Please see the Precise blueprint list for details.

Please test and report any bugs you find:

• http://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

General

Until Ubuntu 11.10, the Unix group for administrators with root privileges through sudo had been admin. Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it is now sudo, for compatibility with Debian and sudo itself. However, for backwards compatibility, admin group members are still recognized as administrators.

Automatic Apport crash reporting has been enabled by default again to catch problems early on. It now checks for duplicates on the client side, which will avoid uploading debug data and creating Launchpad bug reports unnecessarily in many cases now.

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 testing branch, others have been explicitly pulled in for 12.04 Precise Pangolin.

For a list of all packages being accepted for 12.04 Precise Pangolin, please subscribe to precise-changes: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/precise-changes

Linux kernel 3.2

Alpha-2 includes the 3.2.0-12.21 Ubuntu kernel which is based on the most recent v3.2.2 upstream stable kernel. This is an update from the 3.2.0-2.5 which was shipped in Alpha-1 and based on upstream v3.2-rc3. As with Alpha-1, the Alpha-2 kernel no longer carries a separate amd64 -server and -generic kernel flavor. These have been merged to help reduce the maintenance burder over the life of this LTS release. AUFS also remains disabled in the Alpha-2 kernel. Anyone neeing AUFS is encouraged to migrate to overlayfs. We have pulled in the latest overlayfs updates to the Alpha-2 kernel. We have also dropped a set of seccomp_filter patches we were carrying as there were no consumers of these patches at this time. We will re-evaluate their necessity in future Ubuntu releases. We do have some notable additions to mention as well for the Alpha-2 kernel. We've backported an improved set of jack detection patches from the upstream v3.3 kernel. A set of kexec fixes for arm from v3.3-rc1 have also been backported. We've also conducted an extensive review of Ubuntu kernel configs and made numerous config changes as a result.

Upstart 1.4

Upstart 1.4 provides a number of minor fixes, improved documentation, a number of new features including:

• New "setuid" and "setgid" stanzas to allow a job to be run as a specified user.

• Default logging of job output:

  • All job output is logged to "/var/log/upstart/<job>.log" by default.

  • Log files are rotated daily by default using logrotate(8). See "/etc/logrotate.d/upstart".

  • Logging can be controlled via the console stanza and by new command-line options "--default-console", "--logdir" and "--no-log".

  • Improved "upstart-udev-bridge" to handle bad hardware that exposes garbage data to userspace.

For further details see init(5), init(8), upstart-events(7) and The Upstart Cookbook.

Toolchain

Desktop

• Until Ubuntu 11.10, the Unix group for administrators with root privileges through sudo had been admin. Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it is now sudo, for compatibility with Debian and sudo itself. However, for backwards compatibility, admin group members are still recognized as administrators.
• Automatic Apport crash reporting has been enabled by default again to catch problems early on. It now checks for duplicates on the client side, which will avoid uploading debug data and creating Launchpad bug reports unnecessarily in many cases now.

• The default music player has been switched to Rhythmbox. There is no UbuntuOne Music Store yet, this still needs to be ported to GTK 3.

• LibreOffice has been updated to 3.5 beta 2. Please report any regressions that you notice.

• When installing new software through software-center, corresponding language support packages (translations, spell check modules particular to that software, help files, etc.) are now installed along automatically. This removes the need to open "Language Support" after installing new software.

• Only Alternate images are available for Alpha 2
• A new software-center optimized for Lubuntu available by default.

Ubuntu Studio

• On the pre-installed ARM images, sometimes the installer packages are not removed after first-boot setup, which will cause the first-boot setup to be re-run after next boot. The workaround is to manually remove the packages ubiquity oem-config oem-config-gtk jasper. (871785)

• There is no network support on some Beagle board versions. (838200)

• Users of VMWare Workstation 8 or VMWare Player may experience boot problems. (858122)

• If you are installing Ubuntu on a windows system, you may run into a race condition that causes the installer to crash. A fix for this will be available in the dailies soon. (912031)

• Some systems with nVidia hardware are seeing a kernel NULL pointer dereference at 00000000000001f0. This is under investigation. (92440)

Upgrades

• The ia32-libs package that used to provide 32-bit libraries on 64-bit (amd64) installations has been removed in favour of multiarch. Systems using ia32-libs must migrate to multiarch in order to upgrade to 12.04. In most cases, this should be set up automatically by the upgrade process. Some users who upgraded through previous development releases may have removed /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch, and must restore it with the contents foreign-architecture i386 in order to have 32-bit library support in 12.04.

