Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve 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
- http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/