14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop Director Will Cooke reports today on the latest developments done by his team for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.
Not so much hot stuff this week on the Ubuntu land, as Canonical was working lately on updating various GNOME apps that it packaged as Snaps in the edge channel of the Snappy Store, based on the GNOME 3.24 platform Snap and content interface, as well as on cleaning the ISO images of deprecated components.
But it also looks like Canonical is working on adding captive portal detection to Ubuntu 17.10, which will make it possible for the NetworkManager network connection manager tool to support disabling of connectivity checking via the D-Bus interface by adding a new option in the Privacy settings panel.
"We’re working on adding captive portal detection to Artful. We think it would be good if there were an option in the privacy settings to enable or disable this," said Will Cooke. "We’ve done some initial work as preparation – some patches have been submitted to Network Manager’s upstream to enable an option to be created."
Unity 7 still getting improved for low graphics mode
Apart from the ISO cleaning, NetworkManager improvements, and Snap packaging of GNOME apps, Canonical has been working lately on implementing a workaround for the GDM (GNOME Display Manager) bug that blocked the A2DP high-quality Bluetooth profile from being activated in the user session.
As well as on adding some more low graphics mode improvements to the Unity 7 user interface targeting only the long-term supported Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system series, which Canonical say it will benefit those with low powered systems and people who run Ubuntu on a virtual machine.
Other than that, Canonical managed to upgrade various components to their latest versions in the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) repositories, including LibreOffice 5.3.4, which is patched against an i386 kernel issue, GStreamer 1.12.2, and Evolution 3.24.2. They also fixed nplan autopkgtest, unblocking the network-manager update.