Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1 is out!

The Ubuntu team today announced the release of the first beta of Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.The final version of Ubuntu 12.10 is expected to be released on October 18, 2012.

Codenamed “Quantal Quetzal”, 12.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

For the client, this release now has a consolidated Ubuntu image. There is no longer a traditional CD sized image, DVD or alternate image, but rather a single 800MB Ubuntu image that can be used from USB or DVD. This change does not affect Ubuntu Server, which remains a traditional CD sized image.

With Ubuntu 12.10, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Studio also reached Beta 1 status today. These images, along with Xubuntu will continue to have daily updates for the remainder of the release.

New features in Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1 Desktop version are:

The consolidated client images now support the logical volume manager (LVM) as well as full disk encryption.
Update Manager has been renamed Software Updater and now checks for updates when launched.
A new X.org stack has been introduced which includes xserver 1.13 candidate versions, mesa 9.0, and updated X libs and drivers.
Unity has been updated to version 6.4 including support for dash previews and coverflow view. Now that compiz with GLES support has landed, unity-3d works again on the pandaboard.
The Ubuntu desktop has begun migrating from Python 2 to Python 3. Most Python applications included in the desktop is now using Python 3, and most Python modules that are included by default are available for both Python 2 and Python 3.

New features in the Ubuntu 12.10 beta server edition are:

ARM hard float (armhf) cloud images are now available.
OpenStack folsom testing packages are available. Openstack instance architecture testing support has been added, as has a heterogenous scheduler for ARM.
Apache Tomcat 7 is now the default supported version.
Ceph has updated to 0.48.1 (upstream argonaut stable release), and includes RADOS Gateway (S3 and Swift Compatible), as well as performance improvements.
Floodlight (Openflow Network Controller) and mininet (Network Simulation) packages are now available.

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