Ubuntu 8.10 beta release, brings a lot of excellent new features:

• New version of Gnome 2.24 with tons of bug-fixes and new features, tabbed Nautilus.. Read more for new Gnome feautures here.
• X.Org 7.4 – the latest stable version is available in 8.10. It brings much better support for hot-pluggable input devices such as tablets, keyboards, and mice. A new failsafe X is introduced, to give better tools for troubleshooting X startup failures. Warning: fglrx and two of the older nvidia binary drivers are not available for X.Org 7.4 yet, so users of these drivers will be automatically switched to the corresponding open source drivers.
• Linux kernel 2.6.27 – with better hardware support and many bug fixes
• Totem BBC plugin
• Samba 3.2
• Network Manager 0.7
• Encrypted private directory – a secret encrypted folder in your Home Folder
• Guest session – the account cannot access any users’ home directories, or store data permanently. This is sufficiently safe to lend your computer to someone else for a browsing, mail checking, watching movies..
• “Last successful boot” recovery entry – This makes it possible for old kernel packages to be safely auto-removed by the package manager, instead of being kept indefinitely.

If you want to test the new Ubuntu release and report the bugs, you can upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04, press Alt+F2 and type in “update-manager -d” (without the quotes) into the command box. Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release ’8.10′ is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

Attention: This is a beta release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released on October 30th, 2008.

Tags | Linux, Open Source, Technology News, Ubuntu