Ubuntu Developers Party In Budapest

Written by Michael Larabel in Events on 16 May 2011 at 01:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 1. 1 Comment.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) for Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Oncelot" took place last week in Budapest, Hungary. A lot of meetings and development discussions took place. There were a lot of Phoronix news posts that I had wrote from Budapest, so if you happened to miss out on some of them, here's a summary of them.

No SystemD In Ubuntu Soon - SystemD will not replace Upstart in Ubuntu Linux in the near future. No boot transition will occur until at least Ubuntu 12.10.
What To Expect From Unity 2D - Canonical has a lot of plans for the 2D-only Unity desktop release in the next release. The 2D version will be used when no 3D acceleration support is available.
Qt 5 Is Coming Next Year - Nokia announced they intend to do a major Qt 5 release in the 2012 calendar year. It will not be as big of a transition as from Qt 3 to Qt 4, but it should be quite an interesting release. KDE 5 may also come (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTQyOQ).
Wayland & X.Org For Ubuntu - Future plans for the Wayland Display Server and X.Org In Ubuntu. Wayland is not making its big debut until at least Ubuntu 12.10. Ubuntu 11.10 will get updated Mesa (7.11) and X.Org DDX drivers, but the xorg-server won't be upgraded as they are concerned about breaking proprietary drivers. The Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release will also not have any invasive X.Org work due to it being a long-term support release.
Lots Of Embedded Talk - OpenGL ES support for QEMU, Linaro memory management APIs, and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for Compiz / KWin / Cairo.
Btrfs support for Ubuntu Update Manager - It is coming although EXT4 is still the default Ubuntu file-system.
Thunderbird As Ubuntu's E-Mail Client - Mozilla Thunderbird may finally lay to rest GNOME's Evolution as the default e-mail client. There are a few concerns though in terms of lacking Microsoft Exchange support, etc.
Ubuntu Software Center Improvements - Ubuntu Software Center will be more like Valve's Steam platform, will be faster in future releases, and boast user-interface enhancements.
Kicking Around Wayland - The experimental Wayland package will be updated for Ubuntu 11.10 and be moved into the Ubuntu main repository.
Nouveau Gallium3D By Default - Ubuntu may finally enable the Nouveau Galliu3D driver by default in Ubuntu 11.10. The LLVMpipe driver may also be enabled as the default software fallback method rather than the classic Mesa software rasterizer.
LightDM Will Be The Display Manager - LightDM is kicking out GDM (the GNOME Display Manager), KDM, etc as taking care of the log-in screen.

Most of the sessions I was at while in Budapest pertained to the Linux graphics stack (X / Wayland) and Ubuntu hardware testing / QA / certification. I have not written anything about the latter on Phoronix since that is more of Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org dealings, but will probably have a few words about that in a few days. Some other interesting non-Ubuntu news from last week:

- Intel's using more PowerVR in their next-gen Atom. I am hearing more rumblings as well since that point about "freeing embedded graphics."
- Intel lands X.Org Ivy Bridge support.
- Intel releases a Linux OpenCL SDK.
- Microsoft is buying out Skype.
- AMD's hiring more open-source graphics driver developers.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.