Unlike previous times the banner will not be launching with the beta release. There are two betas this period and the team is aiming at releasing the countdown in between the two. The material from the newly announced Ubuntu Branding will give the artists new opportunities in the form of a new color scheme, new logo and new font.
There's already a few submitions on the wiki. Have you submitted your suggestion?
As much as I love the new color-scheme, I can't help feeling that the purple/lavender color belongs to Apple. The face that every member of the design team is using a MAC as their primary laptop, might have something to do with that.
It's very easy to spot the new "table" background and the new card back artwork in Klondike, but in Mahjongg the change is much more discreet. I've added red circle around the changed tile.
The Canonical DesktopExperienceTeam (with help from Ayatana) is working on some nice improvements to the desktop notification area (or systray) for Ubuntu 10.04.
The current notification area is becoming more and more difficult for users to interact with. Each application behaves differently, they're not accessible, and they're even sometime styled differently. Ted Gould explains that this makes the interface difficult for users as they don't know what to expect. It provides a difficult situation for applications as there is no way that they can give the user a good experience as there are no standards to follow. And it makes the whole support system for software more difficult through documentation and long explanations of how to use the computer.
The DesktopExperienceTeam propose to migrate the different applets to using simple menus. This change should provide a more consistent interface and be an important step to improve the user experience with the right hand side of the panel.
With every application being a menu, and the panel knowing this and being able to assume it, then the whole notification area can be a menu bar. This makes it easy to browse application's menus, find what you want, and work with it. It also improves keyboard navigation and increases the accessibility. Menus are a nice mix between simplicity and expandability as they're easy to use and yet provide a way for applications to provide a rich set of functionality.
The proposed changes define two main areas in the panel:
• A "system indicator" area at the far right of the panel, gathering system features like sound, power or session management
• An "application indicator" area, just before it, grouping icons and menus from applications that wish to host a part of their interface on the panel Additionaly, we propose to turn all of the elements on the right side of the panel into regular menus.
This way, users will not have to worry about whether a function is accessible with a left or right click, or be suprised when a click on a panel icon suddenly hides or shows a full application window. Additionally, that will help provide:
• An accessible interface: icons and menus will be introspectable by screen readers
• Style consistency: as the menus will be rendered by the same toolkit as the panel, the context menus of KDE applications will be rendered in the same style as other applications running on a Gnome desktop, and vice versa
• Constant layout: being integrated in a common menubar (as opposed to a collection of applets), icons and menus shouldn't be disturbed by resolution changes, like when doing a presentation and then returning to the desktop to see all applets totally disorganized
• Menu scrubbing: users frequently browse menus in search of a feature; by turning the notification area into a set of menus, the users will be able to search the interface more easily
To understand more about what's coming in Ubuntu 10.04 and how to port applications the DX team tried to put up some documentation including a porting guide for applicationscode with examples.
In the notification area the messaging menu will also receive improvements. The DX team is providing specifications for how applications should integrated with the messaging menu.
A sketch for the Messaging menu in the nocification area for Ubuntu 10.04
Another part of Canonical's plan for panel perfection is a concept that the company calls the Me Menu. Based partly on Ubuntu's current presence applet, the new Me Menu will serve as a one-stop shop for configuring messaging status and social networks. Designed by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth himself, the Me Menu is expected to be one of the highlights of Ubuntu 10.04.
Much like the current presence menu, it will offer tight integration with the Empathy instant messaging client, allowing users to control their status and availability settings. It will also integrate with the Gwibber microblogging client to make it possible for users to post status messages to Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, and other services directly through a textbox in the Me Menu. Another major goal of the Me Menu is to provide a single access point for account management. The user will be able to use the menu to launch account configuration for Gwibber, Empathy, and Ubuntu One. (source ArsTechnica)
I would really like to see GNOME Shell considering picking up some of this amazing work. I am really excited about the opportunities this work is bringing to the Ubuntu desktop and I'm very much looking forward the improved user experience in Ubuntu 10.04.
