The Xubuntu team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 14.04 Beta 1. This is the first beta towards the final LTS release, and with it we have landed a lot of new features and improvements we’ve been preparing since the last LTS release two years ago.

The beta 1 release is available for download by torrents and direct downloads from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/trusty/beta-1/

Highlights and known issues

The highlights of this release include:

• Light Locker replaces xscreensaver for screen locking, a setting editing GUI is included
• The panel layout is updated, and now uses Whiskermenu as the default menu
• Mugshot is included to allow you to easily edit your personal preferences
• MenuLibre for menu editing, with full Xfce support, replacing Alacarte
• A community wallpapers package, which includes work from the five winners of the wallpaper contest
• GTK Theme Config to customize your desktop theme colors
• Updated artwork, including numerous enhancements to themes

Some of the known issues include:

• xfdesktop crashes after logging in to the desktop (1282509)
• Thunar doesn’t automatically mount removable devices and media (1210898)
• Network shares aren’t shown on the desktop (1284914)
• Wallpaper selection dialogue empty (1271713)

To see the complete list of new features, improvements, changes and bugs, read the release notes.

The first beta release also marks the end of the period to land new features in the form of Ubuntu Feature Freeze. This means any new updates to packages should be bug fixes only which the Xubuntu team is committed to fix as many of the bugs as possible before the final release.

Other efforts & thanks

As always, contributors to Xubuntu have worked on various projects not directly visible in the release. While any of these would be worth mentioning, the following are a few we felt may be of interest to the community:

• QA efforts, including ISO and package testing as well as bug reporting and triaging
• Marketing projects, including work on a flyer to promote Xubuntu for people still running Windows XP
• Website updates, including a theme refresh

While many of the improvements in Xubuntu since the last LTS are, indeed, not directly visible. Some of the major improvements have been in design and theming, and as such we hope that you don’t see them - good design should be invisible.

Thanks to everybody contributing to Xubuntu! As always, new contributors are always welcome to join us. There are various different tasks to do, from testing daily ISOs and new package versions to writing and translating documentation to fixing bugs. To learn more about contributing, read the Get Involved section on the Xubuntu website.