Ubuntu – 6.10 Released
Ubuntu 6.10 is now released and see how happy everyone on the Ubuntu site is now?!?! I swear they looked a little less enthusiastic after 6.06 was released. But seriously, I am downloading it now and will be testing it out. Apparently there are major improvements to the boot up process speed which was sorely needed unless you decided to install it and disable a ton of unnecessary services. Also, this release includes Gnome 2.16, Firefox 2.0 along with a kernel update and tons of other software updates.
OK, so I tried it out briefly today. Two major things already I found I did not like – the bootup time is actually a lot worse than what I remember. I tried it out on two different boxes – a celeron 500 which I expected to be somewhat slow and also a 64 bit AMD Athlon XP 3200 with a gb and a half of ddr ram. On the latter box, it still took Ubuntu a full 2 minutes to get to a fully loaded Gnome screen. Also, they have removed the output on the screen so you can see what it is loading and the usual ESC key does nothing to display a verbose mode. I will do some further testing later, but for right now I am not impressed. Also, how could people omit Xchat from a live cd that is Gnome based?
So I did an actual install and the live cd experience is totally different from the install. The install does in fact boast a faster boot up time than its predecessor. The desktop is once again very clean and functional as well as responsive. I still did some customization with BUM (Boot Up Manager) and editing services. I’m not sure how many people need to have bluetooth enabled by default for example. This helped to optimize things even more. With Ubuntu 6.16 using the Gnome desktop, you get the feeling that it is getting closer to an expected standard. The people at Ubuntu do a nice job of not breaking what is already working.