• Ubuntu 10.10: First Look

    Ubuntu 10.10: First Look

    Rohan Naravane, Oct 10, 2010 1000 hrs IST

    The latest version of the most popular Linux distro is here

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On October 10, Canonical Ltd, a company that maintains the world's most popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, will release its yearly stable release. Ubuntu's update cycle is periodical and their version numbering system is much like how our PC Buying Guides were named in the past. 10.10 represents October 2010, while the last release (version 10.04) was in April 2010.  


Ubuntu 10.04 brought over a change in interface; it concentrated to address people's social networking needs. A unified way to change status messages from the taskbar was a really nice touch. The multi-protocol instant messenger Empathy connected to modern chat clients like Google Talk and Facebook chat successfully. An app called Gwibber let us view our Twitter feeds and post new tweets via its interface. Then there was also the Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition, which had a special interface meant for small screens. Certain UI tweaks were done to maximize the viewable area. It had large icons that covered up the entire screen for easily accessing applications. 

So what does version 10.10 bring to the table? We give it a try by downloading the Release Candidate (RC) of 10.10, for both the desktop and netbook and see what's new, other than the obvious bug fixes. We tried the netbook edition on our Asus Eee PC 1000H.  

Booting and Installation woes

Not being a stable release, one can expect a bit of an erroneous behavior with any beta software. We downloaded the 64-bit desktop version and the 32-bit netbook version of 10.10 from their website. Our first hurdle was quite a big one, as via Windows we used the built-in tool that came in the ISO file to make a bootable flash drive bearing Ubuntu 10.10. We tried using the flash drive both on different computers here in the labs, and it would simply fail to boot into the OS. Later, we tried a third party app called 'Unetbootin' to make the flash drive boot-able with 10.10. To our relief, at least the OS booted successfully this way. But installation would get stuck at the first window itself, later asking us to submit a program crash report. Not exactly a positive start, we tell you.

After finding a fix for this on the internet, it is observed that this is a much reported issue. We hope that this problem will be fixed in the final version releasing today. 


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Discussion Board
(3) Comments
Alex
,Oxford, on Oct 11, 2010 05:50 PM
Clicking the clock has brought up the calender for years in ubuntu. A lot longer then vista.
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Chin
,Quezon City, on Oct 10, 2010 11:33 AM
>Also, clicking on the time now brings up a calendar widget, which is something Microsoft has had since Windows Vista. As far as I can remember, you could call up the Gnome clock and calendar panel applet on Ubuntu since Dapper Drake (6.06), which was released in 2006. To imply this is something new and that Windows Vista had this feature first is rather silly.
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Pranab Salian
,Mumbai, on Oct 10, 2010 10:40 AM
I've been looking forward to this release for a while now! This review is inappropriately named though - if you could only review the netbook edition, that should reflect in the title.
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