Today I’ve decided to take a look at the Daily Release (07/15/09) of Ubuntu and Karmic Koala and post my findings on it to show you what too look forward to in October!
Due to its early stage, this version of Ubuntu does not have a graphical installer, so I won’t post any screenshots for the installation. There is a new feature, however, to seamlessly encrypt your home directory which I will be choosing for the purpose of testing new features. Unfortunately, I got an error saying it could not encrypt my home directory, but on the up side, everything else went fine. Edit: After boot up, it asked me if I would like to try and encrypt it again, and all went fine.
On first boot up, I see several things. For one, the version of the GRUB boot leader has been updated, along with Gnome.
The new version includes a nice looking login screen which is somewhat like that of OS X, and has a couple of changes. 1) The fast user changer no longer has shutdown functions because those have been placed into the System menu as they were before the fast user switcher came out. 2) Ubunutu has sub menus items!!! WOAH! There’s a Logic Games sub menu in the Applications menu under games. 3) Empathy is used as the default IM client.
There are also a couple of things that haven’t changed that might should be such as Firefox hasn’t been updated to 3.5 and also the Wallpaper is still the Jaunty defauly, but that probably won’t change till late betas or even RC.
All of my screenshots so far, and ones soon to come are/will be in http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/
I will be posting updated articles about the new features of Karmic Koala