Booting the Xubuntu USB image from a CD

May 3, 2013 — —

Due to the size of the Xubuntu ISOs starting from Raring (13.04), they no longer fit on a standard CD. This guide will help you if your BIOS doesn’t support booting off of USB drives by showing you how to use Plop boot manager.

Getting Plop

You can download the most recent version here (plpbt-*). At the time of writing, the newest version is plpbt-5.0.14.zip (2012-02-11).

Executing Plop

The burning process is similar as documented on the Ubuntu wiki.

Main contents of the downloaded archive should be:

1README.TXT  Instructional Readme.
plpbt.bin    Boot manager binary
plpbt.img    Boot manager floppy disk image
plpbt.iso    Boot manager CD ISO
plpbtrom.bin Boot manager ROM file for the BIOS

doc/          Documentation
experimental/ Experimental versions
pcmcia/       PCMCIA version of the boot manager
Linux/        Linux related programs
Windows/      Windows related programs

You will then have to create your bootable USB device (flash drive) as documented in the installation section of the Ubuntu wiki.

After you create both the bootable USB device and Plop CD, place the CD in the CD drive, and power off the computer. After you power off, place the USB device in the computer and turn the computer on, you may need to go into the BIOS settings and configure it to boot from CD first.

After you boot into Plop from the CD, you should see a “USB” item on the menu that will appear (as pictured to the right), select it with the Down arrow key, then hit Enter to boot.

If everything has gone as expected, Xubuntu live desktop should boot from USB. Enjoy!

Xubuntu 13.04 is here!

April 25, 2013 — , —

The Xubuntu team is glad to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 13.04!

Xubuntu 13.04 will be supported for 9 months and will need other media such as a USB device or a DVD to install. Read more below.

Download Xubuntu 13.04 here!

What’s new in Xubuntu 13.04?

Xubuntu 13.04 is mostly a maintenance release, and there aren’t many new features. However, there are some changes, which include:

  • Gnumeric and GIMP are reintroduced on the ISO
  • New application versions: Catfish 0.6.3 and Parole 0.5.0 with many bug fixes
  • Updates for the Greybird theme and a new wallpaper
  • Duplicate partitions are no longer shown on desktop or Thunar
  • Updated documentation

Notes

Starting with 13.04, Xubuntu will have a support period of 9 months for the interim (non-LTS) releases. To read more about the background for the support window and maintenance changes, refer to the Ubuntu Technical Board meeting minutes from 18th of March.

Also starting with 13.04, the Xubuntu images will not fit on standard CDs. This is an effect of changing the target size to a 1GB USB device. To install Xubuntu 13.04 and beyond, you will need other media such as a USB device or a DVD. The Xubuntu 13.04 image size is approximately 800 MB.

To read the complete release notes including technical overview, refer to the Ubuntu 13.04 Release Notes.

Xubuntu Beta 2 is out!

April 5, 2013 — —

The Xubuntu team is glad to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 13.04 Beta 2!

Note: Starting from 13.04, the Xubuntu images will not fit on standard CDs any more. This affects the Beta 2 images as well. To install Xubuntu you will need other media such as a USB device or a DVD. The Xubuntu 13.04 Beta 2 image size is approximately 800 MB.

Xubuntu 13.04 is mostly a maintenance release, and there won’t be too many new features. In Beta 2, we’ve fixed the following bugs:

  • Documentation is updated to 13.04
  • New version of Catfish (0.6.1) is included and fixes a lot of bugs
  • More updates for the Greybird theme

In addition, new features and bug fixes introduced in Beta 1 and earlier include:

  • Gnumeric and GIMP are reintroduced
  • New version of Parole (0.5.0) is included
  • Duplicate partitions are no longer shown on desktop or Thunar
  • Some updates for the Greybird theme

Download

Please note that the Beta 2 version is not suitable for production machines or anybody who doesn’t wish to have an unstable system. If you want to help Xubuntu testing the new release and are wondering how to help, please refer to our article on Testing Raring.

