Ubuntu Next 8.10

New Wallpapers

intrepid-changes Announcement 1 | intrepid-changes Announcement 2 | intrepid-changes Announcement 3

With the latest update of the package ubuntu-wallpapers, the developers have finally moved on from the Hardy Heron wallpaper. Although not as innovative and elegant, it still means something, particularly the Ubuntu circles going in circles, signifying the Ibex's horns.

Here it is!: (At first it just looks like a brown square. Click on it to enlarge, and you will see!)

With GNOME 2.24 also, the wallpapers have also gotten a refresh. To keep the ISO image below 700 MB image, Ubuntu doesn't include this package by default.

Just run "sudo aptitude install gnome-backgrounds" in the Terminal, then to view the images, run "nautilus /usr/share/backgrounds" or right-click on the Desktop and click Change Desktop Background.

UPDATE: The Intrepid wallpaper has been updated to something more hot. Not the best, but better. This is getting good: (Got from Launchpad PPA testing for Intrepid artwork, not official yet)

UPDATE 2: Wow, right after I update my other post regarding the theme redesign, version 0.28.1 of the ubuntu-wallpapers package gets in. Yes, the above wallpaper is confirmed as default. But the image is changed into JPEG format. ~~I will re-upload the image when the package is available.~~ It's available. I don't notice any changes, but I'll post the official one here: (the above one is from a testing Launchpad PPA of Intrepid artwork)

Archive Managing

Archive Manager (or File Roller, the real name) has gotten a huge lift with GNOME 2.24. Though, for some reason, the GNOME 2.24 release notes mentions nothing of it, it should be mentioned here.

File Roller supports four new file types! Guess what they are? They're ALZ, RZIP, CAB, and TAR.7Z! How did it achieve this? By getting the help of p7zip, of course! Finally, no more "sudo aptitude install unalz && cd /home/exsecrabilus/Desktop && unalz file.alz"!!!

But there is another thing that has been reworked, that no one would have noticed if it hadn't been for the Alpha 6 screenshot tour.

First of all, Nautilus has a new part of it that can manage archives by itself. I don't know why this happened, and the developers of File Roller must be pissed at Nautilus for taking its job and now becoming an ultimate bloated application that also, has tabs. But basically, this is how it works: You locate to the archive, right click on it, and press "Open with "Archive Mounter""; Nautilus file browser will pop up, pretending the archive is a folder. From there, you can just copy and paste the contents, like you've extracted it. This is particularly useful when you have a 1000 GB archive and want to extract one image from it.

Secondly, File Roller has now fully become a true archive manager. You can slap on a password, and if you don't feel secure even with that, you can encrypt it right there on that spot. Don't know what the option "Split in volumes of....." is, but I think it's neat. :) After reading a comment, I found out that this is for splitting the archive into separate pieces.

Finally. After you have chosen to extract an archive, you can choose to open the archived folder directly; this saves about two seconds of your precious life. This is lovely.

File Browsing

GNOME 2.24 Release Notes

With Nautilus 2.24, file browsing for GNOME has been taken a step further. Now comes, file browsing, eject buttons in the Places sidebar, and a new Compact view! *Wait to take it all in*

New Compact view screenshot: (followed by a window of List view, and that followed by Icon view)

Tab browsing in effect, along with the new Eject button for ejectable items in the sidebar:

But not very impressive. KDE 4 with Dolphin already achieved this, but I never noticed it for some reason, even when I installed KDE 4.1. The KDE team needs to emphasize more on new features with cool screenshots instead of just saying it with one sentence in the changelog and have nobody notice it. But everyone uses Nautilus, so this is good.

Late Again: Alpha 6

http://ubuntunextnews.blogspot.com/2008/09/late-again-alpha-6.html

Thank you.

LiveUSB Creator

Ubuntu, deciding that 8.10 would run on all types of computers, which includes subnotebooks without CD/DVD drives, has taken on a project to convert CD ISO images into USB-compatible images that will provide a full Live CD desktop right from the USB.

Strangely, nobody has heard anything of this project since the blueprint got accepted, and everybody assumed it was dead, probably proposed by a developer who dreams of possibilities, but is too lazy to work for that dream.

But a few days ago, intrepid-changes made an announcement with a package named usb-creator, version 0.1, commented "initial release." Weird it appears so suddenly a week after Intrepid's feature freeze.

However, a member of Ubuntu Forums noticed that there was another similar project, and was curious if that project was the one in Intrepid. Nobody knew the answer, until another member posted an IRC chat he had had with an Ubuntu developer.

The explanation is here. No, the poster says, they are not the same projects, and with good reason too. The Ubuntu team is aware of that application already, but they have found it more conveniant, more easy, and more quick to just start from scratch rather than modify the already-built code to meet Ubuntu's requirements.

Then, some might say, why doesn't Ubuntu just use Fedora's already-built and more mature program that does the same thing? The answer again lies in the above link. Fedora's LiveUSB application is written in PyQT, and Ubuntu wants a pure breed, not mixed front-ends and back-ends that are different.

The initial release, version 0.1, was made public to testers of Intrepid roughly three days ago, but we have yet to hear of how fully it does its job.

UPDATE: Apparently this project is fully alive and is receiving a great amount of attention from developers. You could see that, by noticing at the top of this post, I have added more links from announcements by intrepid-changes. Refer to those if you're wanting to get technical and want to see all changes.

UPDATE 2: Added two more intrepid-changes links. (The last two.)

UPDATE 3: Screenshot.