Stéphane Graber will create a complete wiki page listing the needs for each of these items (size, resolution, restrictions, ...) and will then announce it on both ubuntu-artwork and the edubuntu mailing-lists. As you can see from the list, there' s a lot of things to work on, and Edubuntu is looking for all the help they can get.
UDS Lucid was a busy time for the Kernel Team. They chose a new kernel for the Lucid Lynx release, they reviewed their policies for Stable Updates, reviewed their kernel delta and configuration, and much more. Here is a very brief overview of their decisions for those who are interested. I should warn you that this might get a bit geeky.
The primary decision for the kernel team at UDS is to choose the base kernel version for the release. For Lucid this will be 2.6.32. This version has just released providing the maximum stabalization time, it also is expected to be the kernel of choice for long term releases from other major distributions (SUSE, Fedora?). The kernel team will also keep ext4 as their primary filesystem.
They also reviewed their Stable Release Update policy, moving to a more upstream stable branch oriented policy. The team will be taking upstream stable updates for longer and preferring those for Lucid.
The team reviewed their Ubuntu delta, the drivers, and patches they are carrying. They plan to update all of their Ubuntu drivers except for drbd. drbd is primarily consumed by the server team and they use a dkms module to get a more up to date version. On the patch side they have identified a number of redundant patches which have been dropped, and a number which should be moved upstream.
The team has decided to experiment with backporting newer kernels onto LTS releases for Lucid. This will involve provision of a kernel from later cycles into Lucid, supported on certified platforms. The policy here is being firmed up now.
For graphics, they chose to enable Radeon Kernel Mode Settings by default and to seriously look at enabling Nouveau for Lucid. This should bring a flicker-free Plymouth boot to the majority of users, but for people using the 2D-only "Nouveau" NVidia driver on Nvidia chipsets, they will have to sacrifice things like 3D compiz and VDAPU video playback. Confused? Read more about Plymouth and KMS here...
For those who crave more detail on these and a couple of other key initiatives can find more information at the following wiki page, which they will be keeping up to date with the current state of the union for the kernel http://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/UDSLucid
Robert Ancell is working on making scanning on Ubuntu "just work". Currently scanning is performed using the default installed Xsane. Xsane has many options, has a style that does not integrate into the current Ubuntu desktop and does not allow scanning from within applications. In Karmic it was proposed to peplaced Xsane with the application Gnome-Scan, but Gnome-Scan was not found to be stable enough.
Robert Ancell's application titled Simple Scan is basically a frontend for SANE - which is the same backend as XSANE uses. This means that all existing scanners will work and the interface is well tested. However, this does not rule out changing the backend in the future. Besides a much cleaner interface, Simple Scan will also have a GTK+ interface that integrates nicely with the Ubuntu desktop.
Cory Kontrosrecently announced that Ubuntu Studio is looking for a icon refresh and is considering depending on the Breathe iconset as a base for Lucid. The idea is to create new icons in the Breathe/Oxygen style and inherit Breathe as a dependency. This new look will be a nice update from the current Tango styled icons. Saleel Velankar has already made the first submissions on the wiki.
What can we expect from 10.04 - Lucid Lynx?
This post is ment as a followup on my previous post titled "What can we expect from 10.04". Of course no one can know exactly what Ubuntu 10.04 will be like and what features will land. But based on the outcome of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas here's my vision.
An early landing.
If you've been following the Karmic development, you will know that much of the work landed rather close to the actual release. With Lucid Lynx, the plan is to land as many critical elements as possible around alpha 2. The release schedule looks a little different this time. The biggest change is that there's now two beta releases. This is mainly done with the hope that more people will help test the release and report bugs earlier in the development cycle.
Since this is a LTS release, there will also be more time scheduled for bug fixing. Lucid might not be shipping the latest and greatest, because the of the increased focus on stability and long term support. The opposite might also be the case, as we saw in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, where the final release shipped a BETA version of Firefox. There's some crucial choices to be made.
The music store
Rhythmbox will be the default musicplayer (Banshee might be considered again for Lucid+1) and will have an integrated music store. The music store will deliver the ability to purchase music from within Rhythmbox. No actual music partner has been announced yet, but Canonical are looking at several major vendors. The music downloaded to your music player library locally can be synced across all your computers via UbuntuOne. All the music will be DRM free, which means there will be no restrictions as to how many times a user can copy their purchased music.
