Ubuntu 7.10, which is released in October, has came out as a beta. The list of new things is impressing, among other things, the 3D desktop will be running right from the start.
The window environment Gnome 2.20 will be as I mentioned in a earlier post also available from the start.
The 3D desktop Compiz Fusion will be activated from the system start. Ubuntu 7.10 will automatically detect whether the hardware can handle the 3D acceleration or not. If it can’t support 3D a regular version of the desktop will be launched.
A nice search function is found in the operating system, similar to Mac OS X’s “Finder”. The search function searches through files, bookmarks, you contacts and some other things.
Since previous version, several users can be logged in simutanously on the same machine, the difference now is that Ubuntu has implemented “Fast User Switching”. Which enables switching users without having to supply the username and password.
An integrated program to install plugins for Firefox in the same fashion as installing system packages on the distribution will also be found.
The graphics has improved, improved support for multiple monitors and using a graphical interface you can change the resolution and refresh rate without restarting X. X that now also is bulletproof, which I also wrote about in a post a while back, this means that you can screw up xorg.conf as much as you want and the system will still start in a fail safe mode.
Ubuntu 7.10 will also tell you if there are proprietary drivers available for download, this will probably be the best solution for installing drivers for let say Nvidia.
NTFS has before been a problem for Linux. You have since some time been able to read from a NTFS partition, but writing to it has been a somewhat bigger problem. Ubuntu has now implemented the NTFS-3g project which enables you to both read and write to NTFS partitions. Which is good news for all having this problem.
The Power consumption has been reduced due to the fact that the kernel in 7.10 uses dynticks. This allows the processor to consume less energy which leads to less heat generated. Mobile users can look forward to longer lasting batteries.
Apparmor is in from the start, originally it comes from Novell and is for running applications i a sandbox. A good way to run application that you don’t trust or are sure about and where the source code is closed.
The server variations have profiles for email-server, file server, print server and of course the LAMP server, (running Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP).
Ubuntu 7.10 will also come with an improved profile managing to create custom installations. Something you can have use for if you decide to run Ubuntu 7.10 on a greater scale.
Improved support for thin clients: More Effective handling of sessions in form of better compression.
Download Ubuntu 7.10 Beta here.
Source: Ubuntu
Too bad I installed it on my somewhat old laptop. Compiz Fusion doesn’t work here and I don’t really want to run a beta on my workstation.
Brian
September 28th, 2007
The NTFS support both ways is what I’ve been waiting for. I’m not a technical guy so I never could install any of the packages for this purpose before. I think I’ll have to check out Ubuntu in october when the official release is out then.
Dany
September 28th, 2007