Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Enters Alpha

Dec 11, 2009

After saying farewell to the functionally replete Ubuntu 9.10, developers are working on the next version, 10.04, which should be particularly stable. The first alpha of its LTS version has now arrived.

Steve Langasek officially announced the Lucid Lynx Alpha 1 on the Ubuntu Announce mailing list. It's quite definitely an unstable test version that should never be used in production and best be installed on a virtual machine if development work is undertaken.

The focus of development is stability. Ubuntu is intended as a long-term release that needs more extended care than the other releases, three years desktop and five years server, and should have a large presence on servers. The idea is to iron out the Karmic Koala bugs and stabilize any newly introduced features. A few changes do exist, such as kernel mode setting for ATI cards and the Plymouth bootmanager.

The alpha already presents a few previews of coming attractions. On board are Kernel version 2.6.32-7.10, X.org 7.5 and GNOME 2.29. HAL has been fully removed. Even a new KDE SC 4.4 beta 1 has found its way into Lucid Alpha 1. Digikam 2 in version 1.0.0 RC1 is included and Webkitde 0.1, along with a new version of Flash Player.

To test the new alpha, either use the existing Karmic installation (see below) or download the ISO for:

Users of NVIDIA cards should use the vesa driver, because nv can lead to crashes, as does a manual partitioning with the graphics installer. To upgrade from Karmic to Lucid alpha, use the command update-manager -d.

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