Ubuntu Tutorials

I’m sorry this notice is a day late. I didn’t catch it in my Inbox when it first came through–somehow it got filed away without me catching it. In any case, the second Alpha release of the upcoming “Lucid Lynx” release is now available for download. This is a perfect opportunity to fire up Virtualbox on Ubuntu 9.10 and give it a spin–help shape what will become the next flagship LTS (Long Term Supported) release!

Release announcement:

Welcome to Lucid Lynx Alpha 2, which will in time become Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Pre-releases of Lucid are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage.  They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Lucid development cycle.  The Alpha images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Lucid. You can download it here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu)
http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu Server for UEC and EC2)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu ARM)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Edubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/mythbuntu/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Mythbuntu)

See http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mirrors for a list of mirrors.

Alpha 2 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing.  Please refer to http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/alpha2 for information on changes in Ubuntu.

This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.  For a list of known bugs (that you don’t need to report if you encounter), please see:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/alpha2

If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop Lucid, have a look at the lucid-changes mailing list:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/lucid-changes

We also suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list if you’re interested in following Ubuntu development. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases, and other
interesting events.

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce

Bug reports should go to the Ubuntu bug tracker:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

Enjoy!

For those of you that enjoy the bleeding edge and want to help test the next release of Ubuntu, the second Alpha release of 9.10 is now available. You should be warned that this release is not meant for the faint of heart or production machines. It will very likely break before it is done, leaving you with all kinds of interesting problems. On the other hand though, a little bleeding edge never killed anyone (plus, you learn a lot when things break).

Some of the upcoming features in Ubuntu 9.10 are:

• GNOME 2.27.1
• Linux Kernel 2.6.30
• New Intel Video Architecture (testing)
• New default compiler (GCC-4.4 vs GCC-4.3)
• EXT4 filesystem by default (I’m excited about this one!)
• Grub2 by default

If you’d like to help test this release you can find more information regarding known issues, download locations and how to report bugs here. Let the testing begin!

Well its that time again, the Ubuntu community is just about ready to launch another fantastic release and with that release the worlds interweb tubes are going to get clogged as everyone upgrades.  It’s about this time that I always start thinking about ways to be more efficient with my bandwidth.

Bittorrent, of course, is a great improvement over the traditional direct download method but in some cases there are potentially more efficient methods to use.  I’d like to outline (as I do with every release) how to update your current ubuntu images using Jigdo.

Jigdo, if you’re not familiar, takes a current Ubuntu image and compares its contained packages with the packages within an updated image (ie; alpha vs beta, beta vs RC, RC vs final).  Using this method you’re only downloading the packages that have *changed* between images and not the entire image again.  The morning RC was released I used jigdo against my local ubuntu package mirror and had the new image in about a minute!

Installing Jigdo

Jigdo is available within the Ubuntu repositories.  To install Jigdo you can run the command:

sudo aptitude install jigdo-file

Using Jigdo

Jigdo requires a .jigdo file, which outlines what the latest image *should* have, which is then compared to the previous image file that you already have on the machine.  The previous image can be burned and in the drive or loop-mounted (mount -o loop file.iso /mnt).  So, to begin you’ll need to start Jigdo and give it the path to a .jigdo file:

jigdo-lite http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/hardy/ubuntu-8.04-rc-alternate-i386.jigdo

The .jigdo file can be found on most download sites, look for it just below the .iso or .torrent files.

Jigdo will then download that .jigdo file and read the contents of what package versions should be in the latest release.  It will then ask you for the image you want to compare it to, which you can point it to your loaded disk or mounted .iso.

If not much has changed between the images (its *really* efficient for updating dailies!) it should be finished pretty quickly.  The more changes there are the more packages it’ll have to download.  When it has being able to find, or has downloaded the required updated packages, it’ll create a new .iso image for you.  Tada!  You have an upgraded image and you’ve used much less bandwidth than traditional methods.

note: using Jigdo to compare a 7.10 image vs an 8.04 image is not going to offer any improvements–everything has been changed.  It is best used for incremental updates, like beta to RC, RC to final, etc.

For more information on using Jigdo for updating Ubuntu images see the JigdoDownloadHowTo Wiki page.