14 DAY TRIAL // In their latest bi-weekly report, Canonical's Ubuntu Kernel team revealed the fact that they intend to target the Linux 4.13 kernel series for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.
For Ubuntu 17.10, Canonical only tries to accommodate users with the GNOME desktop environment, which is already enabled by default in the latest daily builds. No other major features have been announced for Ubuntu 17.10, but it looks like the kernel packages could be rebased on the upcoming Linux 4.13 series.
"We intend to target a 4.13 kernel for the Ubuntu 17.10 release. The Ubuntu 17.10 Kernel Freeze is Thurs Oct 5, 2017," reveals the Ubuntu Kernel team in their latest newsletter. However, at the moment, the Ubuntu 17.10 daily build ISO images are shipping with Ubuntu 17.04's Linux 4.10 kernel packages.
Once we enabled the proposed repositories in your Ubuntu 17.10 instance, the kernel packages were upgraded to Linux 4.11, which the Ubuntu Kernel team recently rebased on the upstream Linux kernel 4.11.4 update announced last week. This kernel is considered stable, but it won't have a long life.
Why? Because it also looks like the latest RCs of the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel series are being tested by the Ubuntu Kernel team in the unstable repos, with ZFS and VirtualBox support out-of-the-box. However, their intention is to ship the final version of Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) with the Linux 4.13 kernel, whose development is yet to start.
First Alpha of Ubuntu 17.10 launching June 29, 2017
Development of Ubuntu 17.10 is ongoing, and we expect to be able to test the first Alpha milestone, which will be released only for opt-in flavors, at the end of the month, on June 29, 2017. Just like the current stable release, Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), Ubuntu 17.10 will be a short-lived version supported for nine months, until July 2018.
Until then, if you can't wait, and you feel the itch to install Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) on your personal computer to see Canonical's attempts to improve the GNOME desktop environment and the GNOME on Wayland session, you need to rely on the daily build ISO images, which you can download via our website.
