This is now the development branch for Ubuntu Touch

Oct 30, 2014 13:02 GMT  ·  By

Canonical is moving forward with Ubuntu Touch, and a new development version of the mobile distribution has been made available, this time based on Ubuntu 15.04.

A new branch of Ubuntu Touch based on the newly launched Vivid Vervet has been built, and the first images are now available to anyone who wants to try them. As usual, they are considered to be pretty unstable and it will be a while until they become safe enough to be tried as a daily driver.

The Ubuntu team is now focusing all of its energy on Ubuntu Touch 14.09 RTM, which is the version that will eventually land this holiday season in shops and on phones (Meizu most likely).

It's the stable one and it's the version that gets all the attention, although most of the stuff that's implemented right now consists of fixes and smaller improvements. In fact, all of the landings for the RTM branch have been suspended for the moment and only fixes are accepted.

Ubuntu Touch 15.04 will be the star in 2015

Until Canonical manages to get the proper version out the door, the 14.09 build is deemed stable and the new Vivid Vervet branch (15.04) is the development one. For the time being, all the new features will most likely land only on the devel branch and it will take a couple of months at least to see them in the stable version.

"Ubuntu 14.10 is released, but the Ubuntu Phone keeps on rolling forward! We are in the final stages of getting new images built using the vivid archive, and barring any new blockers, expect the first of these to be available later today. This means that we now have two main channels that we are landing on: vivid, and ubuntu-rtm/14.09 (aka: devel, and stable)."

"Fixes for specific bugs targeted for our upcoming customer-oriented release should continue to be landed to ubuntu-rtm/14.09. Anything else that is not being landed for RTM - e.g., any forward-looking feature work - should be landed to vivid only. Because the base system of vivid continues to move on, we will not be doing binary syncs between vivid and ubuntu-rtm/14.09," says Canonical's Steve Langasek.

Soon after Langasek's message about the current releases, the first Vivid-powered Ubuntu Touch image was put together and it's now available through the usual channels. As usual, in order to get Ubuntu Touch, you will need a Nexus 4 or Nexus 7 device and you must follow the instructions on the official wiki.