Steve Langasek from Canonical announced a few days ago, on August 27th, a proposal to drop the Alternate CD ISO images starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.

Four days later, on August 30th, the Alternate CDs were gone from the daily builds and will not be available at the launch of Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1.

Some of the Alternate CD "hard to live without" features, such as disk encryption, were already implemented in the Desktop CD version. But some other nice ones, such as RAID setup, were dropped!

"The good news is that this means today we already have support in ubiquity for cryptsetup and LVM in the guided partitioner, with manual partitioning support soon to follow."

"The somewhat bad news is that we will not have support for RAID setup in ubiquity this cycle," Steve Langasek said in the mailinglist announcement.

Well, Canonical makes the rules and we need to abide!