Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

The first and only Release Candidate for Ubuntu 10.10, aka Maverick Meerkat, was released yesterday. The final release will come out in only 10 days - Ubuntu has decided to make a Sunday release, to take advantage of the 10/10/10 date, rather than their usual Thursday release schedule. As such, this Release Candidate is expected to be a lot getter than most; the release announcement describes it as complete, stable, and suitable for testing by any user.

The installer has been overhauled for this release, with the biggest change being that it does an "asynchronous" installation. After asking just enough questions to determine the language, keyboard and disk layout, it actually starts copying the distribution to disk while at the same time continuing the dialog to get the timezone, user name and password, and the like. Nice idea.

The Gnome desktop in the standard distribution looks quite familiar - I already commented a week or two ago when they updated the default wallpaper. Window decorations are the same as they were in Ubuntu 10.04 - by default on the left side of the window. I recall when there was a big ruckus about that movement that Mark Shuttleworth said they were moving them because they had plans for using the rest of the titlebar, but as yet those plans have apparently not been realized.

This screen shot was taken on my HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez, which has an AMD CPU ATI video controller and Atheros wireless adapter. All of those came up with no problem.

There has been some discussion in the Linux community about "why bother" with this release, because there aren't any really big changes in it. I don't agree, I think that there are advantages to having a fixed 6 month release schedule and sticking to it, but I do agree that there aren't a lot of big changes in this release. Sometimes there will be more, sometimes less, that's the way things are going to go. Complete information about what has changed can be found in the release announcement, linked above, and the Maverick Meerkat Technical Overview.

It was not only the base Ubuntu Release Candidate that came out yesterday, but most of the rest of the family as well. The other version that I use is the Netbook Edition, so I downloaded that as well, and installed it on the Samsung N150 Plus. Again, the desktop looks the same as it was a week or two ago, when I first wrote about the new UNE "Unity" user interface:

There have been noticeable improvements in the functionality and consistency of the desktop since I last wrote about it. The icons on the left side of the screen behave better, and more predictably, and the window decorations integrated into the title bar are better as well. I left the screenshot window on for this picture to show how an application window is integrated in the title bar. This is the one area that still baffles me a bit in this interface, though. There are differences in how the window decorations look, and whether they are present at all or not. But overall it seems to be working well, and I think it is a very nice improvement over the original UNE desktop.

Installation of UNE on the Samsung was basically the same as installing the full version on the HP laptop. There were no problems with the 1024x600 screen resolution, either during installation or afterward. All of the hardware was recognized and configured except for the Broadcom 4313 wireless adapter. For that you have to have either a wired network connection or a mobile broadband connection (my Huawei 3G dongle works fine), then the "Add Hardware" utility will pop up and offer to install the driver for you.

While the base distribution might be criticized for not having a lot of changes in this release, the Netbook Edition certainly has plenty, with the Unity interface topping the list. Again, check the release notes and Technical Overview for more details.

All in all, the Release Candidates look good, seem to work well, and things are looking very positive for the final release 10 days from now.

jw