UbuntuUpdates.org

After waiting for a month and a half, the new version of skype is finally available in a repository and can be easily installed. Check out the Canonical Partner PPA. Version 4.0.0.7 was just uploaded.

See the Skype blog for details about what's new in version 4.

The latest version of Virtualbox, 4.1.16, is available in the Virtualbox.org contrib PPA. Compatibility with kernel 3.4, several regressions were fixed and also a major crash issue was resolved for OSX 10.8.

Here is the changelog.

It's a bug fixes and translations releases and is currently only in the proposed repositories for precise.

http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.8.3.php :
"Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come."

For once, it's Chrome that is playing catchup with Firefox as tab sync has been in Firefox for a long time. But here it is, Chrome stable is now at version 19. Here's an extract from the "Chrome Releases" blog:

Chrome 19 Stable Channel Update
"The Google Chrome team is happy to announce the arrival of Chrome 19 to the Stable Channel for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame. Chrome 19 contains a number of new features like tab sync. More detailed updates are available on the Chrome Blog."

Find it in the Google Chrome repository.

The final version of Firefox 12 is ready for Ubuntu users in the Ubuntu Mozilla Security. The release notes are pretty short and that's because there are few changes for non Windows users.
Expect the new version to also land in the official repositories in a few days.

The new version of Unity is in Precise. The version is 5.10.0 and as can be seen in the changelog, it includes tons of bug fixes. Not a whole lot of new features, but webupd8 describes what has changed.

Live Tab Syncing is the slogan for the new version of Google Chrome Beta that became available today in the Google Chrome repository. If you open a tab in one location ,move to another computer and then sign in, you can immediately get back to the original tab.

The blog post is low on details, but the Chromium changelog has the full list of changes. Be aware that it's a massive page and it might make your browser sad.

After a year and 4 months of development, the new version of MythTV has been released. It supports various new video acceleration standards and a new plugin API among other things.

It's available in the MythTV 0.25 for Natty, Oneiric and Precise and it's also in the official repository for precise.

Despite the recent announcement that Adobe will stop supporting Linux except in Chrome in the near future, there was a new version of Adobe Flash released on March 28th. It brings multithreaded video decoding to browsers. According to the release notes that eliminates jitter in live streams and can increase the frame rate up to 50%.

The new version is available in all Ubuntu official repositories as well as in the Canonical Partner and in google-chrome-stable.

Google Chrome 18 was released on March 28th. It includes lots of bug fixes and fancier graphics.

It's available in Google own repository as google-chrome-stable but also in the official repos for lucid, maverick, natty, oneiric and precise.

For the moment, google-chrome-beta is at the same version as stable 18.0.1025.151, while google-chrome-unstable is at version 19.0.1084.15.

MySQL 5.5.22 is available in the mysql-5.5 PPA. It's available in Natty, Oneiric and Precise. It's a bug fix release that addresses a possible loss of data on update, a bug where master and slave could go out of sync...

Note that mysql-5.5 was also uploaded to the official repository of Precise 12.04. Official repos of Oneiric and previous releases are still on Mysql 5.1.

FreeNX, the fast remote desktop software, does not get frequent updates. In fact it skipped Maverick, Natty and Oneiric entirely. So when it becomes available in a new release of Ubuntu, it needs to be noticed and appreciated.

And there is a new version in Precise, freenx-server is available in the FreeNX Stable PPA for 12.04. It is the same version (0.7.3) that was available in Lucid so don't expect any major improvement.

FreeNX can be a bit tricky to configure, but it's a remarkable challenger to VNC because of its performance that make it feel like you're using a local desktop environment even when when you don't have a broadband network connection.

gnome-shell version 3.4.0, gnome-desktop3 and friends became available in the Precise Proposed repository tonight.

3.4 is the newest release candidate of Gnome and it's also known as version 3.3.92. You can find the list of new features at Gnome 3.4 features

I decided to let all UbuntuUpdates comments on posts and PPAs to DISQUS . I hope this system will be more familiar to users than the custom comments that were used before. It will also bring a few improvements:

• Users will be able to track responses to their comments more easily by relying on DISQUS to notify them if they want to.
• Commenters will have to identify themselves which should eliminate spam and allow the legitimate users to respond to others with more confidence.
• In the end, I hope this will enrich the conversations and help spread the information.

Try it out. Let me know if you like the new system.

It's this time of the year again and the old no longer supported release must make space for the new one. Karmic packages have been purged and Oneiric 11.10 packages just got imported and will all be tracked from now on.

Let me know if you have any question about UbuntuUpdates package tracking.

I'm one of those Ubuntu users who tries to avoid reboots unless absolutely necessary. I typically have at least 10 applications running, each one of them with 1 to 3 windows spread out over 4 viewports (terminals, browser, thunderbird, kate text editors, spreadsheets...). In other words rebooting, restarting gdm or compiz and setting everything back in place is a lengthy process.
Regardless, memory leaks are slow killers, the "restart" workarounds cannot be asked from the average user and all leaks eventually make the desktop unstable. It's disappointing to see leaks as big as those make their way into core components of Ubuntu.

