14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta release for the upcoming Kubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating system.
Canonical has decided that the Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) release will have a limited number of milestone versions, but other distributions from this family have decided to remain on the same schedule, Kubuntu 13.04 included.
Highlights of Kubuntu 13.04 Beta 1 (Raring Ringtail):
• The distribution is based on KDE Plasma and Applications 4.10.1; • Muon Suite 2 RC has been added. This introduces support for installing Plasma widgets found in KDE's KNewStuff framework from within Software Center and Muon Discover; • Rekonq 2 now supports in-line spell-checking; • A full screen alternative to the Kickoff application menu has been added; • A new screen management tool makes it easy to attach and unattach extra monitors; • Krita now uses a nifty new calculations library Vc, making it twice as fast as before; • Users can now access the digital music player and smartphone through the MTP protocol; • Tomahawk is now available in the archives and it is a new music player making it easy to share your music with your friends over IM; • Kubuntu should now be able to support UEFI Secure Boot, a standard for controlling what software can be run on a computer. Supporting Secure Boot, a part of the Windows 8 certification requirements for client systems, ensures that Ubuntu will continue to provide an "it just works" experience on new hardware. • The beta Raring Ringtail snapshot includes the 3.8.0-12.21 Ubuntu Linux kernel, which is based on the upstream v3.8-rc6 Linux kernel; • OpenJDK7 is the default Java implementation. The current revision is OpenJDK-7 7u15-2.3.7-1ubuntu2.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements.
Download Kubuntu 13.04 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.
