14 DAY TRIAL // Lubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) has been deemed a success by its developers, but they think that it can be improved by adding a new official PPA that would bring some updates for the operating system.
Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor based on LXDE and it's built by a completely different team. They only use Ubuntu as a base, but the rest of the packages and the work that go with it are provided by an independent team.
The latest version of Lubuntu is an LTS release, just like the Ubuntu system that it is based on, which means that it will be supported by the developers for three years, for various packages, and it will receive updates for the Linux kernel for the next five years.
If you’ve ever used a flavor based on Ubuntu that shares the same packages, you will know that Canonical is pretty conservative with what it is adding to the official repositories. Sometimes, users might want some newer versions of the integrated applications, but they could be missing from the official repos.
“All common components with Ubuntu will be supported 5 years (like the kernel). I advise people to migrate to 14.04, because it's now the release we support the most, and all the work on the support will go to this release. Of course, it's not perfect, but we are working to fix the remaining little bugs.”
“Of course, we will try as much as possible to push all the fixes to official repositories, especially the critical ones. However, I realized that we should also offer some safe-updates-but-still-too-much-for-the-official-repo to our users during this time,” said Julien Lavergne, one of the Lubuntu developers.
Preparing a PPA for Lubuntu is probably the simplest way of providing some updates that are considered safe by the developers. Adding a PPA to the system is very simple and can be done in a few steps. All you need to do is to add a few command lines in a terminal (you will have to be root in order for this to work):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubuntu-dev/staging sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
The new PPA will offer a new version of sylpheed, a new version of gnumeric, more up-to-date artwork, and some fixes that are currently being worked on.
The artwork changes, for example, will never reach the official repositories because they modify the way the distribution looks, which apparently is not OK.
You can download Lubuntu 14.04 LTS right now from Softpedia.