Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

An early peek at Ubuntu 9.10

5th August 2009

Even if the twice a year release means that changes to Ubuntu are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, that isn’t to say that curiosity doesn’t get the better of me from time to time. The result is that an early alpha version (3 at the time of writing) of the Linux distro has found a home in a VirtualBox VM on my main system. The most noticeable change so far is the inclusion of GNOME 2.27.5 with its Fedora-esque log-in screen and the movement of the shutdown and log-off paraphernalia to the System menu, which is where you find it in Debian or Fedora. On the account settings menu, there lives a link to an equivalent of the Windows Control Panel called Control Centre; the menu item is named System Preferences. For the record, I have seen it in Fedora 11 too and it does look as if Ubuntu’s GNOME implementation is looking more like a brown equivalent of Fedora. Whether this stays is anyone’s guess but a new messaging arrangement is coming into being too.

GNOME Control Centre in Ubuntu 9.10

Otherwise, there appears to be no real drama on the surface with Firefox staying at 3.0.x for now and OpenOffice moving to 3.1. Personally speaking, I’d be very surprised to seeing Firefox 3.5.x being left out though I did run into a spot of bother with the Preferences dialogue crashing it on Windows XP. Under the bonnet, the kernel is at release 2.6.31 and things seem reasonably stable at this stage. Saying that, there is a crash report icon appear every session but that has no effect apart from the visual side of things. VirtualBox Guest Additions work as they should, better than they in Windows guests if my experience provides any sort of benchmark (the display does odd things unless you keep jogging the graphics memory up and down). All in all, things appear usable if undramatic at this stage and there are a few months to go before the final release anyway.

Comments:

  • bob says:

    >>On the user menu, there lives a link to an equivalent of the Windows Control Panel called Control Centre; >>the menu item is named System Preferences.

    It’s always been there…..

  • John says:

    I’m not so sure because I did check 9.04 before publishing the post and didn’t spot it there. Regardless of this, there seems to be some convergence with the GNOME implementations in other distros. If the Control Centre has always been there, then fine but it may just have become easier to find now…

  • All the views that you find expressed on here in postings and articles are mine alone and not those of any organisation with which I have any association, through work or otherwise. As regards editorial policy, whatever appears here is entirely of my own choice and not that of any other person or organisation.

  • Please note that everything you find here is copyrighted material. The content may be available to read without charge and without advertising but it is not to be reproduced without attribution. As it happens, a number of the images are sourced from stock libraries like iStockPhoto so they certainly are not for abstraction.

  • With regards to any comments left on the site, I expect them to be civil in tone of voice and reserve the right to reject any that are either inappropriate or irrelevant. Comment review is subject to automated processing as well as manual inspection but whatever is said is the sole responsibility of the individual contributor.