Those who are fine with having an unstable and promise to do backups before upgrading or installing can download Xubuntu 13.04 Beta 2 here.

Announcing Xubuntu 13.04 Beta 1

March 14, 2013 — —

The Xubuntu team is glad to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 13.04 Beta 1!

Note: Starting from 13.04, the Xubuntu images will not fit on standard CDs any more. This affects the Beta 1 images as well. To install Xubuntu, you will need other media such as a USB device or a DVD. The Xubuntu 13.04 Beta 1 image size is approximately 850 MB.

Xubuntu 13.04 is mostly a maintenance release, and there won’t be too many new features. New features and bug fixes worth mentioning in Beta 1 include:

  • Gnumeric and GIMP are reintroduced
  • New version of Parole (0.5.0) is included
  • Duplicate partitions are no longer shown on desktop or Thunar
  • Some updates for the Greybird theme

Download

Please note that the Beta 1 version is not suitable for production machines or anybody who doesn’t wish to have an unstable system.

If you want to help Xubuntu testing the new release and are wondering how to help, please refer to our article on Testing Raring. This article will be appropriate for daily images as well as Beta 2 images which will be released later.

Those who are fine with having an unstable and promise to do backups before upgrading or installing can download Xubuntu 13.04 Beta 1 here.

Want to help out Xubuntu? Test Raring!

March 11, 2013 — —

It’s again the time to call for more testers – Xubuntu Raring beta 1 is around.

Why help with testing?

Testing is an excellent and easy way to get involved with Xubuntu. It’s a vital part of our release cycle and anyone with a virtual machine (or even better, a spare computer!) can help out with it. When you do testing you will work with most of the people involved in Xubuntu. Don’t be afraid, we won’t bite you!

What do I need to do?

There are different ways of testing the ISOs for all of our releases. Here’s a quick overview of the different tests we need to run:

  1. Installation testing to make sure our ISO’s are installable
  2. Live CD testing to make sure the live CD environment works as expected (and to make sure persistency works on live USB)
  3. Post-installation testing to make sure our applications work as expected
  4. Upgrade testing to make sure upgrades from old releases work as expected

All the results from different tests are reported and recorded on the Ubuntu ISO Tracker. You will need a Ubuntu Single Sign-On account to log in and send results.

Finally, to run a test and report it so it helps the Xubuntu team, you need to do the following:

  1. Go to the Ubuntu ISO Tracker and Log in
  2. Click Raring Beta 1 and select your infrastructure from the Xubuntu product at the bottom of the page
  3. Download the appropriate ISO (see Link to download information at the top of the page for download links as well as zsync commands)
  4. Select a test you want to run – it’s best to start with an installation test and then advance to post-installation tests to get the most out of your time
  5. On any test page, you should see the testcase instructions (if you don’t, click on Testcase) and follow them step by step
  6. If you find bugs while running the test, add them to the report and if they don’t exist, file them
  7. In the Bugs to look for section you will see bugs that people have been experiencing with the same test before – specifically look out for these
  8. Once you’ve finished with the testcase, report your results; select the overall result for the test and list any bugs you experienced during testing. Remember to click Submit result when you’re done – if you don’t do this, the Xubuntu team doesn’t get any benefit from the test!

Need more information or help?

All of the different testing areas for Xubuntu follow more or less the same pattern. To get detailed instructions with pictures on how to report test results refer to the ISO testing Walkthrough on the Ubuntu wiki. You can also ask for help in our developer IRC channel #xubuntu-devel on Freenode.

Once you get more into testing, there are ways to make downloading the latest images and testing them easier for you. These include but are not limited to zsyncing new images, using Testdrive to manage your tests, etc… To read more about the Ubuntu Testing framework and the Ubuntu Quality Assurance team, read the QA Team wiki.

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