Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Begins With Key Package Upgrades

Now with Mark Shuttleworth having announced the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS codename last Friday, a day after the debut of Ubuntu 13.10, this next Ubuntu Linux release is now officially under development.

Matthias Klose announced this morning that Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr" is now officially open for development. Ubuntu Trusty is now syncing from Debian unstable automatically and new packages are being pulled in. Some of what's changed so far for Ubuntu 14.04 include:

- GCC 4.8.2 is a minor point release update over 4.8.1 that shipped in 13.10. It's incredibly likely that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will go with GCC 4.8 over GCC 4.9. Based upon past tradition, it's unlikely GCC 4.9 will be released before March or April, which puts it out of reach for the debut of Ubuntu 14.04 also given its Long-Term Support status. GCC 4.9 has a lot of new features and capabilities though so you can always install the gcc-snapshot package if you wish or build the latest GCC SVN from source.

- Binutils has been updated from the 2.24 release branch.

- A Glibc update is coming.

- Perl, Berkeley DB, and Boost were other key packages that were already uploaded to the Ubuntu "Trusty" archive too.

- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will support the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) architecture from the start but build resources at this point remain limited with ARM64 hardware still not yet being publicly available.

The announcement of Ubuntu Trusty Tahr being "open for development" was made via this mailing list announcement.