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Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 3.16-based kernel, a new AppArmor with fine-grained socket control, and more.
New Features in Ubuntu 14.10 Desktop
Ubuntu Desktop has seen incremental improvements, with newer versions of GTK and Qt, updates to major packages like Firefox and LibreOffice, and improvements to Unity, including improved High-DPI display support.
The general theme for 14.10 on the desktop is one of bug fixes and incremental quality improvements.
Unity
Unity has had many bugs fixed and features improved support for High-DPI displays.
General
Firefox is updated to version 33 and Chromium is updated to version 38.
Gtk updated to version 3.12. Qt updated to version 5.3.
Support for IPP Everywhere printers is added, and printers shared from Ubuntu can emulate IPP Everywhere printers. IPP printers require no configuration under Ubuntu.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice 4.3 brings a lot of improvements including improved PDF support, new features in Writer, Calc and Impress (word processor, spreadsheet and presentations).
Ubuntu Developer Tools Centre
This new tool allows developers to quickly and easily setup a variety of development environments on their Ubuntu Desktop.
Xorg
With Xorg 1.16, we have better support for non-pci devices. Xephyr now supports DRI3. The mesa 10.3 update has support for AMD Hawaii GPU's, improved support for dri3 offloading, the freedreno open source driver, and preliminary support for using nouveau on maxwell devices.
New Features in Ubuntu 14.10 server
Ubuntu Server 14.10 includes the Juno release of OpenStack, alongside deployment and management tools that save devops teams time when deploying distributed applications – whether on private clouds, public clouds, x86 or ARM servers, or on developer laptops. Several key server technologies, from MAAS to Ceph, have been updated to new upstream versions with a variety of new features.
OpenStack 2014.1
Ubuntu 14.10 includes the OpenStack 2014.2 (Juno) release of the following projects in Ubuntu main:
OpenStack Compute -- Nova
OpenStack Identity -- Keystone
OpenStack Imaging -- Glance
OpenStack Block Storage -- Cinder
OpenStack Networking -- Neutron
OpenStack Object Storage -- Swift
OpenStack Telemetry -- Ceilometer
OpenStack Orchestration -- Heat
OpenStack Dashboard -- Horizon
WARNING: Upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment.
Libvirt 1.2.8
Containers launched with libvirt-lxc can now be apparmor-protected.
Libvirt now provides cgmanager support allowing use of libvirt inside containers without cgroups mounted.
Migration of pc-1.0 VMs from a 12.04 host must be done first to a 14.04 host, to the pc-1.0-precise machine type. From there, they may be converted to a new machine type, such as pc-i440fx-trusty, and migrated to a 14.10 host.
Qemu 2.1
Kvm is now supported on the ppc64le architecture.
Cgmanager 0.32
Cgmanager now has a new compiled client tool, and supports new methods including Prune, ListTasksRecursive, and ListControllers. It now supports the features needed for systemd-shim to properly close sessions.
LXC 1.1
This includes container checkpoint and restart as a tech preview.
cloud-init 0.7.6
Cloud-init 0.7.6 brings several bug fixes along with support for booting ubuntu with systemd. Also featured is improvements when using vendor-data on OpenStack.
bcache
bcache support is now included as a technology preview, enabled in the kernel and via the userspace package bcache-tools, but without installer support. We highly recommend that you take full system backups before experimenting with it. It has been enabled with a focus on server use cases. Some desktop use cases should also work, but we have observed some issues when attempting to combine bcache use with LVM and md.
Juju
Juju, the service orchestration tool for Ubuntu, has been updated to the latest current stable release, 1.20.10. See the upstream release notes for full details of all new features and improvements in this release.
Docker
Docker 1.2 is released in Utopic. For the absolute latest upstream version of Docker.
MAAS
MAAS has been updated to the latest current beta release, 1.7-beta8. Many new features have been added, and lots of bugfixes too. Full release notes will be available shortly.