With UbuntuOne you will be able to easily share any folders in your home directory. No need to move files into the UbuntuOne folder anymore. The team has also got massive plans for the future.
Applications
As you might have heard, Rick Spence brought up the suggestion of removing the GIMP from the default installation (it will still be available in the Software Center). The Gimp is a showcase for the power of FOSS, but it is also very complex. It takes up a lot of space, and basic photo editing tasks are taken up by F-Spot (though F-Spot could use some allround love). The plan is to include a videoeditor by default and the choice has, for now, landed on PiTivi. This has caused a lot of people to complain (with feedback), but this really isn't a big deal. The GIMP is not being "abandoned" just because it is not installed by default. The Ubuntu community supports a lot of software; not just what is on the disk. During the Alpha cycle, it will be decided if PiTivi is ready for the Lucid Lynx. Ryan Paul has written a nice article about the topic on the ArsTechnica website.
Lucid will ship OpenOffice version 3.2.1. The selection of games will undergo a clean-up. Basically the goal is to choose fewer, better games by default – especially ones that are online multi-player games.
System indicators
For Ubuntu Lucid, the messaging menu will by default contain a section for each messaging application you are actively using. The goal is to make the panel elements feel coherent and the behavior more consistent. Each section will show an item for the application as a whole, then any custom commands specified by the application, then any items for individual message sources within that application. An application may provide a new-messages count or a time-since-last-message for each message source as appropriate, or alternatively provide a new-messages count for the application as a whole. Your default mail application, and Ubuntu’s non-mail default messaging applications (Empathy and Gwibber for Lucid), will be placed first in the menu if you’re using them. All other application sections should have an item for the application itself, highlighted with a triangle if the application is currently running. Improvements are target the session menu, status menu, sound menu and power menu.
Software Center
One of the biggest features that were introduced in 9.10 was the Software Center. With a simple design it can be used to install and remove software packages and to add repositories for finding, installing and managing new applications. In Ubuntu 10.04 the Software Center will expanded its features and will also present packages (as opposed to end-user applications). It is also planned to include a way for users to review software or packages.
Compiz
Personally I was sad to learn that the rewrite of the Compiz core in C++(which allows for smart functions, easier and smarter private systems, easier initialization and clean-up, and there are numerous other advantages) will not be ready in time for Lucid. The popular eye-candy application will however be receiving some allround improvements. Besides having it's own dedicated milestone in the 100 paper cuts project, the goals have been listed as:
Visual consistency with the Ubuntu theme
Coherent keybindings; utilizing the Super key
Increase awareness of features, really need to think about discoverability
Go back to 4 workspaces to make it worth a users while to learn the feature.
Improve animations - they need to be made more consistent, faster.
Disabling plugins to improve boot performance (compiz currently takes 9 seconds to start!).
Provide better interface for doing settings upgrades and backups
Notifications The notification system that was introduced in Ubuntu 9.04, will have a "do-not-disturb" mode that individual applications can trigger. Whenever a program is inhibiting the screensaver, Notify OSD will be in the do-not-disturb mode. This means that while you’re watching a movie in fullscreen, you will not be notified about chat, e-mail or other non critical notifications. However a notification will appear if for example your battery is low.
100 Paper Cuts
Started during the Ubuntu 9.10 development cycle was an Ubuntu project to address paper cuts in Ubuntu, or rather small usability bugs in Ubuntu and the Linux desktop that are often only minor impairments or annoyances, but these easy-to-fix issues have never been heavily targeted for correction. These "paper cuts" are often spotted by new Linux users but frequently go unnoticed to those that have been using the Linux desktop for a while and are accustomed to its shortcomings. Most of the 100 paper cuts targeted for Ubuntu 9.10 were addressed (the official count seems to be at 76), but this project is going to live on with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Lucid will have ten rounds to fix 100 (or more) paper cuts in time for the Lucid Lynx before it is released in April. Three of the ten rounds are focused on addressing the outstanding paper cuts from Ubuntu 9.10. David Siegel has described the ten milestones that will help structure the effort to fix one hundred paper cuts for Lucid in his blogpost (see the Lucid series on Launchpad). If all goes according to plan, 100 paper cuts will be healed by the end of February.
