The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 19.04, codenamed Disco Dingo.
While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper CD build or installer bugs, you may find some bugs within. This image is, however, reasonably representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 19.04 is released on April 18, 2019.
New Features
In terms of new features, Ubuntu Studio 19.04 will include a new version of the Ubuntu Studio Metapackage Installer, renamed to Ubuntu Studio Installer. This package is used to add features you may have opted-out of during installation. With this release, Ubuntu Studio can now be installed on top of a default Ubuntu installation or any flavor thereof such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu,Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, or Ubuntu Kylin. Documentation on this feature is coming soon.
Another major new feature is the addition of the upcoming Carla 2.0, originally from the KXStudio project. Carla is an audio plugin host and graphical patchbay which can be used as an audio plugin itself, and also can be used as a bridge to use VST plugins compiled for Windows using WINE. Please note that this WINE bridge is not installed by default, but is available in the Ubuntu repositories.
With the addition of Carla, jack-rack has been removed from the default installation for obsolescence reasons, and because Carla duplicates its functionality.
Also included are new GTK and icon themes which modernize the look and feel of Ubuntu Studio.
Known Issues
There is a known bug with the installer. Due to the new theme, there are occurrences of black text on a dark gray background. We intend to fix this before 19.04 is released. (Bug #1822134)
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.
The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 18.10 “Cosmic Cuttlefish”. As a regular release, this version of Ubuntu Studio will be supported for 9 months.
Since it’s just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading. Please see the release notes for a complete list of changes and known issues.
Ubuntu Studio Controls has historically been the app to run to get initial audio configuration set for your system. This release, Ubuntu Studio Controls has undergone a major rewrite, and has the following features:
Option for changing the CPU governor
Configuration of JACK, including any attached USB audio devices
Configuration of the JACK-PulseAudio Bridge
Configuration of the JACK-ALSA MIDI Bridge
Ubuntu Studio Controls now, for the first time ever for any JACK configuration GUI, configures JACK to automatically detect hot-plugged USB audio devices and allows you to use more than one audio device at a time. This is something you will find in no other such utility.
Future plans for Ubuntu Studio Controls includes configuration of WACOM Tablets, which is something currently not available in our default Xfce desktop environment.
Inclusion of PikoPixel
PikoPixel is an easy-to-use application for drawing & editing pixel-art.
Unlimited undo
Supports multiple layers
Customizable canvas background and grid patterns
Hotkey-activated popup panels
Export upscaled images
Supports linear (gamma-correct) color blending
Other Changes
Among those applications upgraded in this release is GIMP 2.10, which saw its release shortly before the release of Ubuntu Studio 18.04. Due to a library conflict between GIMP 2.10 and MyPaint, we had to make the hard decision to drop MyPaint from the default installation of Ubuntu Studio beginning in 18.10, citing other tools, such as Krita, as filling a similar role in graphical art production. As such, if both are installed and you wish to upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 18.10, you must uninstall GIMP or MyPaint for the upgrade to be successful. We apologize for this inconvenience. At this time, we are waiting for the upstream developers of MyPaint to release a new version based on libmypaint 1.3 before both can be co-installable again.
Information on newer packages can be found in the release notes.
Regarding Availability of Additional Desktop Environments
Since Ubuntu Studio is the only official flavor of Ubuntu not tied to a desktop environment, we thought it would be a good idea to attempt to offer more desktop environments for Ubuntu Studio and provide multiple ISO downloads. However, since the Ubuntu infrastructure for flavors is based on the desktop environment per flavor structure, we found this to be time and effort prohibitive. As such, we have decided to abandon this idea.
However, it has also been asked how it might be possible to add Ubuntu Studio to an existing Ubuntu install. As such, our new goal is to make a single package to install which starts that process on any Ubuntu or flavor thereof. We hope this lands in Ubuntu Studio 19.04. This means you will be able to install any flavor of Ubuntu and add Ubuntu Studio on to it, allowing you to work in your favorite desktop environment while having all of the benefits of Ubuntu Studio.
