Feeling Adventurous? Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 1 Released

If you’re feeling a little adventurous this weekend, the first alpha is out for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 release. Code-named Precise Pangolin, the alpha release contains software updates and (likely) some exciting bugs that you can help squash.

The release announcement notes that the milestone CD images should be “reasonably free of showstopper” bugs in the installer — but these are not for production use. If you want to help test Ubuntu or just want to keep an eye on Ubuntu development, you want to start here. If you want a stable system, you want to wait until the final release.

The technical overview notes several changes that are worth checking out, and a list of known issues. This release has standard Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu server, as well as Xubuntu, Edubuntu, and Lubuntu. Kubuntu is apparently not ready yet.

Images are available for x86, AMD64, and ARM. There’s also a slew of images for Amazon EC2, so if you’re an AWS user and want to test Pangolin server all you have to do is fire one of those up. You have the choice of instance or Elastic Block Storage (EBS) root stores with the Pangolin images, too.

Testing out Precise Pangolin? Drop us a note in the comments to let us know how it’s going!