List Of New Features In Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”

Here is a list with the new features in Ubuntu 11.10. Please see the Oneiric blueprint list for details. Please test and report any bugs you find: http://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs


Improved handling of 32-bit compatibility on amd64 systems

Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 1 enables “multiarch” support for installing 32-bit library and application packages on 64-bit systems. For all amd64 installs and upgrades, select 32-bit software, including skype and flash, will be installable directly using the same 32-bit packages that are used on i386 installations, without the need to install the ia32-libs compatibility package. For users this means 32-bit libraries will always be available at the same time as their 64-bit counterparts, even in the case of security updates, and users will only need to install those 32-bit libraries needed by the applications they have installed.

Enabling multiarch if you upgraded before Beta-1

amd64 users who upgraded to oneiric prior to August 16th or who installed oneiric prior to alpha-3 will need to manually enable multiarch support on their systems to ensure they get the same experience (and see the same packages) as other users. This is as simple as running the following command:

$ echo foreign-architecture i386 | sudo tee /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch

An apt-get update later, and you’ll have access to the full array of i386 packages in addition to the amd64 ones.

Installing the correct skype package

As a result of this change, work has begun to deprecate the ia32-libs package, which no longer ships all the libraries that it did previously. Most 32-bit software will either be automatically transitioned to i386 packages on upgrade or will continue to work with the ia32-libs package in oneiric. However, the skype package has not yet been updated for this in oneiric. If you have the skype package installed you will need to manually switch to the i386 package by running:

$ sudo apt-get install skype:i386

For the final 11.10 release, this will be resolved by providing an automatic upgrade to an i386-only skype package.

Ubuntu Kernel

Beta 1 includes the 3.0.0-9.15 Ubuntu kernel which is based on the v3.0.3 upstream stable kernel. Some of the most notable changes since Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha3 with respect to the kernel include:

Rebase to v3.0.3
Enable missing IPv6 options
Ivy Bridge: KVM support for SMEP
Fix integer math bugs in panel fitting
Turn on extra EAPDs on Conexant codecs
Deliver more Atheros, Ralink, and iwlagn NIC drivers to d-i
Package macvlan and macvtap for virtual
Package x86_energy_perf_policy and turbostat
dell-wmi: Add keys for Dell XPS L502X
hfsplus: ensure bio requests are not smaller than the hardware sectors
Ecryptfs: Add mount option to check uid of device being mounted = expect uid
Update ideapad-laptop to v3.1
mac80211: be more careful in suspend/resume
xen-blkfront: Drop name and minor adjustments for emulated scsi devices
xen: Do not enable PV IPIs when vector callback not present
Native driver support for changing backlight intensity on i915
Numerous config updates

Ubuntu Desktop

Revised DVD content

With 11.10 Beta 1, we’re introducing a revised smaller DVD based on community feedback over the last few cycles. This new DVD has a more manageable size of 1.5G. The new DVD image is an extension of our current CD image to include all the language packs and some other useful applications, such as Inkscape, GIMP, Pitivi, and a more complete LibreOffice suite. All the packages that used to be on the DVD are still available from the archive.

Interface updates

A new release of compiz and Unity has been included with this milestone. Highlights of this release are:

A new Alt+Tab switcher.
“Places” were renamed to “Lenses”, now integrating multiple sources and advanced filtering like ratings, range, categories…
A new music lens linked to Banshee is also installed by default.
The restructuring for getting some new features has been done. Known bugs and regressions are documented below.
Better performance of launchers and panel, ported to GTK 3 and GTK 3-based indicator stack.

Unity 2D reduced the delta with Unity, shares more code with it and has almost complete accessibility support. See Known issues for the missing accessibility parts.

The indicators got a visual refresh which includes a refactoring of the session indicator and a new power indicator.

New Applications and Defaults

Thunderbird is included as default email client including menu and launcher integration.

Déjà Dup is included as the default backup tool, making it easy to upload backups to Ubuntu One.

The new Gwibber landed in Oneiric bringing improved performance and a new interface using the most recent GNOME technologies.

GNOME got updated to current unstable version (3.1.5) on its way to GNOME 3.2

LightDM now uses the new Unity greeter by default.

Software Center updates

The Ubuntu Software Center adds new “top rated” views to the main category page and all subcategory pages, now allows you to edit or delete your own reviews, and has had a significant speedup for standalone deb file installations (gdebi functionality).

Ubuntu Core

Ubuntu Core is a new minimal rootfs for use in the creation of custom images for specific needs. With the release of Oneiric Ocelot, developers will be able to use Ubuntu Core as the basis for their application demonstrations, constrained environment deployments, device support packages, and other goals. More information is available on the Ubuntu Core wiki page.

Ubuntu Server

Orchestra which is a collection of the best free software services for provisioning, deploying, hosting, managing, and orchestrating enterprise data centre infrastructure services, by, with, and for the Ubuntu Server has landed in Oneiric and is taking good shape.

