Karmic Koala: That's One Seriously Fast Marsupial
Even though Ubuntu's servers were absolutely hammered today, I was able to download and test out the latest 9.10 Karmic Koala beta.
Tech Broiler Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Beta Tour from Jason Perlow
While I would consider Karmic Koala to be an evolutionary improvement rather than a revolutionary one over Jaunty Jackalope and Intrepid Ibex where functionality is concerned, I can certainly see where a great deal of the development time went, and that is raw performance.
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I used Sun xVM VirtualBox 3.06 to create a Virtual Machine using the 64-bit version of Karmic Koala, with two vCPUs, 2GB of RAM and a 40GB virtual disk file. Once I tweaked my virtual hardware settings accordingly for all of the AMD64/AMD-V performance optimizations -- something that I wouldn't need to do with native hardware -- installation was a breeze and an absolute pleasure. The installer application itself is extremely polished and looks like something that even Apple might produce, it's that good, using nice transition effects and a fully automated hardware detection.