Hardy Heron Second Alpha Release

The Ubuntu develoment team announced the second alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) on late night of Dec 21 GMT.

The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Hardy Heron Alpha 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features.

Pre-releases of Hardy are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Hardy development cycle. The Alpha images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Hardy.

The latest Xorg is available in Hardy, Xorg 7.3, with an emphasis on better autoconfiguration without config files.

Alpha 2 includes the 2.6.24-2.4 (2.6.24-rc5-based) kernel. This brings in significant enhancements and fixes that have been merged in the last few months into the mainline kernel. Among these is the introduction of dynticks support for amd64, bringing the same power savings already available on 32-bit systems to 64-bit laptops and desktops.

Alpha 2 includes PulseAudio enabled by default. Some non-GNOME applications still need to be changed to output to pulse/esd by default and the volume control tools are still not integrated.

You can download it here.

Btw, this is still an alpha release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in April 2008.