Testing
Dustin Kirkland recently announced Testdrive which makes it simple to run any Ubuntu release in a virtual machine, safely, and without affecting your current Ubuntu installation. This is a great way to "try out" the Ubuntu release beyond your current version, before upgrading. Dustin Kirkland expects that testdrive will be very useful to Ubuntu developers, testers, and bug triagers during the Lucid development cycle, as these people will be able to test Lucid's daily ISOs throughout the cycle, and in particular at the release milestones for ISO-acceptance-testing.
Boot experience
There's a 10 second goal for boot time for Lucid, with the Dell Mini 10v with SSD as reference machine. The desktop-team has got a lot of work to do to reach the goal, which will shave 10 seconds off the the boottime. Even though we haven't seen any drastic improvements in Karmic, all the under the hood work done in Karmic will shine though in Lucid. The design and artwork won't change much from what we saw in Karmic - mostly small tweaks and cleanups here and there. Usplash will be replaced with Plymouth. Radeon KMS support should be available in 2.6.32 and later covering the kernel version in Lucid. Nvidia support is expected to only be available via the Nouveau driver, which is currently not slated for inclusion currently.
Only pieces
What I’ve described above only covers the stuff I’m most excited about surrounding the Ubuntu desktop. I hope the 100-papercuts project and Dustin Kirklands TestDrive will help crush a lot of bugs. There is still a ton of exciting stuff that I haven’t mentioned like all the server development, Ubuntu on ARM, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Kubuntu, Cloud, Quickly, Community and so much more. The new Gnome 2.30 release will of course bring a lot of enhancements as well.
I haven't exactly been keeping this blog up to date with information about and from UDS. There's simply way too much going on here for me to cover it all. I'm not going to write a long summary today either, but I've listed some links below. If you want to know more about the discussions, check the Gobby documents which contains the actual notes from the sessions.
I’m at the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit (UDS) in Dallas. If you don't already know what UDS is, please read Alan Popes blogpost which describes it rather well here...
Every day I read, write and listen to English, and yet I rarely speak it. This trip to UDS in Dallas has been really challenging for both my tongue and my English vocabulary.
I've been meeting some very nice three dimensional people with full-sized human bodies and their hackergotchis sitting on top. Today I attended four sessions besides the joint ones in the Grand Ballroom. I'll try to describe some sessions below.
UDS name badges
Opening Plenary
The day kicked off with Jono Bacon, who made an introduction in the Grand Ballroom at 9:00 am. Besides a lot of practical details, Jono told us to eat healthy food, get enough sleep and be awesome! He pointed out that it is important that we stay on topic and that we get the most out of the one hour we're given in each session. Mark Shuttleworth also spoke briefly about Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Desktop round table
At this session we talked about what's important to focus on in this LTS release. Should the choice of applications remain the same to give users a feel of consistency, when moving from one release to another - or should we simply ship the best application for the job to deliver the best desktop experience. Banshee vs. Rhythmbox was brought up as an example.
Although this case was only a thought experiment, I should add that it is not likely that Lucid will be shipped with Banshee. Rick Spencer, the desktop team leader, also brought up the controversial idea of removing the GIMP in favor of a video editor, but he wanted to save the juicy details for the Wednesday session Application selection in the default install.
Boot preformance Scott James Remnant talked for two hours about the plans for further improvements and about how to achieve it. He started the session by giving a short introduction to how to read boot-charts – mainly because people often get it wrong. To sum it up shortly, there are two graphs, the CPU graphs is how hard the CPU is working, the second is the disk being used. On the CPU blue is the CPU working hard, idle is generally bad. Disk utilization, we want the disk to be used as hard as possible for as short a time as possible; red is bad.
