Ubuntu 10.04, currently in development, has hit the second alpha release. As a quite update, here are some of the features you can see in the Alpha 2 release of Ubuntu 10.04.

• A new graphical boot screen manager called ‘Plymouth’ which is to replace the currently used xsplash and usplash boot screen systems.
• The user menu and power/session locking menus have been split into two distinct icons, marking the first steps into the development of Ubuntu 10.04′s social networking features including the ‘Me Menu’.
• Improvements in the manner in which restricted drivers are handled allows you to now have multiple nVidia graphics drivers of different versions installed simultaneously. Activating an individual driver is then only a matter of a few click and a restart.

In terms of application changes, the PiTiVi Video Editor has been added to allow home and professional users to perform various tasks to create new videos or editing existing ones. It comes with a variety of features including different video/audio effects, time-line management, dubbing and the like. A quick screenshot of the PiTiVi video editor is shown below.

Many of the existing default games in Ubuntu are planned to be replaced over the course of the development cycle for Lucid Lynx. gBrainy is the first new game to enter the scene, and is a brain training game, which is essentially a fun and extensible logic, memory and intelligence test. It resembles, it some ways, the brain training exercises and games for the Nintendo DS.

Rhythmbox Music Player, the default music playing application which ships with Ubuntu has seen some usability improvements in the way of a new application indicator. Application indicator’s are a new attempt to standardise and regulate the difference between notification and effective quick access menus for specific applications which require or desire interaction beyond the scope of their main application windows.

On a more heavily technical side, Alpha 2 of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx brings with it the complete removal of ‘hal’, the now legacy hardware abstraction layer. The removal of hal will allow for faster boot up, shut down and improved, speedier resuming from suspend and hibernation mode.

For additional details about Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 2 and the changes it brings, see the official Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 testing page.

Make a comment (1 comment so far)

It turns out that Avatar, the hugely successful science fiction epic film from James Cameron, was rendered using a huge Ubuntu rendering server farm, at Weta Digital. The Weta Digital server farm or ‘rendering wall’, as they call it, has a disk array capable of storing roughly 2 petabytes of data in total. The individual servers are [...]

This article is pulled from a previous site of mine, and relates to the starting of a forum board and the negative cycle of not having enough users registered to entice new users to join. It primarily focuses around the idea of using a vBulletin plugin to artificially inflate the number of online users in [...]

How are you feeling? View the day’s global mood swings with this fun, social media, Twitter-powered tool. Click here to choose a feeling and begin. ‘How are you feeling?’ is a quick social overview of the feelings that are appearing in the microblogging community. It pulls down hourly updates of today’s microblogs (or ‘Tweets’) based on specific [...]

I previously discussed some of the new social networking aspects coming in Ubuntu 10.04. These mainly focus on the brand new Me Menu which is a personalised menu that holds and controls all your social networking and assists with broadcasting to microblogging services. Some related changes are the new changes to the indicator applet and [...]

Social media and social networking are huge now-a-days, with Twitter, Facebook and the like being hugely successful at keeping friends and family in touch. Now only that, but social networks are huge for charities, with many causes being supported and heavily promoted via social networking. Corporations and business use social networking too to promote their products and [...]

Google, who brought forward the specifics of the ‘do no evil’ ideology within consumer visible software, is refusing to host an open-source project due to slight, almost humorous, modifications to its license, denying ‘evil’ use of the licensed software. Douglas Crockford selected the MIT license for his JSMin program to reduce JavaScript code syntax in such a way to make it [...]

Waking up this morning, I discovered the pond at my house had frozen solid. The temperature in the morning was between -3 and -2 degrees Celsius and was ~ -5 degrees Celsius really damn cold overnight. Glad I got my new winter coat recently…

Why is it that computers in TV dramas and science fiction have the magical ability to enhance any photograph? To make good television, that’s why.

Google have released a very simple explanatory video, aimed at new computer users, detailing their new operating system which is focused around the Google Chrome web browser. If you’ve ever needed to ask, what is the difference between Google Chrome OS and Google Chrome, this video explains the answer in the simplest manner possible. Google [...]