Edubuntu Flight CD 4

Edubuntu Flight CD 4 is now available:

The Edubuntu team is happy to announce Edubuntu Flight 4, the 4th milestone CD image in the Ubuntu 6.04 "Dapper Drake" development cycle.

You can download Edubuntu Flight 4 from the following mirrors:

* Europe:
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/dapper/flight-4/

* United Kingdom, and the rest of the world:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/dapper/flight-4/

A list of other mirrors are also available at:
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Archive

To save on bandwidth, we recommend downloading the images using BitTorrent.

Apart from the notable changes in this release that apply to all Ubuntu flavours, which are listed at:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2006-February/000050.html and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperFlight4

the following additional Edubuntu-specific enhancements have gone into this milestone release:

LTSP Flight 4 Featurelist:

Multiarch Support

* PowerPC support was added. Please note however that there is still a small bug in the chroot handling in the client chroot builder of the installer, please run sudo ltsp-update-kernels manually after installation.

* The multiarch code saw plenty of other improvements and fixes.


Less Memory consumption

* LTSP now finally supports the X_COLOR_DEPTH variable to force the usage of 16Bit on the clients through lts.conf.

* By default we now install only the linux-image package in the client chroot, the excessive memory usage of the restricted modules package is gone

* A special netboot mode was added to initramfs so only network device drivers are loaded, this reduces the size to two thirds of a normal initramfs


Serial Mouse Support

* LTSP now understands the X_MOUSE_DEVICE and X_MOUSE_PROTOCOL lts.conf options and adds support for various serial devices from ipaq touchscreens and over plenty of mouse protocols up to some serial tablets.

* 3 button emulation of 2 button mice is now supported as well.


Bootprocess

* The bootprocess has seen further speed improvements, lts.conf values process code only if they carry a value during startup now.

* As mentioned in a previous section, netboot mode speeds up the loading of the initramfs through the size reduction.

* Startup links in rcS.d and rc2.d are now started based on whitelists (RC2_WHITELIST RCS_WHITELIST), only the bare minimum of processes is started on the thin clients - this results in a shorter boottime.

* Usplash was included and enabled by default, got better default values to prevent it from timing out on very low level clients, you will have bootsplash love all over now


General Improvements

* Many patches were merged from the debian team to make the packages work on debian as well.

* Sound support saw some smaller changes and bugfixes

* The ltsp-build-client script now has options to manually enable extra and security mirrors during chroot creation.

* The default mirror of ltsp-build-client points to archive.ubuntu.com now.


We have working LiveCDs for all arches! Enjoy !

The new artwork infrastructure is in place, you will be able to easily select your theme by age once we have the artwork in place.


Current known issues and bugs in this alpha release include:

* PowerPC LTSP support is still experimental, see the features section for more information.

* As previously mentioned there is a bug in the chroot handling in the client chroot builder of the installer, please run sudo ltsp-update-kernels manually after installation


If you are interested in following changes as we continue to develop Dapper, have a look at the dapper-changes list:

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


Edubuntu Specific Development and News is listed on:

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


We also suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list if you are 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


Please take a look at the testing area of the wiki, which suggests various tests that can be performed on the Flight CD releases to help us to catch any remaining bugs, thus allowing us to fix them well before for the final release:

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/CurrentEdubuntu


Bug reports should go to our Launchpad bug tracking facility called Malone:

https://launchpad.net/malone


Have fun with testing and bugfiling!

Oliver Grawert