A core component of Orchestra provisioning is Cobbler, which has been receiving significant attention. Whilst still in the Universe repository, it is considered an important part of Ubuntu Server and testing is much appreciated.

The majority of the Openstack components and dependencies are now in the Main archive. Oneiric Beta-1 is shipping with Diablo-4 development release. Regular snapshots to Oneiric will commence after Beta-1 Freeze is lifed, and will be uploaded on a regular basis. Bugs are being identified, however it’s proving to have a good level of stability; and usage to uncover more issues before release is vital.

Ensemble is now available in the Oneiric archive, it is a critical part of Ubuntu Server designed to handle service deployment and orchestration for both cloud and bare metal.

The Xen hypervisor has now been reintroduced to Ubuntu Server, and is therefore an option. The QA process has identified a number of issues in the cycle, which are making good progress towards a resolution. Further testing of this will ensure good Xen support in Oneiric.

The cloud images have been formally renamed to ‘Ubuntu Cloud Images’ (or cloudimg as short form). The images should now be found at the new address: https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com . ARM cloud images are now being built, but there isn’t currently a cloud infrastructure that can consume them, and therefore are not officially released as part of this beta.

All references to UEC have been changed to “Ubuntu Cloud”. If the term UEC is discovered in this milestone, it should be considered a bug and raised accordingly.

Former UEC components (including Eucalyptus) are no longer part of the CD image, and were demoted to Universe.

Kubuntu

Plasma and KDE Applications 4.7

The latest stable release 4.7 of KDE’s Plasma Workspaces and Applications brings new features and improvements all around. Highlights include:

Visual updates include a new Oxygen icon theme A cleaner default look to Dolphin Gwenview’s new ability to compare two or more images New breadcrumb feature in the Kickoff menu that simplifies navigating submenus More improvements in the Network Management widget

KDEPIM 4.7

Along with KDE 4.7, 11.10 also introduces the new KDEPIM suite, which includes the new Kmail 2. The look and feel is familiar, but under the hood, most of the PIM suite is now fully migrated to the Akonadi storage service.

IMPORTANT: Do note that this is a major upgrade to the mail, calendar and addressbook systems, and as such still needs usage and migration testing. It is, even more highly than usual, highly recommended to back up all important data, mail, contact information, and calendars if you plan to test upgrading to 11.10.

Amarok 2.4.3

The Amarok folks have just released the latest version of the popular music player. Work has been done to improve the interface, drag-and-drop inside of collections, and dynamic playlists are some of the new things to be found.

Muon Software Center

Kubuntu has switched to providing the Muon Software Center and Muon Package manager by default. The Muon package management suite is tightly integrated with the Debian package management system (all Ubuntu flavors use under the hood) for better performance and more reliable results.

Additional information about this release of Kubuntu can be found here.

Xubuntu

Xubuntu has replaced gdm with lightdm as the application that manages logins. Automatic logins will not work with lightdm at the present time. We are sure lightdm is going to provide a much better experience for users than gdm.

Pastebinit is now included in Xubuntu intallations by default. If you need to use http://paste.ubuntu.com/, you can use pastebinit in terminals to paste directly without copying and pasting the data.

The developers have replaced mousepad with leafpad as the text editor. leafpad now includes the ability to print, and is better maintained than mousepad.

The onscreen keyboard, Onboard, is now included in the default Xubuntu menus, under Accessories. For those who require an onscreen keyboard, this will be much easier to access using only a mouse or touchpad.

Astute users will observe a new plymouth splash screen in use. Unfortunately, we have found that occasionally, when using the desktop cd to install, the message “hit any key to continue” will 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.

Bluetooth does not work at the present time in Xubuntu. Please see the bug below. A workaround is to install ‘blueman’ to manage bluetooth.

The Xubuntu developers and contributors had a discussion about replacing the Gimp with an application to assist with digital photos. As a result, gThumb has been added to the default installation. This application is designed to help with image transformations and viewing.

Edubuntu

Edubuntu inherits all the changes that occurs in the Ubuntu desktop.

The default desktop environment is now Unity with fallback to Unity 2D when the hardware doesn’t support running the 3D version. Gnome 3 Fallback (which uses an updated gnome-panel) is available for those who want it through an option in the installer.

One of our goal for this release is to improve our translation support. Oneiric Ocelot Beta 1 is the first release of Edubuntu to feature a fully translated installer. If it’s not accurate for your language, please help translating it! LTSP Live has been re-written and is now fully translatable and network-manager aware.

This beta also offers a refreshed look and feel with a new wallpaper and login screen.

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

Mythbuntu

Mythbuntu oneiric has transitioned over to the quicker lightdm desktop manager and brings updated builds of MythTV. Still on the 0.24 series, but growing more and more stable with each new build. In line with the rest of Ubuntu, it now ships software center rather than synaptic.

