Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex preview 1 Comment
As you probably already know from the official announcement — Ubuntu 8.10 Beta released — and the dozen of blog posts about it, Ubuntu 8.10 ‘Intrepid Ibex’ Beta has been released. Like every beta, with an exception for gutsy, I upgraded soon after this announcement. Although downloading all the updates took a while with our not-so-fast internet connection, I managed to upgrade the system in about three hours without any problems.
When I had removed some unnecessary and reenabled my custom repositories(of which some had become useless) I could test the latest version of Ubuntu. Here a small overview/preview of Intrepid.
One new feature in Intrepid is the support for an encrypted directory at ~/Private that gets automatically mounted and unmounted when you log on and off. This way you can protect your sensitive data on an easy way. Tighter integration is planned for the next release(s).
At Planet Ubuntu it didn’t take long for a new MeMe to start, this time about the contents of their ~/Private directory. One of those posts — What’s in my Encrypted ~/Private directory? — helped me a lot with setting up my own.
Another thing I like a lot, but to which I still need to get used a bit is the tab function in Nautilus. Just press Ctrl+T and a new tab opens! I’ve always missed this since I moved back to GNOME after my short KDE period.
A small thing that was changed is that now a link is placed to the changelog at Launchpad when you’re looking at the changes in update-manager, but there is no information available according to the program. A nice feature for people who do want to know exactly what changed without having to do the searching manually.
Although the system runs quite smoothly and I didn’t find much bugs, I did report some:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nspluginwrapper/+bug/277799
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/278097
However, the flash player still crashes after having run a while and the booting time seemed to be a bit longer. Am I the only one experiencing that?
I also submitted already an idea at Brainstorm after I discovered that during the boot process the progress bar sometimes switches to ’scanning-mode’, like it already used to do at the start of the boot process in previous releases.
This behaviour could be confusing, at least I find it confusing, and it makes it harder to see the current status. I submitted this idea:
What I suggest is move that scanning-mode to a separate indicator, e.g. a small Ubuntu logo that spins whenever it scans.
There are many more new things in Intrepid I could talk about. However, that would be doing double work since a lot of other people already blogged about it and since the release announcements of the beta and GNOME 2.24 were already quite detailed they provided a better source.
For more information about the Intrepid beta release, try this page: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/intrepid/beta
Some other blog posts about intrepid:
http://en.andregondim.eti.br/?p=29
http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog/kubuntu-intrepid-beta-kde-412-released/
http://nancib.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/ubuntu-810-enters-beta-stage/
Good luck Intrepid!
meme is short for memetic
it is not pronounced “Me Me”
look it up