"Maverick Meerkat, the next release of Ubuntu and its official
derivatives, is scheduled to hit the Internet in two weeks' time.
When it does, users will find a more polished release that
continues Canonical's five-year trend of providing steady
incremental improvements. Ubuntu continues to make small usability
changes that push each desktop experience slightly forward without
tripping up users, but all most people will notice is a faster,
more stable Linux distribution.
"The public release of Maverick is slated for October 10 in
order to play off of the day's binary-like date (10/10/10). ISO
images of the beta release are available (via both HTTP and
Bittorrent) through ubuntu.com for Ubuntu Desktop, Netbook, and
Server, as well as mainline variants such as Kubuntu, Edubuntu,
Ubuntu Studio, and several others. I tested the Desktop release for
several days, as it is the most commonly-selected option.
"Installation, for people who still do fresh installs
"Since it had been several years since I had installed Ubuntu
from scratch, I opted to do so with this release to see what had
changed. Not surprisingly, the entire process is far more
streamlined than it was even a few releases ago"
