14 DAY TRIAL // In April this year, Canonical introduced two new wallpapers and three new themes, along with a revamped boot splash theme and a brand-new login screen, for their Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) release. On October 1st, they will unveil Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Beta and I bet everybody is wondering if Canonical will actually change the user interface (read: skin it) with a breathtaking one. The truth is that we have no idea if they will come with that professional-looking theme everyone was expecting since Jaunty, or they will just offer enough possibilities for users to create their own personalized desktops.
What we know at this moment is that there is a very nice splash screen that greets users before the login screen and/or desktop appears, and, starting with today's daily build, Ubuntu 9.10 has 9 wallpapers with planets and stars. The wallpapers are combined into a single entry that will be automatically changed every 30 minutes. So, without any further ado, here are the wallpapers...
Another interesting item that was added today is the new Usplash theme, with Mat Tomaszewski's new logos. I know that, when I presented the X-based splash screen, I said something like "there is no more boot splash," but the Usplash can be seen now when you restart/shutdown your computer and when the Live CD loads. Here is the new Usplash theme...
That's not all... with the newly released GNOME 2.28.0 desktop environment, users now have access to a lot of themes, wallpapers and icons with a single mouse click...
On October 29th, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) will become the 11th release of the Ubuntu operating system.
Among some of the interesting features that will be present in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), we can mention the lightweight and powerful GNOME 2.28.0 desktop environment, which brings lots and lots of improvements in many areas, such as Empathy, Evolution, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Media, GNOME Power Manager, and many more. Karmic's kernel packages will be based on the latest version of the newly released Linux kernel 2.6.31, which will offer an improved support for webcam or wireless devices, new filesystems, USB 3.0 support, etc. Moreover, applications such as OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, The GIMP 2.6, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Mozilla Thunderbird 2, Transmission 1.7 or Pidgin 2.6 (not as default IM client) will also be present in the final version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).
Don't forget to visit our website next Thursday (October 1st) for a detailed report on the Ubuntu 9.10 Beta release, where we will unveil more of Karmic's new features!