RSSEnter the Jaunty Jackalope: Ubuntu 9.04 begins in beta
By Tim Conneally | Published March 27, 2009, 4:33 PM
Canonical today released the public beta version of Ubuntu 9.04, signifying to those on the "every-six-months-give-or-take-a-week" Ubuntu update schedule that a new, stable OS will be available in just about one month (April 23 to be exact.)
![Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" desktop](http://images.betanews.com/media/3050.jpg "Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" desktop")
Outwardly, very little has changed since the 8.1 release last October. Betanews booted both releases simultaneously, and true to the Ubuntu team's claims, 9.04 does start up a bit faster, completing startup at 37 seconds versus 8.1's 58 seconds.
This version uses the GNOME 2.26 desktop environment (the previous release used 2.24,) and updates to the latest version of X.Org server (version 1.6), that was released in late February. Ubuntu 9.04 is based on kernel version 2.6.28.8, which supports the Ext4 journaling file system.
There are a few minor stylistic tweaks, including the updated notification system, which pops up opaque black notifications in a stack on the right side of the screen.
![Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" login/splash screen](http://images.betanews.com/media/3051.jpg "Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" login/splash screen")
Desktop looks the same as it did in 5.10 just with a different wallpaper. You'd have thought after half a decade, Gnome desktop would've made some major asthetic changes....
Score: -1
|Not this time, Ubuntu 9.04 has 3 new themes. See screenshots here: http://news.softpedia.co...nshot-Tour-107809.shtml
Score: 3
|Why mess with something that works? There have been some changes but it is not like Microsoft who reskins the same OS and Office product every other year to convince people the products have somehow changed and they should pay $399 for that single machine license for the "ultimate" edition again.
Score: 3
|@fatty
you must be confusing it with apple right? or you must be some fanboi who likes to talk our of their ars...
Score: -3
|@fatty
Gotta love the ponce who has to lie about pricing to convince himself he's right.
Whatever you need to tell yourself, genius.
Score: -1
|GNOME doesn't change quickly, in part because the GTK+ doesn't change quickly.
I'd still rather have functional changes to the innards and save the desktop dazzle for KDE. Simple elegance works for me.
That's not to say that there aren't 100 things that they could do to GNOME, aesthetics aside but without a serious upgrade to GTK+, it's going to continue to happen slowly.
Score: 0
|8.10 was the earlier release, like 2008 October.
Hopefully, this will have a much less troublesome installation process than the last one or the one before that but I think the beta is not quite safe for those who don't run Linux regularly.
Score: 0
|Brown... ?? Brown... sorry, no useful associations.
Score: -2
|For s***s and giggles I tried this out on ~7 year old hardware and it completely choked. ah well.
Score: -2
|So it's the Vista of Linux (minus the market-share, of course)?
*wicked grin*
Score: -5
|Did it have a "Ubuntu 9.04 Capable" sticker on it?
Score: 7
|That's disappointing to hear! I just put 8.10 (that's 8.10, Tim, not 8.1 - time to research what the Ubuntu version number is all about) on my mother's Athlon XP (8 years old now?) and it runs quite well, IMO. Be a shame if the newer version was so much slower.
Admittedly, I think it wants more RAM than the 512MB that system has aboard.
Score: -1
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