The Ubuntu team has announced the beta release of Ubuntu 7.10 and
its variants, including Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu. The final
release of Ubuntu 7.10, dubbed "Gutsy Gibbon," will happen sometime
next month.
Today’s beta release gives a glimpse of some of the features slated for next month’s final release — GNOME 2.20
and the default installation of NTFS-3g, which provides read/write
access to Windows (NTFS) partitions are probably the biggest new
features.
The Ubuntu 7.10 desktop beta also features
Compiz Fusion, the 3-D window manager and desktop effects package, as
well as improved printer support in GNOME with printers automatically
configured as they are connected.
Other new features include support for Flash through the Gnash
project, an open source Flash player. Given that Gnash is experimental
and only supports Flash 7 and below, most users will probably want to
stick with the proprietary plugin from Adobe. Of course, Gnash does
offer at least partial Flash support to 64-bit desktop systems.
There’s also a new method of installing Firefox plugins in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu now supports automatic installation of popular plugins through
the standard Ubuntu package repositories. Given that Firefox does a
pretty good job of checking and updating plugins, I’m not sure what the
huge advantage of having them in Ubuntu repositories is exactly, other
than it provides a one-stop update mechanism.
Other variants of Ubuntu have improvements as well, most notably Kubuntu 7.10 beta features the new Dolphin file manager, which we’ve written about before.
If you’d like to try out the new betas head over the Ubuntu beta download page, but bear in mind these are pre-release offerings and may have bugs and other issues.
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