Even though we haven't seen much improvement in Karmic, all the under the hood work done in Karmic will shine though in Lucid. Scott talked about having budgets for each section of the boot. If all the teams all hit their budgets, the goal is achieved. He then gave a list of specific tasks to work on for each team to meet the goal. This was a very interesting session indeed.
Short joint sessions
After lunch we all meet back in the Grand Ballroom where Jono talked shortly about how to run a good session. He had created some pretty slides and remembered to recharge his laptop.
MPT explained the future plans for the Software Center. Throughout the week there will be some Software Center sessions, so I won't go into details here. I'm really looking forward to seeing the application mature.
Didier Roche (didrocks) and Rick Spencer did a demonstration of Quickly by writing a small application, building it, testing it and uploading it to a PPA in like five minutes. A fantastic usability improvement if you're writing applications on Linux. The videos aren’t up yet, but there are previous screen-casts showing it off.
Boot experience work
This session focused on the technical how to of the boot experience. Here Scott James Remnant again did much of the talking (along with Collin) and demonstrated his Plymouth dancing monkey animation. The plan for Lucid is to introduce Plymouth, although the details on how everything will fit together isn't entirely clear to me yet. Mat Tomaszewski had a list of technical issues that he wanted to discuss solutions for. Like; Removing the semi hidden and currently flickering mouse cursor and the fade in/out during startup and shutdown, etc..
The Ubuntu Developers Summit will be next week (Nov 16 - Nov 20) in Dallas, TX USA.
All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go, and hopefully I will be writing blogposts from UDS throughout the week - I'm sure many others will too. After UDS, I plan to write an updated version of What can we expect from 10.04 - Lucid Lynx?.
Even if you're not joining the party, there's still ways to participate. Check out the UDS wiki Page for more info in participating remotely.
Internet Relay Chat
Overall discussion, including plenary: #ubuntu-devel-summit on freenode.
Discussion Channels - The tracks are shuffled around different rooms, so the irc channels are /per room/, not per track. Here are the channels, which corresponds to the room of the session in the schedule.
lame -m s /tmp/mystream.wav -o "/tmp/uds_room3.mp3"
for scheduling you can use cron to start mplayer and pkill to stop the recording.
Gobby
gobby.ubuntu.com
Gobby is being used at UDS to collaborate on the specifications that are being written and to facilitate remote participation.
To take part, please install Gobby (available in universe) and tell it to connect to gobby.ubuntu.com. You will be presented with a list of documents being edited. During any session or meeting, and particularly at the end of one, please do make a local backup of your documents. WARNING: There is a new gobby in karmic, gobby-infinote, we will NOT be using this at UDS since we need for people on older releases to participate. Ensure you are using the "gobby" package.
Videos
We will be recording certain sessions and all the plenary sessions at UDS. You can follow along with the videos as we post them on the Ubuntu community on Miro. If you want to automatically receive updates when videos are available we recommend that you Miro and click on the miro links at the site to subscribe to the video feeds. These videos will be in Ogg Theora format and is the recommended method for watching UDS videos.
Micro-blogging
Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to send brief text updates of 140 characters or less. It is a great way to inform the Ubuntu community of discussions and news that happen during UDS. Many Ubuntu users get there news from UDS from microblogging sources. During UDS-Mountainview, Identi.ca saw more traffic during UDS than during the night of the U.S. Presidential elections.
Microblogging is not a replacement for gobby or IRC, which have important uses during an UDS event. It should be used as a tool to communicate with other people at UDS and the wider Ubuntu user community.
Suggested ways to use microblogging at UDS:
Announce session topics at the beginning of the session.
Ask for feedback from the community during the session discussion.
Dent/tweet important discussion points during the sessions.
Dent/tweet any news worthy items during UDS (Kernel version, encrypted swap by default, etc...).
To plan social events and gatherings during UDS.
Identi.ca
We encourage people at UDS to create an account on Identi.ca, an open source micro-blogging platform if they don't already have an account. If you have a Twitter account you can link it your Identi.ca account and posts you make to Identi.ca will automatically forwarded to Twitter.
If you don't wish to create an identi.ca account, each track has a generic account that people can use to post. These accounts will also announce each session as it begins. Passwords for these account will be listed at the UDS venue.