Future goals include providing the optional ability to re-brand your installed Ubuntu flavor to Ubuntu Studio along with the under-the-hood configurations. Yet another, distant goal is to allow you to install your preferred desktop environment at install time from the Xfce-based Live CD so long as you have an active Internet connection. Since these are distant goals, they are not completely solidified and are subject to change.
Want to help out?
Ubuntu Studio is maintained by a very small team and we are actively seeking new contributors. We are looking for developers, packagers and testers. Even if you are interested in contributing outside these areas, please do not hesitate to reach out. Your contribution is precious regardless of your field of activity. We are open to volunteers with all expertise levels. Just head over to our contribute page to find out how to get started.
Found a bug?
Taking the time to report bugs makes a huge difference; it’s the first step towards improvement! Clear and specific bug reports is the best way to get attention to a problem that needs fixing. The easiest way to create a bug report is with the terminal.
The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the final beta release of Ubuntu Studio 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish.
While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper CD build or installer bugs, you may find some bugs within. This image is, however, reasonably representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 18.10 is released on October 18, 2018.
In terms of new features, Ubuntu Studio 18.10 will include the latest release of Ubuntu Studio Controls which will configure the JACK Audio Connection Kit to automatically detect and add hot-plugged USB audio devices as well as allow one to use multiple audio devices simultaneously. This is done independently of QJackCtl and is the first graphical tool to create such a configuration for the user out-of-the-box, making it a unique feature for Ubuntu Studio among operating systems for audio production. Another feature of Ubuntu Studio Controls is its ability to set the CPU governor to “Performance” for performance-heavy tasks such as audio production or to “Ondemand” for default CPU performance to save energy.
Among those applications upgraded in this release is GIMP 2.10, which saw its release shortly before the release of Ubuntu Studio 18.04. Due to a library conflict between GIMP 2.10 and MyPaint, we had to make the hard decision to drop MyPaint from the default installation of Ubuntu Studio, citing other tools, such as Krita, as filling a similar role in graphical art production. As such, if both are installed and you wish to upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 18.10, you must uninstall GIMP or MyPaint for the upgrade to be successful. We apologize for this inconvenience. At this time, we are waiting for the upstream developers of MyPaint to release a new version based on libmypaint 1.3 before both can be co-installable again.
To upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 18.10 Beta from Ubuntu Studio 18.04, follow these instructions:
We would like to thank everyone who participated in our wallpaper contest for Ubuntu Studio 18.10! With 487 votes, the top 5 submissions were chosen. The winners can be found at this link.
Additionally, we’d like to announce the new default wallpaper for 18.10, designed by Ubuntu Studio developer Eylul Dogruel, and is pictured to the right.
Again, thank you to everyone who submitted and voted for our new wallpapers to be included in Ubuntu Studio 18.10!
Voting is open to the public at https://www.strawpoll.me/16471434. You may vote for more than one. The top 5 wallpapers will be added to Ubuntu Studio’s wallpaper pool based on the results of the poll.
Voting closes Wednesday, September 19th at 1800 UTC.
As we begin getting closer to the next release date of Ubuntu Studio 18.10, now is a great time to show what the best of the Ubuntu Studio Community has to offer! We know that many of our users are graphic artists and photographers and we would like to see their/your talent also reflected more directly in the upcoming version of the distro.
For this purpose, we are going to be holding a wallpaper contest this summer. Submission will be open to works of photography, codeart, abstract paintings, illustrations and other art genres, that highlight the capabilities of the software available in the distro and the open sourced software in general.
The Ubuntu Studio council will be selecting a short list of images that will be put up to public vote. The top selections will become part of the wallpaper pool of Ubuntu Studio.
To submit, upload your creation to imgur.com and tag it with #ubustucontest1810. We are looking forward to seeing your creations!
We would like to thank everyone who participated in our wallpaper contest for Ubuntu Studio 18.10! With 487 votes, the top 5 submissions were chosen. The winners can be found at 
