Friday 17 October 2008

Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' Beta Screenshots Tour

Although I'm a KDE fan, after the last Kubuntu release (8.04 - LTS) I was a little disappointed, so I decided to try Ubuntu 8.10, which is going to be the next release of this wonderful distribution, codenamed 'Intrepid Ibex'. Ubuntu is definitely the most popular Linux distribution, also occupying the top position at page hits on Distrowatch.com for almost 4 years now.

Below are screenshots I took after I installed Ubuntu 8.10 Beta on a separate partition of 10 GB, on an my Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz PC with 1 GB DDRAM2. I took all the screenshots leaving default appearance and settings in applications, including the wallpaper, after I installed the nVIDIA restricted drivers and enabled Normal effects in System -> Preferences -> Appearance. Resolution is 1280x1024. I also performed a full apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade and restarted the computer before taking the screenshots, so the installation is more recent than the actual beta release.

Intrepid Ibex comes with GNOME 2.24, Firefox 3.0.3 and OpenOffice.org 2.4.1. The installed system occupies 2.4 GB after dist-upgrade and apt-get clean.

Default desktop

Rhythmbox music player

Totem movie player

Nautilus file manager

OpenOffice.org Writer word processor

Tomboy notes-taking application

GNOME Terminal shell-like application

Firefox web browser

Ubuntu Help Center

Pidgin IM and IRC client

Appearance properties

Brasero CD/DVD burner

Character Map

Visual effects

I can't say it behaves very well until enabling the desktop effects, below is a screenshot showing artefacts while fetching graphically the nVIDIA driver:


I found a bug here and there, especially regarding artefacts at drawing window decorations, but the final version did not arrive yet so no comments regarding those. I just hope for a good release.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

The main thing of interest that I notice in your screenshots is a confirmation of something I've seen reported elsewhere: that GNOME is now dispensing with Cancel buttons in dialog boxes. This is a really stupid thing to do. GNOME has for a few years now had a misguided focus on reducing the GUI to the most idiotic simplicity possible. They seem to consider it more important to make the system usable by imbeciles than to make it tolerable for power users. This is just more of the same.

Anonymous said...

The bug you described is "Screen refresh problems with nvidia on intrepid". The latest compiz updates should provide a workaround - it works >99% of the time for me. The bug was introduced by the 177.80 nVidia binary driver, and so switching to 173 should ask fix the problem in most cases.

Here's the link: Bug 269904: Screen refresh problems with nvidia on intrepid

If the latest updates don't work, try aplatners PPA (the link is on the page). Although I believe his patch has now been integrated into the main compiz package.

Anonymous said...

I don't understand the comment about cancel buttons. They have a 'close' button. Is it just that you object to the word 'close' instead of 'cancel'?

gali98 said...

is right, but in the appearences, you need to select "Dark Room" (only after you are fully updated will you see that)
It is a darker theme - almost choclatey.
I like it a lot, and it goes good with the background.
Also I disagree with the comment about the cancel button. How is adding something that does not hurt anything, but adds another feature a bad thing?
Kory

Craciun Dan said...

Anonymous @ 1:40 - Great to see the bug was already filed. I have 173 on Debian Lenny (which I'm writing from now), but then I guess Ubuntu installs 177. Thanks for the info and for the link, I'll have a look.

Kory: I think it is available in the beta too (without the updates), under the name Ubuntu New or something like that. But I really didn't like it, it seems too dark for me (or maybe I'm just not used enough with dark backgrounds).

Anonymous said...

On its own the bright orange Human theme look alright.

On its own, the dark brown wallpaper also looks good.

But anyone who thinks the two go together needs their eyes checked out.

This theme is yet another embarassment for Ubuntu.

What are the Ubuntu Art team doing?

Anonymous said...

I got to agree with anonymous above...

that the background looks good on its own, the orange theme looks OK/reasonable on its own... They look terrible together.

Solution: Desaturate (a lot) the "human orange" on the window decoration. It may need a touch of darkening too. Please do this, the standard coloring is just too "in your face"... (not cool).

Anonymous said...

In reply to the first comment: It is not true that “GNOME is now dispensing with Cancel buttons in dialog boxes”.

For many settings windows in Gnome, the system is smart enough to make changes immediately, instead of waiting for you to click an “OK” button. This makes it much easier, for example, to see the effect of changes you make to the Appearance settings before closing the window. But this is not something that is happening “now”; it has been like that for over half a decade.

Manysounds said...

I just installed the latest build on my wife's week-old machine. There was a little complaining from some new hardware drivers (for the nvidia chipset) but that disappeared after the auto update. The newest drivers from nvidia are sorta wonky but the default driver works "ok". I had much better luck with my ATI after a recent update -there were no openGL drivers for either in the original beta.
Since I went Ubuntu about a month and a half ago I haven't gone into windows except to use some media editing programs/games I purchased that won't run well under Wine or VirtualBox.

Also, yes the "DarkRoom" theme is much better IMO.

Anonymous said...

What ever happened to Mark Shuttleworths Plans to Make Ubuntu "Prettier" "in his own words"
Than Mac Osx/Leopard???
In my Opinion this long awaited new ubuntu theme, 'which isn't even set to default'
gets a BIG Thumbs Down from me.
Thank Fark For Kde
kaddy

Anonymous said...

I think that those of you who were waiting for that theme revamp are gonna have to wait for Jaunty.

Anonymous said...

Personally, I always thought Cancel buttons in dialog boxes were pretty useless. Why not just click the X?

costa rica hotels said...

thank you very much for your information helped me understand things I did not know because