Introducing Xubuntu 12.10 Beta 2

The Xubuntu team is glad to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 12.10 Beta 2!

Along with new features and completely new looks, Beta 2 comes with other changes too: the Xubuntu team has decided to drop the alternate images at least for 12.10 due to the lack of manpower.

New features include:

Notable bug fixes include:

  • ISO now fits on a standard 700M CD
  • No more window traces or “black on black” in installer

Known issues:

  • The messaging indicator is not available for 12.10
  • Duplicated partitions might be shown at Thunar sidebar and desktop

Offline documentation rewritten for 12.10

When you go to “Help” in the main menu in Xubuntu Firefox will launch and bring you to an offline documentation page where users can learn the basics.

After a couple of cycles without updates, the Xubuntu team worked hard this cycle to take a fresh look at the documentation. The team spent time reorganizing the structure, updating to reflect current default applications and in many cases completely rewriting whole sections. The look was also refreshed to reflect the current style and branding that the project has adopted.

The team would like to formally thank the following volunteers who made this effort possible:

Pasi Lallinaho (knome) for leading up the effort in lieu of a formal Documentation Lead this cycle. Pasi also contributed directly to the documentation itself, tracked reviews, updated documentation branding, converted everything back into DocBook and worked with the Ubuntu Doc team to get the documentation uploaded and released before the documentation freeze.

Elizabeth Krumbach (lyz) for setting up, hosting and maintaining the wiki that was used by the team during the rewrite and coordinating some of the work between volunteers and the Ubuntu Doc team.

Sean Davis (smd-seandavis), Jack Fromm (jjfrv8-gmail), Kev (elfy) and Jay van Cooten (skippersboss) for their extensive edits both the writing of the documentation and efforts during the rushed review process.

But that’s not all…

The work of a documentation writer is never truly finished! The team has already defined several areas where we’d like to improve upon the documentation for the 13.04 cycle, including: improvements to packaging, translations support, routine documentation review and expanding some of the shorter sections.

To see the complete and current list of things we are planning to improve even further, see our documentation blueprint for the R cycle. If you want to help us with the planning, want to take part in the discussion or want to get your hands dirty when it’s time to work again, subscribe to the blueprint, apply to the xubuntu-doc Launchpad team and be in touch with us (see the starting points at Get Involved)!

No Quantal Beta 1 for Xubuntu

You may have noticed in the release announcement for Beta 1 today from Kate Stewart this line:

“With Ubuntu 12.10, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Studio also reached Beta 1 status today. These images, along with Xubuntu will continue to have daily updates for the remainder of the release.”

You read right, Xubuntu didn’t release a Beta 1 this time around but we are continuing to work on our daily builds.

Currently we’re working to get the image to fit on a single CD, fix up some visual regressions and there are a few outstanding bugs that we really want to tackle. We putting all our effort into getting this all completed so we can have have a great Beta 2 release!

If you download one of the daily images, you will notice new features, including:

  • Updated artwork, including new wallpaper, documentation looks and updates to LightDM, Greybird and Ubiquity slideshow
  • New versions of Catfish and Parole.

For more details, visit the Quantal Quetzal Beta 1 Technical Overview and browse to the Xubuntu sections.

LTS upgrade time!

Xubuntu 12.04.1 has been released today along with the rest of the Ubuntu flavors. This means everybody on 10.04 are able to upgrade to 12.04.1 at their convenience. Users on 10.04 should get an upgrade notification when booting their systems up the next time.

Users using Xubuntu 12.04 will be upgraded to 12.04.1 automatically along with normal upgrades.

Xubuntu 12.10 alpha 3 released

The Xubuntu team is proud to announce the Alpha3 release of Xubuntu 12.10, Quantal Quetzal!

We don’t have any major changes from the Alpha2, but there are a few known issues you should be aware of:

  • There are no alternate images for this release
  • The image is still oversized for 700M CDs (see related bugs: 1028486, 1029552), please use a USB stick, DVD or other method for installing these oversized images
  • All applications using Gtk3 currently have some mismatched colors in menus and buttons because of a bug in the Unico engine (1016713). A fix has been applied upstream but has not yet made it to Xubuntu.
  • The installer locks when attempting to do the “Install Xubuntu 12.10 alongside…” auto-resize (1027461), manual method for editing partitions and resizing works

Visit the download page to give it a try. Be sure to report your testing results to help the Xubuntu developers – see the ISO testing tracker. Bugs can be reported in Launchpad. If you are looking for support, please see the #ubuntu+1 IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Before testing this release, make sure to review the release notes.

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