But unfortunately, there are two major ones in Natty.

Are you affected too?

You probably are and you will notice if you let your computer run with unity for more than a day. To verify simply run this command in a terminal:

ps -eo rss,vsz,pid,cmd,cputime | sort -n | tail -20

At the bottom of the list, you'll find the biggest memory guzzlers on the system. Repeat the test every few hours and watch the rss and vsz numbers grow for the compiz and nm-applet processes.

Compiz

Compiz (0.9.4) with Unity (3.8.12). My own experience on 2 separate laptops shows about 100MB lost per day (rss). There is a bug in Launchpad, the number is 720446: possible memory leak in compiz when using places, dashboard. The bug was marked Critical/In progress back in February, it was apparently fixed then but it came back in April. There's still no fix as of April 5th 2011.

When unity is run long enough without a restart, the system becomes unresponsive.

To clear up the memory, restart Unity (use Alt-F2):

unity --replace

That messes up with windows which get all shuffled up but at least, there's no need to exit gdm completely and restart applications.

nm-applet

nm-applet is the network indicator at the top right of the screen. It belongs to the network-manager-gnome package and it's also shamelessly spilling memory, about 50MB per day in my measurements.

In this case too, there is a bug report: 780602: nm-applet leaks memory and stops functioning after a while.
User JKL apparently found the root cause of it in glib and proposed a fix. Given how core glib is, my expectations for a quick fix release are low.

The workaround is to restart nm-applet once in a while.

There are several MySQL forks out there. The 3 most popular ones can be setup from repositories in Ubuntu:

Drizzle: it's a complete fork, the guys at drizzle.org want to build a new database using MySQL only as a starting point. In their own words: "The Drizzle team has removed non-essential code, has re-factored the remaining code, and has converted the code to modern C++ and modern libraries.". And the best thing is that it's about to release its first GA binaries.
• MariaDB: Founded by Michael Monty Widenius, who is also the original author of MySQL, MariaDB is a drop in replacement for MySQL. They provide enhancements over the regular MySQL database and regularly sync up with the official MySQL tree. Finally, MariaDB ships with the XtraDB, the DB engine derived from InnoDB and developed by Percona. Visit mariadb.org for more information.
• Percona: Percona Server is the contender that has been there for the longest time. It's also a drop in replacement for MySQL and they have a DB engine of their own which they claim is faster than InnoDB: XtraDB. Here is the Percona Server page.

Repository and package indexes for those 3 MySQL forks are available by following the links below.

	Repository	Main Package
Drizzle	Drizzle Developers PPA	drizzle
MariaDB	MariaDB 5.2	mariadb-5.2
Percona Server	Percona Server	percona-server-dfsg-5.1

Happy SQL!

The Ubuntu kernel changelogs can be found in many packages across ubuntuupdates.org website, but the easiest place to find them is under the package called linux. For each Ubuntu release, there are 3 kernel versions available, one in each repository: proposed, updates and security.

The full list of kernels with their versions for any release and any repository can be found on the linux package_meta page.

From there, the changelog is just one click away. Follow the link for the version you want and you get to the package page with all revisions and changelogs, one by one.

For example in Maverick security, the kernel is linux 2.6.35-27.48. The proposed repository is usually ahead of security and updates but as of 3/1/2011, the same version is in all 3.

Sometimes the security repository skips versions and therefore, the changelog for those intermediate versions is missing from the security linux package page. The kernel in Maverick security directly went from 2.6.35-25 to 2.6.35-27.48 and this latter version changelog appears very small. But in reality, a lot changed. Go to the Maverick proposed linux package page to find all the intermediate versions. The bulk of the changes are in 2.6.35-27.47 and 2.6.35-26.46.

Note that all of those logs are just Ubuntu kernel logs and they rarely include much information on what happened upstream. For the upstream changes, visit kernelnewbies.org or kernel.org.

One last thing: Ubuntu most recent LTS release, Lucid 10.04 has a PPA with all the newest backported kernels. It's called Kernel PPA and it includes the original maverick kernel 2.6.35-22.34 as well as the brand new 2.6.38 Natty kernel.

google-chrome-beta got upgraded this morning February 18th to version 10.0.648.82-r75062 in Google Chrome repository.

New in this release:

• New javascript engine.
• Hardware acceleration support.

See this post for more details.

The 2.6.38 kernel, said to bring substantial performance gains, has been published in Natty 11.04. This kernel, which is still at the RC stage, eliminates the last global lock and includes a new scheduler auto-grouping feature discussed at great lengths in the blogosphere last year.
It's also available in the Kernel PPA for those using Lucid as the linux-lts-backport-natty package.

Natty 11.04 got imported into ubuntuupdates.org today and will be tracked from now on. There are 29250 new packages and the flow of Natty updates is very rapid.

