Both 32- and 64-bit ISO images will be available

Sep 21, 2016 23:30 GMT  ·  By

Today, September 21, 2016, Canonical's Adam Conrad announced that the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Final Beta is now in freeze stage and will arrive, as initially planned, on September 22, 2016.

However, early adopters should look for the release late Thursday or very early on Friday, September 23, because the Ubuntu developers are a little busy right now pushing last minute updates to the stable archive, and they also managed to land the new Linux 4.8 kernel packages earlier today, as reported right here on Softpedia.

"Due to a rocky start on this beta with landing a last-minute kernel and a few other hiccups, it's possible the actual release will happen on Friday morning instead of Thursday night, but let's aim for the Thursday release and see how we do," says Adam Conrad on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team.

Ubuntu 16.10 to be officially released on October 13, 2016

Tomorrow's Final Beta or Beta 2 build is the last development milestone for the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system, which has an official launch date set for October 13, 2016, for all official derivatives except Mythbuntu and Edubuntu. Also, you should know that the queue freeze stage will last until the October release.

Ubuntu 16.10 Final Beta will be released for both 64- and 32-bit hardware platforms, so it looks like Canonical did not put its plan into action as reported earlier this year, despite the fact that most users voted for 32-bit ISO builds to be dropped from Ubuntu 16.10 and future releases.

We will see if the final release of Ubuntu 16.10 will ship only with 64-bit ISOs or not, but the rest of the official flavors are currently sticking to having both 32- and 64-bit images. The Final Beta milestone will also be the first for Ubuntu itself, which means that we will finally be able to take if for a proper test drive on our PCs.