Ubuntu 9.10 – Karmic Koala

I run Ubuntu as my primary operating system and as far as I’m concerned it’s the best operating system out there for me. Linux has come a long way in the last few years, it has become a much more viable desktop OS – even for the computer illiterate, such as my parents – and although Ubuntu isn’t solely responsible for this, it’s certainly been a big part of it.

The latest version, Karmic Koala, is scheduled for release in October. I’ve been running it for a little while now and although it’s still unstable, it’s very usable.

Karmic finally brings the official build of Firefox 3.5 to Ubuntu which has support for HTML 5 video, the ability to tear off a tab to create a new window and a faster JavaScript engine. It also includes Canonical’s new file syncing and collaboration service Ubuntu One. It’s very similar to Dropbox and offers 2GB of storage for free or if you’re willing to shell out $10/month, 10GB. It’s limited to Ubuntu for now.

One of the more controversial changes in Karmic is the replacement of Pidgin with Empathy. Empathy is still missing a number of rather significant features for the MSN protocol (file transfers, off-line messaging and chatting with invisible users) and there are a number of people who think that Empathy isn’t mature enough to replace Pidgin. Empathy’s biggest advantage over Pidgin was voice and video support for Gtalk and XMPP. Pidgin received these features in 2.6.0 so there’s a chance that the decision will be reverted before the official release in October.

With 9.10 comes Gnome 2.28 and lots of small but noticeable changes. The most obvious is the removal of icons from buttons and menus. Gnome has always had a fetish for icons littering the interfaces – everything had an icon attached to it. The removal of them means less cluttered menus and smaller, more aligned buttons – perfect for small screens and netbooks.

A couple of features have been added to the mouse configuration, specifically for touchpads. “Disable touchpad while typing”. To whoever added this I want to say thank you! It’s made typing on my laptop keyboard so much easier. “Two-finger scrolling” does exactly what you think it does; it allows you to use 2 fingers to scroll anywhere on the touchpad. Just a couple of examples of small updates that make a big difference.

One thing that has me very happy is the updated Intel video drivers. Compiz in 9.04 could get very choppy and slow at times. In 9.10 they have done an amazing job at getting it back up to speed and even my integrated intel video card handles the most demanding Compiz effect without a problem. It’s also now possible to run Compiz while using a combined resolution greater than the maximum texture size of your graphics card. Previously Compiz would stop working if I attempted to use my laptop screen and my 1680×1050 LCD monitor set side by side. The only way to have both working was to place one above the other, keeping the combined resolution within the 2048×2048 my card could handle. Now I can have both running side-by-side.

If you want to get your hands of a copy of Karmic Koala and are willing to put up with crashes, bugs and potentially loss of data then you can find out more here or simply run sudo update-manager -d if you’ve already got Ubuntu installed.