Several of the in-house built apps have been updated

Jul 28, 2016 21:10 GMT  ·  By

Martin Wimpress has informed Softpedia today, July 28, 2016, about the availability of the second Alpha 2 milestone towards the upcoming Ubuntu MATE 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system.

If you've read our previous report on the availability of the Ubuntu 16.10 Alpha 2 development release of opt-in flavors, you already know that only Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu MATE have announced their participation, and they all ship pretty much with the same GNU/Linux technologies under the hood.

So yes, Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2 remains powered by the Linux 4.4 LTS kernel that is used in the stable Ubuntu MATE 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus). However, there are some very interesting changes implemented in this milestone, such as the Unity-like HUD (Heads-Up Display) that Martin Wimpress teased earlier in the week on Twitter.

The HUD can be used for running commands directly from the menubar, but it's not enabled by default. If you decide to test-drive Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2, you must enable the new HUD feature from the MATE Tweak tool, which has been updated to version 16.10.4 with improved Indicator support via the Message Menu.

MATE Dock Applet 0.73 and Ubuntu MATE Welcome 16.10.7 are present

Also new in the Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2 release, the Ubuntu MATE Welcome 16.10.7 tool is present with automatic focus of the search text entry, along with MATE Dock Applet 0.73, which introduces drag and drop support when rearranging dock icons, revamped window list on mouse hover over a dock icon, and a few other bug fixes.

Other than that, the Mozilla Firefox web browser now has a customized Ubuntu MATE Start Page, the Cheese webcam viewer is now installed by default, Indicator Session has been reimplemented in the Ubiquity installer and will be available during installation of Ubuntu MATE, and it looks like the ISOs are approximately 150MB smaller.

Last but not least, Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2 ships with the latest MATE 1.14.1 desktop environment. You can download the Live ISO images for either 64-bit, 32-bit or PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures right now via our website and take the distribution for a test drive to report bugs.

Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2 comes with MATE 1.14.1
Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2 comes with MATE 1.14.1
 

Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2 (2 Images)

Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2 released
Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2 comes with MATE 1.14.1
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