Some PPAs have already been upgraded for 11.04:

• Docky PPA for Natty
• Extras PPA for Natty
• Gnome Shell PPA for Natty
• LibreOffice PPA for Natty
• Mozilla Team Firefox Next PPA for Natty
• MythTV 0.24 PPA for Natty
• Nginx PPA for Natty
• Pidgin PPA for Natty
• and a few others... Check the PPAs page.
  

As usual if you are not interested in Natty yet, you can still get to the home page of the site (changelogs) with a filter on your favorite release:

• Maverick changelogs only
• Lucid changelogs only
• Natty changelogs only

Or for the update list of a single release:

• Maverick updates
• Lucid updates
• Natty updates

Enjoy!

Correction 11/19/2010: Unity is not in this PPA and won't be. Those who want to experiment with the new Unity must install Natty. See post at jonobacon.org. Sorry for the confusion.

Unity packages for Maverick got uploaded today to the Unity PPA. It comes with the latest version of Compiz and should give a good taste of Natty to the early adopters among us.

Kernel 2.6.36 just landed into the Kernel PPA and it can be setup in Lucid 10.04. See linux-image-2.6.36-1-generic package for more details and check the PPA page for install instructions.

Maverick packages were added to UbuntuUpdates on Saturday 8/14. That's 36195 new packages spread across the main, multiverse, universe, partner and restricted areas. They are all at the 'base' level as is usual for Ubuntu versions that have not yet been released.

Here is a comparison of the number of packages between the last 3 Ubuntu releases for packages at the 'base' level (excluding PPAs):

	Karmic	Lucid	Maverick
main	11587	7752	8121
universe	25956	26403	27258
multiverse	825	841	779
restricted	35	37	37

Check the Opera package page. It's a bug fixing release for testing purposes only.

Maverick went into feature freeze today and it's now time to track 10.10 updates here.

But beware, the number of Maverick daily updates is still very high and ubuntuupdates.org home page, as well as the updates Atom feed, will get flooded with Maverick changes.

For those of us who are not yet interested in 10.10, there is a solution: in the home page, select "Show updated packages for: Lucid" and Go. That will filter out all packages that don't belong to Lucid. What it does is append "dist=lucid" to the URL. That preference is saved in a cookie so you don't have to select it again the next time you load the page.

The same applies to the Atom feed, simply add "dist=lucid" to the URL to see only Lucid updates. For a complete list of ubuntuupdates.org Atom feeds, please read All UbuntuUpdates News Feeds.

Thunderbird 3.1 was released several weeks ago but sadly, there is still no clean solution to set it up in Lucid.

Of course there is thunderbird-3.1 in Ubuntu Mozilla Daily Builds but it's a very old alpha version that never got updated.

Fortunately, I just found about the Ubuntuzilla repository, it has .deb packages for the binaries published by Mozilla for Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird. This repository is now tracked by UbuntuUpdates.org at Ubuntuzilla.

Things to be aware of:

• This is 32-bit only.
• The Ubuntuzilla binaries are installed under /opt, they don't replace the official Ubuntu binaries for Thunderbird except that /usr/bin/thunderbird gets renamed to /usr/bin/thunderbird.ubuntu and that a symlink is created from /usr/bin/thunderbird to /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird.
• The Ubuntuzilla packages come with all the dependencies they need. All libraries from libssl to libldap are part of the packages and are installed under /opt/thunderbird for example. This way the packages are compatible with any version of Ubuntu.
• The Thunderbird profile directory from the official Ubuntu installation is reused.
• Addons for the new version get updated automatically.
  
• Gnome interaction is okay but font smoothing is imperfect.
• You may or may not like the new search boxes: there are now 2 of them, the first one at the top is always visible and uses the main Thunderbird search engine. The other one can be toggled ON or OFF and correspond to the search box there was in Thunderbird 2: search subject, sender or recipient. For me, this latter form of search resolved 95% of my problems and it's much faster than the new search engine. I also regret the lost vertical space due to the superposition of 2 search boxes.
  

The main draw of the new version is improved performances. Thunderbird 3.0 search engine was a CPU hog but 3.1 appears to be behaving very nicely.

The Opera PPA got updated a few hours ago with Opera 10.60. Check it out!

The release notes for 10.60 are available on the opera website.

UbuntuUpdates feeds got a much needed makeover today.

The changelog feed is the one that received the most attention. There are now several variations of that feed based on the desired release and the inclusion/exclusion of PPA updates. It's now formatted in HTML and includes links back to the website.

Here is the full list.

New package versions with changelog

• All updates, excluding PPAs
• All updates, including PPAs
• Lucid updates only, excluding PPAs
• Lucid updates only, including PPAs
• Hardy updates only, excluding PPAs
• Hardy updates only, including PPAs

News

• Posts
• Comments

Bugs

• Launchpad, Debian and CVE bug fixes

It's there, in the Kubuntu Updates PPA. All packages were updated today to version 4.4.4. Check out kdeutils for example.

The changelog only says:

   * New upstream release
     - Bump build-depend versions
     - Bump up package standards version

but the official kde.org changelog page has more info.