During a meeting of the Ubuntu Developer Membership Board on March 11, 2019, two Ubuntu Studio developers, Council Chair Erich Eickmeyer and Council Member Ross Gammon, successfully applied for and received upload rights to Ubuntu Studio’s core packages, fulfilling the requirements prescribed in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecognizedFlavors.
We would like to thank the community for staying with us through this uncertain time, and thank the Ubuntu Developer Membership Board for approving Erich and Ross’s applications.
The release of Ubuntu Studio 19.04 will remain on-course. Beta is scheduled for March 28th, Release Candidate for April 11th, and Final Release scheduled for April 18th.
The following is a statement about the recent activity regarding Ubuntu Studio’s status as an official flavor of Ubuntu from council chair, Erich Eickmeyer:
Hello Ubuntu Studio Community,
As you have probably heard by now, Ubuntu Studio’s status as an official flavor of Ubuntu was recently called into question. You can read more here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2019-March/002428.html
Basically, in order for Ubuntu Studio to remain an official flavor, we must have at least one team member with package upload permissions. Right now, out of the three active developers (Myself, Len Ovens, Ross Gammon), we have no upload permissions. As such, since before the release of 16.04 back in April 2016, the team had been going to other members of the Ubuntu community known as Masters of the Universe (MOTUs). Those are a select few active developers that have unlimited upload access to the Universe repository of Ubuntu, which contains applications and components not found in the Main repository, such as the core components of Ubuntu Studio.
Unfortunately, this was the result of a bad leadership hand-off when a previous Ubuntu Studio Project Lead failed to properly hand-off the project to other team members. At the time, there was a lot of team burn-out, and the project leader was among those burnt-out. When that leader left, it was abrupt and, in the opinion of others I have spoken to, not without malice. As such, that leader was the last member of the Ubuntu Studio team with package upload permissions.
During this period, Ross had applied for upload permissions, but the process stalled. In the meantime, the team had pinged MOTUs to help on a temporary basis. In some cases, with development cycles with no activity, the work was minimal and simply required a sign-off on the Ubuntu release. For this reason, Ubuntu Studio saw little, if any development between 16.04 and 18.04.
I came on just before the 18.04 release, and ended up taking on the mantle of leadership. This resulted in an improvement for 18.10. With 19.04, currently in development, we made some pretty significant changes.
However, when I went looking for a MOTU to help with uploading, I had trouble finding someone willing to sponsor & upload that many changes. When I started escalating the issue, it sparked the situation we are in today.
As such, Ross is reapplying, and I’m am applying for package upload permissions. In the past 24 hours, I was able to contact two MOTUs (Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre and Dmitry Shachnev) and the packages awaiting upload have now been uploaded. Meaning, all of the changes previously announced for 19.04 are now expected to land.
If, for whatever reason, both PPU applications are rejected, it unfortunately means there will be no 19.04 release for Ubuntu Studio. However, with Ross’s packaging experience with upstream Debian, and the high need for at least one or both of us to be uploaders, this is unlikely.
We will know more information on Monday after the meeting of the Developer Membership Board.
At this time, there is not much the community as a whole can do. We are waiting for this process to complete. My whole goal was to bring awareness to the situation, as I believe in transparency from a leadership perspective.
So, here’s to looking forward to a bright future for Ubuntu Studio. At this point, I’m 95% sure things will be okay.
With warm regards, Erich Eickmeyer Council Chair Ubuntu Studio
With Ubuntu 19.04’s feature freeze quickly approaching, we would like to announce the new updates coming to Ubuntu Studio 19.04.
Updated Ubuntu Studio Controls
This is really a bit of a bugfix for the version of Ubuntu Studio Controls that landed in 18.10. Ubuntu Studio Controls dramatically simplifies audio setup for the JACK Audio Connection Kit on your Ubuntu installation, and is the only GUI tool that enables JACK to automatically detect hotplugged USB audio devices along with allowing more than one audio device to be connected to JACK simultaneously.
Addition of Ubuntu Studio Backports PPA
Because Ubuntu Studio Controls is easy to use, we found it was also easier to support than the stack available in Ubuntu Studio 18.04. For this reason, among others, we have created an Ubuntu Studio Backports PPA, and will backport the newer versions of the Ubuntu Studio tools and select applications to this PPA. Please do keep in mind that this PPA is not supported by Ubuntu. Use it at your own risk. Support is provided by the Ubuntu Studio team only.
If you are on Ubuntu Studio 18.04 or newer, simply add this PPA by typing the following into your terminal:
While support for Ubuntu Studio 18.04 was supposed to end in January due to its non-LTS status, we have decided to support it until the release of 20.04, and we felt a Backports PPA was the best way to do this. There will be no releases of Ubuntu Studio 18.04.x ISO, but updating the already-available ISO as well as adding the backports PPA will keep you up-to-date and allow the Ubuntu Studio team to support you better.
New Features in Ubuntu Studio Installer
In the past, Ubuntu Studio Meta Installer had been a tool used to install metapackages of various creative application categories. Now, Ubuntu Studio Installer can be used to install not only those metapackages, but also the under-the-hood tweaks used to enable real-time audio processing and reduce the default swappiness, which dictates when the system starts moving unused portions of RAM to the hard drive swap file. This increases overall performance for most applications, but is not recommended for systems with less than 4GB of RAM. Also included is the lowlatency Linux kernel, as well as the option to move the lowlatency kernel to the top of your GRUB bootloader menu, making it the default which is especially useful for audio production.
With these changes, Ubuntu Studio Installer allows you to install Ubuntu Studio as a ToolKit on top of your existing Ubuntu installation, including official flavors (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie), although our default ISO installer is based on Xubuntu.
Additionally, Ubuntu Studio will allow you to rebrand your Ubuntu (or flavor) install as Ubuntu Studio, theming your GRUB menu and Plymouth theme accordingly. For Ubuntu (proper), it will also re-theme your GDM login screen to Ubuntu Studio, and install the vanilla GNOME session which more closely matches the Ubuntu Studio branding, and install GNOME Tweaks to allow you to retheme using our Numix Blue theme and icon theme. These items are purely cosmetic, but we believe it adds to the Ubuntu Studio experience.
The Ubuntu Studio Installer will also give you the option to add the backports PPA mentioned above.
New Tool: Carla
The ubiquitous JACK routing tool, Patchage, is no longer developed. This has made finding a replacement a priority. The Ubuntu Studio Team determined a good replacement to be Carla from KXStudio. We have been working closely with the upstream developer to add this tool as not only a replacement for Patchage, but to add a high-quality plugin host as well. Carla includes a graphical patchbay and experimental features such as the ability to host Windows VST audio plugins (the Windows bridge will not be installed by default and must be added after Ubuntu Studio installation). This has been a much-requested feature and we hope it helps audio producers everywhere.
Carla will be available in Ubuntu Studio 19.04 as well as our Backports PPA.
New Boot Theme
We hope you like the new, simplified, Plymouth Boot Theme coming to Ubuntu Studio 19.04, which will be added to our Backports PPA.
Telegram as an Additional Support Channel
We have added a new way to receive official support from the Ubuntu Studio team, as well as a way to connect the community: Telegram. Telegram is an instant-messaging app available for Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. As such, we have created a bridge from our brand-new Telegram groups to our official Ubuntu Studio IRC channels, expanding the methods in which to connect our community and offer support. Additionally, we encourage our community to offer support to each other via Telegram and IRC.
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.
