A Preview of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

I don’t know if I can say this enough:  I am really excited for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

A few changes have been made, including Canonical’s revenue sharing deal with Yahoo.  Firefox will now use Yahoo! for a default search engine, and switching it back to Google only requires a few clicks.  According to the mailing list:

...Canonical has negotiated a revenue
sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide
developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and
the Ubuntu Platform. This change will help provide these resources as
well as continuing to respect our user's default search across Firefox.

This entirely makes sense; Canonical is working on becoming self-sufficient and a revenue-sharing deal can only help this.  Right now, there is a lot of drama surrounding this issue, but I’m not going to get into that.  Arstechnica has a pretty decent article explaining this decision a little more in-depth.

That aside, the interface is proving really snappy.  Truth-be-told, I was actually fooled into thinking my Visual Effects settings had been turned to “None” from “Extra” because when I clicked on Applications, the menu opened like it did without the extra settings.  Sure enough, they were still on “Extra” and I was impressed.

There is a bug that I encountered with plymouth (introduced to provide a flicker-free startup experience) that has since been fixed.  Also with startup experiences, it appears faster than Karmic, and bootchart is reporting GDM is firing after only 21 seconds.  Whether or not this is accurate to exactly when I can login, I do not know, but it’s definitely quicker.  Improving startup time is definitely a very important goal for the Canonical Team for this release.

Ubuntu Software Center is making nice progress with its visual appeal, ease of use, installing/removing packages, as well as making a separate category for “Free Software” which will eventually accompany a list that will show separate PPA’s, software from Canonical partners, etc.

The Me Menu introduced is just that:  A representative of yourself in Ubuntu.  It should let you broadcast to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, set your status for instant messaging, and access settings for instant messaging, microblogging, and Ubuntu One.  Integrating these features into one menu will ease clutter of having to manage all of these separately.

The Lynx is a predator that depends on very considered tactical positioning for success. It’s a small cat, which fits nicely with the lean nature of Ubuntu on both the desktop and the server. It’s stylish and sleek, the bow-tie-adorned James Bond of the feline set, so you can bet we’ll make sure it’s dressed for the occasion. The lynx likes to keep things in perspective, sticking to high ground. So do we. And it’s the national animal of Macedonia, a country that has deployed tens of thousands of Ubuntu desktops in schools.

Speed is an essential ingredient in the attack of a lynx, and speed remains our goal. We have improved the boot time in each of the releases during this era of Ubuntu, and expect to complete some of the major improvements required for 10 second booting with Lucid. Fully harnessing Upstart, in collaboration with Debian, will get us even closer to the goal. [via The Fridge]

This LTS version (supported for 3 years on Ubuntu Desktop, 5 years on Ubuntu Server) will sport the Linux Kernel 2.6.32; complete HAL removal for faster boot, suspend, and resume from suspend; a new default open source driver for nVidia hardware called nouveau, which will only support 2D rendering at this time; improved support for proprietary nVidia drivers; and a new likewise-open package that provides Active Directory authentication and server support for Linux, and a lot more.

There was a lot of hype about Gnome 3.0 being released in time for inclusion in Lucid Lynx, but that won’t happen this release.  The Lucid Release Schedule outlines major points in the development process.