14 DAY TRIAL // On February 19, 2016, Canonical's Joseph Salisbury reports for the Ubuntu community the latest news from the Ubuntu Kernel Team, which just released their weekly newsletter with information about the latest kernel work for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Well, don't get your hopes high, because, according to the Ubuntu Kernel Team, the kernel of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, which has just entered Feature Freeze on February 18, 2016, remains based on the Linux 4.4.1 LTS (Long Term Support) upstream packages.
As some of you may know from our previous reports, we're currently tracking the development cycle of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system, which we have installed on two computers. That being said, we can report today that Xenial Xerus' kernel packages have been updated to February 18 to version linux-4.4.0-6.21.
"Our Xenial kernel remains based on v4.4.1 and is available for testing in the archive, i.e linux-4.4.0-6.21. Please test and let us know your results. Also, as an early reminder, Xenial Kernel Freeze is Thurs, April 7. We encourage anyone needing kernel patches pulled into Xenial to please submit them well in advance of Kernel Freeze to allow for as much testing as possible," developers explained.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Beta 1 available for public testing next week
In more good news, we're informing Ubuntu users today that they will be able to test drive the first Beta build of the forthcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system next Thursday, February 25, 2016, when the Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu flavors will be available for download.
Please note that Ubuntu itself won't be part of the first Beta release, but it will be ready for public testing during the Final Beta announcement on March 24, 2016. After that, the development cycle of Xenial Xerus will continue with the Final Freeze on April 14, when the Release Candidate images will be available internally, and the final release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on April 21.