What's Coming Next

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Maverick Meerkat Alpha 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 10.10, bringing with it the earliest new features for the next version of Ubuntu.

Updated Packages

As with every new release, packages--applications and software of all kinds--are being updated at a rapid pace. Many of these packages came from an automatic sync from Debian's Unstable branch. The period of automatic syncs has stopped now, so from now on there will be fewer changes.

For a list of all packages being accepted for 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, please subscribe to maverick-changes:

• https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/maverick-changes

GNOME

The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.31 versions. This particularly includes the new dconf and gsettings API. Evolution was updated to the 2.30 version, which operates much faster compared to the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

KDE

KDE was updated to the current 4.5 RC 1 release.

Qt

Qt was updated to the current 4.7 beta release.

Unity

The new Unity interface is now the default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. This includes the global menu bar as part of the default interface. Please note that applications still retain the menu in their own window as long as the global menu bar is still being tested and fixed.

Linux kernel 2.6.35

Alpha 2 includes the 2.6.35-6.7 kernel based on 2.6.35-rc3.

This kernel includes new security enhancements. Of major note is the change the default behavior of PTRACE which is used by gdb, strace, ltrace, etc. The behavior for 10.10 is that only child processes can be PTRACEd, due to the default value of "1" in/proc/sys/kernel/ptrace_scope. This value may be inappropriate for some development systems and servers with only admin accounts. If using "sudo" for PTRACE is not desired, please change this value to "0".

New cloud-init features

cloud-init, the configurable initialization process for Ubuntu Server cloud images, has gained new features in Maverick Alpha 2, including pluggable hooks, ebsmount, ext4 support, and new stanzas in the cloud-config format.

Installation

The new btrfs file system may now be used during installation via manual partitioning, as long as /boot is on some other file system. (At the moment, this only works on the alternate and server CDs.)