Canonical Shoots for “Perfect 10” With New Ubuntu Release
This Sunday–the tenth day of the tenth month of the tenth year of the millennium–Ubuntu 10.10, better known to some as “Maverick Meerkat,” will officially debut. We can’t promise the day will be as momentous as the end of the First World War. But it will bring a number of major changes and new features to the world’s most popular Linux distribution. Read on for highlights.
Ubuntu 10.10 breaks with the past on a number of fronts. Beyond its debut date on a Sunday–a contrast to Canonical’s tradition of pushing out new releases on Thursdays, and usually a bit closer to the end of the month–notable changes in Maverick include:
- An enhanced look for the desktop edition, which represents a refinement of the radically new theme introduced with Ubuntu 10.04 last April. Maverick keeps the same color palette, but features classier fonts and a wider selection of wallpaper built in. Of course, many users may not pay much attention to updates in the appearance department, since Ubuntu’s look can be customized to infinity by anyone who doesn’t like the defaults.
- New Ubuntu One features, which help set the Ubuntu One client apart from services like Dropbox by emphasizing the former’s potential to support a “personal cloud,” as Canonical is calling it, rather than serving merely as a data-synchronization tool.
- Updates to Ubuntu Server’s cloud tools, which Canonical no doubt hopes will help Ubuntu Server Edition to compete against enterprise-oriented Linux distributions like Red Hat and Novell’s SUSE.
- Unity, a version of Ubuntu customized for netbooks and other highly portable devices, has become the default interface for Ubuntu Netbook Edition. While Canonical’s Steve George told me to expect Unity to continue evolving in significant ways beyond Maverick, I liked what I saw when I tested Unity last month and look forward to what the future will hold.
This list isn’t comprehensive, of course–there are a number of smaller changes that complement the major ones outlined above.
Will Maverick be the “perfect 10.10” that Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth envisions? That’s not a question we can answer, since perfection is in the eye of the beholder. But whether you use on Ubuntu on a desktop, netbook, server or all three, let us know if you check out Ubuntu 10.10.
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Here seems to be an interesting issue with Ubuntu and Windows. I actually use Mint, but often refer to the Ubuntu forums for help.
It’s great for Canonical to be Reaching Out, and develpoing tools like U-1, etc. But the seemingly basic stuff is still a problem – at least for this user.
Example: File and Printer sharing. I have a box with Vista SP2 on it, to which is attached a Printer. I run Mint 9 on the other box, installed via their equivalent of wubi. It runs just fine – music, Flash, browser, etc.
But: I cannot see the shared files on the Visat box, nor can I access its printer.
When I revert to XP SP3 on the Mint box, everything works just fine. I can print to the Vista printer, see the shared files — everything one would expect from networked computers.
I’ve read the forums, and there are many and varied suggested solutions. Lots of Command Line work. Lots of “sudo”. Lots of stuff that no Windows user ever has to do.
Seems like basics like this should be fixed first, before the fancy stuff.
“Lots of Command Line work. Lots of “sudo”. Lots of stuff that no Windows user ever has to do.”
You mean, lots of stuff Windows users can’t do, right?
There are fairly easy ways to access SMB shares and printers from a Windows Vista box, you just don’t know how yet. Keep at it and you might find that it is lot more powerful than you thought.
Remember, not everything can or should be able to be done in a single mouse click.
No, but things like that should be relatively easy with guidance on how to do it. And it isn’t. It isn’t easy and it isn’t straight forward, and the guidance is missing.
Still, I think that’s an issue with Vista. I had three machines at one point, Ubuntu, XP amp; Vista. Vista could not access the XP machine that I wanted to copy off, Ubuntu could access the XP machine but not Vista, and Vista could read from Ubuntu. So to copy the files from XP to Vista required a copy from XP to Ubuntu (in Ubuntu), and another copy from Ubuntu to Vista (in Vista).
In short: a ruddy mess.
Yes, a mess. Maybe it’s a Vista issue, but my Vista and XP share printers and files just fine, but my Wubi-installed Mint 9 on the XP machine does not see the Vista machine, and vice-versa.
Truth to tell, Vista doesn’t have to solve the issue; Ubuntu does. Under the present set of conditions, if I want to share files and printers, I must use Windows, because Linux doesn’t do it.
And I’ve become bleary-eyed, searching the forums for both Mint and Ubuntu. As Fox says, “It isn’t easy and it isn’t straight forward, and the guidance is missing.”
So again, I say: Ubuntu needs to get basics like this running properly, before they worry about the bells and whistles in a new release.
Jack, I’m sorry you have had so much trouble setting up your file sharing how you want, but I don’t think Ubuntu is really at fault.
I personally use Ubuntu Linux as my main OS both at home and at work, work being an all-Windows environment with an AD domain and SMB shares all over the place, after a little bit of research I could access the files and network printers without much trouble.
Ubuntu is certainly capable of sharing files and printers between itself and Windows, but you must remember that Ubuntu is made by people who already know about how computers do and should work, which can be confusing to others at first! (Unlike Windows, which was made for ‘the rest of us’ who want something that simply works and has little to no flexibility)
I certainly had a lot of trouble grasping Linux from Windows to start with, in fact, it took over a year to truly switch properly to Linux, and I’m glad I did! I find using my computers much more interesting and liberating than I did with Windows.
Good luck, keep at it, and hopefully you’ll be able to look back and laugh at how you were worried about your system working with Windows boxes in the first place! 😛