"You can’t be friends with a squirrel! A squirrel is just a rat with a cuter outfit."
– Sarah Jessica Parker
Our own squirrel, Xenial Xerus (to become 16.04 LTS), should be much better than your average rat. You can see for yourself, as Alpha 1 has now been released!
This alpha features images for Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, and UbuntuKylin.
Pre-releases of the Xenial Xerus 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 flavor developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this release ready.
Alpha 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.
While these Alpha 1 images have been tested and work, except as noted in the release notes, Ubuntu developers are continuing to improve the Xenial Xerus. In particular, once newer daily images are available, system installation bugs identified in the Alpha 1 installer should be verified against the current daily image before being reported in Launchpad. Using an obsolete image to re-report bugs that have already been fixed wastes your time and the time of developers who are busy trying to make 16.04 the best Ubuntu release yet. Always ensure your system is up to date before reporting bugs.
Lubuntu
Lubuntu is a flavour of Ubuntu based on LXDE and focused on providing a very lightweight distribution.
The Alpha 1 images can be downloaded at: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/xenial/alpha-1/
More information on Lubuntu Alpha-1 can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Alpha1/Lubuntu
Ubuntu MATE
Ubuntu MATE is a flavour of Ubuntu featuring the MATE desktop environment.
The Alpha-1 images can be downloaded at: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/xenial/alpha-1/
More information on Ubuntu MATE Alpha-1 can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Alpha1/UbuntuMATE
UbuntuKylin
UbuntuKylin is a flavour of Ubuntu that is more suitable for Chinese users.
The Alpha-1 images can be downloaded at: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/xenial/alpha-1/
More information on UbuntuKylin Alpha-1 can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/Alpha1/UbuntuKylin
Regular daily images for Ubuntu can be found at: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com
If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop Xenial, we suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases and other interesting events.
A big thank you to the developers and testers for their efforts to
pull together this Alpha release!
Originally posted to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list on Mon Jan 4 19:13:20 UTC 2016 by Walter Lapchynski, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team