You Can Help Ubuntu This Weekend Test The Near-Final Cosmic Cuttlefish

If all goes well, the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" release will happen on 18 October but for that to happen they could use your help this weekend testing their release candidate spins.

Running a few days behind with ideally their RC builds should have been spinning on Thursday (11 October) but instead being announced on Saturday (13 October), there are non-final but test-friendly Cosmic RC builds now coming out for all Ubuntu 18.10 flavors.

These builds are not final as they are still working to land some more fixes, but overall should be in good shape for end-users wishing to test the live environment or installs of this Cosmic Cuttlefish release on your own systems -- of course, you can continue apt upgrading to what will be the final packages in the days ahead.

"Test, test... And test," says Ubuntu developer Adam Conrad in his call for testing. If all goes smoothly, Ubuntu 18.10 will be officially released on Thursday, 18 October. The RC ISO builds are here.

Ubuntu 18.10 is bringing with it its new GNOME Shell theme, X.Org Server 1.20.1 and Mesa 18.2 as the latest and exciting open-source graphics driver components, GCC 8 as the new compiler stack, Linux 4.18 to serve the latest hardware out there, and a variety of other improvements.