The Ubuntu Studio team has been working on some exciting things since the release of Ubuntu Studio 18.10 back in October, and we thought we should update the community on these things.
Ubuntu Studio Installer
In the past, the “Ubuntu Studio Metapackage Installer” has served to allow those that choose to install metapackages in Ubuntu Studio’s default Xfce-based environment after installation if they elected not to install those packages at install time. This will continue to exist, but will also serve a secondary purpose.
One of the visions for Ubuntu Studio has been the ability for users of other Ubuntu flavors to essentially “bolt-on” Ubuntu Studio to their existing installation. This will be easily available for those users beginning with Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo. It will be a 2-step process: 1) install the “ubuntustudio-installer” package, and 2) Launch it and select the features you want. It will allow you to install any of the metapackages along with the “under-the-hood” performance tweaks that Ubuntu Studio includes by default.
Application Updates
Most applications are getting updated to the latest version. One to highlight will be the inclusion of Calf Studio Gear (Calf Plugins) 0.90.1 which includes many enhancements to the audio plugins, but also fixes some compatibility issues.
Unfortuntely, a side-effect of an upstream packaging error in LMMS exposing the calf-ladspa plugins to the rest of the system (which was never intended by the developers or LMMS or Calf) is causing a conflict when those plugins are loaded by other DAWs such as Ardour. As such, we have had to temporarily remove LMMS from the daily Ubuntu Studio spins until this problem, which was resolved upstream in Debian, makes its way back downstream to Ubuntu.
Also coming will be bug fixes to Ubuntu Studio Controls with improvements to settings persisting after reboot.
Ubuntu Studio on Reddit
The Ubuntu Studio subreddit has existed for some time, but recently our core team has gained moderation privileges to be able to revitalize it and create a community hub for our Ubuntu Studio community. If you’d like to join in that conversation, please visit https://reddit.com/r/ubuntustudio.
Ubuntu Studio in the Media
Our council chair, Erich Eickmeyer, was recently featured in an article on Forbes talking about Ubuntu Studio. Check it out!
Also, Erich appeared in a couple of podcasts, including This Week in Linux and the Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. Erich has also been a long-time contributor to the LINUX Unplugged podcast and can be heard as part of the “Virtual Linux User Group”
Want to contribute?
Currently, we are looking for people to come to the #ubuntustudio IRC chatroom at irc.freenode.net and participate by helping people with technical support. We get a lot of people asking for help at times when our most active members, namely Erich and Len who live on the west coast of the United States and Canada, are asleep. So, if you can help, that would be wonderful.
Bear in mind that you don’t have to know everything, and if you don’t know the answer to a question, you can direct the user to other places to get help. If it’s related to the desktop environment, the folks in #xubuntu can help if you don’t know the answer. For everything else, there’s #ubuntu. For specific applications there is help by those developers and communities.