• In some cases, the package manager in Ubuntu 11.10 may not be able to decide on a correct unpack ordering when upgrading 64-bit systems with the ia32-libs package installed; if this is the case, it will fail before starting to unpack any new packages with a message something like "Couldn't configure pre-depend libtinfo5 for libncurses5, probably a dependency cycle". A workaround is to install the apt and libapt-pkg4.12 packages from precise before starting the upgrade. (924079)

• Landscape is currently incompatible with multiarch. We hope that this will be fixed in time for 12.04; but if you are using Landscape then you will need to either remain with 11.10 or remove any 32-bit libraries.

Graphics and Display

• On Intel N10 Graphics, plugging in external monitor to VGA port makes both displays corrupted with thick slanted lines. (830949)

• Remote Desktop does not work with the -fglrx video driver, nor with the legacy nvidia drivers. You can establish a connection but the remote screen does not update. As a workaround use Unity2d, or switch to the free drivers or nvidia-current. (772873, 918815 )

• The Onboard window in Unity2d when maximized puts the window on top of everything and has no window controls when maximised as it refuses focus, and you can't double click the title bar to restore it. Once maximised your only real option is to switch to another workspace using a hard keyboard ctrl+alt+arrow keys then run gconf-editor and in the apps\onboard section change the height, or reboot into Unity3d and double click or drag down the top panel. (859288).

• Maximized windows can be accidentally closed from wrong monitor.(865701)

• For languages that are read right to left (arabic, hebrew), there is some inconsistency in display between the login screen (lightDM) and the desktop environment (unity). (871764, 834386)

Desktop

• Sometimes when locking the screen, a "num lock is on" warning may appear even though num lock isn't actually on. (841541)

Kernel

• Sandy Bridge power regression still present (30% more power at idle) (818830) -- Platforms affected by this power consumption regression are sixth generation i915 GPUs having the following PCI identifiers: 8086:0102, 8086:0112, 8086:0122, 8086:0106, 8086:0116, 8086:0126, 8086:010A. A nice summary of the issue written by Eugeni Dodonov of Intel can be read here. RC6 will remain disabled by default for 12.04 due to the potential issues such as hangs or graphics corruption. If you do choose to enable RC6 (ie boot with i915.i915_enable_rc6=1) please let us know if you experience any problems.

Ubuntu Server

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Ubuntu Cloud

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Ubuntu Core

• DRM libraries are always installed, even for users who are not enabling graphical environments (819802)

Edubuntu

• As Edubuntu includes a standard Ubuntu desktop, most of the issues above also apply to Edubuntu.

Xubuntu

• When using the new plymouth splash screen, occasionally using the desktop cd to install, the message "hit any key to continue" does not appear. Should you get a black screen with text and the sliding throbber, when the throbber stops moving and the cd ejects, remove the cd and hit enter on the keyboard to continue.(872472)

• Was required to enter new account name and password both in wubi.exe and in the second phase Xubuntu installer. This should be fixed in an upcoming daily build. (924899, 924535)

Lubuntu

• Ubiquity requires more than 4 Gb of free space to install, please use alternate ISO if you are in this case (775124)

• Keyboard layout can't be saved using LXKeymap. Please run "sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration" (729880)

• In persistent mode, items created on the desktop are not displayed until next reboot. (837470)

• Lubuntu xfce4-power-manager displays a "broken" icon in lxpanel. (871553)

Ubuntu Studio

• package flashplugin-downloader 11.0.1.152ubuntu1 failed to install/upgrade. (Bug: 870643)

Mythbuntu

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It should come as no surprise that this Alpha 1 release of Precise Pangolin contains other bugs. Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve the quality of future releases. Please report bugs using the tools provided.

If you want to help out with bugs, the Bug Squad is always looking for help.

Participate in Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

• http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

More information

You can find out more about Ubuntu on the Ubuntu website and Ubuntu wiki.

To sign up for future Ubuntu development announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu's development announcement list at:

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