On the first day of December, the Ubuntu developers published a new iteration of the Ubuntu Kernel Team Weekly Newsletter, informing us all about the latest work done on the Linux kernel packages of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

We reported last week that the target kernel for the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system would be Linux kernel 4.4 and that version 4.3 would soon land in the master-next branch. Well, today is that day, as the Ubuntu devs have announced the rebase of kernel packages of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) on Linux kernel 4.3, the latest stable and most advanced Linux kernel.

"Our Xenial master-next branch has been rebased to v4.3 and our first v4.3 based kernel has been uploaded to xenial-proposed in the archive. Please test and let us know your results. Our unstable repo continues to track v4.4-rc3 in parallel. As noted last week, we will eventually rebase both our Xenial master/master-next branches to v4.4 since that is our target kernel version for 16.04," say the devs.

First Alpha release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS lands on the last day of the year

On this occasion, the Ubuntu devs recommend all users who want to help test the new Linux kernel 4.3 packages to download the daily build ISO images and install the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system on a non-production computer. Please note that the new Linux kernel 4.3 packages are available for installation in the Proposed channel, which you will need to activate from the Software Sources tool.

The first Alpha build of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will arrive on the last day of the year, on December 31, 2015, which, we have to admit, is a pretty unusual date for a testing release. Anyway, the Ubuntu developers continue to track the upstream Linux 4.4 kernel, and they've just updated the unstable repositories to the recently released Linux kernel 4.4 RC3 build.