In the morning Canonical unveiled the final release of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system for desktop, server, and cloud computing. The Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) release has been in development for the past six months. Probably the most important feature of Yakkety Yak is Linux kernel 4.8, which brings support for the latest hardware, but other than that you’ll get some updated components that are mostly based on the GNOME 3.20 Stack. Ubuntu Yakkety Yak will come with quite a few pre-installed applications that are based on the latest GNOME 3.22 Stack, but not the Nautilus file manager, which remains at version 3.20.3 for the Yakkety Yak release. The LibreOffice 5.2 office suite and Mozilla Firefox 49.0 web browser are also present using the GTK3 technologies by default. Yakkety Yak also brings the experimental Unity 8 session, that’s installed by default and accessible through the login manager. Remember that Unity 8 is a beta release and will have some issues and bugs. Also, Unity 8 will lock up when you press the PrtScr or media keys, and the Web Browser app has no sound. “Ubuntu 16.10 previews Canonical’s device convergence vision. Unity 8 developer preview includes apps that scale from phone to desktop, from mouse to touch screen, setting a precedent for the next wave of Linux devices,” says Canonical in today’s announcement. Among other interesting changes added in the Ubuntu 16.10 operating system, we can mention an updated Unity 7 desktop environment that should perform better on any system, GPG binary based on GnuPG 2, implementation of system for user sessions, as well as support for viewing changelog entries for PPAs (Personal Package Archives). Canonical simultaneously announced the release of Ubunty 16.10 Yakkety Yak Server version. The Yakkety Yak Server version release includes the latest OpenStack release, Newton, which consists of OpenStack Identity – Keystone, OpenStack Imaging – Glance, OpenStack Block Storage – Cinder, OpenStack Compute – Nova, and OpenStack Networking – Neutron components. Moreover, OpenStack Newton contains OpenStack Telemetry – Ceilometer and Aodh, OpenStack Orchestration – Heat, OpenStack Dashboard – Horizon, OpenStack Object Storage – Swift, OpenStack Database as a Service – Trove, OpenStack DNS – Designate, OpenStack Bare-metal – Ironic, OpenStack Filesystem – Manila, and OpenStack Key Manager – Barbican. The OpenStack Newton release in Ubuntu 16.10 comes with a warning, “Upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment,” said Canonical, and it’s also available for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users via Ubuntu Cloud Archive. “The world’s fastest hypervisor, LXD, and the world’s best cloud operating system, Ubuntu, together with the latest OpenStack and Kubernetes make for the world’s fastest and best private cloud infrastructure” said Mark Shuttleworth in the announcement. “Our focus is to enable true hybrid cloud operations, and this release further enhances the tools and platform that most companies depend on to operate effectively across all major public clouds and in one’s own data center, from bare metal to cloud container.” Other novelties included in the Ubuntu 16.10 Server release are LXD 2.4.1 pure-container hypervisor with support for AppArmor profile stacking and new network management features, libvirt 2.1 virtualization API, Open vSwitch 2.6 multilayer virtual switch, as well as QEMU 2.6.1 virtualization software with a backport to enable GPU Passthru for PowerPC 64 Little Endian (PPC64le) platforms. Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) 16.07 set of data plane libraries and network interface controller drivers for fast packet processing are also included in Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Server operating system, which we remind you that ships with the latest Linux 4.8 kernel. You can download all the Ubuntu Yakkety Yak 16.10 versions from here.
