Awesome Techs

Ubuntu 9.10 – aka Karmic Koala – is taking the fight to Microsoft and its new Windows 7 operating system.

The Koala – due for its official release today – brings faster boot times, a revamped software installer, better disk encryption, online services, and quite a bit more to the popular Linux desktop.

There are lots of new features for this new version of ubuntu.

• This time they have transitioned to Upstart native jobs, to let users get to their desktop faster after boot.

Upstart is an event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon which handles starting of tasks and services during boot, stopping them during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running. Read more about upstart here.

• Ubuntu 9.10 RC includes the Ubuntu Software Center, developed by Michael Vogt, replacing ‘Add/Remove’ in the Applications menu.

The new software center is almost blindly operable even by starters in linux. As it stands with the 9.10 release Software Center doesn’t really do anything Add/Remove didn’t, but the interface is considerably cleaner and will likely be easier for Linux newbies to navigate.

• Ubuntu 9.10 RC includes the latest GNOME 2.28 desktop environment with a number of great new features.

Empathy has replaced Pidgin as the default instant messaging client, introducing the Telepathy framework. The gdm 2.28 login manager by William Jon McCann is a complete rewrite compared to the version in earlier Ubuntu releases, permitting a more integrated login experience. Evince, the GNOME document viewer, now ships with an enforcing AppArmor profile. This greatly increases security by protecting you against flaws in the historically problematic PDF and image libraries. Users who use a non-standard location for their home directory will need to adjust the home tunable in /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home. This profile has been developed by the Ubuntu Security team.

• Encryption is included.

• Under the hood of Ubuntu 9.10 there are some nice improvements including GRUB2, which is now the default bootloader, along with an improved AppArmor and disk encryption utilities.

• Ubuntu has included the AppArmor enhanced access control framework ever since the 7.10 release. However, Ubuntu has never surfaced or promoted AppArmor as much as other distros like Fedora. That continues with Karmic Koala where, for example, there’s a new Firefox sandbox policy, but it’s disabled by default.
• Ubuntu One cloud storage tools that come baked in with the latest release.

• Kubutnu – Kubuntu 9.10 includes the first Kubuntu Netbook release, Social from the Start and the latest KDE packages.
• Ubuntu One – For all our Backup needs.

Its a simple way to backup, sync and share files over the web. Ubuntu One offers 2GB of storage for free, with a 50GB option available for the price of 10 per month. Ubuntu One also offers public shared folders, which other Ubuntu users can access from their desktop. Anyone not using Ubuntu can still access the files through their browser.

• Filesystem ext4 by default.

Karmic Koala is the first Ubuntu release to use the ext4 filesystem by default.

For more information Read this.