@udscommunity
@udskernel
@udsqa
@udsfoundations
@udsmobile
@udsdesktop
@udsserver
In identi.ca, please use the !ubuntu and !UDS groups in your message, which already have many followers. These automatically post to the hashtags #ubuntu and #uds, if you want to follow and are not interested in sending.
Gwibber
Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME developed with Python and GTK. It supports Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, and RSS. Gwibber is available in universe in Ubuntu 9.04+.
While we have an incredible bunch of people in the Ubuntu community, at Canonical and upstream that fixes bugs, we are always looking for good people to hunt down these bugs and report them. Reporting bugs is the only way for developers to know about the bugs you experience and to fix them and make Ubuntu the best Operating System it can be. But it is absolutely crucial that we have enough user to test the entire system on various hardware, and that these users provide the developers with good bug-reports.
From the Windows 7 download site, Microsoft can see that 8 million users download the Windows 7 BETA release!Microsoft also has these telemetry data that they get. Whenever anyone installs the Windows 7 BETA, they will automatically enroll into the customer feedback program. In the RC release and the final release it's an opt in program, but back in the BETA the deal was; "Hey, you're BETA testing this thing, we want the feedback - you have to provide us with this information!".
From the data collected by the customer feedback program, Microsoft was able to see that the testing pool wasn't 8 million, as the download site indicated, but instead 15 million people! So, this means 7 million people obtained the BETA or RC release of Windows 7 from elsewhere (Bittorrent, etc.).
I have no idea how many people tested the Karmic Koala alpha/beta/RC, but I'm sure the number is "slightly" smaller. It is impossible to calculate how many people is using Ubuntu. Ubuntu, and Linux in general, is getting a lot of spotlight from the press lately, which helps bring new users to Linux every day. More user means more software testers.
It seems to me that the average judgment in the Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 reviews, says it's a close race and the score is roughly even. Some like Windows 7 better and some like Ubuntu 9.10 better. Basically, I don't freaking care. I couldn't care less about a boot race when I know that Karmic Koala is merely a stepping stone. You could of course argue that every release is, but Windows 8 isn't due until early 2012.
Six months from now, Microsoft will still be shipping their new flagship, while Ubuntu will be releasing Ubuntu 10.04 - the Lucid Lynx. At this point, Windows 7 will be fighting the fastest, most solid and most beautiful version of Ubuntu ever.
As with every release of Ubuntu (..., Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty, Karmic), there's a wiki page for incoming artwork submissions and concepts (themes, icons, etc.). On the wiki you can post your artwork submissions and concepts for the Ubuntu release planned for April, 2010, nicknamed Lucid Lynx. The first submission has already been made to the Lucid Lynx artwork wiki.
During the Karmic cycle, you could submit background and wallpaper suggestions both on the wiki and on Flickr. This was the first time Flickr was used as a supplement to the wiki. It was a huge success with over 2000 submissions! With the restriction of disk space, only 19 of the fabulous wallpapers made it onto the final Ubuntu 9.10 CD. If your favourite isn’t on the CD it will be made available as a separate package!
For Lucid Lynx no wallpapers can be submited on the wiki to avoid having submissions in two separate places. You must join the Flickr Ubuntu Artwork group if you would like to offer Wallpapers for Ubuntu.
Because there's shortcomings to both using the wiki or Flickr, there has been thoughts about creating a special site for artwork submissions. The discussion also brought up the question of how to make it easier for people to select wallpapers directly from the pool.
What do we know?
Well, not very much at the moment, but that will all change next month. In November, Ubuntu developers from around the world will gather to help shape and scope the next release of Ubuntu at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas. At UDS it will be decided what the developers will be working on over the next six months, and as a result, what we'll be seeing in the next versions of Ubuntu. However, until UDS arrives let’s see what we can predict at this time.
LTS release
Ubuntu 10.04 will be Ubuntu’s third long-term support (LTS) release, coming, as promised, two years after 8.04, the last LTS release. With security updates available for five years for servers and three years for desktops. The enhanced stability and longer lifecycle of LTS releases make them appealing to hardware makers and organizations that are rolling out large Ubuntu deployments. With the increased focus on stability, this also means that there won’t be a long list of new features.
