Weekly newsletter 23rd June 2017

[Will Cooke]

Hi all,

Here's an update from this week:

= GNOME =
We’ve migrated ubuntu-session to a new unity-session package.  This means
that the default session is GNOME Shell and people can install Unity 7 and
it’s related packages via unity-session.  The migration is working well so
far, but we still have some more work to do in order to make sure
everything “just works”.

= LivePatch =
We’re now working on the update-manager UI to add the list of kernel CVEs
which are handled by the LivePatch service and a brief description of each.

= Snaps =
We’ve done more work on getting desktop themes working better with Snaps.
We’re documenting the problems we’ve encountered and are creating some
sample Snaps help with making the improvements we need.

= QA =
We completed our review of the desktop test plan this week and have set our
priorities for this cycle. This will cover installation, upgrades, some
core application smoke tests, suspend/resume, Network Manager and
translations.  We will be publishing a blog on how you can get involved
next week.

= Updates =
A new version of PulseAudio is in Xenial proposed (version
1:8.0-0ubuntu3.3).  This brings fixes for Bluetooth A2DP audio devices.
We’d appreciate testing and feedback.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/1:8.0-0ubuntu3.3
Updated chromium beta to 60.0.3112.32, dev to 61.0.3128.3.

= Video Acceleration =
We’ve got hardware accelerated video decoding working in a Proof-Of-Concept
using a GStreamer and VA-API pipeline.  The result is 3% CPU usage to play
an h264 4K 60FPS video on Haswell.  4K h265 HEVC is also playable but
requires a Skylake or later processor.    This wiki page has been updated
with information about how to try it yourself:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntelQuickSyncVideo

Cheers, Will
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