Article by George Norman

On 26 Oct 2009

The 22nd of October marked the release of Microsoft’s latest version of the Windows-based operating system, mainly Windows 7. It also marked the release of three new Get a Mac ads that, as you would expect, make fun of Windows 7 (I especially liked the Broken Promises ad). Naturally everyone’s attention was focused on the two giants, Microsoft and Apple.

But something very interesting occurred on the 22nd of October in the Linux world as well. Ubuntu 9.10, codename Karmic Koala, moved out of Beta. Just as scheduled, Ubuntu 9.10 RC (Release Candidate) was released to the public.


“The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop and Server editions, Ubuntu 9.10 Server for UEC and EC2, and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Codenamed “Karmic Koala”, 9.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable for testing by any user,” explained the team behind the popular open source operating system

Compared to the Beta, Karmic Koala does not bring any new features to the table. Speaking of which, here are the features you can expect to get from Ubuntu 9.10, features we've known about since Beta :

- To improve boot performance, Canonical has transitioned to Upstart.
- Improved look and feel of the boot up process. The operating system boots up faster (about 20 seconds) and the old animation has been replaced by xsplah (see here – YouTube link).
- Ubuntu Software Center replaces Add/Remove in the Applications menu.
- Gnome 2.28 desktop environment
- Pidgin has been replaced by the Empathy instant messaging client.
- Seamless application development with Quickly. Developers can come up with new Ubuntu applications and share these apps with other Ubuntu users via .deb packages or personal package archives.
- Images for common use on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon's EC2
- Ubuntu One: service that provides Linux users Cloud synchronization functionality.
- Linux kernel 2.6.31
- New Intel video driver architecture
- By default, Ubuntu 9.10 Beta uses the ext4 filesystem and the GRUB 2 boot loader
- Improved iSCSI installation process
- AppArmor with better parser which gives it faster initialization on boot speeds.
- Several new profiles have been added.
- AppArmor integration in Libvirt when using KVM or QEMU
- Uncomplicated Firewall with support for filtering by interface and egress filtering when using the ufw command
- Enhanced module loading blocking
- More applications were built as Position-Independent Executables (PIE)

If you would like to get Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Release Candidate, choose your appropriate download location here.

Please note that the final version of Ubuntu 9.10 will be launched on the 29th of October, 2009. You might want to wait three more days and get the final version.

In completely unrelated news, here’s a picture of Linus Torvalds giving Windows 7 one thumb up (via Bink.nu).





Tags: Ubuntu, Ubuntu 9.10 Release Candidate, RC, Karmic Koala

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