No new interface
If you’re waiting for Gnome 3 to arrive, don’t hold your breath – at least not as default. Ubuntu 10.04 will use Gnome 2.x as its desktop environment, with the focus to shift to Gnome 3.0 thereafter. This means the user interface won’t look very different from previous releases. It is of course to be expected that Gnome 3 will have a lot of rough edges at its birth, which again doesn’t make it ideal in a LST release. The Gnome shell will be available for installation though, should you want to take it for a test drive. Overall, a wise decision.
The upcoming Gnome 3 that is to be released early 2010, can already be tested in an early stage in Ubuntu 9.10. If you want to test the Gnome Shell, install the package "gnome-shell", open a terminal and enter the command "gnome-shell --replace&".
Gnome Shell
Artwork
With Ubuntu 9.10 things has started to look really good. Michael Forrest, the Canonical Design Team GUI prototyping guy, explains on his blog that we must remember that this is work in progress and I’m sure they won’t let us down. Michael writes: “There is a lot of work to do on a million other aspects of Ubuntu so I hope people won't get fixated on things like the default desktop too much - these are matters of taste and there are no correct answers - you have to trust that we have a long-term vision and that decisions are made to move things in a certain direction. We don't think you'll be disappointed when things really start to come through over the next few releases.”
Faster
Boot speed has been a hot topic for a long time now and Ubuntu has come a long way in the last few releases. For Ubuntu 10.04 the target boot speed is 10 seconds! The reference platform for this target is a Dell Mini 9 netbook with a slow CPU and fast SSD that makes it an excellent "middle of the road" machine. Some people's machines will be slower, some will be faster.
There’s also a plan to improve the speed on the installation process. Currently when installing packages in Ubuntu the download is a separate step from the unpack/configure. Ubuntu will be able to install package faster by doing downloads and installs in parallel. While downloading the cpu and disk are mostly idle. While installing the network is idle. Doing them in parallel is a good way to utilize both systems.
Under the hood Ubuntu 10.04 will also be switching to using a swap file, instead of a separate partition. This will allow on-the-fly resizing.
Boot experience
In Ubuntu 9.10 the boot experience went through intensive surgery and came out with a much improved look and feel. We will be seeing more improvements in this area in 10.04.
On shutdown will we have the option to install updates. This feature was planned for 9.10, but deferred.
A graphical OS selector is planned for switching (rebooting) between two or more operative systems. The preferred version of the graphical OS selector will have easily recognizable logos for the installed OSs. This will require a lot of work and might not actually land in 10.04.
Ubuntu Software Center
One of the biggest features that were introduced in 9.10 was the Software Centre. With a simple design it can be used to install and remove software packages and to add repositories for finding, installing and managing new applications. In Ubuntu 10.04 the Software Center will expanded its features and will replace Synaptic, Software Sources, Gdebi and (if appropriate) Update Manager.
Mark Shuttleworth's announcement
Attendees at Atlanta Linux Fest's breakout session Ubuntucon were among the first to hear the Lucid Lynx announcement straight from Mark Shuttleworth himself.
What does it all mean
All over Ubuntu 10.04 is looking to be an amazing release!
Speaking via video to UbuCon at the Atlanta Linuxfest, Mark Shuttleworth announced that the code name for the 10.04 Ubuntu release would be "Lucid Lynx". It will be an LTS version featuring 3 years support for the desktop version and 5 years for the server version. This will be the 3rd LTS version, proving that Ubuntu can not only deliver a new version every 6 months, but also an LTS version every 2nd year, something Mark is very proud of. Speaking briefly of what we can expect to see in the Lucid Lynx, Mark talks of cloud computing and Gnome. Mentioning our relationship with Debian, Mark hopes to continue expanding that relationship in the hope of bettering both distributions. In closing Mark asks our community to search out those who put in so much work delivering a quality Ubuntu product to us, and to give them all a big thanks. We think a big thanks is also deserved by Mark for his oversight and tireless work on our behalf.
