Ubuntu 9.04 Beta released, final release in 24 days

The newest release of Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, has been released in Beta. The main focus of thie release is speed, and there is no denying that it boots very fast. I've installed it on my Laptop to replace 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and noticed a significant speed boost. To test the speed of it out, I ran a boot test, to see how long it took for each OS on my laptop to boot from the bootloader to the desktop, once the HD indicator light had stopped flickering. Here are the results:

Ubuntu : 45 seconds

Windows 7: 1 minute, 45 seconds

Windows XP: 2 minutes and counting...

While there may be a slight bias towards Ubuntu as it is a fresh install, there is still a massive gap between it and Windows 7. As for Windows XP...

The beta also comes with some other improvements - there's a new verion of GNOME, the desktop interface/controls/application set. The display managment GUI has been tweaked again to work better, but is still sketchy at best. Also included is X.Org 1.6, which adds support for even more videocards. One of the more noticable features is the new notification system - rather than have annoying little popups, messages are displayed top-right of the screen as semi-transparent notifiers which fade out as you mouse-over them. To see what they look like, there is a flash demo here (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/jaunty904_notifications_example1_web_092.swf)

Other than that, there's not much new - just a lot of bug fixes. One other thing I should add is cloud computing support for Ubuntu Server - I still don't entirely understand the definition of 'cloud computing', but if you have a look at the link below, you'll find more details.

Link: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/jaunty/beta