Lubuntu

Lubuntu is a flavor of Ubuntu based on the LXDE desktop environment. The goal is to provide a very lightweight distribution, with all the advantages of the Ubuntu world (repositories, support …). With many LXDE components, Lubuntu also uses well-known applications, such as Chromium, Openbox, Pidgin … (More informations on applications used or on the Lubuntu project are available on the wiki.).

Known issues

As is to be expected, at this stage of the release process, there are still some significant known bugs that users may run into with the Oneiric Beta 1 Release. 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

usb-creator is currently unable to create EFI-bootable USB sticks. (702283)
In the Ubuntu live system, the panel shows an indicator with “[Invalid UTF-8]”. (837246)
In some cases, booting the live system takes a long time until the desktop starts. (791139)
When overwriting an existing installation in the Ubiquity desktop installer, it creates a new swap partition instead of re-using the already existing one. (782507)
Ubiquity desktop installer proceeds to use free space without warning, if sufficient free space exists, and “install alongside” is selected, then clicking on the forward button just begins the installation without warning. (766265)
ARM Desktop installations sometimes crash during the OEM configuration step or upgrades, due to a race condition in flash-kernel. (779410)
No support for Panda ES2.0 (prerelease) dev boards. Use an older x-loader/u-boot if needed. (837235).
omap3/omap4 netboot images are known to be too small with the Beta 1 release (806751).
omap3 netboot fails to leave system in a bootable state. Need to add ROOT= to the boot cmdline (820621).
Selecting “Configure encrypted volumes” in the alternate/server installer initialises encrypted volumes from scratch, and will destroy any encrypted data that was previously present. There is no way to reuse an existing encrypted volume at installation time at the moment, although we do consider this a bug that will be fixed in a future release. (420080)
In OEM install mode, the text in the language selection during the end user configuration dialog is very hard to read. (838672)
OEM install mode is not working on DVDs. (837503)
Server images do not support installation on EFI systems. This will be fixed in Beta-2. (837332)

Upgrades

During upgrade a debconf prompt about DM to use is displayed (806559)
Ubuntu 11.10 has migrated away from /var/run, /var/lock and /dev/shm and now uses /run, /run/lock and /run/shm instead (respectively). While the Ubuntu AppArmor packages and shipped policy have been adjusted for this, custom policy may need to be updated. The following my be used to aid in migration (it allows both the old an the new paths):
$ sed -i -e ‘s#/var/run#/{,var/}run#’ -e ‘s#/var/lock#/{run,var}/lock#’ -e ‘s#/dev/shm/#/{dev,run}/shm/#’
Graphics and Display

We had to revert from unity-window-decorator to gtk-window-decorator for performance reasons. This means that the “1 px border” for resizing window is back temporarily.
Unity 2D is not working on KVM with xen and cirrus video devices. As a workaround, use the -vga vmware option. (759803)
Since Unity is in active development right now, please check the unity bug reports before filing new bugs.

Desktop

Pressing the physical power button immediately shuts down the machine, instead of asking what to do. (837266)
On ARM OMAP4 installations, Firefox currently crashes on start. (837685)
Installing with Chinese (Simplified) creates broken localization (771510)

Kernel
Sandy Bridge power regression from kernel 3.0.0-6 to 3.0.0-7 (30% more power at idle) (818830)

Ubuntu Server
When running an i386 system under a virtual machine without enough memory allocated a kernel error is detected during installation. (790712)
Authenticated and unauthenicated iscsi clients fails to complete boot. (838809)
Installation on EFI systems is currently not possible, but should be available in post beta daily images. (837332)
In the nova-compute component of openstack, console.log grows indefinitely which could be a security concern. (832507)
nova requires the addition of –use_deprecated_auth in /etc/nova.conf, due to a late change of keystone becoming the upstream default. (838768)
Oneiric Eucalyptus fails to start up, upstream are tracking this issue (791607)

Kubuntu

kubuntu-full doesn’t install complete system – If installing from the Kubuntu DVD, a fully functional system isn’t installed. To work around this for Oneiric Beta 1, use the text mode installer and select both the kubuntu-desktop and kubuntu-full tasks. (838325)
Shutdown in the live session under VirtualBox sometimes does not work and seems to just hang on the desktop. Just restart the computer with the power button in that case, there is no possibility of data loss. (805906)

Xubuntu
There are three terminals in the menus, the normal one is in Accessories (836311)
Bluetooth fails for those users attempting to use. Gnome-control-center is not being installed due to numberous dependencies (831488)
oneconf-service will crash when updating and when the system is idle for an unspecified period of time (829570)
oneconf-query will crash when updating and when the system is idle for an unspecified period of time (616463)

Ubuntu Core

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

Mythbuntu

AMD64 images are oversized. Have to be burned to USB sticks or DVDs.
Tray icons are broken for Jockey and Network Manager. They’ll be fixed for beta 2.
Some parts of the installer remain sensitive when they shouldn’t be allowing options that shouldn’t be selectable normally.

Lubuntu

Generic icon for network-manager (819617)
Generic icon for jockey (819542)