Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 5 has been released:

Flight 5, the latest alpha of Dapper Drake, is available. These releases are tested to be reasonably free of show stopper bugs, but are obiviously still alpha quality, so do not use these on your production systems. You can download the Flight 5 cd here:

Europe:
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/dapper/flight-5/ (Ubuntu)
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/dapper/flight-5/ (Edubuntu)

United Kingdom, and the rest of the world:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/dapper/flight-5/ (Ubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/dapper/flight-5/ (Edubuntu)

The Kubuntu images were not ready at the time of this announcement, but they will be in the near future and will be announced then.

Please download using BitTorrent if possible, and see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Archive for other mirrors.

A list of notable changes in this release across the whole distribution is available here, thanks to Matt Galvin:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/flight5

Significant changes affecting the installer and live CD include:

* A much improved version of Espresso, the live CD based installer is included. It still has bugs, but we encourage everybody to test it and file bugs about any bugs you find.

Unfortunately, due to a programming error, it will in many cases not work correctly on PowerPC. We are sorry for this and will correct this before the next Flight.

* A new default theme has been included.

* NetworkManager has received a lot of attention and bugfixes and should work much better with the rest of the system now.

* A range of ATI cards which were previously unsupported (some of the high-end X850 cards) are now supported.

* The X autoconfiguration on AMD64 has been improved to use information from the screen, not just the graphics card.

* New development version of GNOME is included.

Some known bugs:

* PowerPC has problems with the keymap selector which will make the installer fail completely. The keyboard selection is also a complete dummy and won't actually set up your keyboard.

* Both the NetworkManager applet and the GNOME wireless applet is included in the taskbar.

* The OpenOffice.org menus and the new theme interacts in an unfortunate way which ends up with the menus being transparent. This has already been fixed, but the fix wasn't ready when the installation CDs were made.

* The new theme is very orange. A less orange version has already been uploaded after user feedback told use the theme was too bright.

If you're interested in following changes as we further develop Dapper, have a look at the dapper-changes list:

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

The Testing area of the wiki suggests various tests that can be performed on Flight CD releases to try to catch bugs far enough before the final release that they can be fixed:

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing

Bug reports should go here:

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bugs